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Incline System Shock 1 Thread

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
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13,582
Codex 2014
Using System Analyzer module ("STATUS" in hardware inventory) shows you security level of the current level. Automap shows you locations of intact cameras as red dots (pixels, more like). I don't think there was a way to show overall (station-wide) status if you're asking about that.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The Antiquarian does System Shock: https://www.filfre.net/2021/03/system-shock/

System Shock



We approached games as immersive simulations. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still had a lot of respect for the simplicity and focus of [the id] games. There was, to my recollection, a vague sense of fatalism about the parallel tracks the two companies were taking, since it was clear early on that id’s approach, which needed much less player education and which ran on adrenaline rather than planning and immersion, was more likely to be commercially successful. But we all believed very strongly in Looking Glass’s direction, and were proud that we were taking games to a more cerebral and story-rich place.

— Dorian Hart

We hope that our toiling now to make things work when it is still very hard to do effectively will mean that when it is easier to do, we can concentrate on the parts of the game that are less ephemeral than polygons per second, and distinguish ourselves by designing detailed and immersive environments which are about more than just the technology.

— Doug Church

In late 1992, two separate studios began working on two separate games whose descriptions sound weirdly identical to one another. Each was to make you the last human survivor on a besieged space station. You would roam its corridors in real time in an embodied first-person view; both studios prided themselves on their cutting-edge 3D graphics technology. As you explored, you would have to kill or be killed by the monsters swarming the complex. Yet wresting back control of the station would demand more than raw firepower: in the end, you would have to outwit the malevolent intelligence behind it all. Both games were envisioned as unprecedentedly rich interactive experiences, as a visceral new way of living through an interactive story.

But in the months that followed, these two projects that had started out so conceptually similar diverged dramatically. The team that was working on DOOM at id Software down in Dallas, Texas, decided that all of the elaborate plotting and puzzles were just getting in the way of the simpler, purer joys of blowing away demons with a shotgun. Lead programmer John Carmack summed up id’s attitude: “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” id discovered that they weren’t really interested in making an immersive virtual world; they were interested in making an exciting game, one whose “gameyness” they felt no shame in foregrounding.

Meanwhile the folks at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based studio Looking Glass Technologies stuck obstinately to their original vision. They made exactly the uncompromising experience they had first discussed, refusing to trade psychological horror in for cheaper thrills. System Shock would demand far more of its players than DOOM, but would prove in its way an even more rewarding game for those willing to follow it down the moody, disturbing path it unfolded.

It was in this moment, then, that the differences between id and Looking Glass, the yin and the yang of 1990s 3D-graphics pioneers, became abundantly clear.
Looking Glass arrived at their crossroads moment just as they were completing their second game, Ultima Underworld II. Both it and its predecessor were first-person fantasy dungeon crawls set in and around Britannia, the venerable world of the Ultima CRPG series to which their games served as spinoffs. And both were very successful, so much so that they almost overshadowed Ultima VII, the latest entry in the mainline series. Looking Glass’s publisher Origin Systems would have been happy to let them continue making games in this vein for as long as their customers kept buying them.

But Looking Glass, evincing the creative restlessness that would define them throughout their existence, was ready to move on to other challenges. In the months immediately after Ultima Underworld II was completed, the studio’s head Paul Neurath allowed his charges to start three wildly diverse projects on the back of the proceeds from the Underworld games, projects which were unified only by their heavy reliance on 3D graphics. One was a game of squad-level tactical combat called Terra Nova, another a civilian flight simulator called Flight Unlimited. And the third — actually, the first of the trio to be officially initiated — was System Shock.

Doug Church, the driving creative force behind Ultima Underworld, longed to create seamless interactive experiences, where you didn’t so much play a game as enter into its world. The Underworld games had been a big step in that direction within the constraints of the CRPG form, thanks to their first-person, free-scrolling perspective, their real-time gameplay, and, not least, the way they cast you in the role of a single embodied dungeon delver rather than that of the disembodied manager of a whole party of them. But Church believed that there was still too much that pulled you out of their worlds. Although the games were played entirely from a single screen, which itself put them far ahead of most CRPGs in terms of immediacy, you were still switching constantly from mode to mode within that screen. “I felt that Underworld was sort of [four] different games that you played in parallel,” says Church. “There was the stats-based game with the experience points, the inventory-collecting-and-managing game, the 3D-moving-around game, and there was the talking game — the conversation-branch game.” What had seemed so fresh and innovative a couple of years earlier now struck Church as clunky.

Ironically, much of what he was objecting to is inherent to the CRPG form itself. Aficionados of the genre find it endlessly enjoyable to pore over their characters’ statistics at level-up time, to min-max their equipment and skills. And this is fine: the genre is as legitimate as any other. Yet Church himself found its cool intellectual appeal, derived from its antecedents on the tabletop which had no choice but to reveal all of their numbers to their players, to be antithetical to the sort of game that he wanted to make next:

In Underworld, there was all this dice rolling going on off-screen basically, and I’ve always felt it was kind of silly. Dice were invented as a way to simulate swinging your sword to see if you hit or miss. So everyone builds computer games where you move around in 3D and swing your sword and hit or miss, and then if you hit you roll some dice to simulate swinging a sword to decide if you hit or miss. How is anyone supposed to understand unless you print the numbers? Which is why, I think, most of the games that really try to be hardcore RPGs actually print out, “You rolled a 17!” In [the tabletop game of] Warhammer when you get a five-percent increase and the next time you roll your attack you make it by three percent, you’re all excited because you know that five-percent increase is why you hit. In a computer game you have absolutely no idea. And so we really wanted to get rid of all that super opaque, “I have no idea what’s going on” stuff. We wanted to make it so you can watch and play and it’s all happening.

So, there would no numbers in his next game — no character levels, no character statistics, not even quantifiable hit points. There would just be you, right there in the world, without any intervening layers of abstraction.

Over the course of extensive discussions involving Doug Church himself, Paul Neurath, Looking Glass designer and writer Austin Grossman, and their Origin Systems producer Warren Spector, it was decided to make a first-person science-fiction game with distinct cyberpunk overtones, pitting you against an insane computer known as SHODAN. Cyberpunk was anything but a novelty in the games of the 1990s, a time when authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson all occupied prominent places on the genre-fiction bestseller charts and the game developers who read their novels rushed to bring their visions to life on monitor screens. Still, cyberpunk would suit Looking Glass’s purposes unusually perfectly by presenting a credible explanation for the diegetic interface Church was envisioning. You would play a character with a neural implant that let you “see” a heads-up display sporting a life bar for yourself, an energy bar for your weapons and other hardware, etc. — all of it a part of the virtual world rather than external to it. When you switched between “modes,” such as when bringing up the auto-map or your inventory display, it would be the embodied you who did so in the virtual world, not that other you who sat in front of the computer telling a puppet what to do next.


System Shock‘s commitment to its diegetic presentation is complete. As you discover new software and gadgets, they’re added to the heads-up display provided by your in-world neural implant. This serves the same purpose that leveling up did in Ultima Underworld, but it in a more natural, realistic way.

Dissatisfied with what he saw as the immersion-killing conversation trees of Ultima Underworld, Church decided to get rid of two-way conversation altogether. When the game began, there would be enticing signs that other humans were still alive somewhere on the space station, but you would be consistently too late to reach them; you would encounter them only as the zombies SHODAN turned them into after death. Of course, all of this too was highly derivative, and on multiple levels at that. Science-fiction fans had been watching their heroes take down out-of-control computers since the original Star Trek television series if not before; “I don’t think if you wrote the novel [of System Shock] it would fly off the shelves,” admits Church. Likewise, computer games had been contriving ways to place you in deserted worlds, or in worlds inhabited only by simple-minded creatures out for your blood, for as long as said games had existed, always in order to avoid the complications of character interaction; the stately isolation of the mega-hit adventure game Myst was only the most recent notable example of the longstanding tradition at the time System Shock was in development.

