So, System Shock 2....oh the horror!

[Metro]

That's been the Kodex Konsensus for a while now.

 

[Daemongar]

SS2, yeah it is hard to love. But only because it's been ripped off to death by countless later games. Bioshock, Doom 3, Deus Ex, and others all picked the bones of SS2. Hard to appreciate because anyone who has played a few FPS has already played SS2.

The thing about SS2 is that you can mitigate any problem in the game by hobbling yourself in other areas. SS2 was designed when developers believed players would want to replay the game. Not hit everything in one shot. i suspect some complaints about combat respawns are taking a balanced approach trying to do everything on one run-through. A little combat, a lot of engineering, and maybe some psi. Repair is rough, but there are ways to mitigate that as well. Going pure soldier makes combat easy, but it's not that interesting.

Besides, what current game would put tons of chemicals and manifests on every floor, knowing that 60% or so players may never put a point in research? What game would put in so many psi hypos and have 6 psi levels when 80% of players will never play psi (and if they did, they'd really know the horror of combat.)

 

[Taxnomore]

J_C should stick to review beers people send him.

 

[Severian Silk]

I enjoyed SS1 more, too.

 

[J_C]

So we're agreed J_C is a colossal faggot, right?

That's been the Kodex Konsensus for a while now.

Yet more and more people agree with me.

 

[EG]

So we're agreed J_C is a colossal faggot, right?

That's been the Kodex Konsensus for a while now.

Yet more and more people agree with me.

Just proof that the Decline has reached critical mass.

 

[thesheeep]

Indeed Bioshock: Infinite is the game that some people deserve...

I'd say it is a great game interactive story.

About the weapon degradation in SS2... yes, it's broken. There is no arguing around it. When sci-fi weapons work less reliably than 17th century muskets, something is horribly wrong. I wonder how that bs passed QA. It constantly rips you out of immersion, because it is just so utterly unrealistic.

So, yeah, SS2 is a good game to criticize, a lot of things are bad in it. But then again, it is one of the greatest games ever made. Weird how gaming works, sometimes.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

The no_spawn line doesn't seem to work for everyone, I remember it didn't when I played through the game last time. There is a mod for that that does work though, if you're a faggot bothered much by it. And yeah, I agree that respawns weren't always done in a best way in SS2, when enemies spawn from thin air in front of you in precise intervals then it doesn't really add to the tension, only irritation. Security alarm spawns and game event spawns with random spawn or two in areas which were already ransacked would be fine.

Still, SS2 is one of the best games of the golden era of late nineties and my definite favourite of all the hybrid fps/rpg games, I liked it a lot more than Deus Ex for example.

 

[Average Manatee]

Can't say respawns ever annoyed me. "right behind your back"? Literally, I've never seen that in dozens of replays. If you mean something coming down a hallway you've come from, sure. But never in a situation where I would go in a room, walk out, then immediately go in again and find an enemy the second time. Whenever it happened, the enemy always came from some well-traveled corridor that it could plausibly have come from if the ship was really crawling with them. Overall I thought the spawning was actually pretty weak up until the Rickenbacker. If you are being surprised I think you are being too fast rushing around, not listening and/or peaking around corners.

Yes, guns are basically unusable at the beginning due to lower ammo efficiency (damage per bullet) and low ammo availability/lack of repair. This is obviously intentional, most of the Hybrids are specifically made to be dispatchable with melee while the robots are designed to be what you need to save your ammo for. Wrench hit detection is perfectly fine, stop being shit. I can clean out the med deck with a wrench and have a 50/50 shot of taking no damage, there's no excuse if you can't comprehend simple timing to move forward while your hit connects.

You talk about finding enough tools eventually, you DO know that you can buy maintenance tools from the beginning of the game, right? Hack the very first replicator in the game, it costs like 90 nanites. And that's on impossible difficulty, on normal I believe they cost half that (45). You should have several hundred nanites available by the time you finish the med level. Pistol can fire IIRC 10 shots for each level of durability. Yes it's still silly that they break, but if you have anything over 1 maintenance you have no excuse for running out of tools. And anyone using tools at 1 maintenance should probably just go ahead and kill themselves.

Repair skill is indeed shit though, you should basically never take it because simply maintaining guns before they reach 1 durability ensures they never break. The few broken things you want to repair can be repaired by the automatic units.

Vote OP for faggot of the year.

