KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[Jaedar]

Is there any point to the ID tags?

There's a section in the manual where the key personnel on every floor is named. Might be something for the OCD autists who need to know where everyone died on the station.

EDIT: Ninja'd with the proper response.

There's clearly not enough staff. All of citadel station and it has like 20 humans working on it? What is even the point.

 

[Jenkem]

Whoever decided to limit the hotbar to categories needs to be kicked very hard in the nuts.

when you're so mindfucked by a game you get filtered by the options...

damn, that was hard.

Whoever decided to limit the hotbar to categories needs to be kicked very hard in the nuts.

You can turn it off in the menu.

The game has surprisingly rich customisation options enabled, when taking modern game design into account. Hell, in many modern games you can't even separately disable motion blur without turning post-processing completely off, or tinkering with the ini files.

but actually knowing what he's talking about would make it harder for him to bitch and whine which is the only reason he's playing the game in the first place

 

[Lemming42]

Played through Research and my impressions are exactly the same as after Medical - it's close enough to the original that there's no reason at all to not just play the original, which has better visuals (yes, I believe this), better combat (yes, I also believe this), far better character movement, objectively better music, and a much better sense of what it's trying to do tonally and thematically.

This game's weird, it's just walking around recognisable areas from a different game but everything's dead and devoid of what made it special. It's like playing one of those old 3D Doom mods for GZDoom, where everything just ends up looking and feeling shittier, and also having the music off.

I'm not surprised a lot of reviewers don't like it, because it does keep most of what modern gamers would find annoying about the original game's design. But that's the thing. Anyone who's not put off by 1994-era graphics, level design and lack of handholding might as well just play the original. I genuinely can't understand who the game is made for. Keeps everything that would alienate a modern gamer, but removes things that made the original worth playing. Wtf.

Also lol @ the fucking respawn cubes.

 

[JDR13]

I mean, not that I've ever been in a gay nightclub in Amsterdam. Well, it wasn't gay. I think.

yeah, sure. wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

More like twink-twink, fudge-fudge.

 

[Jenkem]

I took one of those melee-combat stims and as it was wearing off saw hallucinations of the zombos from the original game.. nice touch

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-system-shock-2-made-stephen-kick-and-nightdive-studios

How System Shock 2 made Stephen Kick and Nightdive Studios​

“Hey, I’ve got this far. Let’s see how far I can take it.”

Oh yeah, we’ve got the System Shock IP,” said the insurance company. “What do you want to do with it? Do you want to make a sequel?”

It’s a question you could imagine being posed to Ken Levine, or Warren Spector, or several other notable designers who could reasonably lay claim to the legacy of Looking Glass and Irrational’s legendary immersive sims. Instead, it was asked of Stephen Kick - at the time, a recently unemployed videogame artist holidaying in a Guatemalan hostel. Up until that point, Kick had dedicated his life to creative pursuits. He had no business background, and none of the acumen required to understand contracts or negotiate licensing fees. More to the point, he had no more than $5,000 to his name. Hardly the foundation for a follow-up to two of the most acclaimed PC games of all time.

“I’m in the middle of the jungle on satellite internet,” he recalls now. “It’s not really in my near future, you know?” And yet, finding himself at an existential crossroads, Kick pitched the insurance company on re-releasing System Shock 2. And they said yes.

“From then on, I felt like I had just jumped into the ocean,” he says. “The intent of the trip was to expose myself to things that were brand new, so that my brain could connect some new synapses and make some new experiences and maybe find inspiration in things that previously I may not have known about. And it really ignited this passion for, ‘Hey, I’ve got this far. Let’s see how far I can take it.’” So far, Kick has taken it all the way to a lavish, ground-up remake of System Shock, built by his own game studio, the remaster specialists Nightdive.


But his journey with System Shock, the series that kickstarted Nightdive and ultimately led to its purchase by Atari for an initial consideration of $10 million, didn’t start in the jungle. It began in early 1999, as the snow and dark gathered in Massachusetts. A buddy at school had recommended System Shock 2 as a chaser to Half-Life, and Kick carried the borrowed game home in its hulking box.

“It was one of those perfect evenings,” Kick recalls. “There was that cold feeling even though it was comfortable next to my computer. And I just remember playing it and just getting totally immersed in it and not stopping for hours and hours and hours.” Back then, Kick had developed a habit of playing games to the accompaniment of CDs on his boombox. He cued up the industrial rock band Filter. “There’s this one song that came on while the Shodan reveal was happening,” he says. “This really ethereal female voice talked about how humanity is a cancer on Earth, and it just gelled so perfectly. I’ll never forget that.”