But often it’s not what you do in any form of media, it’s how well you do it. And System Shock does what it sets out to do very, very well indeed. It tells a story of considerable complexity and nuance through the artifacts you find lying about as you explore the station and the emails you receive from time to time, allowing you to piece it all together for yourself in nonlinear fashion. “We wanted to make the plot and story development of System Shock be an exploration as well,” says Church, “and that’s why it’s all in the logs and data, so then it’s very tied into movement through the spaces.”


Reading a log entry. The story is conveyed entirely through epistolary means like these, along with occasional direct addresses from SHODAN herself that come booming through the station’s public-address system.

Moving through said spaces, picking up bits and pieces of the horrible events which have unfolded there, quickly becomes highly unnerving. The sense of embodied realism that clings to every aspect of the game is key to the sense of genuine, oppressive fear it creates in its player. Tellingly, Looking Glass liked to call System Shock a “simulation,” even though it simulates nothing that has ever existed in the real world. The word is rather shorthand for its absolute commitment to the truth — fictional truth, yes, but truth nevertheless — of the world it drops you into.

Story is very important to System Shock — and yet, in marked contrast to works in the more traditionally narrative-oriented genre of the adventure game, its engine also offers heaps and heaps of emergent possibility as you move through the station discovering what has gone wrong here and, finally, how you might be able to fix it. “It wasn’t just, ‘Go do this sequence of four things,'” says Church. “It was, ‘Well, there are going to be twelve cameras here and you gotta take out eight of them. Figure it out.’ We [also] gave you the option [of saying], ‘I don’t want to fight that guy. Okay, maybe I can find another way…'”

Thus System Shock manages the neat trick of combining a compelling narrative with a completely coherent environment that never reduces you to choosing from a menu of options, one where just about any solution for any given problem that seems like it ought to work really does work. Just how did Looking Glass achieve this when so many others before and since have failed, or been so daunted by the challenges involved that they never even bothered to try? They did so by combining technical excellence with an aesthetic sophistication to which few of their peers could even imagine aspiring.

Just as the 3D engine that powers Ultima Underworld is much more advanced than the psuedo-3D of id’s contemporaneous Wolfenstein 3D, the System Shock engine outdoes DOOM in every sense but the admittedly important one of raw speed. The enormous environments of System Shock curve over and under and around one another, complete with slopes everywhere; lighting is realistically simulated; you can jump and crouch and look up and down and lean around corners; you can take advantage of its surprisingly advanced level of physics simulation in countless ingenious ways. System Shock even boasts perspective-correct texture mapping, a huge advance over Ultima Underworld, and no easy thing to combine with the aforementioned slopes. None of this is true of DOOM; it’s peculiarly flat and regular spaces were designed to avoid many of the complications which System Shock tackles head-on.


Each of the ten “levels” of System Shock is really multiple levels in the physical sense, as the corridors often curve over and under one another. Just as in Ultima Underworld, you can annotate the auto-map for yourself. But even with this aid, just finding your way around in these huge, confusing spaces can be a challenge in itself.

That said, it’s also abundantly true that a more advanced engine doesn’t automatically make for a better game. Any such comparison must always carry an implied addendum: better for whom? Certainly DOOM succeeded beautifully in realizing its makers’ ambitions, even as its more streamlined engine could run well on many more of the typical computers of the mid-1990s than System Shock‘s could. Yet System Shock wants to be a very different experience than DOOM, catering to a different style of play, and its own engine is every bit as essential to realizing its own ambitions. It demands a more careful approach from its player, where you must constantly use light and shadow, walls and obstacles, to aid you in your desperate struggle. For you are not a superhuman outer-space marine in System Shock; you’re just, well, you, scared and alone in a space station filled with rampaging monsters.

A fine example of the lengths to which Looking Glass’s technologists were willing to go in the service of immersion is provided by the mini-games you can play. Inspired by, of all things, the similarly plot-irrelevant mini-games found in the LucasArts graphic adventure Sam and Max Hit the Road, they contribute much more to the fiction in this case than in that other one. As with everything in System Shock, the mini-games are not external to the world of the main game. It’s rather you playing them through your neural implant right there in the world; it’s you who cowers in a safe corner somewhere, trying to soothe your soul with a quick session of Breakout or Missile Command. You get the chance to collect more and better games as you infiltrate the station’s computer network using the cyberspace jacks you find scattered about — a reward of sorts for a forlorn hacker trying to survive against an all-powerful entity and her horrifying minions.


Taking the edge off with a quick game of Pong (in the window at lower left).

Sean Barret, a programmer who came to Looking Glass and to the System Shock project well into the game’s development, implemented the most elaborate by far of the mini-games, a gentle satire of Origin Systems’s Wing Commander that goes under the name of Wing 0. The story of its creation is a classic tale of Looking Glass, a demonstration both of the employees’ technical brilliance and their insane levels of commitment to the premises of their games. Newly arrived on the team and wishing to make a good impression, Barrett saw a list of mini-game ideas on a whiteboard; a “Wing Commander clone” was among them. So, he set to work, and some days later presented his creation to his colleagues. They were as shocked as they were delighted; it turned out that the Wing Commander clone had been a joke rather than a serious proposal. In the end, however, System Shock got its very own Wing Commander after all.

Still, there were many other technically excellent and crazily dedicated games studios in the 1990s, just as there are today. What truly set Looking Glass apart was their interest in combining the one sort of intelligence with another kind that has not always been in quite so great a supply in the games industry.

As Looking Glass grew, Paul Neurath brought some very atypical characters into the fold. Already in late 1991, he placed an advertisement in the Boston Globe for a writer with an English degree. He eventually hired Austin Grossman, who would do a masterful job of scattering the puzzle pieces of Doug Church’s story outline around the System Shock space station. There soon followed another writer with an English degree, this one by the name of Dorian Hart, who would construct some of the station’s more devious internal spaces using the flair for drama which he had picked up from all of the books he had read. He was, as he puts it, “a liberal-arts nobody with no coding skills or direct industry experience, thrown onto arguably the most accomplished and leading-edge videogame production team ever assembled. It’s hard to explain how unlikely that was, and how fish-out-of-water I felt.” Nevertheless, there he was — and System Shock was all the better for his presence.

Another, even more unlikely set of game developers arrived in the persons of Greg LoPiccolo and Eric and Terry Brosius, all members of a popular Boston rock band known as Tribe, who had been signed to a major label amidst the Nirvana-fueled indie-rock boom of the early 1990s, only to see the two albums they recorded fail to duplicate their local success on a national scale. They were facing a decidedly uncertain future when Doug Church and Dan Schmidt — the latter being another Looking Glass programmer, designer, and writer — showed up in the audience at a Tribe show. They loved the band’s angular, foreboding songs and arrangements, they explained afterward, and wanted to know if they’d be interested in doing the music for a science-fiction computer game that would have much the same atmosphere. Three members of the band quickly agreed, despite knowing next to nothing about computers or the games they played. “Being young, not knowing what would happen next, that was part of the magic,” remembers Eric Brosius. “We were willing to learn because it was just an exciting time.”

Terry Brosius became the voice of SHODAN, a role that fell to her by default: artificial intelligences in science fiction typically spoke in a female voice, and she was the only woman to be found among the Looking Glass creative staff. But however she got the part, she most definitely made it her own. She laughs that “people tend to get freaked out” when they hear her speak today in real life. And small wonder: her glitchy voice ringing through the empty corridors of the station, dripping with sarcastic malice, is one of the indelible memories that every player of System Shock takes away with her. Simply put, SHODAN creeps you the hell out. “You had a recurring, consistent, palpable enemy who mattered to you,” notes Doug Church — all thanks to Austin Grossman’s SHODAN script and Terry Brosius’s unforgettable portrayal of her.

