KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[cvv]

To be fair, Ultimate Underworld was in some ways the template for SS1

Not really, except both were 3D. Nobody would accuse UU to be particularly immersive, let alone a sim.

SS1 was really the first of its kind, a genuine revelation.

 

[Neuromancer]

The editing suite had a specialized audio editing program that happened to be on the PC (unusual for the time, since most music stuff was on Macs)

Was it the case at that time?
I thought, that the Mac was very big in the Graphics/Designer scene, but not so much in the music scene.

Some years before, of course the Atari ST got big in the electronic music scene because of its integrated MIDI interface. Kraftwerk for example used Atari STs for their first compositions.

But I don't know how long this lasted and when musicians switched to other computers or devices.
I thought, most switched directly to PC and not the Mac, but I certainly can be mistaken in that point.

 

[Rahdulan]

Holy shit, IGN wrote this?

 

[JDR13]

Is this or Prey better?

Why? Just play both.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Nobody would accuse UU to be particularly immersive, let alone a sim.

You should play it again and experiment with stuff. I started playing it a few months back but had to take a break from it but I remember there are absolutely sim elements in it. Running into walls repeatedly causes you to take damage and push you back, firing rocks from your sling at the rocks that the enemies throw at you causes them to collide and stop midair and fall to the ground or even ricochet in some rare cases, for example. In Thief 2 you can also shoot arrows to intercept bombs shot by the big robots and cause them to fall to the ground or detonate in the air. You should experiment with a lot of stuff in wildly different ways and you'll be surprised.
Edit 1: whereas in SS1 and SS2 I haven't seen stuff like this. But then again I also didn't experiment much in either so I could be dead wrong.

 

[SharkClub]

Holy shit, IGN wrote this?

Haven't actually checked any of this or even read the review but I'm going to guess that since IGN is one of the bigger games "journalism" publications that they probably have enough people on board to hand reviews to people who are actually somewhat experienced with the subject matter or genre of any given game in question these days. The guy who gives this iteration of SS1 a 9/10 has probably either played the original or is at the very least familiar with imsims or related games and not reviewing Forsoyken/God of Soy/The Last of Soy/Soycharted/Gears of Soy/Soylo/Horisoy moviegames on a weekly basis.

 

[Butter]

Nobody would accuse UU to be particularly immersive, let alone a sim.

You should play it again and experiment with stuff. I started playing it a few months back but had to take a break from it but I remember there are absolutely sim elements in it. Running into walls repeatedly causes you to take damage and push you back, firing rocks from your sling at the rocks that the enemies throw at you causes them to collide and stop midair and fall to the ground or even ricochet in some rare cases, for example. In Thief 2 you can also shoot arrows to intercept bombs shot by the big robots and cause them to fall to the ground or detonate in the air. You should experiment with a lot of stuff in wildly different ways and you'll be surprised.
Edit 1: whereas in SS1 and SS2 I haven't seen stuff like this. But then again I also didn't experiment much in either so I could be dead wrong.

SS2 allows you to increase your running speed to the extent that you can die by running into a wall. It definitely has some of those elements. But yeah, saying UU doesn't simulate things is very silly.

 

[cvv]

But yeah, saying UU doesn't simulate things is very silly.

Ok UU is a sim, sure. Why the fuck not. A survival sim to boot! Rule of thumb, in a retarded thread, lean into it.

 

[SharkClub]

The chess minigame is filtering my younger brother, especially after I told him there's an inventory upgrade for beating it.

 

[gurugeorge]

The editing suite had a specialized audio editing program that happened to be on the PC (unusual for the time, since most music stuff was on Macs)

Was it the case at that time?
I thought, that the Mac was very big in the Graphics/Designer scene, but not so much in the music scene.

Some years before, of course the Atari ST got big in the electronic music scene because of its integrated MIDI interface. Kraftwerk for example used Atari STs for their first compositions.

But I don't know how long this lasted and when musicians switched to other computers or devices.
I thought, most switched directly to PC and not the Mac, but I certainly can be mistaken in that point.