A protocol droid in System Shock 2

Then Kick grew up, joined Sony Online Entertainment in San Diego as a character artist, and burned out - which is when he and his girlfriend took that fateful trip to Central America. “We quit our jobs, put everything in the car, drove across the border into Tijuana, and basically just travelled for ten months.” Beforehand, Kick had loaded up a laptop with “whimsical things that would provide me with a lot of enjoyment”. The Curse Of Monkey Island. Full Throttle. Fallout. During a torrential tropical downpour in Guatamala - perhaps compelled by the memory of another, much colder, extreme weather event - he booted up System Shock 2.

“And I just kept getting error messages,” he says. “All the little tricks that I could try to get it to work didn’t work. So I went to GOG.com, because why wouldn’t they have this? It’s one of the best games of all time. And that’s when I discovered that it was their number one wishlisted game.” That second dead end prompted another question: “What happened to the rights? Why can’t they release this?” Kick headed to the Wayback Machine, and looked up old articles from the time that Looking Glass went out of business.

“I found an article by Jared Newman, for G4TV, about how when Looking Glass went under the rights to the game were split, and the IP went to their insurance company,” he says. “The trademark remained with Electronic Arts.” And so Kick found the insurer, and fired over an email using the contact form on their website. It was only a day later that the company’s general counsel got in touch to offer System Shock 3.

By extraordinary coincidence, around the same time, EA had let its trademark lapse - and the insurance company had snatched it up. But legally speaking, the only way to secure that trademark was to use it. “They had all the pieces, they needed to do something with System Shock, they just didn’t know what,” Kick says. “Because they’re an insurance company.”

It’s an unlikely story, and the wider games industry initially treated it as such. When Kick approached GOG.com, they were incredulous that a nobody with a newly-registered company had secured the rights to its most-wanted game. “They didn’t believe me,” Kick says. “They actually said in the email that I was full of shit. Because they had been trying to get this game for years. Like, how does this kid just get it? They asked me a bunch of questions, like, ‘Which of your family members works at this insurance company?’” Later, after System Shock 2’s relaunch, Ken Levine’s agent found Kick’s phone number and rang him up out of the blue, demanding to know who he was. “It felt like an interrogation,” he says. “And immediately I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I just get into?’”

After that initial breakthrough, Kick returned to GOG.com’s wishlist of old games yet to be adapted for digital release, and worked his way through. Even where some games were already available as GOG exclusives, he reached out to rights holders and offered to make them money on Steam as well. “That’s where we got The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour,” he says. “We were the ones to broker the deal with Harlan Ellison for I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream. It was a lot easier to get those types of deals where the game was still owned by an individual.”


Captives in cages in I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream

Over time, Nightdive progressed from curios and cult classics - like the campy comic book adventure Noctropolis, and Bad Mojo, which cast you as a cockroach - to collaborations with major publishers, like Turok and Doom 64. Ten years on from that first deal, despite the occasional misstep and iffy launch, Kick and the company are respected players in the games industry. Yet fittingly, they’re still deeply involved with System Shock - having bought the rights from the insurers, and committed to the new remake of the 1994 original.

“We didn’t go so far that the formula would be unrecognisable,” Kick says. “The labyrinthian level design, for one thing, is something that we wanted to maintain. But the inventory management and the interactivity from System Shock 2 and Bioshock, we brought back. There’s so much borrowing from all these different games that were originally inspired by the first one that helped us amalgamate this new remake.”

Nightdive haven't messed with the narrative structure of the original campaign, but have rewritten some of the lines to create more bonds between characters around Citadel station. They also preserved System Shock’s considered approach to shooting - furnishing you with alternative ammo types, and pushing you to match your weapons to your targets, whether they be mechanical or biological. “We made sure that there were lots of opportunities to experiment and figure out what worked best because of the limited inventory that you’d have,” Kick says. “Knowing you could only carry so much ammo and so many different weapon types, stuff that really makes you think about your choices.”


The CPU cores in System Shock classic (left), and Nu System Shock (aka the remake)

Nightdive have kept, too, the surprisingly forward-thinking difficulty options for System Shock - which allowed you to configure not only combat but puzzles, and even alter the complexity of the story to suit your tastes. It’s a degree of granularity that the wider games industry has only recently begun to adopt. “To be able to change a couple of factors like that before the game starts is gonna just make it more accessible for a lot of people,” Kick says. That said, Nightdive eschewed many of the player safety nets of modern AAA productions. “If you wanted the real System Shock experience, you had to listen to the audio logs,” he says. “You were probably going to need a piece of paper to write down door codes.