As I think about the combination of technical excellence and aesthetic sophistication that was Looking Glass, I find one metaphor all but unavoidable: that of Looking Glass as the Infocom of the 1990s. Certainly Infocom, their predecessors of the previous decade on the Boston-area game-development scene, evinced much the same combination — the same thoroughgoing commitment to excellence and innovation in all of their forms — during their own heyday. If the 3D-graphics engines of Looking Glass seem a long way from the text and parsers of Infocom, let that merely be a sign of just how much gaming itself had changed in a short span of time. Even when we turn to more plebeian matters, there are connections to be found beyond a shared zip code. Both studios were intimately bound up with MIT, sharing in the ideas, personnel, and, perhaps most of all, the culture of the university; both had their offices on the same block of CambridgePark Drive; two of Looking Glass’s programmers, Dan Schmidt and Sean Barrett, later wrote well-received textual interactive fictions of their own. The metaphor isn’t ironclad by any means; Legend Entertainment, founded as it was by former Infocom author Bob Bates and employing the talents of Steve Meretzky, is another, more traditionalist answer to the question of the Infocom of the 1990s. Still, the metaphor does do much to highlight the nature of Looking Glass’s achievements, and their importance to the emerging art form of interactive narrative. Few if any studios were as determined to advance that art form as these two were.

But Looking Glass’s ambitions could occasionally outrun even their impressive abilities to implement them, just as could Infocom’s at times. In System Shock, this overreach comes in the form of the sequences that begin when you utilize one of those aforementioned cyberspace jacks that you find scattered about the station. System Shock‘s cyberspace is an unattractive, unwelcoming place — and not in a good way. It’s plagued by clunky controls and graphics that manage to be both too minimalist and too garish, that are in fact almost impossible to make head or tail of. The whole thing is more frustrating than fun, not a patch on the cyberspace sequences to be found in Interplay’s much earlier computer-game adaption of William Gibson’s breakthrough novel Neuromancer. So, it turns out that even the collection of brilliant talent that was assembled at Looking Glass could have one idea too many. Doug Church:

We thought [that] it fit from a conceptual standpoint. You’re a hacker; shouldn’t you hack something? We thought it would be fun to throw in a different movement mode that was more free-form, more action. In retrospect, we probably should have either cut it or spent more time on it. There is some fun stuff in it, but it’s not as polished as it should be. But even so, it was nice because it at least reinforced the idea that you were the hacker, in a totally random, arcadey, broken kind of way. But at least it suggested that you’re something other than a guy with a gun. We were looking at ourselves and saying, “Oh, of course we should have cyberspace! We’re a cyberpunk game, we gotta have cyberspace! Well, what can we do without too much time? What if we do this crazy thing?” Off we went…

By way of compounding the problem, the final confrontation with SHODAN takes place… in cyberspace. This tortuously difficult and thoroughly unfun finale has proven to be too much for many a player, leaving her to walk away on the verge of victory with a terrible last taste of the game lingering in her mouth.


Cyberspace was a nice idea, but its implementation leaves much to be desired.

Luckily, it’s possible to work around even this weakness to a large extent, thanks to another of the generous affordances which Looking Glass built into the game. You can decide for yourself how complex and thus how difficult you wish the game to be along four different axes: Combat (the part of the game that is most like DOOM); Mission (the non-combat tasks you have to accomplish to free the station from SHODAN’s grip); Puzzle (the occasional spatial puzzles that crop up when you try to jigger a lock or the like); and Cyber (the cyberspace implementation). All of these can be set to a value between zero and three, allowing you to play System Shock as anything from a straight-up shooter where all you have to do is run and gun to an unusually immersive and emergent pure adventure game populated only by “feeble” enemies who “never attack first.” The default experience sees all of these values set at two, and this is indeed the optimal choice in my opinion for those who don’t have a complete aversion to any one of the game’s aspects — with one exception: I would recommend setting Cyber to one or even zero in order to save yourself at lot of pain, especially at the every end. (The ultimate challenge for System Shock veterans, on the other hand, comes by setting the Mission value to three; this imposes a time limit on the whole game of about seven hours.)


If you really, really want to play System Shock as a DOOM clone, that’s okay with Looking Glass.

System Shock was released in late 1994, almost two full years after Ultima Underworld II, Looking Glass’s last game. It sold acceptably but not spectacularly well for a studio that was already becoming well-acquainted with the financial worries that would continue to dog them for the rest of their existence. Reviews were quite positive, yet many of the authors of same seemed barely to have noticed the game’s subtler qualities, choosing to lump it in instead with the so-called “DOOM clones” that were beginning to flood the market by this point, almost a year after the original DOOM‘s release. (One advantage of id Software’s more limited ambitions for their game was the fact that it was finished much, much quicker than System Shock; in fact, a DOOM II was already on store shelves by the time System Shock made it there.)

Although everyone at Looking Glass took the high road when asked about the DOOM connection, the press and public’s tendency to diminish their own accomplishment in 3D virtual-world-building had to rankle at some level; former employees insist to this day that DOOM had no influence whatsoever on their own creation, that System Shock would have turned out the same even had DOOM never existed. The fact is, Looking Glass’s own claim to the title of 3D-graphics pioneers is every bit as valid as that of id, and their System Shock engine actually was, as we’ve seen, much more advanced than that of DOOM in countless ways. No games studio in history has ever deserved less to be treated as imitators rather than innovators.

Alas, mainstream appreciation would be tough to come by throughout the remaining years of Looking Glass’s existence, just as it had sometimes been for Infocom before them. A market that favored the direct, visceral pleasures of id’s DOOM and, soon, Quake didn’t seem to know quite what to do with Looking Glass’s more nuanced 3D worlds. And so, yet again as with Infocom, it would not be until after Looking Glass was no more that the world of gaming would come to fully appreciate everything they had achieved. When asked pointedly about the sales charts which his games so consistently failed to top, Doug Church showed wisdom beyond his years in insisting that the important thing was just to earn enough back to make the next game.

id did a great job with [DOOM]. And more power to them. I think you want to do things that connect with the market and you want to do things that people like and you want to do things that get seen. But you also want to do things you actually believe in and you personally want to do. Hey, if you’re going to work twenty hours a day and not get paid much money, you might as well do something you like. We were building the games we were interested in; we had that luxury. We didn’t have spectacular success and a huge win, but we had enough success that we got to do some more. And at some level, at least for me, sure, I’d love to have huge, huge success. But if I get to do another game, that’s pretty hard to complain about.

Today, free of the vicissitudes of an inhospitable marketplace, System Shock more than speaks for itself. Few games, past or present, combine so many diverse ideas into such a worthy whole, and few demonstrate such uncompromising commitment to their premise and their fiction. In a catalog filled with remarkable achievements, System Shock still stands out as one of Looking Glass’s most remarkable games of all, an example of what magical things can happen when technical wizardry is placed in the service of real aesthetic sophistication. By all means, go play it now if you haven’t already. Or, perhaps better said, go live it now.

