KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[SharkClub]

I was able to load my old savegame right before the final fight with SHODAN to try it and didn't have any crashing or issues like that.

The fight is definitely quite different, and mostly for the better I'd say:

• Instead of 1 hitscan beam cybergun to shoot over and over they've made three brand new cyberguns for you to play around with while fighting the virus enemies that spawn in. You get an automatic rifle that shoots projectiles, a shotgun and a charge-up explosive rocket launcher type thing. You unlock the next one with each stage of the fight.
• SHODAN is also thankfully much more chatty during this iteration of the fight than the last one, she has some new lines interspersed throughout the fight.
• There's a few more mechanics to the fight, you have to bait SHODAN's sky beams into some generator things to unlock the cyber pineapple that you throw at her giant cybercarrot in each stage.
• When the beam hits the generator things you can see the power flowing through lines to get to the pineapple spawner, but some of the lines meet with nodes of ice that you have to break with your cybergun to allow the power to travel.
• You do this for three stages with each being harder than the last and then in the final (4th stage) you get given the hitscan cybergun back and have to shoot the pineapples floating around SHODAN's cybercarrot with it.
• Also the stakes are higher, this might be just because I loaded my game on the highest difficulty setting to do this, but you used to be able to respawn infinitely during the fight (and also you can't save during it), but now if you die in cyberspace you die for real, you only get one life and you have to do it all without any saves inbetween stages.

My only real complaints are that if you fail you have to reload to before entering cyberspace and then having to travel to the boss fight arena again, instead of having an autosave at the start of the fight proper. You also can't see your health and as far as I could tell there was no indicator of it. So dying is a lot more dangerous and impactful here but you aren't really given any help in figuring out how close you are to dying.

Overall it's definitely an improvement over how half-baked it was originally. There are more mechanics, it's more mechanically, visually and audibly competent, there is more variety in the fight with more weapons and light puzzle solving, more SHODAN voicelines during the fight and it is more difficult with higher stakes (as I said, originally you would just respawn over and over and it was impossible to actually lose the fight).

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I started from scratch with all levels on 2, automatically assuming that both saves and mods would be bricked. Currently mucking about on the Reactor-level, trying to do away with the mining laser.

The last time I jacked up on mods which improved inventory management. Now I'm going vanilla and inventory management hurts.

Cyberspace feels slightly different, but I can't put my finger on how. Still nothing to write home about, but at least I'm not encountering any super-hard sections like before.

 

[mindx2]

Is the GOG version updated?

 

[Spukrian]

Is the GOG version updated?

Update scheduled to May 11th.

 

[mindx2]

So Unkillable Cat says "Yes!" and Spukrian says on May 11th... ?

 

[Spukrian]

Well, you can update it immeadiately if you click a button.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

1: The offline installer is updated, it's what I'm using.

2: There's an ad blurb on the GOG frontpage right now about how System Shock is updated to 1.2.

3: There's been an update since I installed and played, so I need to install and apply a patch now. EDIT: False, they just added a new patching-option, it seems.

(4: Current GOG-version is 1.2.18830.)

 

[Spukrian]

Sorry for the misunderstanding. Unlike you guys I use Galaxy: there is an "Update" button right next to the "Play" button.

(4: Current GOG-version is 1.2.18830.)

Where do you see the version number?

EDIT: Found it. Nevermind.

 

[Jenkem]

Where the hell is my System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition??

 

[Sacibengala]

This update fucked up my savefile. now I can't finish the game. They said they already have a hotfix but plaion, their publisher are withholding it, the same way they withhold the patch (That is ready for sometine now, because of console release). Who the fuck is plaion, I never heard of them.

 

[Jenkem]

Zombra not sure if serious wat.. SS2EE was promised to backers/pre-orders of SS remake

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Making my way through Citadel station again with the 1.2-patch. Been finding a few more hidden places, like one on Medical that I'm unsure whether is in the original game or not (Hint: Far north section.) and another in Reactor (Hint: Close to SHODAN's 'trap'.)

A few encounters got rendered trivial by clever usage of explosives. That mutant ambush at the start of the Research-level? One proximity mine sorted that out. One overly crowded encounter in Storage, involving a Loader-bot? Stand so that all the enemies are between me and the Loader-bot as it fires its load, saving some ammo in the process and watch the game lag as everything on-screen exploded. ("To me, my Scrub-bots!")

