System Shock System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster by Nightdive Studios

[NotAnotherUsername]

They're reselling you community mods (Confirmed by the project's art director eldrone recently (I think that's his role?), last post #719). They're also introducing "new character and weapon models" and besides that probably gimmicky multiplayer and updated rendering. They also already showed off what those new assets look like in a previous release and got flak for looking like utter horseshit. Combine that with mods and you get this ridiculous, tacky mess.

If the new rendering is anything like their recent Thing remaster it'll do little to improve the outdated look. Not to mention how those mods drastically change the pacing of the gameplay, and dweebs who don't know any better won't realize they aren't playing the original game but this abomination instead.

They've been working on this project in between other projects so I assume work has slowed down enough to where they can finally shit this one out.

 

[Tweed]

Shock 2 was such a fantastic game... for its time. Alas, it hasn't aged as well as the Thief series.

How? You can install the newdark version and be off and running with no problems on a modern system p.easy. The game has a small, but dedicated modding community for everything from QoL to larger changes. RSD's mods are excellent whether you're new or you've played it a billion times.

 

[Morgoth]

Shock 2 was such a fantastic game... for its time. Alas, it hasn't aged as well as the Thief series.

How? You can install the newdark version and be off and running with no problems on a modern system p.easy. The game has a small, but dedicated modding community for everything from QoL to larger changes. RSD's mods are excellent whether you're new or you've played it a billion times.

I'm not talking about NewDark, I'm talking about the entire game design. It's just not as engaging anymore as I remember it to be. The game is also way too easy.

Thief aged better because it's laser-sharp focused on sneaking around and socking Taffers. Shock 2 in comparison is all over the place, and it does not do a single mechanic well. I even found Deus Ex to have aged better.

 

[baba is you]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/4314641

System Shock® 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster - Coming Soon!​

Hello, Hackers!

We have some exciting news to share with you… the release of System Shock® 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster is fast approaching! In March during GDC 2025, we will announce the game’s release date during The MIX’s Spring Game Showcase livestream.

As a reminder, Kickstarter backers at the Humanoid Mutant tier and above will receive a free key for System Shock® 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster when the game releases. Important note, similar to how you received your digital copy of System Shock Remake, your key will be sent to the email that you have listed on Backerkit.

If you have any questions or issues receiving backer rewards including System Shock® 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, please reach out to us at support@nightdivestudios.com.

Thank you!

- Team Nightdive

So, this remastered version or should I call it the ee version? It looks like it's finally being released.

 

[NoNamedNN]

They will be including fan-made mods, which include high-res textures.
Source: https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=11449.0

29. October 2020
Hello everyone, this is Stephen from Nightdive with a bit of an update.

We are currently nearing the end of reverse engineering Shock 2 and wanted to reach out to the various authors and content creators that have worked diligently for so many years on some of our favorite mods to see if there was interest in including your work with the official release.

So far we will be including:

Vurt's Space Textures, Flora, Hi-res Water, Organics/Goo
ACC's Four Hundred (400) Hi-res Terrain Textures
Eldron's Psi Amp
Olfred's Fixed Objects
Grosnus' Hi-Res Spinning Marine/Navy/OSA logos
SCP
SHTUP
ZylonBane's New Quest Notifier
Vaxquis Vintage Song Remake v1.0 Mod
Mercurius' Tacticool Weapon Replacements

SHTUP stands for Shock Texture Upgrade Project, which contains many high-res textures.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

I'm not talking about NewDark, I'm talking about the entire game design. It's just not as engaging anymore as I remember it to be. The game is also way too easy.

The game is way too easy because it's extremely busted. SS2's design lends itself to optimal strategies, because half the skills are overpowered and the other half are worthless, so a competent player knows how to build their character correctly to the point where the game becomes an absolute snore, both in terms of being very easy to beat and being largely mindless, making it boring.

If you want to play SS2 in the best way possible, install the RSD mod. Alongside Scary Monsters, this makes the game much harder by improving it's core systems so you have to actually strategise around your skill builds, which naturally makes everything much harder. I have gone from being able to breeze through SS2 on Impossible to struggling on Hard with these mods.

If you really want a good time, follow a good community mod guide

As someone who is closely involved with the SS2 modding community and who has made multiple mods, this "Remaster" looks like nothing special. A collection of community mods (which are basically only a small handful of ones from the Newbie Modding guide, none of the actually good ones), some new models slapped on top (which, to be fair, if they wanted to be ultra lazy they could have just included Rebirth), and not much else. I wouldn't buy it, personally. This is much closer to an Enhanced Edition than a remaster, so I don't know why they changed the name. Especially since it's not System Shock 2's 25th anniversary (that happened last year), so what gives?