(Sources: the books Game Design Theory and Practice, second edition, by Richard Rouse III and System Shock: Strategies and Secrets by Bernie Yee; Origin’s official System Shock hint book; Origin’s internal newsletter Point of Origin from June 3 1994, November 23 1994, January 13 1995, February 10 1995, March 14 1995, and May 5 1995; Electronic Entertainment of December 1994; Computer Gaming World of December 1994; Next Generation of February 1995; Game Developer of April/May 1995. Online sources include “Ahead of Its Time: The History of Looking Glass” and “From Looking Glass to Harmonix: The Tribe,” both by Mike Mahardy of Polygon. Most of all, huge thanks to Dorian Hart, Sean Barrett, and Dan Schmidt for talking with me about their time at Looking Glass.

System Shock is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)
 
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Arbiter

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Is Enhanced Edition worth it? It is currently discounted on GOG and I am wondering if I would be better off playing Shockolate.
 

schru

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It's a pretty straightforward and functional source port, but one thing it doesn't address (at least when I tried it) is the MIDI music. I'm not sure if it even includes settings for the different types of MIDI synthesizers that the original game had. NightDive also didn't attempt to modify the music system so that it could work with recordings from an optimal module, which in case of SS is probably SC-55. Of course it'd probably involve some difficulties, as it's a dynamic system made up of lots of separate sections, cues, and flourishes, but without that the game just falls back on Windows' very simplified version of the SC-55 (Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth).

I posted them in the other thread, but here are SC-55 recordings of the game music together with the bonus CD tracks from the Mac version (made and found by Unreal): https://mega.nz/file/LBlEQTaL#5IZlRE58Ky_c3kvl-gJKsWXmnNxdhxArUNZzpM6jHBE
 

RoSoDude

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Keep in mind that the source port has been broken for months with terrible stuttering on the GPU renderer (some issue with a Kex engine update). Either rollback to the previous version or use the software renderer (though you'll still get stuttering in cyberspace with the latter).
 

Maggot

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
The enhanced edition doesn't actually offer anything over the original version in DOSBox aside from the ugly mac sprites, the possibility to play some shitty fan mods, and a low effort widescreen mode that stretches the interface completely at the cost of missing minor visual features and no easy way to change the game's soundfont. It's not like you even need it for mouselook if you're a baby that doesn't want to use the original controls, just get SSP for that.
 
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RoSoDude

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RoSoDude what game are you planning on inclining next?

Right now the focus is on finishing up my work in System Shock 2. As for the next project, I had a few ideas for some small one-off mods for New Vegas and I want to produce a hardcore/balance mod for Dying Light that isn't crap like all the others on Nexus.

a low effort widescreen mode that stretches the interface completely at the cost of missing minor visual features

They updated the widescreen implementation so that UI elements are no longer stretched. In fullscreen mode this means that the UI elements are placed further apart from one another, while in the default windowed mode you get filler textures in the gaps. You can independently tune how much it's stretched in x/y as well.

Most other EE features are pointless to me (like cheating hotkeys for reloading, ugly Mac portraits enabled by default), but I do think the widescreen is pretty good now.
 

LarryTyphoid

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How's your guys' setup for playing SS1 in DOSBox? It works alright for me, but the mouse sensitivity is way off. It makes it pretty hard to quickly select weapons or do the puzzles. It's weird because I don't have the problem in Ultima Underworld or Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, despite using the exact same dosbox.conf for those games.
 

Maggot

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
How's your guys' setup for playing SS1 in DOSBox? It works alright for me, but the mouse sensitivity is way off. It makes it pretty hard to quickly select weapons or do the puzzles. It's weird because I don't have the problem in Ultima Underworld or Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, despite using the exact same dosbox.conf for those games.
What resolution are you playing SS1 at? Could be some shenanigans with aspect ratio and resolution not matching so your horizontal mouse speed feels different from vertical.
 

LarryTyphoid

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What resolution are you playing SS1 at? Could be some shenanigans with aspect ratio and resolution not matching so your horizontal mouse speed feels different from vertical.
Yup, that was it. I had the in-game resolution set to 640x400 rather than 640x480, so the aspect ratio was off and the mouse movement wasn't working right. Thanks, bro. It's still not perfect but it's on the same level as the other DOSBox games, which is perfectly manageable and acceptable.
 
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Getting this one ready to go, planning to start once Thief 2's finshed. Are the "original" files with the GOG EE missing anything? Was going to go for SSP instead of the EE version for a 1st playthrough.
 

schru

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Feb 27, 2015
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Getting this one ready to go, planning to start once Thief 2's finshed. Are the "original" files with the GOG EE missing anything? Was going to go for SSP instead of the EE version for a 1st playthrough.
Unlike with DOSBox, you can't select an alternative MIDI device, so it always uses the system default, which can be changed with CoolSoft MIDI Mapper. It seems that the music was composed on an SC-55, so it'd be best to have it or else use SC VA.

Disable the portraits from the Macintosh version, as they're enabled by default. They're higher-resolution, but they make certain iconic characters look rather stupid.

Play in a 4:3 resolution, as the wide-screen mode is somewhat faked and it stretches the very nice user interface.

Disable the mouse-look option as it was never a part of the original game, but a mod which NightDive included. It makes the combat too easy. Switch the controls to the original presets; they're much easier to use than it might seem at first.

Here are SC-55 recordings of the music if you'd like to see what it can sound like, and lossless versions of the bonus CD tracks included with the Mac version: https://mega.nz/file/LBlEQTaL#5IZlRE58Ky_c3kvl-gJKsWXmnNxdhxArUNZzpM6jHBE
 

Puukko

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For anyone looking to play the EE, the above-mentioned stuttering issue still hasn't been fixed. Combined with a default locked fps of 60, EE as it is today feels like ass to play. Luckily, both issues can be solved:

First, downpatch the game as per these instructions:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2820787706

Afterwards, unless on a 60hz monitor, follow the PCGW instructions to uncap the framerate:

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/System_Shock:_Enhanced_Edition

I only briefly tested this but noticed nothing off with the cap lifted.

Nothing necessarily new here but I figured I'd save someone a bit of headache and googling to get the game running as it should. Last time I looked into this I wasn't aware of the downpatching tool and I had the impression the framerate cap was set in stone for some reason which killed off any potential interest I had in returning to the game. Good thing I did a bit of extra research.
 
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399
Finally finished it. What a great game. May write up some concise thoughts on it if I get some more free time.

I think I actually prefer SS1 to SS2 but it's been some years since I last played 2. Recall 2 having greater mechanical depth in some ways but it also having that Levine trademark theatre kid stink on it re the presentation & story. Seems our last big spergout on the topic ended with 2 winning by the thinnest of margins.
 

Ivan

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I didn't find it to be very memorable, but I do recall enjoying the metroidvania backtracking after acquiring new tools. My fav thing about the experience is this gem:
 

pOcHa

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Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I didn't find it to be very memorable, but I do recall enjoying the metroidvania backtracking after acquiring new tools. My fav thing about the experience is this gem:

then you're gonna just love this soundtrack:

 

Ivan

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stop-my-penis-can-only-get-so-erect-v0-g6k8n4rs4j791.png
 

Semiurge

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For anyone looking to play the EE, the above-mentioned stuttering issue still hasn't been fixed. Combined with a default locked fps of 60, EE as it is today feels like ass to play. Luckily, both issues can be solved:

First, downpatch the game as per these instructions:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2820787706

Afterwards, unless on a 60hz monitor, follow the PCGW instructions to uncap the framerate:

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/System_Shock:_Enhanced_Edition

I only briefly tested this but noticed nothing off with the cap lifted.

Nothing necessarily new here but I figured I'd save someone a bit of headache and googling to get the game running as it should. Last time I looked into this I wasn't aware of the downpatching tool and I had the impression the framerate cap was set in stone for some reason which killed off any potential interest I had in returning to the game. Good thing I did a bit of extra research.