“We’ve already had a lot of people go, ‘Where do I go, what do I do?’” he adds. “And it’s like, ‘Well, were you even listening? The characters tell you what to do, in a roundabout way.’ I think it’s going to take a lot of people by surprise, but I hope that Dark Souls and Cuphead fans are gonna like this.”

It’s been an expensive and difficult project, and its success or otherwise will determine whether Nightdive tackle another remake on the same scale. Once again, System Shock is the axis upon which Kick’s future turns. But whatever the outcome, the company’s guiding philosophy will continue. “I want people to make games that are influenced by our past,” Kick says. “As far back as we can go. And the only way we can do that is if we preserve them for people to play.”

 

[Luka-boy]

There's clearly not enough staff. All of citadel station and it has like 20 humans working on it? What is even the point.

I suppose that when a station is managed by an AI you only need a skeleton crew.

SHODAN seems to agree. In a very literal way.

 

[Tyranicon]

I genuinely can't understand who the game is made for.

Modern remakes are generally to double-dip the same audience.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

objectively better music

how moddable is this? i can't wait for the ss2 music mod.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

objectively better music

The music bumming me out but if someone could just patch in the HD updated remixes into the game that would be awesome.

There's clearly not enough staff. All of citadel station and it has like 20 humans working on it? What is even the point.

I suppose that when a station is managed by an AI you only need a skeleton crew.

SHODAN seems to agree. In a very literal way.

dafuq? There's like 30 mutants, aka former crew, on every floor.

 

[Lyre Mors]

As someone who is a big fan of System Shock and has played through the original several times, it's fun having a reason to replay it with enough change to make it feel like a fresh experience. Sure, if you're someone who hasn't played the original and are willing to learn the interface/controls, play that one first. Otherwise, not seeing much here to bitch about.

Enjoying myself greatly, with the music being the only big thing that is bothering me so far.

 

[Tweed]

objectively better music

how moddable is this? i can't wait for the ss2 music mod.

Or the remove fall damage mod, or the faster movement mod, or the remove bisexual lighting mod, or the remove unnecessary animations mod, or the remove backer audio logs mod, or the skip cyberspace mod, or original audio logs restored mod, or real horse vaginas mod, or the weapon rebalance mod, or the vaporizer hotkey mod, or the explode on impact grenade mod, or the inventory autosort mod, or the ammo counter UI mod, or the sensearound costs zero energy mod, or the jumpjets make you fly mod, or the sexy cyborg enforcer mod, or the sexy shodan mod.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

the original, which has better visuals

Sorry, but this is another hard no
Not because the remake's tech is far more advanced to the original, but more just the attention to detail that they put in here is quite charming
And arguing this point weirdly feels like those "the orignal RE is aesthetically superior to REmake" discussions...

 

[DJOGamer PT]

And speaking of RE

snip

It seems we have found our Drakortha analogue!

 

[ciox]

Listen and weep.

 

[Jenkem]

Robert Waters is also on the Underworld Ascendant team: https://underworldascendant.com/the-game/team.php

Which makes me think, why even bother, just license it to OtherSide as their next game.

kek, this post aged like milk

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

I always hoped that there would be a game that comes out in the present where all Codexers can hold hands and finally be happy as one but I realized now that will never be true, it's more like if Jesus comes back to life and someone says "fuck that fag" then a fight breaks out.

 

[Lemming42]

It's like if Jesus comes back but he's given himself a shitty undercut and dyed his beard purple.

 

[KIss My Ass]

Why is tweed having a mental breakdown?

 

[Jenkem]

 

[Trithne]

Also, anyone else noticing an anti-capitalist vibe here? Lots of logs with shit like "Why did I come here?" and Diego going "False narrative blah blah blah..." and Diego looks like some stereotypical bourgeoise instead of a laid back sleaze trying to sell bioweapons to the highest bidder.

Those all seem to come from the backer logs, which can fuck right off.

Not happy with the change to Diego's character personally, and I mentioned the changes to the intro and how they affect the hacker's motivations before.

I have noticed a number of changes from the backer beta, some of which might change up optimal paths.

 

[Lemming42]

Some of the new logs are indeed pretty dire, and yeah, what even is going on with Diego in this one? The character was already kind of a weak link in the original's plot but I actually said "fuck off" at the screen when I first saw him pop up as some transatlantic guy in a fucking tuxedo here.

Speaking of the intro, I can't get over the Hacker giving the finger to the soldiers. It's such a small gesture that immediately makes me hate the character, purely because the devs want me to think he's cool. Seeing his full appearance in the Cortex Reaver cutscene just drives the point home - look at the state of him. The Watchmen t-shirt and the brief email to himself was all it took for SS1 to make him likeable; the finger and the undercut is all it takes for the remake to make him unbearable.