I even found Deus Ex to have aged better.

AHAHAHAHA!!!

Are you serious?

System Shock 2's systems are pretty broken, but nowhere near as broken as Deus Ex. The whole game just honestly barely holds together when you look at it's gameplay. You can hack your way through everything, certain skills are borderline useless (Weapons: Demolition, Swimming), mechanics are unintuitive (pain screams are louder than death screams, so the silenced stealth pistol actually ends up being worse for stealth than the regular pistol because it gets less one-shot kills due to doing lower damage), it has a lot of outright bugs (Spy Drone not working when Synthetic Heart is active, etc), and is just generally quite flawed and primitive in it's design.

The only proper way to play Deus Ex is via GMDX, which fixes most of these issues and makes the gameplay actually good.

 

[baba is you]

The reason for the name change is probably because they said they would give the Enhanced Edition for free to backers of the 1 remake, but it wasn't the 25th anniversary remaster, so they probably changed it.

If my guess is correct, Nightdive is doing some pretty thuggish things.

 

[Yosharian]

If you really want a good time, follow a good community mod guide

As someone who is closely involved with the SS2 modding community and who has made multiple mods, this "Remaster" looks like nothing special. A collection of community mods (which are basically only a small handful of ones from the Newbie Modding guide, none of the actually good ones), some new models slapped on top (which, to be fair, if they wanted to be ultra lazy they could have just included Rebirth), and not much else. I wouldn't buy it, personally. This is much closer to an Enhanced Edition than a remaster, so I don't know why they changed the name. Especially since it's not System Shock 2's 25th anniversary (that happened last year), so what gives?

Interesting. This looks pretty cool

Shame ND probably won't use any of the balance changes

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Shame ND probably won't use any of the balance changes

It's the right move, financially.

While it's unfortunate that SS2 is quite broken gameplay-wise out of the box, what's even more unfortunate is the sheer amount of brainlets who play it vanilla and who swear by it's gameplay. Often considering it near-perfect in terms of execution.

Changing literally anything about the gameplay - even significantly improving it - would cause riots and draw hatred from diehard immersive sim fans, who are the only ones who are going to buy this anyway.

 

[Junmarko]

They also promised the game to anybody who pre-ordered System Shock on Steam. Not sure if they're going to honor their promise though.

Proof: https://webcf.waybackmachine.org/we...ore.steampowered.com/app/482400/System_Shock/

I remember them saying this.

People should ask the question in Steam Discussions.

 

[DesolationStone]

Hello everyone, first time posting here in over a year. By the way, this morning I finished System Shock 2 for the first time and it was a lot easier and less scary than I remembered. Even some areas of the colourful System Shock 1 felt the scariest to me, and the final boss fight, Jesus Christ, I beat Shodan in less than 2 minutes. Anyway, the game had a wonderful atmosphere and sublime writing for the audio logs. The story behind the fall of the Van Braun was more interesting than the main plot itself.

Talking about this remastered enhanced anniversary edition, my hopes are that:

• Create a new standard version of System Shock 2 for all future modding;
• Fix all the problems with the co-op;
• Makes the game available on consoles, in the hope that console gamers will finally understand why everyone goes into rage mode when they read a critic calling the next immersive sim "a BiOsHoCk Clone";
• Make it easy to enable EAX (maybe integrate Alchemy/OpenAl by default?);
• Add more options for difficulty and for the game in general.

 

[Tweed]

I can't see how this is going to improve much over anything the community can already do except allow mouthbreathers who can't imagine apple play Shock 2 again and console plebes, but I repeat myself.

 

[NotAnotherUsername]

They also promised the game to anybody who pre-ordered System Shock on Steam. Not sure if they're going to honor their promise though.

Proof: https://webcf.waybackmachine.org/we...ore.steampowered.com/app/482400/System_Shock/

Looks like they really are screwing people over (11,744 to be exact)

In their recent Kickstarter update, they state "backers at the Humanoid Mutant tier and above will receive a free key".

However, in January 2021 they previously announced:

"We’d also like to announce that anyone who pre-orders System Shock remake will receive System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition for free and ALL Kickstarter/Backerkit backers who backed at the $30 level or higher will also be receiving SS2:EE for free"

The Humanoid Mutant tier is $50, meaning the 11,744 $30 "Repair Bot" backers who were promised a free key can go fuck themselves, lol--but hey, that was for the "Enhanced Edition" which no longer exists

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Talking about this remastered enhanced anniversary edition, my hopes are that:

• Create a new standard version of System Shock 2 for all future modding;
• Make it easy to enable EAX (maybe integrate Alchemy/OpenAl by default?);

These are both already possible with SS2Tool. The enhanced edition is literally pointless for these.