Doom 64 EE's version of KEX automatically picks 59Hz instead of 60Hz if your refresh rate's 60Hz, which of course introduces stuttering if you enable vertical sync. I know 60Hz panels don't really refresh at 60Hz but instead 59.9Hz or something, but still setting it to 60Hz works best as with all other games. What were they thinking.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Big roundtable chat with members of the original dev team: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/system-shock-the-oral-history-of-a-forward-thinking-pc-classic

System Shock: The oral history of a forward-thinking PC classic

Origin point

For a certain sort of PC gaming fan, System Shock is where it all began. 30 years of immersive sim development started here, as Looking Glass escaped the restraints of the RPG genre and embraced thoughtful first-person action. SHODAN broke free, and the world was never the same. Without System Shock, there would be no Thief or Gloomwood, no Prey or Dead Space. Bioshock was conceived as its sequel. The creative figureheads behind Deus Ex and Dishonored were wrapped up in its creation, and forever changed by contact with Looking Glass and its unique philosophy.

Countless studios have used Citadel Station as a star to steer by, measuring their own work against System Shock’s commitment to simulation, dense atmosphere, and method-ish refusal to break character. This was not so much a game as an alternate reality. As one of our interviewees tells us: “We were trying to build the holodeck.”

Here’s the story of how it was made, as told by the people who made it.

Through the Looking Glass​

Long before gaining legendary status, Looking Glass was experimenting with early 3D worlds.


Rob Fermier, programmer: I joined Looking Glass in 1993, maybe even late ‘92, pretty much at the start of the project. They were working out what they were going to do with the science fiction version of [RPG spin-off series] Ultima Underworld. Looking Glass was chock-full of talented, brilliant people who would set aside their egos. Eventually it got bigger and had more problems, but in its early stages it was just a really raw creative place to work.

Warren Spector, executive producer: That place was like a graduate school for game developers. There was a thoughtfulness about what games could and should be that I haven’t encountered much since. And were those folks smart? Holy cow. I remember walking into team meetings thinking, ‘I’m the stupidest person in this room,’ and loving the hell out of that. Working with those folks was one of the high points of my life, let alone my career.

Austin Grossman, designer: I remember someone writing about Looking Glass and calling it ‘the studio too good for regular fun.’

Greg Travis, programmer: Every few days we would go to the mall, buy any new game that was there, take it back and stand there and critique it. The whole company was full of people who cared about this.

Robb Waters, artist: Looking Glass was my first professional job. Even in art school they were saying, ‘You gotta cut the hair, you gotta put on a tie.’ And I walked into Looking Glass, and people were walking around with shorts and shirts that were way too tight, with hair popping out of the holes. That was the culture shock. The work ethic was so strong that everything else just fell to the side.

The player approaches a mutant with a lead pipe in System Shock

Grossman: It was super exciting. It was a bunch of people out of MIT, and then a bunch of other extra people like me, who were picked up along the way. The first reference I heard to the System Shock project was somebody saying, ‘Oh yeah, we’re gonna do Sonic The Hedgehog, but it’s in space.’

Spector: Really? I have no memory of that at all. Even looking back, I don’t see it. Weird.

Grossman: That was the original concept. I don’t know whose concept that was, or why that sounded like a super good idea to them. That went away at some point, and somebody said, ‘OK, now we’re doing cyberpunk.’

Spector: My first D&D dungeon master was cyberpunk guru Bruce Sterling, so I was pretty steeped in the whole vibe.

Grossman: Everybody had seen the Ridley Scott films, and I was a huge fan of William Gibson. After all of the pretension and forced whimsy of the Ultima franchise, we just wanted things to be dirty and messy and futuristic for a while, which is what drove the aesthetic.

Marc LeBlanc, programmer: Origin wanted another Underworld, in space, and that is what we were pitching. How do you make a dungeon in space? Well, it’s going to be a space station. We imagined you were a hacker. We had physical augmentation and cyberspace. In the original pitch there was going to be terminal hacking, where you would sit down and start typing. That got cut, because it was too real at the time. That was like most people’s experience of a computer before Windows was really a thing - sitting down and typing in a text prompt.

Fermier: Before we named it System Shock, one of the names going around was BIOSfear, which is like computer BIOS, and sort of like ‘biosphere’ also. Thank goodness we did not go with that.

LeBlanc: Citadel was the project codename.

Travis: I remember the codename of the project was ‘T-E.P’. [Director and lead programmer] Doug Church would not say what that meant for years. It stood for ‘techno electric paganism’. If you had to boil the initial spark of the idea of System Shock down to one phrase, that was apparently it.

Fermier: I was really happy when we came up with System Shock. I pretty vividly remember a drive back from one of the local malls, where we were talking about D&D, and you had that constitution stat that gave you your chance of system shock. And we were like, ‘That’s a cool term, we should use that as the name.’

The player encounters a cyborg enforcer in System Shock

Death to NPCs​

After two Ultima games, Looking Glass was ready to leave RPG conventions behind - even if that meant killing everyone.

LeBlanc: We were done with CRPGs - the idea that you were going to have a character sheet with a bunch of stats, and you were going to level up and have all these numbers deriving what your capabilities were. We had all that in Underworld and you could barely tell. If you’re running around in a 3D world, how does that number matter?

Grossman: The real-time 3D world was the thing we were doing that shined - that’s fascinating, that you never want to look away from.

Spector: We were all frustrated with state-of-the-art branching tree conversation systems. I mean, as much as I loved the Ultima games, the whole Name/Job/Bye thing didn’t exactly capture the richness of the RPGs that inspired them. And once you got to the end of a branch, the response ‘I don’t know about that’ drove me nuts.

Grossman: It’s not a terribly fun minigame and doesn’t even encapsulate what’s interesting about conversations - that punchy back-and-forth. Instead, you’re sort of doing your taxes, but it’s trying to get somebody to tell you where the sacred rabbit is. We couldn’t figure out how to do it a better way, but we did figure out how to get around it.

Spector: Doug [Church] and I were talking one day and one of us - probably Doug - said, ‘Why don’t we just kill everyone so there are no conversations?’ That seemed like a great answer.

Grossman: Everybody’s dead, and you have the audio logs. Which weren’t audio logs at the time. The first round of System Shock was on floppy disks, and there was no digitised audio. We were just straddling the line of CD-ROM games. It shipped with text logs, and then audio logs.

Fermier: I remember at the time being very excited about Austin [Grossman] coming up with that. There was a desire to have the mechanics be a little more diegetic in their nature.

Grossman: I pitched the audio log idea. It came from a couple of different sources. I remember playing one of the Gold Box D&D games, Pool of Radiance, and there was this whole sequence where you're trailing somebody and you found their diaries and blood traces. It was classic environmental storytelling, except we didn’t have the word at the time. That stuck in my mind as evocative, and it didn’t have the cringy awkwardness of menu conversations.

Spector: Once you kill off everyone in a game, there isn’t much left in the way of storytelling tools other than artifacts left behind by the former denizens of the place. That and stuff painted in blood on the walls. There hadn’t been much in the way of environmental storytelling before Shock.

Grossman: One inspiration for that style of storytelling was in The Fellowship of the Ring, when they’re in Moria and Gandalf is reading out the record the dwarves have kept of their downfall. We knew we wanted exactly that: reading the words of this person who was trapped. The other place it comes from was a book of poetry called the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. It’s a series of monologues from people in a small town, and as you read all the monologues, you start to get a sense of the relationships and the history. That was what I cited when I originally pitched the system, because I had this naive idea that everyone would have read a book of poetry by a relatively obscure early 20th century American poet. I can’t believe that was taken seriously at the time.

A screenshot from System Shock where Rebecca Lansing is sending you a message

Dark art​

Looking Glass turned its back on the eight virtues of Ultima to create a murkier, more cynical world better befitting the ‘90s.

