Completed Let's play System Shock 2 (impossible / video)

[DarthBehemoth]

Not long to go until majestic giant teeth platforming then.

Oh, I almost forgot the glorious 90s platforming

Spoiler

in the body of The Many

 

[DraQ]

Problem is that almost none of these have any real effect

Really? Recoil is pretty significant problem, especially given that it is random. It means that your automatic fire accuracy goes to shit and single fire rate of fire plummets, because you're forced to aim before every shot. Weapon jamming due to mishandling even when in good shape would also be more than mere nuisance. Same with other things.

The important part is that the more ways you affect weapon performance in, the more subtle you can make each of them without sacrificing the magnitude of their combined effect.
In any case it bets moronic "hurr dunno how to fire a pistol" - Goggles' cyber-rig is supposed to plug into his brain, not replace it.

and degradation rate is already something that is appropriate for the maint skill.

Except maint doesn't seem to do anything with degradation rate, and I don't really see any problem with dual skill checks when appropriate.

Ehh, some of these things are subjective or outside a pure balance mod.

That doesn't change the fact that many weapons are boring or same-y, many have stupid shit about them and they would benefit from such changes.

IMO, best option for the most part is to reprice a bunch of the powers. But you know, there's gonna be some lame things when you have that many powers available.

The former would break consistent cost scheme, the latter is not a valid excuse.

IIRC they didn't need hyperdrive to reach Tau Ceti. Just an unreasonably fast normal-space drive (and even that I'm not sure about, but I don't recall an exact time table mentioned in-game to reference). Aimed perfectly at the spot where Tau Ceti V would be in x number of years to crash land and all that.

Except jettisoned grove obviously didn't have powerful drives, or fuel/remass (and it would have to brake to crash-land gently enough to not turn Tau Ceti V into Alderaan). It was a fucking bubble pod with grove inside, not an interstellar spaceship.
Plus, grove suddenly accelerating out of the system (with power/heat signature appropriate for such drive) and towards Tau Ceti would have been obvious to human observers - no one would be surprised to find SHODAN there.

OTOH if SHODAN devised a crude, one-shot FTL drive prototype, it would allow the grove to get where the plot needed it and would give SHODAN good head start at knowing what sweet things she can do with VB's FTL drive. Of course she would have to have waited to use it without drawing attention, but that would be consistent with timeframe.

Breaking more weapons wouldn't really do much when you are only going to use 2 or 3 weapons anyway.

Randomly breaking weapons through misuse regardless of condition if your skill is low, OTOH, would give you very valid reason to invest in repair. Two birds, one stone.

 

[Average Manatee]

Problem is that almost none of these have any real effect

Really? Recoil is pretty significant problem, especially given that it is random. It means that your automatic fire accuracy goes to shit and single fire rate of fire plummets, because you're forced to aim before every shot. Weapon jamming due to mishandling even when in good shape would also be more than mere nuisance. Same with other things.

Recoil really isn't a problem. This isn't a headshot game, and it's also not a fast game. Overcharge laser pistol works just fine in battle, any amount of recoil you throw at me can't impact the rate of fire anywhere near as long. Having multiple skills do the same thing is just a bad idea.

Breaking more weapons wouldn't really do much when you are only going to use 2 or 3 weapons anyway.

Randomly breaking weapons through misuse regardless of condition if your skill is low, OTOH, would give you very valid reason to invest in repair. Two birds, one stone.

Break, or degrade? Weapons breaking from usage with low skill would be as silly or sillier than weapons that can't be fired at all by low-skilled characters. Why would pulling a trigger magically make the gun explode in your hands simply because you are untrained? I don't recall that mechanic getting any praise in Fallout.

The important part is that the more ways you affect weapon performance in, the more subtle you can make each of them without sacrificing the magnitude of their combined effect.
In any case it bets moronic "hurr dunno how to fire a pistol" - Goggles' cyber-rig is supposed to plug into his brain, not replace it.

Doing this would make weapon skills completely irrelevant. That's a bad thing. Unfortunately the entire game as designed favours total damage and damage/shot as basically the only important aspects of weapons.

and degradation rate is already something that is appropriate for the maint skill.

