System Shock 1 vs 2 - Which is better and why?

[Darth Roxor]

The only place in Shock1 where the respawns were noticeable and super-shitty was that one floor filled with respawning invisible mutants, which served as a hub for 2 different elevators.

 

[JayQ]

SS2 lets you type on the automap, you have to place a navigation marker first, by hitting "N" I think, then select it.

The discussion about interfaces is interesting, too bad we know how that discussion ended as far as the actual developers are concerned, with inventories and stat screens that either pause the game completely or just don't exist anymore.

I'll give that a shot, thank you very much. I searched high and low for this and it turns out you seem to be 100% correct with the N key according to a few Steam posts I just found using "nav point."

The interface is great in SS2, and it's essentially what the enhanced edition of SS1 did, minus the ability to use your gun while mouselook is off. Realism can be argued on that one because if you're fumbling with your stuff you might not have a free hand for your guns but it made a lot of sense to be able to defend yourself while hacking in SS1 and I used it a lot that way. Obviously the mouselook was tacked on SS1 and the inventory mode of SS2 was a carry-over from SS1, essentially tacked on mouselook...

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The only place in Shock1 where the respawns were noticeable and super-shitty was that one floor filled with respawning invisible mutants, which served as a hub for 2 different elevators.

You're forgetting the bigger culprit, the maze on the top floor that constantly spawned Autobombs.

 

[Mikeal]

It wasn't so bad. Two slowmo drugs and I did it in 5 minutes.

 

[Sykar]

Spoiler

given its age and scope, ss1 is one of the best games ever. but daaaaaamn, it aged baaaaaaad. there are some unforgivable sins of youth, due to the time is was born, controls, interface, graphics, even the fonts. it's like one of those mosaics from 1200 still lacking perspective, you can see the huge effort but they still are an eyesore.
ss2 is a "drier" experience, more focused, lost something like cyberspace and some of the coolest gadgets, but in its essentiality it's still largely enjoyable. and easily improved and updated with mods.
and medsci. holy scream of fear medsci.

My favorite though is Coolant Tubes, the music gives you a "fuck yeah get rekt hybrids" feeling tingling down your spine. Or at least mine.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

you know, that's mine too, but faulty memory made me pick medsci which is very very similar and still awesome. it's been so long since i last played ss2, but it scares me shitless :'(

 

[Darth Roxor]

My favourite by far is Hydro 1



The cold oooooooOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooOOOOOOOOOO coupled with the frozen level is fucking ace.

 

[Sykar]

It sure is a great track. In fact I really enjoy most of the OST.

 

[JayQ]

The OST in SS2 reminds me of Lunatic Calm songs a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maP6q3D4Hf0

 

[DraQ]

You're forgetting the bigger culprit, the maze on the top floor that constantly spawned Autobombs.

It was the magical place of wonder where sensaround and railgun were actually useful.

 

[RoSoDude]

Nice balanced points JayQ , I was in the same boat just over a year ago when I played SS1 and SS2 for the first time back to back. I remember thinking after SS1 that, despite all of the praise I had heard, there was no way I would be as impressed with its sequel since I was so utterly engrossed playing SS1. But that opinion turned around quickly, and SS2 blew me away again. So, I vote SS2, but still have a huge degree of appreciation for SS1 and everything it accomplished.

I thought I'd respond to some of your points with my own.

1. Regarding the automap -- yeah, SS1's is better, if only for the simple fact that the map is described on a more granular grid that you fill out incrementally with every few steps. This creates a bit more mystery during exploration of the levels, where you don't know where the next 10 feet of a twisting corridor will lead you. In SS2 the level geometry is more complex and couldn't be easily inscribed on a 2D grid in the level editor, and they didn't develop the tech to incrementally fill the map out in a radius around you (e.g. like Fallout NV and Prey), so you fill it out in big chunks. By comparison, SS1's automap gives me the same joyous sensation I get filling out a 2D map in a Metroidvania game (and the similarities go much further than this). There are some benefits to showing you the map in chunks, to be sure (there can be tension just from knowing there's a corner where an enemy could spring at you, and it also engages more intensive tactical reasoning upon entering a new zone since it all happens at once), but it's not quite as satisfying.
2. SS2 has my favorite user interface in any game I've ever played, so I have to disagree here. It manages to capture all of the tactile control I like from SS1, but with a layer of sleek polish that makes it a joy to use. Little touches like your mouse cursor spawning in its most recent position when you enter "USE" mode makes repeated tasks like looting and applying hypos very natural, and manages to simulate how a person would mentally and physically prepare for certain actions in a real-life scenario. SS1's dragging and dropping and manual reloading is immersive in its own right, and it was fun to learn little tactics to optimize it (e.g. double clicking on a container will always take the first listed object from it, so in the Enhanced Edition you can quickly center your crosshair on a container again after dropping items in your inventory to quickly grab more items), but I also think there's a reason that even Looking Glass et al. moved to a new interaction paradigm with Thief/SS2/Deus Ex/Arx Fatalis. To my mind, SS2 offers the best compromise between streamlined usability still with a great degree of tactile control.
   