Speaking from a pro UK perspective, the Atari ST was indeed the big breakthrough phenomenon in digital music, but it was really only MIDI (plus Pro24/Notator, then Cubase/Logic) paired with synths and the big samplers (the Akai s900, then s1000/s1100 in the UK - IIRC Roland was the equivalent in the States and other parts of Europe at the time, forget the model). Pretty much most of the big hits during the growth of House and club music/rave scene music in the early to mid 90s was done with that sort of combo.

At that time (early to mid 90s), at the pro level, usually you'd be recording samplers and synths (and ofc things like real instruments and vocals) to analogue multitrack with a timecode, which ran the Atari. At that time Pro Tools, the first major actual digital recording was still not quite ready for prime time - frankly its i/o A/D & D/A conversion boxes sounded horrible, kind of brittle and tinny - but it was the harbinger of things to come (in terms of "in the box," i.e. all in one computer production). And it was on the Mac, which kind of set the tone for pro Mac dominance.

What you may be thinking of is a brief period when Macs and PCs started becoming really powerful, the Atari was getting long in the tooth and weak, but people were still thinking in terms of the logic of the old pairing of Atari MIDI+outboard samplers+multitracks, and still working in the same way - at that time, Logic transitioned to PC for a while, and while Cubase's main home was always on the PC it also flirted with the Mac for a while (there was a lot of disappointment on all sides when Logic locked into Mac and Cubase locked into PC). (MOTU's Performer was more of a thing in the States, but my knowledge of that is sketchy.)

But then Pro Tools i/o and conversion got good and other similar digital systems like MOTU became more widely available and cheaper, but generally only for Macs, and people who could afford it migrated from the Atari or PC to Macs (mainly because the internal clock/timing was a bit better and more precise in the Mac OSes than in the early versions of Windows at the time). Then at that point you started getting things like full "in the box" digital audio recording and inbuilt samplers like the EXS24 in Logic, the outboard gear was gradually ditched, and by the end of the 90s everything started going in the box. This was all happening at breakneck speed - things changed from year to year. (You also have to factor in the transition from vinyl to CDs.)

PCs didn't really start becoming viable for in the box music production until the very end of the 90s, but it was a bit finicky and required a lot of PC building knowledge (e.g. esoterica about formatting sectors in hds properly for audio recording), and the PC was still a bit of a red-headed stepchild for music until I'd say about the middle of the Noughties, when PC stuff started coming up to par with Mac stuff. (Though the one i/o equivalent to the big Mac guns for the PC at the time, RME, was really top notch quality wise, though again, a bit finicky and temperamental to set up). This is in terms of i/o and D/A, A/D conversion ofc, the softwares were all much of a muchness and what you chose was really just what you were comfortable with (e.g. if you'd started way back with Pro24/Cubase on the Atari, you would probably carry on with Cubase, and if you'd started with Notator/Logic, you'd carry on with Logic, because there's no point in changing your workflow). I should say that although Pro Tools i/o is superlative these days, everyone still hates the Pro Tools software, except for the one precious gem it has going for it, Beat Detective (basically a brilliant, proprietary audio quantization algorithm that nobody else has been able to match yet)

Nowadays, people are pretty agnostic, as you can get good pro and semi-pro stuff, sofware and hardware, for both platforms.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Ultima Underworld was in some ways the template for SS1

"In some ways"



The fack they teaching kids these days? SS1 was the direct descendent of UU1-2, with Looking Glass saying so in interviews and alluding to "our next game will take this 3d tech even farther." Stupid terms like "immersive sim" didn't exist until Arkane and Ubisoft Eidos (Edit: durr) started copying the genre successfully. FYI, Looking Glass superfans Arkane's first game was a #&$!ing Ultima Underworld clone. System Shock was always Ultima Underworld in space.

Of course, Looking Glass's next big evolution after SS1 was Terra Nova, so take that how you will.