Except maint doesn't seem to do anything with degradation rate, and I don't really see any problem with dual skill checks when appropriate.

Maintenance determines weapon reliability through maint tools. Making weapon skill determine weapon reliability too is just stupid.

Ehh, some of these things are subjective or outside a pure balance mod.

That doesn't change the fact that many weapons are boring or same-y, many have stupid shit about them and they would benefit from such changes.

No, but it does mean that it's not a balance mod then.

IMO, best option for the most part is to reprice a bunch of the powers. But you know, there's gonna be some lame things when you have that many powers available.

The former would break consistent cost scheme, the latter is not a valid excuse.

1. The consistent cost scheme is entirely irrelevant to the game design, and enforcing it cuts a huge aspect of making power useful.
2. It's not an excuse, it's a fact.

IIRC they didn't need hyperdrive to reach Tau Ceti. Just an unreasonably fast normal-space drive (and even that I'm not sure about, but I don't recall an exact time table mentioned in-game to reference). Aimed perfectly at the spot where Tau Ceti V would be in x number of years to crash land and all that.

Except jettisoned grove obviously didn't have powerful drives, or fuel/remass (and it would have to brake to crash-land gently enough to not turn Tau Ceti V into Alderaan). It was a fucking bubble pod with grove inside, not an interstellar spaceship.
Plus, grove suddenly accelerating out of the system (with power/heat signature appropriate for such drive) and towards Tau Ceti would have been obvious to human observers - no one would be surprised to find SHODAN there.

OTOH if SHODAN devised a crude, one-shot FTL drive prototype, it would allow the grove to get where the plot needed it and would give SHODAN good head start at knowing what sweet things she can do with VB's FTL drive. Of course she would have to have waited to use it without drawing attention, but that would be consistent with timeframe.

Did some quick numbers, the grove would need only about .025Gs of sustained propulsion to both get to Tau Ceti and decelerate so as not to become a crater. If it was some high-powered Ion Drive or similar it would be nearly undetectable in terms of power/heat signature, and no one would plot the course of what is effectively debris heading out of the system (not to mention the whole incident is probably being covered up). The idea of SHODAN magically inventing hyperdrive and THAT not being detected would be silly.

 

[potatojohn]

Accelerating tens of tons at 0.025G would be brighter than any star...

 

[Average Manatee]

Thats some nice dancing there.

IMO, should have bought in a bunch of PSI. level 6 + soma transference to rape the mind of the many, or the Adrenaline Overproduction + Recursive Amplification + PSI melee weapon to become the ultimate incarnation of rape if/when you happen upon another group of rumblers. No use ending the game with 20 psi hypos unused when you could be having FUN rather than plinging away with the laser pistol.

Accelerating tens of tons at 0.025G would be brighter than any star...

Man, you shoulda told those NASA guys who have to launch 2000 tons at around 3G. We'd have wiped out our planet if that was true.

With a proper drive you could make it nigh-undetectable, given sufficiently advanced technology . And given that this is a race on the verge of FTL, you could assume that capability.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Hey, you came pretty far with this, don't die on us now!

 

[DraQ]

Recoil really isn't a problem.

I beg to differ, as SS2 is the only game to this day in which I have missed two consecutive shotgun blasts at point blank range.

Overcharge laser pistol works just fine in battle, any amount of recoil you throw at me can't impact the rate of fire anywhere near as long.

That's good, because I've never thought about adding recoil to a laser weapon. I mean, come on now.

Having multiple skills do the same thing is just a bad idea.

That's good, because I've never mentioned that. I only mentioned either having multiple skills be required for single activity, or having many aspects of one activity being affected by single skill.

Break, or degrade? Weapons breaking from usage with low skill would be as silly or sillier than weapons that can't be fired at all by low-skilled characters. Why would pulling a trigger magically make the gun explode in your hands simply because you are untrained?

Break. It makes a lot more sense than refusing to even try firing a weapon, regardless of situation, especially if this weapon is something foolproof like pistol or shotgun.

