KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[SpaceWizardz]

Room across the medbay (where you start) doesn't have a severed head in it anymore.

Spoiler

More interesting fun facts about this demo coming from me never again because playing this is miserable.

 

[Nano]

So there's no point in playing this demo if you already played the older one?

By the way, the old demo was available on GOG but this one isn't. Lame.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

This is on the same dilettante level as Underworld Ascendant. What were these fools thinking?

 

[unfairlight]

It's generally not a good thing if a game is so dark that it's tiring to look at and makes me want to quit after 30 minutes. The original Thief games are guilty of this. I play most other games continuously until completion with a few hours every day, but something like this or Thief would just be so boring and hard to look at I'd have to take a good few months to complete them. I'd turn up the gamma or brightness to make it easier to see but it doesn't have any such option. Is it really that hard to implement a torch and add outlining to items and interactables?
This performance is miserable. It started off at 60 FPS but then dropped to 30 and 40 later. There's this weird stutter or skipping to the game as well, there is no smooth motion because it just keeps skipping ahead. It started later on after my FPS took a dump. After I couldn't figure out how to get to that northern part of the map I'm not really motivated to continue.
I'm not really entirely sure what they are going for with this. The modern audience isn't going to want the thrilling gameplay of walking in a boring grey maze with a bunch of emissive textures no matter how pretty it might be and the people who played it way back when are crusty farts who hate anything new.
I like the magnum pistol at least, has a nice punch to it. Not like it matters since everything dies in 2 shots maximum.

 

[Nano]

It's generally not a good thing if a game is so dark that it's tiring to look at and makes me want to quit after 30 minutes. The original Thief games are guilty of this

Either your monitor sucks or you need to get your eyes checked out.

 

[unfairlight]

It varied from mission to mission but the repetitive textures combined with the darkness of something like the cave missions really took a number on me. Something like the lost city has those two combined along with annoying level design and anal loot requirements so I'm generally just not motivated enough to play those games in longer than one hour sessions once per week.

 

[JDR13]

It is pretty dark in some places. I'm sure that will be adjustable in the finished game.

 

[unfairlight]

I wouldn't have any complaints if they gave me a torch. Maybe there is one, but they forgot to put it in the control options just like they did with reloading. For some reason to reload my Magnum I needed to press the comma key, only then after did it reload with R.

 

[JDR13]

Shit performance. And now it crashes everytime I wanna launch the game. Great job, Stephen.

The crash is caused by changing the graphics settings, to fix it delete the config files in AppData\Local\SystemReShock\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor. The game will rebuild the files next time you launch it.

How does that help? It rebuilds the files, but everything gets reset back to defaults. So you're saying we can't change any settings without the game crashing?

 

[unfairlight]

I don't think graphics settings did anything at all for me, so I don't see much of a reason to change them. There's no feedback on the Apply button either. Interesting decision to have texture quality on a 0.1 to 1.0 slider in 0.1 intervals.

 

[Nyast]

Finished the demo and completed the level. Overall it was a good experience and I'm happy with the result, can't wait to (re)play the full game. On the downside, I also suffered from these random micro freezes that makes the game barely playable. The lack of english sub-titles also made the audio logs a pain for a non-english native like me, especially what it gave directions / hints / key codes. The mini games are pretty good so far, nothing super original but they don't overstay their welcome (yet) ( especially in future levels ).

One thing I dislike is the lack of items - there are so many bodies and crates, they and never contain anything / interesting. But the game's in development, so I can only hope they'll populate the levels with a lot more items in the future, otherwise it'll be a problem. The level is quite huge and there are different visual ambiances / styles ( loved the "beta" section with the pathways to activate ). It really feels like a dungeon crawler with some narrative elements and a complex dungeon layout. I mean, that's not exactly a surprise since it's a remake, but I barely remember playing the original, so it was interesting.

 

[Curratum]

Just played the pre-alpha demo on Steam.

This game is going to be so hilariously bad, I feel sorry for anyone who either backed it or was excited about it.

 

[Melan]

So they spent three years to recreate the shitty, poorly performing demo they released back in the first place?

 

[JBro]

It's good. Just too dark and I miss the music. You negative Nancys can eat shit, though.

 

[Venser]

Downloading...

 

[Bad Sector]

It looks ok, but *way* too slow on my laptop here (i am moving and i do not have my normal PC), which is ironic since a reason to switch from Unity was better performance, but the original demo both runs better (though still sub-30fps) and looks much better. Also i liked the little animations, like when inserting your cyberware (with headphones the sound is perfect for getting a feel that something got in your skull) - some are a bit too long, but i'd prefer them to be shortened, not removed.

Judging from the first few moments, i think this new demo is worse than the original Unity one (which i beat a couple of times), though the performance is too bad to judge it properly. Sadly the demo period will be over by the time i get my PC (but i kept a copy of the files just in case). And TBH i am not a fan of the pixelated "high definition" textures, i hope there will be an option to turn texture filtering on.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Had another go at the demo. After the "Press any key"-prompt, I confirmed that you actually have to press Another Key after the first prompt.