Plus the prick won't stop examining every log I pick up, even if I'm being shot at. I wouldn't mind these "immersive" animations if they didn't actively limit your ability to turn, prevent you from doing other things, and if the Hacker's entire hand didn't fill the fucking screen every time he does something. I hate the battery pack animation especially, closing his fist and swiping it to the side like a shonen protagonist. Hate him.

On another note, I'm gonna have to retract my praise for the cyberspace sections; the mechanics are better than SS1's but the amount of times they lock you in a room to force you into combat is beyond a joke. At least in SS1 you could just fly through shit rather than playing a janky version of Descent. It's another example of them just making things deliberately slightly worse for no reason, in a way that detracts from the original but also doesn't help to modernise the game for new players.

 

[SharkClub]

Seen a few people complaining about the cyberspace gameplay/visuals/etc... are you too prideful to just turn the Cyber difficulty down and breeze through it with zero problems since you clearly don't enjoy that aspect of the game? Also have no idea why anyone would think the cyberspace portion of the game in the remake is somehow worse (especially visually? personally I prefer textured walls instead of getting lost in the wireframe sauce) than the original's. Anyone complaining about the cyberspace gameplay for some reason being "worse" is clearly just being a contrarian for the sake of it, when was the last time you actually played SS1 and somehow came to form this opinion on its cyberspace being some sort of unmatchable ludo? The 90's? Never? I'm not even one of the people that disliked it in the original but it was clearly the weakest part of the game as a whole and the one part that Nightdive would have had to have tried pretty hard to not come up with something at least a little better with the past 30 years of 6 degrees of freedom shooters (however little there may be even in such a vast timeframe) to look back on.

I found myself wanting to explore and find all the secrets (new or old) and comb over everything instead of having to rush to the end so I abandoned my (likely) bricked run and restarted on Mission Difficulty 2 to get rid of the timer, and I've pretty much already caught up to where I was before. I'll leave the 3333 for when I'm more familiar with the remake.

 

[Butter]

Played through Research and my impressions are exactly the same as after Medical - it's close enough to the original that there's no reason at all to not just play the original, which has better visuals (yes, I believe this), better combat (yes, I also believe this), far better character movement, objectively better music, and a much better sense of what it's trying to do tonally and thematically.

This game's weird, it's just walking around recognisable areas from a different game but everything's dead and devoid of what made it special. It's like playing one of those old 3D Doom mods for GZDoom, where everything just ends up looking and feeling shittier, and also having the music off.

I'm not surprised a lot of reviewers don't like it, because it does keep most of what modern gamers would find annoying about the original game's design. But that's the thing. Anyone who's not put off by 1994-era graphics, level design and lack of handholding might as well just play the original. I genuinely can't understand who the game is made for. Keeps everything that would alienate a modern gamer, but removes things that made the original worth playing. Wtf.

Also lol @ the fucking respawn cubes.

I've only watched a stream of this, so this isn't coming from first-hand experience, but I would say the reason to play this is for UI. 94 System Shock isn't completely esoteric and unapproachable, but its UI is definitely clunkier than it needs to be, and that's probably the #1 thing deterring new (younger) players. I agree on the visuals though; it's too contrasty and hard on the eyes.

 

[Lemming42]

Anyone complaining about the cyberspace gameplay for some reason being "worse" is clearly just being a contrarian for the sake of it, when was the last time you actually played SS1 and somehow came to form this opinion on its cyberspace being some sort of unmatchable ludo?

The mechanics and visuals are obviously better than SS1, the problem is that they keep locking you in large arenas and forcing combat, where the original game didn't. I can't understand the motivation behind this - as with some other decisions they made in the remake, it serves only to artificially gives you less freedom, and drags some cyberspace sections out in ways that are annoying. It's especially a problem because, while better than SS1, the mechanics still aren't very good and wear out their welcome pretty fast.

"Just turn cyberspace down to 0 or 1" wasn't a good justification for it being crap in SS1, and it's not good enough in the remake either. I've got it on the default of 2, for whatever that's worth.

I've only watched a stream of this, so this isn't coming from first-hand experience, but I would say the reason to play this is for UI. 94 System Shock isn't completely esoteric and unapproachable, but its UI is definitely clunkier than it needs to be, and that's probably the #1 thing deterring new (younger) players. I agree on the visuals though; it's too contrasty and hard on the eyes.

Interesting, the new one doesn't seem that much less cluttered to me. The SS1 interface is quite intuitive with all your augs on the screen at all times and the inventory always immediately accessible at the bottom (with a weapons list and grenades list, plus the med/stim/detox patches listed off at the side). I think the only real innovation in the remake is the hotbar.