Travis: The plot starts off dismally - you’re a criminal, and the only way you can get out of jail is to commit another crime. And then when you get out of your coma, you realise the deal with the devil is literal - you actually have to interact with this malevolent creature, SHODAN. A terrible pact has been made and it has destroyed everyone except you, practically.

Grossman: I don’t remember exactly how we signed off on something that dark. I remember pitching a whole bunch of versions of that plot, including one where there was a teenage girl in an asteroid mining colony, and she runs away from home and finds herself on this abandoned generation ship. I pitched a bunch of ideas around a female protagonist, which literally they didn’t even laugh at. They looked at me with pity in their eyes, that I was this sad, deluded man. Of course, this was three or so years before Tomb Raider.

Travis: I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that System Shock was like Alien - looks like science fiction, it’s actually horror. It’s claustrophobic and paranoid.

Waters: At one point early on, all our textures were pristine - brand new station, Star Trek. And then at one point Warren gave the directive that we should distress it. So we went back and put in all these dings and scratches and whatnot, and that did give it a little more atmosphere.

The player approaches a docking station with lots of winged monsters near it in System Shock
Travis: If you remember music videos from the time, Nine Inch Nails and Tool, there was a lot of candlelight and unpleasant, scary, dark moods.

Grossman: It was quite a while before we settled on having it all happen in the same place. We thought, ‘OK, we’ll have a sense of place that we can deepen over time, rather than just dropping people in a bunch of different levels.’

LeBlanc: Revisiting any place you’ve been is an important idea in the game. Maybe new enemies have spawned. Even though it’s this tiny dungeon, it’s an open world. You never finish a level and are done with it. It’s always a space that you inhabit.

Travis: If we could have, we would have made the entire station a space you could move around in freely, without having to go into an elevator. But we didn’t have the technology to do it.

Waters: It was a blessing if a designer had any sort of understanding of art at all, but usually they didn’t. A lot of System Shock, I always call it crazy quilt, because the textures were stamped around so haphazardly that it’s just not pleasing to look at.

Travis: You get to the corporate level which is super low-key, just a bunch of boring offices with cheesy furniture in them. Then you go into cyberspace and come back out. It’s dreamlike - it doesn’t proceed from boring to interesting, it goes back and forth.

Waters: There were only so many takes on a sci-fi wall panel that we could come up with. So some of them got pretty abstract, in ways that the engine just couldn’t sell in terms of real depth and dimension.

Grossman: The feature that stayed the same was the relationship between the protagonist and [Citadel Station VP] Edward Diego. Doug Church was obsessed with someone being hired and then betrayed by their employer. Don’t ask me why.

Travis: System Shock has its own moral stance, but it’s extremely negative. There are no good guys and no hero in that game. It's a story about corporate greed, isolation and betrayal. I think those were themes that Doug in particular was interested in, and Dorian Hart and Austin [Grossman] took that up. We couldn’t do those things in the Underworld games, because the story was more optimistic.

Grossman: I left the project partway through to go to grad school. Dorian Hart did a lot of the actual writing and deserves a lot of the credit for the personalities in the game.

Two mutants approach the player in a cyberpunk-looking control room in System Shock

The Church of Doug​

A singular figure drove development of System Shock, and helped to invent the immersive sim in the process.

Fermier: Any talk about System Shock has to orbit around Doug [Church], he was definitely the heart and soul of that project.

Spector: Doug was, as they say, 'The Man' on System Shock. His influence on game design and on me was huge. The world has no idea, which frustrates the hell out of me. I’ve tried to make that guy famous for decades and he just won’t let me.

Grossman: He’s brilliant. He would always be almost horizontal in his office chair and reach up and type. He has a charisma. Doug and Warren were this great combination.

Spector: Eccentric? I don’t know. I guess so. The most important thing about Doug, to me, is that he’s a natural born teacher. He has great conceptual strengths and has the ability to communicate those concepts to others. Whatever combination of things he has, people were certainly willing to follow him anywhere. Hell, I was willing to follow him. He’s a one-of-a-kind unsung hero and deserves greater recognition than he gets, whatever words you use to describe him.

Grossman: Doug was the project leader, and he projected the vision, but we also shared the vision so well that he didn’t have to be a dictator. Everybody would jump in with their ideas. It was very much not a siloed project.

Fermier: He had a vision of what he wanted, but he led by example. He wrote a ton of code, he was involved in a lot of design discussions. The process was way less formalised than you envision today. But he had a very egalitarian approach to the actual programming, he was not a super micro-manager.

Grossman: We’ve always waited for Doug’s next thing. We have yet to see it. System Shock remains the last game that Doug Church shipped as project leader. No company ever seemed to want to take on his visions and ideas the way Looking Glass did, and that’s a shame.

Spector: He was as important as anyone - OK, probably more important than most anyone else - in defining the immersive sim genre and promoting games as having the potential to be more than just a way to pass some time. A true visionary.

A monster approaches the player in a corridor in System ShockA dismembered body lies in a corridor in System Shock

Sim-ple pleasures​

System Shock wasn’t an RPG; nor was it a shooter either. It occupied a new space that nobody yet had a name for.

Fermier: The term ‘immersive sim’ wasn’t around at the time, but the term ‘immersive’ was. We were talking about these concepts.

Spector: Underworld was kind of a nascent immersive sim, empowering players to tell their own stories in some simple ways. System Shock took that a step further.

Grossman: We didn’t have the nice vocabulary for game design and game behaviour that we have now. We were struggling to grasp and formulate it. That sense that we were on the verge of a bunch of exciting ideas really charged System Shock.

Grossman: It was a very exciting moment, because real-time 3D tech was still not very old. At the time that we were designing System Shock, we had Wolfenstein, we knew that Doom was in development. But the hardened idea of what a first-person shooter was didn’t exist - which you can see in Shock, by the way that the mouse cursor moves independently of the camera, for instance. People hadn’t really gotten the conventions down of how it would work.

Fermier: Doug knew some people at id Software, I don’t know whether it was [John] Carmack or [John] Romero, [but] they talked about technology and the games. So it wasn’t a shock to us that id was working on Doom. It didn’t really feel like competition, it felt like it was a different kind of game. We were pretty pleased to see the idea of 3D games becoming more popular and less of a weird novelty.

Travis: System Shock was not meant to be a shooter. It was not essential that you could swing your point-of-view around at an incredibly high framerate. It was more of a stealth and planning game, watching your ammunition and sneaking around. And so that meant it could support more detailed graphics, unlike Doom.

LeBlanc: We were really interested in immersion, and having nothing in your face reminding you that this is a video game. It’s why you don’t have a cutscene where you hear your own voice. We wanted your first-person experience of what you were doing to match what your character was doing and what was in the story.

Grossman: There was a lot of debate about whether to show the protagonist. I think I was on the other side of that, but people were fairly adamant that this would be an invisible, faceless protagonist. We weren’t going to impose ourselves on the player as to what they thought they looked like.

LeBlanc: Some of it was where ‘90s culture was pointing. Virtual reality was not a thing yet, and we were very much of the mindset that VR isn’t just hardware, it’s software - you can’t just strap goggles on and have something. Somebody’s got to make the world. And the world has to be believable. We were trying to build the holodeck.

Grossman: The studio took the simulation aspect of the game quite seriously. The kind of emergent complexity and creative problem solving that you could do in the real world was what we wanted to support in the game. Which is why we worked so hard on a generalised physics system, because we knew that the physics in the Underworld games was a place where players got to improvise.

LeBlanc: Harvey Smith tells a story of a mutant finding its way onto a repulsor lift and coming up to his level to start fighting him. But right next door there’s a switch which reverses the direction on the repulsor lift, so he just pushes the down button. Problem solved. It’s a simple moment, but those are the moments that we were looking for.

