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Incline System Shock 2 Roundtable Interview

skacky

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Not sure where to post this, but this section seemed the most appropriate.

IncGamers has a podcast with two developers who worked on SS2, Dorian Hart (numbers balance/level designer, also designed Bafford's Manor and the Bonehoard for Thief) and Jon Chey (project manager/creature behavior and AI). I haven't listened to the thing yet but hearing ex LGS/Irrational devs talk is always a joy.

:love:
 

felipepepe

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Incgamers.com just released a nice 6-page interview with Jon Chey and Dorian Hart, developers of SS2. They talk about replaying the game after all these years, resource scarcity, horror atmosphere, why the hell SHODAN is on the cover and even about spaceships with giant steering wheels:

http://www.incgamers.com/2013/08/sy...view-with-developers-jon-chey-and-dorian-hart

Jon: We were all fans of the original System Shock, and obviously a very large amount of inspiration for the game comes from that. The way we envisaged the game was a little bit of a cross between System Shock and Ultima Underworld, which of course were other games produced by Looking Glass.

So it has the setting, the characters and the claustrophobic feel of the original System Shock. But it has the roleplaying stats system from a more Ultima type game. Those were probably the biggest influences for the game. What do you think Dorian?

Dorian:
I would be in general agreement with that. I personally wasn’t really a big horror game or genre fan, I was much more into the roleplay stuff. I was a big fan of Ultima Underworld and all the Ultima games. From my own numbers balancing point of view I knew on an intellectual level I was making it scary via resource scarcity, but I’m not a horror guy.

Jon: I think a lot of the horror comes from that though. For me the important part of System Shock 2 is the difficulty and the resource scarcity. I would probably describe it more as being about tension than horror. There’s a horror element to the story and characters are terribly disfigured or in pain or whatever, but that’s actually less important to me than the fact that the game is really, really hard.

It requires you to constantly be very focused and intense. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. That’s the most interesting aspect of it for me, and is also the thing that’s hard to find these days. That’s why I mention Dark Souls because it’s one of the few modern exceptions.

Tim: Yeah, I’ve got to agree with you Jon. It comes down to the resource scarcity and also the fact that you never really feel safe.

Jon: Yeah, the respawning I think is really important.

Tim: The horror aspects for me aren’t really down to, you know, the corpses everywhere and horrible monsters roaming the corridors. It’s more down to the unknown and this general sense of dread because you never feel safe, and because you have such scarce resources every encounter actually matters.

It’s a very fine balancing act and it seems to do it really, really well, which is something that a lot of games that purport to be horror games these days don’t tend to do. They focus more on jump scares, but as soon as you get your hands on a few weapons they suddenly aren’t scary any more.

:salute:

Stolen from Gamebanshee.
 

CappenVarra

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Peter: Yeah, I think the Dark Souls comparison is an interesting one. I think the initial tutorial/training bit is actually really good. It was the bit after that with the tour of duty, where you have to choose some stats.

Dorian: You have to choose stats with no idea what you’re going to want, how good anything is … yes, it’s kind of embarrassing in hindsight.

Jon: I think it was inspired by the Traveller character creation system, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that old pen and paper RPG system?

Peter: Bizarrely, yes I am. It was a Games Workshop one wasn’t it?

Jon: I’m not sure why we picked on that, in retrospect. Given that it’s actually a pretty bad character creation system.
:rpgcodex:Traveller character creation is great (even if it's sometimes more fun than playing the game)

Tim: Yeah, SHODAN’s reveal in the game was kind of a surprise, but sort of ruined by the fact that SHODAN’s face is …

Jon: On the cover!

Tim: Is that something that came as a surprise to you guys?

Jon: Wow, that’s taking me back. It was EA’s job to do a cover for the game and they sent us a bunch of five or six cover concepts and they were some of the worst cover concepts I’ve ever … Well, actually I’ll say they were THE worst concepts I’ve ever seen. They were unbelievably bad. I remember one of them, for some reason, had a picture of a piece of rope on it, like a hangman’s noose or something. It had nothing to do with the game.

So we actually decided that we were going to do the box cover ourselves, which wasn’t our job. I have a feeling we put SHODAN and the ship on the cover because they were the coolest pieces of art we had. We spent quite a bit of money making that SHODAN head. That was the mode we were in at that time, “god damnit we spent a few thousand dollars on this, we’re going to get value out of it.” [Laughter]
:lol: at EA doing a fine job as ever
 

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