3. Grenades and throwable objects would have been nice in SS2, though I never found the grenades to be that interesting in SS1 anyway. I also think a grenade hotkey is a better way to do it than throwing from your inventory, but the latter certainly fit SS1's overall control configuration (and far slower paced combat) just fine.
   
4. Meh, I'll take all of the illogical soldier training on board to have deep RPG systems, which is an area where I think SS2 self-evidently shines. SS1's Metroidvania-esque upgrades are fun to play around with, but ultimately I didn't find much incentive to engage with all of the systems when it was so easy to roller skate up to enemy's faces and one-shot them with a laser rapier. In SS2, locking your options behind harsh upgrade choices gives every decision about equipment, resource use, and combat approach a lot of weight, especially with the resource economy tuned much more towards survival. There's maybe less to experiment with, but more inherent depth due to the high degree of challenge and relevance of your short- and long-term decisions on your ability to survive and progress.
5. Same point about the cyber-modules that are uploaded to you. Yeah, it doesn't make much sense, but rewarding players on goal completion (+a bit extra here and there for exploration) is almost certainly the best way to do progression in an RPG of this type, since it assures that the challenges can be tightly designed to match the player's power level regardless of character build, and that no approaches to solving problems are incentivized beyond their intrinsic value (that is, there's a functional difference between using AP ammo to blow up a turret vs hacking it, but the game doesn't additionally incentivize one over the other with an XP reward). They could have just made it an abstract skill point system, but LGS were very adamant about contextualizing everything as an actual in-universe thing, so that's why we have cyber-modules. I like it, despite how gamey it is.

Sound and visuals are a tossup for me. I love SS2's stark and cold atmosphere and I think its sound design is obviously superior (plus its mix of dark DnB and ambient soundscapes is to die for, burn any heretic that tells you to turn it off), but there's a huge degree of charm to SS1's densely packed cyberpunk detailing and crunchy NIN-inspired techno-industrial as well. On SS2's visuals, I do highly recommend that you play without the Rebirth models. The weapon and level texture upgrades are all fantastic and stay true to the visual style, but the Rebirth models are uncanny as all hell and warp the original artistic vision. Old papercraft models are ugly, but convey the original spirit of the game much more accurately. I regret playing the game for the first time with Rebirth.

I mean, Christ, look what it did to the poor Cyborg Assassin:

 

[JayQ]

I can't disagree that much with any of it!

But I do miss my usable gun following the cursor in inventory mode. It really made me feel like that fucking guy who spots a foe from the corner of his eye and shoots it one handed nonchalantly while doing something else.

About the models I was really torn because I have blind trust in Looking Glass and how their games look, but still wanted to sharpen the textures and felt awkward about old models in a modernized world. I'm very happy with how it looks and feels overall but the cyborgs are indeed pretty drastically different. This could be annoying now that I know. In other news I had not really paid close attention to how the hybrids look because then I'd get killed, but after learning about the wormlike parasite that connects torso and head I started noticing it on the models and it's good work IMO. I'd like to give pure vanilla a whirlbut I'm worried about my saves. I did not install SCP (which wrecks your saves) since apparently GOG's version of SS2 is already running it. Or was it just the New Dark makeover? Not sure about that one and I'm no SS2 modding expert. However, you titillate my vanilla sensibilities significantly.

 

[RoSoDude]

I can't disagree that much with any of it!

But I do miss my usable gun following the cursor in inventory mode. It really made me feel like that fucking guy who spots a foe from the corner of his eye and shoots it one handed nonchalantly while doing something else.

About the models I was really torn because I have blind trust in Looking Glass and how their games look, but still wanted to sharpen the textures and felt awkward about old models in a modernized world. I'm very happy with how it looks and feels overall but the cyborgs are indeed pretty drastically different. This could be annoying now that I know. In other news I had not really paid close attention to how the hybrids look because then I'd get killed, but after learning about the wormlike parasite that connects torso and head I started noticing it on the models and it's good work IMO. I'd like to give pure vanilla a whirlbut I'm worried about my saves. I did not install SCP (which wrecks your saves) since apparently GOG's version of SS2 is already running it. Or was it just the New Dark makeover? Not sure about that one and I'm no SS2 modding expert. However, you titillate my vanilla sensibilities significantly.

I think I like the distinction between using and shooting (there's a simulationist element to it somehow), but I can see where you're coming from about the original design.

You should be fine if you just turn off Rebirth mid-playthrough (I was, though I think I had a few bugged models that were fixed by leaving and entering the area). It's just a model swap, not a gamesys mod like SCP (or Secmod, for anyone aware of that). AFAIK SS2 is only patched with NewDark on Steam and GOG.

Everything else listed in the SS2 Newbie Modding Guide is just fine (including their recommendation against using Vurt's Biomatter and GrubPodSlimey). That's aside from some minor, minor gripes I have with SCP, which for the most part is just a faithful polish/bugfix mod.