Besides, there are RL precedences to weapons borking/jamming if not handled properly. There are assault rifles that can seemingly accommodate more than 30 rounds in magazine with no problems, but it tends to jam them, there is WWII MP40 that lacked proper foregrip and tended to bork when you understandably tried to use magazine as foregrip. Pump action shotguns tend to not take showoff one handed cycling well either. I can easily imagine mishandling something like laser pistol causing it to fry a critical component as well.

There are, however no RL precedences to trained soldier being so dumbfounded by a basic weapon he should be familiar with that he couldn't operate it at all. Because it's downright moronic.

I don't recall that mechanic getting any praise in Fallout.

Critical failures? Fallout's implementation was wonky as they relied on difficulty of the attack rather than user's skill (so expert marksman could blow his face off with a sniper rifle when trying to pull off a nigh-impossible shot), but critical failures in general are awesome.

Plus, like I said, it would make repair skill actually useful.

The important part is that the more ways you affect weapon performance in, the more subtle you can make each of them without sacrificing the magnitude of their combined effect.
In any case it bets moronic "hurr dunno how to fire a pistol" - Goggles' cyber-rig is supposed to plug into his brain, not replace it.

Doing this would make weapon skills completely irrelevant. That's a bad thing.

How is keeping the same overall influence over weapon performance by splitting it over multiple aspects of weapon use the same as making the skill irrelevant? You are not making any sense.

Unfortunately the entire game as designed favours total damage and damage/shot as basically the only important aspects of weapons.

Again, I disagree, and you *can* keep your damage in as well. If most weapons can technically be used at any skill level it will help make damage scaling meaningful and balanced too, because previously high-level weapons will then also have their damage scale with skill level.

Except maint doesn't seem to do anything with degradation rate, and I don't really see any problem with dual skill checks when appropriate.

Maintenance determines weapon reliability through maint tools.

And weapon skill would determine it reliability regardless of tools by extending time weapon can go without maintenance.
Two different things.

Making weapon skill determine weapon reliability too is just stupid.

It doesn't - see RL precedences above. In any case is it more or less stupid than grunt being unable to fire pistol or shotgun any civilian can fire without any sort of training? Or even AR like the ones fired routinely by Africa's expendable kid soldiers?

Give an untrained civilian a weapon and have them run with it and fire it for a long time and two things will happen:
1. Civilian will generally be able to fire and handle this weapon - with varying degree of effectiveness, but still well enough to kill someone at close to medium range.
2. After some time they will probably bork it due to mishandling a trained professional could avoid, and this will likely happen before the weapon dies to lack of maintenance.

That doesn't change the fact that many weapons are boring or same-y, many have stupid shit about them and they would benefit from such changes.

No, but it does mean that it's not a balance mod then.[/quote]It means it's more than that, but you can't say that making energy weapons not cripplingly overspecialized, making most heavy weapons actually useful, or making pistol retain its niche even after finding an AR would be a bad thing.

Did some quick numbers, the grove would need only about .025Gs of sustained propulsion to both get to Tau Ceti and decelerate so as not to become a crater.

Only.

Citadel had mass 2*10^9kg.
Mass of the grove hasn't been officially stated, but based on in-game images of the station with groves, it can be estimated.
The diameter of the grove is 1/6 of diameter of station's primary hull. If scaled up to this size it would take around 3 groves stacked on top of each other to fill up station's volume.
We can therefore assume the grove to weigh 3*6^3 times less than the entire station - around 3*10^6 kg.
To accelerate it at 0.025G (haven't checked your math) you'd need to maintain thrust of around 757kN (ok, stuff gets more complex because of expending remass and rocket equation).
It's not that much, but you'd have to maintain constant thrust for 30 years.

So, how much of grove's mass would you consider to be remass?

high-powered (...) nearly undetectable in terms of power/heat signature

Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

The idea of SHODAN magically inventing hyperdrive and THAT not being detected would be silly.

1. TriOp was able to come up with hyperdrive 42 years later.
2. Inventions don't spawn in vacuum, but are created based on previous knowledge.
3. TriOp would presumably be able to do it much earlier was it not for the massive legal shitstorm and data being lost with their station where cutting edge research was conducted.
4. Shodan had access to to all that data and presumably had it backed up on board of the grove, as it is the kind of thing shodan with her countless backup plans and contingencies would have done.
5. Shodan presumably had some resources, scrappable stuff and automatons on board of ejected module of highly automated station.
6. Shodan was fucking smart, motivated to do something instead of drifting in space forever and didn't have to asspull the drive until much later.
7. We don't know anything about power requirements and signature of drive based on completely unconventional physics.

