Most players demonstrably don't know about jack shit about good game design or balance
That's why still to this day most people think Dark Souls 2 is genuinely inferior 1 and 3
True that most players don't know anything. The difference is that dumbass players don't have the power to irrevocably ruin a game post-release, developers do.
When Developers know nothing about game development (or when they listen to people on Reddit who give them bad ideas), they can do far more damage than the average gamer can.
Darkest Dungeon is a perfect example of what happens when you have players who are stupid and know nothing about game design, combined with arrogant developers who want to shove their notions of balance onto everyone else. You end up with a grindy, barely playable mess of a game.
Also Dark Souls 2 is awful, what are you getting at? They can't even get movement right! If you want to understand why DS2 is awful in one example, try moving forward and slightly to the left. Either you will go forward only, or your character will "snap" to moving 45 degrees to the left. This movement snapping results in many deaths, especially because DS2 has a lot of segments that require jumping at specific angles (like the lava areas which have rocks at certain spots). The game will punish you for it's own shitty controls. Then you have the early regen ring and unlimited life gems utterly ruining the health balance (this could have easily been fixed by capping the player at 20 total life gems of all types combined), the awful branches of yore which have some branches behind others, so if you do them in the wrong order you permanently miss out on things, the largely pointless lockstones that will either give you powerful items or give you nothing, the horrible bosses with woeful hit registration fighting you in tight rooms where you can't move very much, and you have a totally unplayable mess of a game. SOTFS is even worse because the number of enemies has been arbitrarily quadrupled for "difficulty" and it just results in having to kite and chop through endless amounts of spam to actually get anywhere, which is extremely tedious and not a good way to add difficulty. Most people sum up DS2's issues as "lol Adaptability" and leave it at that, but it's far, far worse than that. Adaptability is a small issue in a vast ocean of horrendous game design choices.
Dark Souls 2 isn't just bad, it's irredeemably bad, and using it as an example of "stupid gamers not understanding game design" is asinine. Dark Souls fans probably understand gameplay FAR more than the average gamer (on account of Dark Souls being far more complex and far less accessible than the average game), and simply handwaiving their criticisms away to defend a lackluster game is disingenuous. Dark Souls 2 is horribly designed, there's no other reasonable conclusion that can be drawn given the evidence. You can like it as much as you want, taste is subjective, but it's really not a good game and the people rightly considering it awful have some very good arguments as to why. You can't simply ignore what they are saying by concluding they are stupid.
Extra Junk:
- Long Animations when picking things up. These would be acceptable if they played once, but every single time you pick something up is just obnoxious.
- The junk/crafting system adds almost nothing to the game, because there's already more than enough power available using stock weapons and ammo. This just adds an extra level of tedium to gameplay. You want that weapon upgrade? Better go find all the useless junk all over the map and melt it down for triop coins! It also makes no sense in the context of the game world - why would the security booth have guns locked behind triop coins? Do the security team have to purchase their own weapons? That's absurd. This would add some level of tension if respawns were more frequent and were unlimited (currently, spawns stop once deck security reaches 0%), because then you would have the risk vs reward element and the time taken to craft things would be a tradeoff between safety and gaining resources. As it stands now, it's just a tedious chore you have to do once you clear the deck if you want to maintain maximum viability. It's an optimal strategy, and basically incentivises time wasting for a largely unnecessary buff.
- They managed to remove all the depth from Cyberspace while adding a bunch of extra stuff. No more multi-level software, no more finding logs, codes and other information in cyberspace. I don't even care about the MFD games, they removed everything that added nuance to cyberspace. They added a bunch of extra junk instead - new enemy types, button doors, etc, that are all serviceable but not particularly great. Cyberspace is still far more mindless than it was in the original (it wasn't great there either) while adding a bunch of extra fluff. I don't actually mind the cyberspace overall, so take this as a minor criticism. I just wish they had retained the depth of the original while also making it more accessible, since Cyberspace in SS1 is CLUNKY.
- The extra intro and other "interactive cutscenes" are very clunkily executed, with awful voice acting and pacing. Waiting in your apartment to start the game is agonising on a second playthrough. The intro especially is overly long and drawn out, compared to the relatively quick intro from the original. Instead of a concise 2-3 paragraphs to set up the world, we get a completely pointless drone flythrough of New Atlantis followed by 5 minutes of questionable "gameplay" before finally actually starting in Medical. I'm sure this turned a number of people off the game instantly.
Changing a bunch of stuff for no reason:
- Certain story beats were changed, as was a lot of the dialogue, and in my opinion it sounds far less realistic and the writing quality is much worse. Emails especially are far less to the point and have a lot more pointless extra words in them.