 

[JayQ]

Ah shit I thought GOG was SCP. Well, I'll be on vacation on the other side of the planet for two weeks, unable to play the game. This might be the separation I need to let go of my current game, install SCP and start over with the ability to go visual vanilla if the mood strikes.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Someone might find this info useful, but these are the mods that I installed the last time I played SS2: Vurt's Flora Overhaul, Obj_Fixes, SHTUP-ND, 400 (+ patch), Rebirth, Vintage Song Remake and SCP Beta 2.

I don't recall there being any major problems with them, though I'm certain someone here will correct me on that.

 

[RoSoDude]

Ah shit I thought GOG was SCP. Well, I'll be on vacation on the other side of the planet for two weeks, unable to play the game. This might be the separation I need to let go of my current game, install SCP and start over with the ability to go visual vanilla if the mood strikes.

I looked into it, and apparently the critical fixes from SCP are indeed included by default in the patched GOG/Steam versions:

https://af.gog.com/forum/system_sho...es_mods_recommendations/post772?as=1649904300

So, you're not totally out of luck if you just want to continue your playthrough as-is. The vast majority of SCP changes are fitting and nice, and there are even a few minor balance changes which improve the game. But there are two which bother me, namely that the Tank O/S upgrade had its health bonus buffed from 5 -> 10 (which is way too much on Impossible), and that the Powered Armor has any protection at all when unpowered (currently 20%, they said they'll nerf it to 10% but I still think it's too strong).

 

[Average Manatee]

the Tank O/S upgrade had its health bonus buffed from 5 -> 10 (which is way too much on Impossible)

Glad to see someone agrees with me on this. It's even better than the +100% base health looks, normally with 10 HP vs. the usual 5-6 damage hits you have to heal every time you're hit and only get 5-6 HP out of it, with 20 HP you can generally take 3 hits and heal 15-18, a +200% increase.

Power Armor doesn't bug me much though, don't think I've ever let it become unpowered.

 

[RoSoDude]

the Tank O/S upgrade had its health bonus buffed from 5 -> 10 (which is way too much on Impossible)

Glad to see someone agrees with me on this. It's even better than the +100% base health looks, normally with 10 HP vs. the usual 5-6 damage hits you have to heal every time you're hit and only get 5-6 HP out of it, with 20 HP you can generally take 3 hits and heal 15-18, a +200% increase.

Power Armor doesn't bug me much though, don't think I've ever let it become unpowered.

Exactly. I get that +5HP is pretty garbage on lower difficulties, so they should have just made it scale instead! 5 was a perfect number for Impossible, to keep other O/S upgrades attractive. Now it's just the obvious first choice, every playthrough.

If you manage your Powered Armor well (maintenance skill helps by giving it a bigger capacity), then 50% protection for a measly 3 Strength requirement is a great reward (compare to the Medium Combat Armor's 30% protection for 4 Strength and Heavy Combat Armor's 40% protection for 6 Strength!). But the entire point of the design was to make you vulnerable if you didn't keep it up, particularly in levels where you might go for a while without returning to a recharger (parts of Recreation, the Rickenbacker, and Body of the Many come to mind). Giving you a baseline level of protection ruins this tradeoff, and makes it a no-brainer for nearly every playthrough. The rationale I was given was that "the description of the armor strongly suggests that there should be some protection going on even with no power", but that's a supremely uncompelling reason to mess with tight gameplay balance in my opinion.

 

[Average Manatee]

If I was to balance Power Armor I'd rather have it weaker than heavy armor (if not medium armor) even while charged. Given the abundance of charge stations and batteries and the psi-ability there's got to be some compelling reason why every other version of combat armor even exists, let alone exists onboard the Von Braun/Rickenbacker. These are supposed to be state of the art vessels, who requisitioned the obsolete equipment?

For example:
Light: 20% 2 Str
Powered: 30% 2 Str
Medium: 40% 4 Str
Heavy: 50% 5 Str

Make the PA modifiable, first mod increases it to 40% protection w/ +50% power consumption and the second mod reduces the power consumption back to normal.

 

[Micormic]

Hard to say, both had parts I liked more, both had parts that frustrated me.

SS1 didn't age well at all, super clunky but very nice atmosphere that's unmatched, something about that game just got to my bones.

SS2 didn't age that well either but much nicer and less clunky then the first.



Overall if the 1st game was in SS2's engine I would probably prefer it. As it stands the 2nd is easier for me to play today.







Went on youtube and found the 2 I was thinking of, something about those 2 logs just freaked the shit out of me when i was like 10-11 years old playing that game haha.

 

[Santander02]

First played SS1 in 20xx with the mouse-look mod and was comfortable enough.

 

[Makabb]

Ken Levine sounds a lot like Todd Howard

 

[Sykar]

Ken Levine sounds a lot like Todd Howard

Meaning he is a lying sack of shit, too?

 

[Crash]

Still thinking whether to play System Shock 2. Enemy respawn is something I really dislike, but folks say it's WAD and meant to reinforce the atmosphere...

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

Still thinking whether to play System Shock 2. Enemy respawn is something I really dislike, but folks say it's WAD and meant to reinforce the atmosphere...

Don't think, just play.