And like the first time, I experienced a five-second lag at the start as all the assets got loaded and I felt like a drunkard on acid.

Then the game started properly, and this time I did manage to exit the med-bay without a CTD. Yay. I activated the surgical unit in hope of some healing, and only got it after a lenghty animation played out. Likewise with the power charger... and come to think of it, all those silly "What's this then?"-animations that played at the start for various modules... I can see where the devs are coming from with those, but those are too many bundled together in one place.

I would have wasted more time bitching about all of that, but then I was confronted by another problem: There's a logic puzzle that's supposed to unlock an elevator in the hallway. Kudos for the engine allowing this to be activated in real-time placement (instead of a seperate window) but for the life of me I couldn't solve the bloody thing - the icons I needed to press were non-pressable for some *reason*. So I just quitted the thing and uninstalled.

I'm not having that. Right now this *new* demo is even worse than the original demo, and this release looks to be a disaster on par with Underworld: Ascendant. The team needs to get their shit together in the next three months or so, or this is an Epic-Level Disaster... one that I'm refusing to be a part of.

Good Day, sirs.

 

[LESS T_T]

Ah, I hate the sticky ladders.

 

[Nyast]

You guys comparing it to Ultima Ascendant are extremely unfair. UA is more buggy and has less gameplay than this "demo" *at the current stage*. So yeah I'm not disputing that it's buggy and has performance issues, but it does have gameplay. And having bugs / performance issues is not terribly shocking at this stage of development. Of course, if it stays in that state for the full release, it'd be bad.. but it's a bit too soon to scream incompetency IMO.

 

[unfairlight]

Ah, I hate the sticky ladders.

They're tolerable, not as bad as HL2 ladders. At least you can jump from them.

 

[Lemming42]

Did I get some kind of shitty version of the demo? There's only like three enemies - Servobots, Mutants, and one type of Cyborg. Med-level is meant to have way more enemy types than this.

I feel like my fears from earlier have been realised - the devs think System Shock is meant to be survival horror, and not the frantic action FPS it actually is. Med level in System Shock is about running around lobbing grenades at the unstoppable tide of enemies while wicked-sick techno pumps out of your speakers. In this, it's about walking around in the dark getting jumped by one or two mutants in absolute silence.

This is not going to be ready for release in 2020.

 

[RoSoDude]

I'm still of the opinion that interacting with keypads and logic puzzles should open a new UI window like in the original System Shock or zoom in on the object like Nu-DX with a free mouse cursor. Aiming at tiny buttons in 3D with mouselook is not intuitive, nor is it how human beings interface with things in the real world (you don't lock your arm to the center of your vision to press the buttons on a keypad). Prey at least zoomed in on computer screens if you pressed the scope key but still tied your cursor to mouselook. Just give me a free mouse cursor, thanks.

Speaking of which, the wire/grid puzzles superficially resemble their original counterparts but actually completely different. Grid puzzles just require you to rotate a bunch of elements to get current to flow from start to finish (think an even more straightforward version of BioShock's pipe dream hacking), while the wire puzzle requires you to combine streams from different colors to obtain the correct color at the end node. There are converters that combine and split colors in some manner, as well as binary switches that can toggle color streams on and off. Honestly I'm still kind of confused by it. It doesn't help that I'm red-green color deficient but hey screw me I guess

Screenshots taken from this Let's Play that I found (I haven't been playing this myself):

 

[soulburner]

WTF is this? My eGPU setup (Thinkpad X230 with dual core, four threaded CPU and Radeon RX570 as the external GPU) runs this game like shit. The average fps is about 22, drops to about 17 with occasional high at the range of 30. CPU usage is about 70 to 90%, GPU usage is almost constant 100%. The built in settings don't seem to work. For a moment I thought it might be running on the integrated GPU, but it doesn't.

This, so far, is the worst performing game I have ever launched on this setup.

 

[cvv]

Well it's janky af but it's also pre-alpha so no beef there. The real problem is they went with nostalgia. Copied the color palette, general texture design, the lot. As a result you don't really feel like being on a futuristic space station. You feel like being in a 1994 game upscaled into current day standard.

Back in the day SS1 was THE most immersive game ever made, by a million country miles. Today the remake doesn't feel immersive, it feels goofy. Shame.

P.S. sound design is solid tho.

 

[MuscleSpark]

I wouldn't have any complaints if they gave me a torch. Maybe there is one, but they forgot to put it in the control options just like they did with reloading. For some reason to reload my Magnum I needed to press the comma key, only then after did it reload with R.

I wish I had read your comment before beating the demo.
I guess I can do it again later. Shame there's no save system because the game starts chugging hard after 30 minutes.

Kinda fun despite all the missing features though.