About the weapon degradation in SS2... yes, it's broken. There is no arguing around it. When sci-fi weapons work less reliably than 17th century muskets, something is horribly wrong. I wonder how that bs passed QA. It constantly rips you out of immersion, because it is just so utterly unrealistic.

I think the problem is more that (AFAIK) absolutely no weapons in the game come fully repaired, and the vast majority of them come with 1 or 2 durability. A fully-functional pistol will fire about 100 shots before breaking. It's still unrealistically low, but 100 shots is a god damned lot in gameplay terms. It would be interesting to think how perceptions would change if most guns started off with 9 or 10 durability but finding repair tools was much harder. But even still, if you exercise an ounce of thought weapon maintenance should never be a problem.

IIRC there was a planned audio log that would have explained that The Many had created some kind of biological containment on the ship that caused machinery to break down, but it never got put in.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

There are places where you can just stand and see enemies pop out one after another as you kill them, Ed mentioned the first one you can come across.

As for the weapon degradation, it's not exactly a big secret that you can find quite a few weapons that will never break, so you can also arbitrarily skip that feature if you desire.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Funny, I never had any trouble with weapon breaking... maybe precisely because I actually used Repair (which brings stuff to p. high condition at high ranks and almost removes the need for maintenance tools) and had some spare guns on me in case of sudden jam

The respawns never bothered me. In most places they are meaningless (o hey a hybrid, have sum wrenching), and in others they add a ton of tension (FKN PROTOCOL DROIIIIIIIDS). I'm also puzzled about the notion of stuff spawning "right behind your back".

But then again, it's not the first time I notice that my skillz are infinitely superior than the rest of the unwashed masses

 

[Zero Credibility]

I was never really bothered by respawing. There are only a few areas (corridors in cargo bays, tram station) that you need to pass through several times that will have respawning enemies. Others you can just avoid by keeping backtracking at minimum. There are also several useful areas in the game with upgrade stations, rechargers and replicators where enemies will not respawn. Like that area in hydroponics just right of the elevator. I always end up using them as supply depots for all the stuff I pick up.

Now, weapon degradation, yeah, they went overboard with that. Maybe it would be better if it was much slower, but maintenance tools were much rarer and/or expensive.

 

[J_C]

But never in a situation where I would go in a room, walk out, then immediately go in again and find an enemy the second time.

Sorry, but this is just what happens. Although this is the worst case scenario, usually they come from a hallway as you said. But it DOES happen that they come from a room you just left.

Wrench hit detection is perfectly fine, stop being shit. I can clean out the med deck with a wrench and have a 50/50 shot of taking no damage, there's no excuse if you can't comprehend simple timing to move forward while your hit connects.

This is not true. Obviously hitting a full grown soldier is OK, the hit detects. But if you say that hit detection is OK with the smaller enemies (monkeys, worms, spiders), than you don't know the game. Do you want me to make some videos about your wrench just flying through their bodies when I stand right in front of them?

 

[Average Manatee]

There are places where you can just stand and see enemies pop out one after another as you kill them, Ed mentioned the first one you can come across.

But the one Ed mentions is a perfectly reasonable place for them to spawn. In the context of the game, they've walked in from one of the other areas. Yes, you've cleaned those areas, but in the fiction of the game the ship is vast enough and teeming to the point where that is impossible. Unless said enemies are literally spawning while you are still in the room there is no problem.

Sorry, but this is just what happens. Although this is the worst case scenario, usually they come from a hallway as you said. But it DOES happen that they come from a room you just left.

So you say. Your original post gave me the impression that you are simply a ridiculously unobservant player. And just to clear it up, by "just left" I mean, immediately. Not 30s ago after you've gone into out of that room and into a few other rooms down the hallway. That's, again, a situation in which an enemy logically could have wandered in.

This is not true. Obviously hitting a full grown soldier is OK, the hit detects. But if you say that hit detection is OK with the smaller enemies (monkeys, worms, spiders), than you don't know the game. Do you want me to make some videos about your wrench just flying through their bodies when I stand right in front of them?

You need to offset your aim a bit. Is that what you call bad hit detection? "Bad hit detection" to me means you swung and missed even when the wrench physically hit.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I don't really care for your rationalizing or larping that a hybrid just came out of the shitter to find his friends murdered and is out there seeking revenge. All I'm saying is that there are places where the enemies just spawn constantly one after another and such design does not create tension at all. I'm fine with the alarms or the event spawning (like hybrids attacking you after you read the code log at the same deck).

 

[EG]

There are places where you can just stand and see enemies pop out one after another as you kill them, Ed mentioned the first one you can come across.