Also, I think it's clear that SS1 is the superior game to SS2, and felt SS2 was not great when I played it at launch. I've often found its legendary reputation baffling since I find it rather tedious and not terribly fun. The additions it made to the subgenre were not well implemented (skill points, PSI), and lacked a lot of what made SS1 fun.

 

[Infinitron]

When did Ubisoft copy it? Do you mean the Hitman devs or something

 

[MLMarkland]

I'm not far in, but I'll continue playing it despite some mixed feelings.

Why do bodies flop around and fall down every time I load the game?

Did nobody notice that during development or testing?

Rag doll state being null on-load or something like that — probably the devs and QA all have developer physics packages installed and no one saw this and it only appears with a consumer physics package. That would be the first thing a team would check once it was reported by players but not seen by developers.

Alternatively, if it doesn’t change gameplay & stability, it was labeled a non-critical and non-urgent bug, and the game was released despite the bug not being fixed yet.

 

[Lemming42]

Also, I think it's clear that SS1 is the superior game to SS2, and felt SS2 was not great when I played it at launch. I've often found its legendary reputation baffling since I find it rather tedious and not terribly fun. The additions it made to the subgenre were not well implemented (skill points, PSI), and lacked a lot of what made SS1 fun.

Yeah, I don't understand the insane hype around SS2, especially when compared to SS1. It does a lot of things right, but it's easily weaker than the first game IMO.

And in terms of the story, the treatment of SHODAN in that game is utterly abominable, I'd go as far as to say it's an actual insult to the SS1 character. They took one of the more memorable antagonists in gaming and just completely fucked everything up by interpreting the character in the most boring, asinine, point-missing way possible. By the end of the game I actually fucking hated what I was seeing on screen.

I get the feeling that after it became considered a classic, SS2's reputation continued to swell due to the praise of people who hadn't actually played it but just wanted to seem cool in their gaming knowledge - hence everyone online always misquoting the "look at you, Hacker" line in every SS2 thread, despite that line not being in the game.

 

[ciox]

I get the feeling that after it became considered a classic, SS2's reputation continued to swell due to the praise of people who hadn't actually played it but just wanted to seem cool in their gaming knowledge - hence everyone online always misquoting the "look at you, Hacker" line in every SS2 thread, despite that line not being in the game.

It's literally the first thing you hear when you turn on the game.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Yeah, I don't understand the insane hype around SS2, especially when compared to SS1. It does a lot of things right, but it's easily weaker than the first game IMO.

It's because when most people play a game, they prefer it to not handle like a spreadsheet program.

SS1 was bound to be less popular than the sequel when the sequel was actually appealing enough to play like a videogame, and many people have fond memories of it as a result. SS2 is compelling enough and complex enough as a game (and is so unlike anything that came after it) that it makes perfect sense that everyone loved it, even if it's flawed.

And in terms of the story, the treatment of SHODAN in that game is utterly abominable, I'd go as far as to say it's an actual insult to the SS1 character. They took one of the more memorable antagonists in gaming and just completely fucked everything up by interpreting the character in the most boring, asinine, point-missing way possible. By the end of the game I actually fucking hated what I was seeing on screen.

Ehh, that sounds pretty exaggerated but you're....technically correct I suppose?

I get the feeling that after it became considered a classic, SS2's reputation continued to swell due to the praise of people who hadn't actually played it but just wanted to seem cool in their gaming knowledge

Actually, those people just played Bioshock, said "this is the same thing" and now make themselves look stupid constantly by calling Bioshock an immersive sim. They never played it, but instead of overhyping it, the current popular trend is to say "it's outdated and clunky, but Bioshock is the same thing but better. Or at the very least, play Prey"

The people that love SS2 really love SS2.

hence everyone online always misquoting the "look at you, Hacker" line in every SS2 thread, despite that line not being in the game.

It's literally the first line spoken in the entire game.



All that said, SS2 definitely has plenty of rough parts, but thanks to the modding efforts of the community, it has definitely gotten better with age and it plays SIGNIFICANTLY better now than it did at launch, both technically and in terms of gameplay. Give it another shot with a handful of good gameplay mods if you haven't played it recently.