Accelerating tens of tons at 0.025G would be brighter than any star...

Man, you shoulda told those NASA guys who have to launch 2000 tons at around 3G. We'd have wiped out our planet if that was true.

NASA runs out of fuel within minutes. To build up momentum in one direction you need to give your remass equal momentum in opposite direction. Momentum is velocity times mass. To achieve more momentum you need to either throw a lot of shit (increased mass) or throw it harder (increased velocity). Unfortunately kinetic energy increases with square of velocity, so throwing shit 2x harder to achieve twice as much thrust requires your power source to burn 4x brighter.

To still have shit to throw after 30 years you'd better throw as little of it as hard as you can. Grove with this kind of propulsion would be fucking bright.

With a proper drive you could make it nigh-undetectable, given sufficiently advanced technology . And given that this is a race on the verge of FTL, you could assume that capability.

Nope, as long as this FTL isn't actually achieved and you move around realspace by throwing shit in opposite direction.

 

[toro]

Accelerating tens of tons at 0.025G would be brighter than any star...

How many times did you play SS2?

 

[Average Manatee]

Recoil really isn't a problem.

I beg to differ, as SS2 is the only game to this day in which I have missed two consecutive shotgun blasts at point blank range.

Then I pity your aiming, I suppose. If that happens constantly you might want to look into not playing FPS.

Overcharge laser pistol works just fine in battle, any amount of recoil you throw at me can't impact the rate of fire anywhere near as long.

That's good, because I've never thought about adding recoil to a laser weapon. I mean, come on now.

Sorry, I didn't fully explain my logic.

- Overcharge laser pistol has a several second period in which I can't fire again.
- Any amount of weapon recoil (within reason, not making me do a complete 180) is just a short downtime in which I have to re-adjust my aim. Effectively the same downside as using an overcharged laser pistol except that I can re-adjust my aim far quicker than it takes the laser pistol to recharge.
- Since using the overcharged laser pistol in battle doesn't pose many problems, adding more recoil to weapons would basically do very little in terms of the weapon effectiveness.

Having multiple skills do the same thing is just a bad idea.

That's good, because I've never mentioned that. I only mentioned either having multiple skills be required for single activity, or having many aspects of one activity being affected by single skill.

Break, or degrade? Weapons breaking from usage with low skill would be as silly or sillier than weapons that can't be fired at all by low-skilled characters. Why would pulling a trigger magically make the gun explode in your hands simply because you are untrained?

Break. It makes a lot more sense than refusing to even try firing a weapon, regardless of situation, especially if this weapon is something foolproof like pistol or shotgun.

Besides, there are RL precedences to weapons borking/jamming if not handled properly. There are assault rifles that can seemingly accommodate more than 30 rounds in magazine with no problems, but it tends to jam them, there is WWII MP40 that lacked proper foregrip and tended to bork when you understandably tried to use magazine as foregrip. Pump action shotguns tend to not take showoff one handed cycling well either. I can easily imagine mishandling something like laser pistol causing it to fry a critical component as well.

There are, however no RL precedences to trained soldier being so dumbfounded by a basic weapon he should be familiar with that he couldn't operate it at all. Because it's downright moronic.

I don't recall that mechanic getting any praise in Fallout.

Critical failures? Fallout's implementation was wonky as they relied on difficulty of the attack rather than user's skill (so expert marksman could blow his face off with a sniper rifle when trying to pull off a nigh-impossible shot), but critical failures in general are awesome.

Plus, like I said, it would make repair skill actually useful.

Problem with this is that it makes repair, like maintenance, a skill that everyone needs (beyond dedicated psi/melee builds of course). At that point you might as well just make maintenance cost 2x as much and merge repair into maintenance. Unless the break rate is zero when you reach a certain weapon skill requirement, at which point repair again becomes useless (and no one would pump points into repair to repair weapons broken by a low weapons skill rather than simply increasing their weapons skill in the first place).