Take for example, the first email in the game:
Rebecca Lansing (Original) said:
Employee 2-4601, listen carefully. My name is Rebecca Lansing, and I'm a counter-terrorism consultant to TriOptimum. We're tracking a disruption on Citadel Station, something involving an onboard AI called SHODAN. You are TriOp's only contact on station. Communications are out, and there is evidence of biological contamination. The mining laser is charging for a possible strike against earth. There's a man named Nathan D'Arcy who may know something about taking the laser offline. His office is near the central hub on your level. The AI is on the bridge. Once the laser is out, look for the source of the problem there. And by the way, we know all about you and your friend Diego. Pull this off, and we'll clear your record. That implant you're wearing is military grade hardware, use it well. Lansing out.
This is just my opinion, but the writing in this email is very punchy and to the point. She explains who she is, what the situation is, the immediate threat to earth, and where to look for help.
In the remake, the equivalent email is this:
Rebecca Lansing (Remake) said:
We got someone! Employee 2-4601, I'm Rebecca Lansing, a Counter-Terrorism consultant for Tri-Optimum. Here's the situation: Our scans of Citadel Station show a biological outbreak is in progress. We're in a comms blackout since SHODAN is unresponsive, and worse yet the mining laser is charging for a potential strike on Earth! Nathan D'Arcy has an office on the Medical Levels Central Hub. If he's alive, he'll bring this station under control. I'll contact you through your Military Neural Implant soon. Lansing Out!
I personally don't see any reason why this email was changed, and in my opinion, this writing is still decent but not as good. It's far slower to get to the point, gives the same information about where D'Arcy is but doesn't provide an image like the original game. She doesn't explain the location of the AI or tell you to take out the laser as your first objective (it's only implied), in fact she implies D'Arcy will do it. They also don't mention your deal with Diego at all, that's saved for another email, which in my opinion, is particularly clunkily written:
Rebecca Lansing said:
Hacker, Rebecca here. It says here that you're listed as Employee 2-4601. Diego provided that cover to you, and the Neural Implant...in exchange for what? The keys to SHODAN? Not hard to put two and two together regarding the current state of the station. Tri-Op authorized a deal: Help get the station back under control and you get a clean slate. It looks like we're partners now, and if we play this right, we can work out what Diego was- I prefer a quiet station, thank you.
I have no idea why they didn't just re-record the original audio logs and emails. The voice acting was a mixed bag in the original game, but the writing was really good. Professionals (like Lansing) were written like professionals, and were to the point. Panicked characters were written that way. Etc.
- The Music is very different and quite a lot of people consider it inferior to the original music. I personally don't mind as much as I understand they wanted to go for a more atmospheric route, and some tracks I actually like better than the originals (like the Executive track), but I can understand why this would upset people. Aparrently they are working on giving players the option to use the original music (and there are already mods for it), but IMO the music is mostly fine.
- The game is unnecessarily dark. Again, I understand going for a more atmospheric setting, and I don't hate this idea in principle, but there are some areas where visibility is so bad the game becomes nearly unplayable, even with the lights on. I understand some dark areas make a lot of sense (like the powered-down area in Reactor), but the whole game being super dark got quite old. I didn't like the overly bright tutti fruitty aesthetic of the original that much, but what I do miss is the glowing lights on the walls. These are pretty much non-existant in the remake:
- Despite having a full MFD, there's no way to fine-tune weapon charge (for weapons like the Sparq) through the UI. They decided to turn everything into real-world interactions as much as possible. While I can see why they would do this, it results in far less control over the overall power of weapons (now there's only 3 settings, minimum, maximum, and overcharge, rather than a full bar), it's much harder to see at a glance what level your weapon is on, and it takes away some of the identity of the original game - many games have weapons with switchable modes, and almost all of them do so through a button press. System Shock was unique in that it had a full MFD controllable with the house. This extends to other aspects of the game as well - it has a pretty standard control scheme, and it unfortunately comes across as another generic RPG/FPs hybrid as a result. The irony is, if this was called "Space Shock", people would be calling it a "stale addition to the imsim genre that doesn't really add much and feels outdated". I feel like this is because taking away the original MFD has reduced it's identity to yet another action game with an inventory. Obviously I don't think they should have completely reimplemented the original control scheme in it's entirety, as SS1 feels very clunky to play (even SS1:EE can feel pretty clunky to play), so I understand getting rid of things like going prone and the full momentum-simulation of the player. But they seem to have gone too far the other way and created a game where the UI and control scheme feels like just another FPS/RPG hybrid with a System Shock skin on it.
- The wire puzzles have gone from overly simple representations in the original game to overly complicated ones which tend to be confusing and hard to figure out as a result. I have seen multiple players get confused by the puzzles in the new game because they are so visually noisy and hard to focus on. Again, a simple MFD Representation would have been good here. They could have taken inspiration from the MFD hacking in System Shock 2 for the overall aesthetic, as it provides a clear and coherent overview of the games wire puzzles (they aren't really puzzles, it's more of a chance game in SS2, but I'm talking about the visual style).
I could go on. There's lots wrong with this remake.
All that said, I still enjoyed playing it quite a bit. Despite having a significant amount of criticism, I don't think it's awful, just sort of average, and I'm disappointed because it could have been so much better.