The player approaches a control panel of sorts in System Shock
Grossman: The guy who did the physics is Seamus Blackley, who went on to mostly be known for working on the early Xbox stuff.

Spector: If I remember correctly, the team even implemented a physics-based recoil on guns and physics-driven knockback when you took damage. That’s pretty radical.

LeBlanc: It was all super hacky, but everything in the mantling and jumping and leaning was all physics-driven. People on some forum would collect soda cans in System Shock for grenade practice, to practice their trajectory.

Travis: In the more shooter-like games, you’re running at an unnaturally high speed and your motion is pretty simple. In System Shock, the motion was realistic, and the natural speed really made it very immersive. When you’re crouching and hiding, you have as much time as you have in the real world, so you know that feeling. It reminds you of playing when you’re a kid, hiding from other kids.

Grossman: The whole simulationist bent of it was great. Also, if you played it on the original hardware of the time, you were constantly running into situations that degraded the framerate. But that was kind of like a feature of the time that everyone just accepted.

LeBlanc: The reason we didn’t have mouselook is that System Shock ran at 20 frames-per-second on most people’s computers. People forget what the world before 3D hardware was like. 30 frames-per-second was considered flying fast. The mice at the time were not great either - you had to clean the gunk out of the balls every week.

Fermier: In fairness, mice weren’t super common yet. But later, when Quake would come out with mouselook, we were all like, ‘Oh, that’s so obvious.’

Spector: The first time I tried a game with mouse control, what was it? The Terminator 2029 or something. Anyway, I remember saying, ‘This will never catch on.’

LeBlanc: The System Shock user interface is not known as a work of brilliance, but it also came from its time.

Spector: I went to GenCon one year and Origin had a booth there. We were showing System Shock and another game that was superficially similar - first-person, science fiction-y and so on. I’d rather not name it. They were opposite each other in the booth and I watched grown-ups - gamer grown-ups - play Shock and within 30 seconds getting themselves crouched and leaning and stuck in a corner. Turn around and, I swear, I saw a kid reach out, grab the joystick and run around joyously in that other game. Should have been a wake-up call.

SHODAN speaks to the player in System Shock

Tribe ascends​

In an unlikely turn of events, the System Shock team absorbed a beloved local rock band, and found its SHODAN.

Grossman: Terri Brosius and the whole audio team were an interesting presence. They were literally a Boston-area rock band that, I don’t even know how, suddenly had jumped into Looking Glass in this weird cultural mashup. I have to appreciate how open they were to all that dorkiness.

LeBlanc: We were all huge Tribe fans. And so at first it was just, ‘Let’s get Greg LoPiccolo from Tribe to come in and do our music.’ We wanted to make a dynamic score, System Shock was one of the first few games to do that. Then he started bringing in the rest of Tribe, and we were thrilled to have Eric and Terri Brosius join the project.

Travis: Sound is so important for that kind of immersive game, and you take that for granted now.

LeBlanc: I remember the first time I met Greg, he mispronounced Ultima and it was the funniest thing.

Grossman: All the voice acting was done by people from around the office. I was Edward Diego.

LeBlanc: Terri has this amazing voice. And she’s this diva - not in personality, just in her presence.

Fermier: There was some work to try to write it so that SHODAN’s gender was very ambiguous. There was no ‘she’ or ‘he’. But then when we did the audio, that completely changed.

Travis: I’m the only one who seems to remember a conversation I was listening in on - where it was decided that SHODAN is male, but uses a female voice to be creepy or sexist or something. Like the trope of the nagging, evil computer lady was actually a put-on. I always thought that was an important point that was completely forgotten.

Grossman: In a sense, SHODAN would represent us. We would have all these triggers in the world, and we would be seeing through the triggers what the player was doing, and we’d be commenting on it. It turned out to work very well.

Fermier: We wanted SHODAN to feel like this presence. We wanted a sense that she was all around, literally the ghost in the machine, running the whole station. I remember the designers saying they wanted you to hate SHODAN not just because you were told to, but because you experienced her messing with you directly. We talked about a bunch of crazy things that never went in. At one point SHODAN was going to drain your XP from you.

LeBlanc: We had desires to do more of the dungeon master AI. There’s so much more we could have done. We did a lot of set pieces, like that moment on the Maintenance level where you walk in and the lights go off, and SHODAN taunts you, and you’re fighting a bunch of guys as the doors open.

Fermier: That notion of this evil AI - it wasn’t a horror game, but we wanted you to be immersed and a little scared.

Grossman: When you’re in game development, the player kind of is the enemy. You’re always picturing them trying to break your game or sneak past something. Sometimes it does feel like a siege situation, so the dynamic with SHODAN worked on a bunch of different levels.

Fermier: The original ending of the game was gonna be that when you defeated SHODAN, we would make it look like you had crashed to desktop. Your commands wouldn’t work, and you would start to think that SHODAN had come into your actual PC.

The player walks through an industrial area of System Shock

A brush with deletion​

Warren Spector shielded the System Shock team from a publisher which was, at best, indifferent to the ugly duckling in its release schedule.

Grossman: Warren was responsible for pushing our sense of ambition to try new things and supporting it with the publisher. There absolutely would be no System Shock without Warren. It’s so rare to have management that embraces the new things you want to try and the originality of a vision. And he’s a very rare guy in the industry who has never rested on existing techniques.

Spector: Let’s just say I was hugely invested in System Shock - maybe, actually, to the detriment of other things going on at Origin.

Fermier: Obviously we had a publisher and we had to keep them happy. My sense is that there was a lot of politics on the Origin side, and there were people who wanted to kill the game for whatever reason. Warren was always very supportive. He brought a good, kindly uncle energy to all the meetings we would have with him.

LeBlanc: Warren saved us from getting cancelled. There was a moment relatively early on, where we gave Origin a demo of what we were making. And you’ve got to understand that we worked in a very different way from Origin. When they were making an Ultima or a Wing Commander, the first thing they did was make the intro cutscene. And that was there as a pillar of inspiration. You had this one very pretty thing that you could look at. It was a point of communication between development and the execs: ‘This is what we’re making.’

Spector: I took the game to what we called ‘product review’ and the other executive producers were showing off their titles, which were earlier in development than Shock, but looked fantastic. I mean, fantastic. Those guys made their games pretty even before they had nailed the gameplay. Clearly the powers that be valued that approach. I always thought it was backwards. And Shock, I admit, didn’t look great at that time.

LeBlanc: The textures were repeating, we didn’t make it pretty, we didn’t put a bad guy in there. And the execs came out of that meeting and said, ‘We’re going to cancel this game, it looks like shit.’ Warren talked them back from the edge.

Spector: There was a fight there! Luckily, the fight went my way and we were allowed to continue.

The player does battle with a mutant in System Shock

Screen burn​

The System Shock team’s work ethic exceeded healthy limits, a results-driven approach that mirrored MIT student life.

Waters: We had programmers come in at nine o’clock in the morning. And then from behind the cubicle comes a programmer stumbling up from sleeping on some mattress on the floor. I would attribute the game getting done in that two-year timespan largely to the fact that everyone was living, breathing and eating this game.

LeBlanc: It was very much an MIT nerd culture. It was very intense. I don’t know that it was the most healthy or positive culture. Whoever did the work got to decide how the work was done, and so it was a race to do the work. If you wanted [programmer] James [Fleming] to do something, you just told him it was impossible, and then he would go do it.

Grossman: No one knew that crunch was bad. No one knew about work-life balance. The games industry has gotten so much better at project management and knowing how to give people lives. The dominant culture at Looking Glass was from MIT, and MIT was all about staying up late and pulling all-nighters.