The point of repair in the original game was really to let you repair and start using powerful weapons that were not otherwise obtainable for a long time. If you want to make repair useful, give more and more powerful weapons to be repaired earlier, put the already repaired weapons later or otherwise requiring large other investments (assault rifle could reasonable stand to appear often on the rickenbacker, the actual military ship, and only on high-security crates on the Von Braun), and remove auto-repair units. Maybe even some repairable weapons that come pre-upgraded?

The important part is that the more ways you affect weapon performance in, the more subtle you can make each of them without sacrificing the magnitude of their combined effect.
In any case it bets moronic "hurr dunno how to fire a pistol" - Goggles' cyber-rig is supposed to plug into his brain, not replace it.

Doing this would make weapon skills completely irrelevant. That's a bad thing.

How is keeping the same overall influence over weapon performance by splitting it over multiple aspects of weapon use the same as making the skill irrelevant? You are not making any sense.

Unfortunately the entire game as designed favours total damage and damage/shot as basically the only important aspects of weapons.

Again, I disagree, and you *can* keep your damage in as well. If most weapons can technically be used at any skill level it will help make damage scaling meaningful and balanced too, because previously high-level weapons will then also have their damage scale with skill level.

If this was Deus Ex where there are mid and long-distance fights and enemies that have location-specific points to target (headshots), I would agree. As it is, no combat in SS2 takes place more than about 10 feet away and there is no locational damage. No one who isn't my grandmother is going to have accuracy problems in an FPS under those conditions, and certainly almost anyone in real life would be able to hit a target at 10 feet almost all of the time.

Did some quick numbers, the grove would need only about .025Gs of sustained propulsion to both get to Tau Ceti and decelerate so as not to become a crater.

Only.

Citadel had mass 2*10^9kg.
Mass of the grove hasn't been officially stated, but based on in-game images of the station with groves, it can be estimated.
The diameter of the grove is 1/6 of diameter of station's primary hull. If scaled up to this size it would take around 3 groves stacked on top of each other to fill up station's volume.
We can therefore assume the grove to weigh 3*6^3 times less than the entire station - around 3*10^6 kg.
To accelerate it at 0.025G (haven't checked your math) you'd need to maintain thrust of around 757kN (ok, stuff gets more complex because of expending remass and rocket equation).
It's not that much, but you'd have to maintain constant thrust for 30 years.

So, how much of grove's mass would you consider to be remass?

Less than required to use a hyperdrive and go faster than light?

high-powered (...) nearly undetectable in terms of power/heat signature

Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

Yes? If the exhaust doesn't intersect anything, it's undetectable. I mean if we go to completely arbitrary limits of power (you're already considering hyperdrive, which is a step beyond this), you could get by with a single atom launched once a minute at a speed arbitrarily close to the speed of light. OK, so that will squash everyone like a bug without some magical inertial dampeners, but you get the point.

The idea of SHODAN magically inventing hyperdrive and THAT not being detected would be silly.

1. TriOp was able to come up with hyperdrive 42 years later.
2. Inventions don't spawn in vacuum, but are created based on previous knowledge.
3. TriOp would presumably be able to do it much earlier was it not for the massive legal shitstorm and data being lost with their station where cutting edge research was conducted.
4. Shodan had access to to all that data and presumably had it backed up on board of the grove, as it is the kind of thing shodan with her countless backup plans and contingencies would have done.
5. Shodan presumably had some resources, scrappable stuff and automatons on board of ejected module of highly automated station.
6. Shodan was fucking smart, motivated to do something instead of drifting in space forever and didn't have to asspull the drive until much later.
7. We don't know anything about power requirements and signature of drive based on completely unconventional physics.

Able to invent hyperdrive in 6 months but can't even clean out the Citadel in the same amount of time? Sorry, not buying it.

 

[potatojohn]

Final part, finally

 

[potatojohn]

Also,

Hmm, that's not true... I'll just "dispute" it...

Or maybe not. There's no "your system is wrong" option

 

[VioletShadow]

Thanks for doing this LP! I've never been brave enough to try it on impossible, might give it a try. Also the video quality is great and you have a nice voice.