 

[Lemming42]

I get the feeling that after it became considered a classic, SS2's reputation continued to swell due to the praise of people who hadn't actually played it but just wanted to seem cool in their gaming knowledge - hence everyone online always misquoting the "look at you, Hacker" line in every SS2 thread, despite that line not being in the game.

It's literally the first thing you hear when you turn on the game.

I thought it was the SS1 audio test.

 

[Lemming42]

Ehh, that sounds pretty exaggerated but you're....technically correct I suppose?

No exaggeration intended, I really hated the story to the point where it repulsed me from the more appealing parts of the gameplay and world design.

The Many were boring as hell but the misuse of SHODAN was the real killer. The ending to SS2 is genuinely one of the few times I've actually had my head in my hands playing a videogame. Not even joking when I say that the remake could have made the character transgender and it'd bother me less than Ken Levine's incarnation of the character.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

When did Ubisoft copy it? Do you mean the Hitman devs or something

My bad, I meant Eidos. Both Montreal companies.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

I thought it was the SS1 audio test.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4lL_Rd_-o

I get the feeling that after it became considered a classic, SS2's reputation continues to be degraded due to the negativity of people who haven't actually played it in a long time but just want to seem cool by saying SS1 is better

 

[Lemming42]

Lol. Alright, I'll accept the retard rating on that one. Hit me with your retard ratings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4lL_Rd_-o

I get the feeling that after it became considered a classic, SS2's reputation continues to be degraded due to the negativity of people who haven't actually played it in a long time but just want to seem cool by saying SS1 is better

You're correct in that I haven't played the game in a long time, but I don't really have any interest in doing so for the reasons I outlined. Even if the gameplay - which I didn't find to be terrible to start with - is improved with mods, the writing really repelled me. I'm glad you agree on that point, at least. I didn't even mind literally going up someone's asshole at the end of the game, it's just the use of SHODAN that really turned me off.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

You're correct in that I haven't played the game in a long time, but I don't really have any interest in doing so for the reasons I outlined. Even if the gameplay - which I didn't find to be terrible to start with - is improved with mods, the writing really repelled me. I'm glad you agree on that point, at least.

Only the writing for Shodan. And only in relation to SS1. As a standalone villain, she's mostly fine if a bit generic. It's the change from benevolent and purposeful mother to "humans are scum dieeeeeeee" that makes it bad.

The Many are great, though. I have no idea what crack you're smoking on that one.

The only really unforgivable part in SS2 is the "nah" line at the end, which pretty much everyone hates.

BUT SS2 is a game that's really meant to be played for the atmosphere, the survival aspects, and the gameplay. That's where it really shines and is definitely the reason why it's worth playing and replaying. If you're tying yourself up on story beats you're doing yourself a disservice.

 

[ciox]

Btw, a quick look into what might have happened with the remake's soundtrack.
The composer made posts about how he's analyzed SS1's music very closely, how it sounded, how it was played, but seemed to have gotten way too distracted with SS1's implementation of dynamic music and trying to push that forward to create 'generative music', not realizing that without the original style the most epic music-generating system is kind of pointless.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/1889009

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

tbh I would have been happy with standard """""dynamic"""" music being one combat track and one ambient track per area, as long as the music was good.

The music generation system in SS1 was kinda busted, don't know why they would want to replicate it, especially with something other than MIDI

I don't actually hate the new music, though. I feel like it fits better with the darker and more foreboding station in the remake, as opposed to the colourful circus of the original. Blaring techno remixes wouldn't work. I just wish they had more actual music and less silence.

 

[ciox]

tbh I would have been happy with standard """""dynamic"""" music being one combat track and one ambient track per area, as long as the music was good.

The music generation system in SS1 was kinda busted, don't know why they would want to replicate it, especially with something other than MIDI

Yeah, it also was often rather dissonant and random when going dynamic, suggesting the focus was on making the music interesting first and worrying about the sub-tracks second.. rather than making sure all the tracks fit together perfectly even if it's at the cost of making the music bland.