• Add more options for difficulty and for the game in general.

Just use mods. Especially for difficulty. The aforemenetioned RSD mod massively improves the gameplay and increases the difficulty by rebalancing the core systems.

 

[kangaxx]

I'll probably bite just to see what they've done. The original still plays really well, especially with mods, but I'm interested in whether they deliver on their promise to fix the multiplayer. Most people won't give a fuck about it, but when you've played the game a hundred times it offers something a bit different/gets my OG gamer friend online for a few hours.

 

[Trithne]

I'll end up with it because of kickstarter stuff so I'll give it a try. As long as they don't fuck up my GoG copy I'm good.

Also, my kickstarter shit actually arrived from this fucking clown fiesta. Only took eight and a half years. And the manual has printing errors, none of the personnel list has images. Peak ND quality.

I don't mind the remake itself though. It's passable.

 

[Tweed]

Hello everyone, first time posting here in over a year. By the way, this morning I finished System Shock 2 for the first time and it was a lot easier and less scary than I remembered. Even some areas of the colourful System Shock 1 felt the scariest to me, and the final boss fight, Jesus Christ, I beat Shodan in less than 2 minutes. Anyway, the game had a wonderful atmosphere and sublime writing for the audio logs. The story behind the fall of the Van Braun was more interesting than the main plot itself.

Talking about this remastered enhanced anniversary edition, my hopes are that:

• Create a new standard version of System Shock 2 for all future modding;
• Fix all the problems with the co-op;
• Makes the game available on consoles, in the hope that console gamers will finally understand why everyone goes into rage mode when they read a critic calling the next immersive sim "a BiOsHoCk Clone";
• Make it easy to enable EAX (maybe integrate Alchemy/OpenAl by default?);
• Add more options for difficulty and for the game in general.

Another vote for RSD mod, it's the best way to play. There are some optional mods that can make things more unpleasant if you find it too easy, but there's only so much you can do anyway, especially if you've played the game to death.

 

[OneBasis_33]

What's even the point of something like this, it looks like the original game updated with the most basic mod list. Is it because they promised the backers and now can't back out? Even those retards would probably prefer if they worked on SS2 remake or SS3 instead. I found the remake acceptable, would say I liked it if it wasn't for those pathetic cyberspace sections and even worse final boss.

 

[Trithne]

Thirding RSD. But in addition to that, I highly recommend Alarming Cameras. It's such a simple change (destroying a camera sets off the alarm, unless the security is down or you're using a specific psi power) but that simple change adds so much to the "class" system of SS2 that it feels like it was intended to work that way but someone felt it was too punishing.

 

[kangaxx]

What's even the point of something like this, it looks like the original game updated with the most basic mod list.

I actually agree, unless you have any interest in "fixed" multiplayer to squeeze a different experience out of the game. Obviously it's mainly intended as a solo horror shooter, but I'm guessing most people on here have already done that a hundred times.

 

[Tweed]

Even if you fix the netcode you can't fix that mess because it was never meant for it. Multiplayer is fun to play as a joke, especially since you'll spend the first two or three minutes laughing at Goggles and then you'll spend another two minutes laughing the minute one of you leans left or right. Then comes all the friendly fire incidents and "friendly fire" incidents and trying to designate who's going to learn what.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

All the positive votes for rsd are good, but there are so many other good mods out there too.

As a mod maker I'm so tempted to shill, but I won't

 

[Semiurge]

Shock 2 was such a fantastic game... for its time. Alas, it hasn't aged as well as the Thief series.

How? You can install the newdark version and be off and running with no problems on a modern system p.easy. The game has a small, but dedicated modding community for everything from QoL to larger changes. RSD's mods are excellent whether you're new or you've played it a billion times.

The newdark version is completely hassle free, supports modern resolutions and the works. Other than that it's mostly vanilla, some small bugfixes, gameplay, sound and item tweaks have been made but nothing game changing.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

The NewDark patcher (ss2tool) also essentially removes the laser rapier hum, which is an awful and unnecessary change.

 

[Trithne]

All the positive votes for rsd are good, but there are so many other good mods out there too.

As a mod maker I'm so tempted to shill, but I won't

Shill. I'm always in the market for new mods to shake up my roughly annual runs through the VB.