 

[potatojohn]

Thanks! The hardest part is probably engineering, so if you make it past that you'll be ok.

 

[DraQ]

Then I pity your aiming, I suppose. If that happens constantly you might want to look into not playing FPS.

Except the joke is on you - I don't mean to boast, but I typically am a pretty good shoot in a variety of different FPS games - as different as UT'99 (both regular and instagib) and STALKER (no, you don't need 2.5 mags of 5.45 to put down a bandit).

It's just that SS2 weapon recoil direction is randomized and recoil jerks your weapon around very rapidly, so re-firing your weapon in SS2 in a fast, reflexive way borders on impossible unless you have that psi power.

Sorry, I didn't fully explain my logic.

- Overcharge laser pistol has a several second period in which I can't fire again.
- Any amount of weapon recoil (within reason, not making me do a complete 180) is just a short downtime in which I have to re-adjust my aim. Effectively the same downside as using an overcharged laser pistol except that I can re-adjust my aim far quicker than it takes the laser pistol to recharge.
- Since using the overcharged laser pistol in battle doesn't pose many problems, adding more recoil to weapons would basically do very little in terms of the weapon effectiveness.

I think I did explain mine, but whatever:

- Recoil is a factor in (non-energy) weapon use (one of many)
- Splitting skill impact over many different factors contributing to an activity allows to maintain its overall impact while keeping its effect on any single of those aspects relatively low key - a desirable thing
- an advantage of many non-energy weapons is that they can be fired in rapid succession, this advantage would be diminished at low skill levels in addition to other disadvantages appearing, otherwise why even have anything but laser pistol implemented in game?

Problem with this is that it makes repair, like maintenance, a skill that everyone needs (beyond dedicated psi/melee builds of course).

Beats skill that no one needs.
Ideally every skill should be something everyone needs. Since no one can get all the skills it forces player to prioritize, work around and generally have fun.

At that point you might as well just make maintenance cost 2x as much and merge repair into maintenance. Unless the break rate is zero when you reach a certain weapon skill requirement, at which point repair again becomes useless (and no one would pump points into repair to repair weapons broken by a low weapons skill rather than simply increasing their weapons skill in the first place).

Weapons would stop breaking independently of their durability at skill level equal to game's normal skill req.

They would still degrade and break once in bad shape, though, and would still need maintenance skill equal or above maintenance requirement to be successfully maintained. The question would be, for example, whether to pump a weapon skill up to 6 and maintenance skill accordingly for no nasty surprises and perfect use of particular gun, or, after much more modest investment in repair, risk nasty fuck-ups but be able to fix a broad variety of weapons when (not if) they break.

The point of repair in the original game was really to let you repair and start using powerful weapons that were not otherwise obtainable for a long time.

No. That's the point of auto-repair units.

remove auto-repair units.

I don't like removing stuff that's already in game. Making it work better in the context of mechanics is preferable. Removing ceiling from the number of times you may need something repaired makes auto repair units work better in the context of mechanics and is therefore desirable.

If this was Deus Ex

Then no one would bitch about lack hard skill requirement despite poping someone in any bodypart being trivial regardless of skill unless in the middle of heated firefight.

Less than required to use a hyperdrive and go faster than light?

Hyperdrive is not a reaction drive.

Yes? If the exhaust doesn't intersect anything, it's undetectable.

Exhaust doesn't have to be. At any given efficiency the amount of waste heat needing to be eliminated will be proportional to drive's power. Powerful drive will need to shine like a little star in order to not vaporize from its own waste heat.
This would be noticed found interesting, tracked back and determined to be grove ejected from Citadel precluding SS2 plot - at the very least everyone on the VB would be prepared to find SHODAN and her creations on Tau Ceti V.

Able to invent hyperdrive in 6 months but can't even clean out the Citadel in the same amount of time? Sorry, not buying it.

I bet many of those people whose corpses were strewn around the station could also invent brilliant shit and yet it didn't help them.

 

[agentorange]

shutup Draq.

Good job on the LP potato. Rarely watch video LPs but yours are very fun. Made me wanna try SS2 on impossible myself, as a PSI/conventional weapons character.

 

[Kalin]

Excellent Let's Play well worth watching.