Fermier: I have fond memories, in that esprit de corps sort of way, of driving back with everybody from the offices at like 7am, dawn breaking, and going to a diner that was a haunt for overnight truckers. We knew exactly when the nearby McDonald’s opened up, because that’s when we would drive over there and get Egg McMuffins en masse. The game has this error that’s like, ‘Don’t forget to salt the fries.’

Grossman: I felt super privileged to be working on this forward-thinking and ambitious video game. All of my cohort at college had moved on to jobs in publishing or internships. I was the only person I knew who was working in games, and I felt like it was awesome.

Fermier: I didn’t know any better at the time, and sort of enjoyed it in a masochistic way. People worked crazy hours. I met my wife during System Shock and I’m amazed that she stuck with me. She would hang out and sleep at the office, and make sandwiches for people. That told me she was a keeper.

Grossman: I think MIT brought a culture of crunch and no work-life balance, but it also brought a culture of enjoying thinking together and a lack of pretension. There was a sense that we had a good flow of ideas, and a group ability to pick up the good ideas and discard the bad. It was an alchemy. There was a shared spirit of investigation and ambition that functioned well.

LeBlanc: There was Paul Neurath and the other grown-ups. Paul was not part of the culture, totally - he had kids and had a life and worked roughly nine to five. He owned property. We were practically living at Looking Glass, we had futons we took turns crashing in.

Fermier: Some of my memories of the end of it are pretty messed up, because I was trying to do this thing where I would stay up and be awake for 12 hours, then sleep for two hours, just to get more time in the office. That worked, but man, it devastated my long term memory. There’s a huge gap of a month or two.

LeBlanc: It was very much a ‘suffer for the art’ kind of culture. We were super into it, and we all really believed in what we were making. We didn’t have all the answers. None of us had particularly good communication skills. It wasn’t Lord of the Flies, but there was a backwards aesthetic to it. We were just living our spartan lives, pouring everything into this thing. And if you weren’t on board, then you didn’t have a right to have an opinion.

The player receives a message from Anna Parovski in System Shock

Showdown​

System Shock’s launch brought disappointing sales and a dawning realisation that the future looked like Doom.

Spector: I went down to QA to talk to Harvey Smith, a tester at the time - he’s gone on to bigger and better things, I’d say! He showed me the latest build of System Shock and the security cameras were moving and there was a moving starfield outside the windows of Citadel Station. The team had put in features, like, the day before we went into maybe the most critical phase of the project’s development. I was furious.

Fermier: I remember the stars going in extremely late. Up until a week before ship we had a flat starfield that was not parallax, basically a painting of stars.

Spector: Then I went to my office, closed the door and - one of many times this happened on the project - did my happy dance. The team was that committed to making the game as great as they could make it. I loved that. I wish more teams felt that way about their games and gave me ulcers like the Shock team did.

Fermier: Even two months before the end, it felt like System Shock was a pile of pieces on the floor of the garage. It really clicked at the last minute. I remember playing it after it shipped and being pleased with how well things came together.

Spector: It was what you might call a late bloomer. That was one of the things that resulted in Origin’s and EA’s concerns about the game late in development. As a note, no one ever believes me when I say immersive sims come together late. But it’s the truth.

Grossman: System Shock came out, and Doom came out, and one of them was hugely successful and one was a small critical hit. And it was a huge lesson to me. I’m proud of what System Shock was, but I wanted to learn what Doom did that made it such a phenomenon.

The player encounters two mutants in System ShockThe player encounters a mutant with glowing red eyes in System Shock
Waters: I was just more of a Doom person, and I was jealous of the game they had made, in contrast to the game we had made. People say, ‘Well, System Shock is the thinking man’s Doom.’ And I’m not a caveman. It’s just not as accessible to me.

Fermier: From a business perspective, Doom was obviously way more accessible and made a lot of much smarter decisions about how to pull people in.

Waters: For the people that got it and could stick with it, I think System Shock was great, and it became a cult game. But it never gained that status where it was this widely accepted thing. It was just for people that were into that niche of micromanage-y stealth game.

Fermier: I remember being disappointed that it didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped. It’s still really hard to factor out sales from piracy. Piracy was extremely rampant in that era. But there’s no two ways about it, we made a pretty inaccessible game. We made a game that you had to be a little committed to learning to get out of the first few levels.

Spector: Honestly, I wish I had pushed back harder on the Origin/EA folks and had never released the floppy version at all. It was clearly a mistake - once you make a first impression with an audience, that’s it. No do-overs. But there was a deadline to hit and quarterly projects to be made.

Fermier: A lot of people don’t remember that SHODAN didn’t have a voice in the original System Shock. After we launched it, me and a handful of people did the Enhanced Edition. That was when it first got the voices.

Spector: The floppy version was like a silent film compared with the CD version.

Fermier: We felt like we were really proud of the game we made, and we didn’t quite understand why it didn’t take off a little better. I have no sense of whether the marketing was good or bad on it. I don’t recall there being a whole lot of marketing for it.

Spector: Sales were good enough to warrant a sequel that took the ideas behind System Shock and went a step further. I honestly don’t remember anyone at Origin giving a damn. They had bigger fish to fry with Wing and Ultima.

The player walks down a dark corridor in System Shock

Remember Citadel​

Despite commercial failure, System Shock’s influence spread to every corner of the games industry.

Fermier: It was not an easy sell when we made System Shock 2. There was a little bit of a sense that, ‘Well, System Shock was an interesting experiment but a failure’, that we had to overcome when pitching. But I’m very proud of those games. They were the games we wanted to make. Ultimately, that’s the part we can control. We can’t directly control sales.

Waters: I appreciate the game more now than I ever have. At different points in my career I looked back at System Shock and was just embarrassed by it. But rediscovering it, I’ve done the math, thinking about how influential that game was, and the fact that it was way ahead of its time.

Grossman: System Shock had a certain amount in common with Deus Ex. It was a lot of the same people and it was somewhat the same kitchen sink approach.

Spector: Deus Ex wouldn’t have happened - couldn’t have happened - without games like Shock. There’s a clear evolutionary line from one of those games to another.

Grossman: Warren has made a life’s project of working on the problems we were working on in System Shock. He has what I refer to as the Warren Spector Finishing School, where he’s constantly taking on new younger teams and indoctrinating them with the ambition to tackle these questions, and then releasing them into the game industry.

Travis: Maybe ten years ago, a friend of mine was like, ‘Oh, you gotta check out Metroid Prime.’ And it looks like System Shock, moves like System Shock, and even uses Austin’s trick of recordings to tell the story rather than awkward dialogue. That was such an amazing breakthrough and imitated by so many games.

Grossman: Flash forward to working on Dishonored, they still used menu conversation systems. No one’s ever really killed that beast.

Grossman: The door code, 0415, still pops up. It was the door code we used to get into the office. It’s very fun to see that reference continue.

Waters: The reason it’s called Bioshock is because the System Shock IP was so locked up in limbo in terms of who owned it. And so frankly, if it wasn’t Bioshock, it could have been System Shock 3.

Grossman: Maybe we will someday get to do System Shock 3. It would be so fascinating to go back and, for instance, set it in a city that has been taken over by SHODAN. It’d be fun to do all the things that we couldn’t do at the time. Maybe on the back of the relaunch, we’ll be able to do something.
 

Feyd Rautha

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
I need some advice on difficulty for my second run. I have completed it once so I'm not a total noob but I want to avoid annoying stuff so maybe not have enemies on max respawn? Can I play with the timelimit of 7 hours? According to Steam my first playthrough took 21 hours but maybe the ingame timekeeping is different?
 

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