Relatively amusing seeing an enemy pop into the air then slowly fall to the ground every 2-3 minutes, though.

Great for practicing your melee attacks.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I think you should stick to reviewing Ducktales.

Given how he got so butthurt about respawns making SS2 too difficult, I wouldn't look forward to that review either.

In b4 "Honestly, Ducktales is almost unenjoyable. There are a lot of good things about the game, but they're all ruined by the unnecessarily cruel checkpoint save system."

 

[Infinitron]

Tension-inducing element in horror games is steadily depleting finite resources. And that is what respawning enemies do.

This. And the key word is "slowly". SS2 would be a very different game if it was made out of fewer but harder combat encounters, as Ed suggested. It's a unique game because the challenge in it is almost entirely strategic - survival over the long term, not the short term. Professional game designers love SS2 because it shows how a game can be hard without being save scummy.

 

[J_C]

So you say. Your original post gave me the impression that you are simply a ridiculously unobservant player.

Unobservant? I'm observant enought that see how an enemy hybrid materializes from a white flash/smoke. Because that's what I saw several times. I'm going into a small closed room. Nobody's there. I'm leaving for a few seconds. Oops, I forget to check something. I go back into the room, I see a white flash, and bang, there is a hybrid. They are not coming from the hallway, not from sewers, they teleport into a closed room in front of my eyes.

You need to offset your aim a bit. Is that what you call bad hit detection? "Bad hit detection" to me means you swung and missed even when the wrench physically hit.

I know that I have to offset my aim. I learnt it after failing to make damage, although visually the wrench hits the body of the spider/monkey. In my book bad hit detection is that I see that I hit, but there is no damage.

Maybe you don't remember these things, because you played the game a while ago. But I'm playing it now, and see the things I'm saying.

 

[evdk]

I get the complain about the end game, the game goes downhill after you enter the Rickenbacker

FTFY

 

[felipepepe]

Indeed Bioshock: Infinite is the game that some people deserve...

I'd say it is a great game interactive story.

NO.

Maybe if you only watched the cutscenes together on youtube it would be a story, but having all the drama about escaping the city and Brooker's regret for a massacre while shooting hundreds of citizens and policemen is just retarded. There is nothing of interactive to it's storytelling, it all happens on cutscenes, all you play is a dumb shooter. And the gameplay itself is bad and boring, it becomes a chore for people to play, when all they want is to watch another cutscene of their waifu.

 

[evdk]

Maybe if you only watched the cutscenes together on youtube it would be a story

I did that and it's just a mess. Disjointed mess trying to cover all the holes with quantum magic.

 

[The Vanished One]

The Rickenbacker had a few good moments too, but yeah, the Von Braun has the best content in the game.

I don't think I was bothered by either respawning or degradation, but it's been a long while. Time to replay it I guess.

 

[felipepepe]

Maybe if you only watched the cutscenes together on youtube it would be a story

I did that and it's just a mess. Disjointed mess trying to cover all the holes with quantum magic.

I never said it would be a GOOD story...

 

[DraQ]

But it is almost entirely ruined by the constantly respawing enemies. SS2 is worst than any other modern popamole game in this regard. And if you think otherwise, then you don't know what you are talkig about. Seriously, they spawn in front of you from thin air, they spawn again and again behind you. And because the game is quite hard, you can get a lot of damage from enemies you don't even see, because in one moment they are nowhere to be seen, but suddenly they are hitting you from behind. Sometimes I was strafing during a gunfight, and I didn't notice that a spider or some robot spawned behind me, and killed me. I was near ragequit at that point.

Attach the bow of shame...


Seriously, the very *point* of respawns is that they prevent you from just clearing the area out and masturbating over yourself being Duke "Damn, I'm Good" Nukem, and preventing you from being Duke "Damn, I'm Good" Nukem is arguably *the point* of SS2.

Man up or choke on an MHD.

The weapon degredation system is hit and miss. It was enfuriating in the beginning, because you couldn't fire 5 bullets without breaking your gun (literally).

See above.

Oh, melee hit detection is shit.

Actually it's surprisingly good. Especially for such an old game.

And the repair skill is shit

Yes.

Can't say respawns ever annoyed me. "right behind your back"? Literally, I've never seen that in dozens of replays. I

Well, no. I have clearly seen enemy spawning once or twice in plain sight and quite possibly have also seen them spawning in illogical areas.

Still, refining the spawn system != cutting it, and respawns are arguably part of what made SS2 what it was (in positive sense).