Beta quadrant on the Research-level has usually been a nightmare in terms of respawning robots. I found an interesting workaround to that: Don't kill the robots there.

Weird thing happened on the Storage-level. I'm going there for the first time, I'm still in the freight elevator and I'm peeking out while checking for hostiles. A flyer-bot spots me before I spot it, and somehow it manages to utterly waste me before I could do anything. By all sense and logic I should be looking at a Game Over-screen... but because I died inside the elevator, I instead awake in the medical-section on the Maintenance-floor.

I'm not seeing any major changes yet... but they're upcoming.

 

[Spukrian]

Weird thing happened on the Storage-level. I'm going there for the first time, I'm still in the freight elevator and I'm peeking out while checking for hostiles. A flyer-bot spots me before I spot it, and somehow it manages to utterly waste me before I could do anything. By all sense and logic I should be looking at a Game Over-screen... but because I died inside the elevator, I instead awake in the medical-section on the Maintenance-floor.

That's just how the remake works, if you die in a level without a valid chamber you'll automatically be transferred to a level that has one. With some exceptions (I think if you die in a boss fight you get gameover).

 

[Trithne]

Weird thing happened on the Storage-level. I'm going there for the first time, I'm still in the freight elevator and I'm peeking out while checking for hostiles. A flyer-bot spots me before I spot it, and somehow it manages to utterly waste me before I could do anything. By all sense and logic I should be looking at a Game Over-screen... but because I died inside the elevator, I instead awake in the medical-section on the Maintenance-floor.

That's just how the remake works, if you die in a level without a valid chamber you'll automatically be transferred to a level that has one. With some exceptions (I think if you die in a boss fight you get gameover).

Story difficulty 3 reinstates the original "only resurrect if you've activated the resurrector on the same deck" behaviour.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Thanks for clearing that up, I can also confirm that dying in a boss fight equals Game Over, regardless.

Speaking of boss fights, I had my first one this playthrough: the cortex reaver on the flight deck. I spent some time experimenting here, what weapons worked and what weapons didn't. Lots of reloads took place. Eventually came to the conclusion that if I try doing this FPS-style I'll only get killed, so I went with what others have tried before: One Reflex-booster, one Berzerk-booster, one EMP-grenade to the face, and then skate in and hack and slash 'till it's dead. It took 2-3 hits, I honestly missed out on whether the third swipe was hitting air or not.

Another thing I missed out on my last playthrough: You can find a credit card on the Executive-level. I made the mistake of recycling it last time because it appeared useless, but this time I took it to the ATM. Got a nice bundle of TriOptimum-credits for that.

Two minor thoughts occurred to me:

# The escape pods are right in front of the exits from flight bays 2 and 3, to the point that when a shuttle enters they have to come in at an extra altitude, and have to pull up immediately upon exit. This is just stupid level design, no matter how you look at it.

EDIT: If you look at Citadel station as it's spinning on the title screen, you'll notice that there is no structure between flight bays 2 and 3. None. You can see it even better if you wait a while and the view switches to a close-up of the flight deck. They had full artistic license to include the escape pods any way they saw fit... and they chose to be this retarded?

# Question: If the hacker is disabling cyborg conversion processes in the regeneration chambers as (s)he goes through Citadel station, doesn't that mean that recently-killed cyborgs that are sent through the chamber get de-borgified? If the hacker has restored the chamber on the flight deck before they meet the cortex reaver there, shouldn't that mean that the people in that room can be restored somehow?

I can understand the original game doing it the way it did, as technological limitations both were a factor to implement such a thing, and a game design decision was made to have no one else alive on the station but the hacker because Looking Glass Studios could not into dialogue trees. But that was 30 years ago, neither excuse manages to cover for this today.

So what is needed is an acceptable explanation - and I think that's where the surgeon drones in the medical bays enter the picture. They not only oversee the cyborg conversion process, but also function as triage units, deciding who gets to go into the chamber and who doesn't. SHODAN obviously wants the hacker turned into a cyborg so (s)he gets top billing, but everyone else is just turned away or... recycled into spare parts.