Vapourware System Shock 3 by OtherSide Entertainment - taken over by Tencent!

[Cynicus]

Infinitron, Pacotti being onboard is about all that's keeping me from giving up hope on SS3, story-wise at least.

 

[cherry blossom]

All of what you said except for the NPCs. I still feel System Shock works best as a game where you are totally isolated and cut off from anyone else. That feeling of utter solitude, knowing the sounds you hear down the corridor isn't going to be something nice.

NPCs could work but would require some good event planning and scripting. I would it love it to be.

Early in Alien Isolation -which has a very similar atmosphere to the System Shocks-, you run into a non-hostile couple on a service elevator, working at their own plan to somehow make it out alive, and following a short exchange and a tense standoff over lack of trust, they leave with the elevator. The whole thing is a very short scripted scene but it filled me with such wonder and excitement.

"There are other people on this goddamn hunk of junk, doing their own thing trying to make it out", I thought. "Wait, why do they have to leave? We can help each other! They look like good and reasonable people. I hope they make it. I wonder if we will run into each other again." I played on with the gamist and saddening expectation that it was just one of those scenes, there for spectacle but otherwise insignificant and irrelevant to your gameplay session while secretly wishing it to have some meaning for plot and the gameplay.

Spoiler

Later in the game, when you reunite with your original shipmates or temporarily meet up with a bunch of survivors, it is at first a huge relief on both occasions, after having been completely alone for so long, instilling some sense that now things can start to get better or at least different until you realise they are just set pieces also insignificant and irrelevant to gameplay which ought to be the biggest sin of the game, that the entirety of gameplay itself is pretty much static, never really developing into anything interesting or exciting beyond the initial formula, which drags it down the longer the game keeps going at it

Perhaps what should have happened was dynamic or at least conservatively branching NPC events where your brief interactions with NPCs could have some meaning for the plot and the gameplay. Done well, it could elevate a game into vast greatness. I think they something similar with The Thing .

 

[Invictus]

The new Shodan sketches show that she might have a physical form instead of just beign an AI
And her whole motivation for disliking humanity might be something pretty cliched, or something cool... Given that she did create new life with The Many and then bonded with a human maybe her next stage would be to have her consciousness spread across humans in better versions than the cyborgs and experiments from the previous games
Even if it is not very groundbreaking it could be cook

 

[crakkie]

The end cutscene of SS2 was supremely retarded. That's really going to be the starting point?

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

The end cutscene of thus supremely retarded. That's really going to be the starting point?

Well this is going to be a sequel.
What really concerns me is that this is likely to be set on Earth where the horror will be less claustrophobic.

I figure they'll go with Shodan takes over Earth and you're part of the resistance.

 

[---]

And now it begins a four years waiting

 

[HoboForEternity]

The end cutscene of thus supremely retarded. That's really going to be the starting point?

Well this is going to be a sequel.
What really concerns me is that this is likely to be set on Earth where the horror will be less claustrophobic.

I figure they'll go with Shodan takes over Earth and you're part of the resistance.

So no enclosed isolated place?

 

[Infinitron]

Note that one of the concept art pieces in the Polygon interview is a space station.

 

[Infinitron]

Looks like they've had Doug Church around for a while now: https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=1255.msg19936#msg19936

Doug has been behind the scenes with advice well, forever. Just because we are not in the same building or company doesn't mean we don't all still talk to each other.

Doug was one of those 'OMG' guys when I started at Looking Glass. So chill, so smart, and the very rare gift to explain complex things in non-complex terms. That continues to this day. His insight into...um..everything is worth listening to.

 

[LESS T_T]

"As I was playing them, I emailed people who worked on the original games," he said. "I would say, 'oh my god, this game is so hard' and the response I would get back would be '1994.' Then I'd say, 'this thing is so big' and the response was '1994.' And then I'd say, the UI in this game is terrible, what were we thinking?' and the response would be '1994.' So it was an eye-opening experience just in terms of how far games have come since then.

FYI, the person who replied with "1994" is Doug Church. Spector mentioned this anecdote also in the Nightdive livestream.

 

[Ash]

System Shock isn't particularly hard, at least not once you get the controls down. Ammo is everywhere, cyborg chambers revive you ad infinitum with little consequence, and AI do not persistently hunt you down once aware of your presence as they did in Doom, for example.
Big and with a terrible UI, sure, but it isn't very hard even with the diff. settings whacked right up. I'd expect a new game in the series to be just as hard if not harder. You can always have a "modern braindead gamer" mode representing easy/normal.

Challenge is at the heart of the experience, people these days forget.

 

[Rhuantavan]

I shamefully haven't completed the first game in the series. I've tried to several times, but was held back by the controls. Anyway, I enjoy looking at the big box on my shelf.

The second one was just too tough on me, since I always ran out of ammo.

I keep my fingers crossed for the third one.

 

[LESS T_T]

Some Facebook comments: https://www.facebook.com/OtherSideEntertainment/posts/1794480037430831

Shawn Sancha "Arturo has been working on our version of Shodan, which is going to be interesting and different from what people expect. I expect it will infuriate some people but definitely get people talking."

"Nowadays, cyberpunk is a little less current."

"I've learned over the years that it's foolish to try to convince people to become interested in something they don't care about, so we're finding things that people are interested in today."

:l

OtherSide Entertainment That does not mean its not cyberpunk. What does cyberpunk look like now with all the advances over the past 15 years? There are ways to modernize and hit the same feeling as the old. Doing the same thing is boring, exploring a space with fresh eyes isn't.

Michael Fry SS2 is still my favourite game of all time! I am very hopefully for SS3, I second the comment below about don't 'dumb it down', or 'consolise' it as I like to say lol. [...]

OtherSide Entertainment Has Warren ever dumbed anything down?

Francisco Encarnacion I wonder how the hacker will look like after 42 years, soldier has to speak with him because the hacker is the real mute XD unless if he is like the soldier

OtherSide Entertainment well, if this office is any example, balder, rounder and slower.

OtherSide Entertainment the post above this was castrated.

Sidney Olsen Povlsen Just logged out to see if I was the only one who could see the comment, and it seems you did remove it. What the hell is your problem, you can't even take criticism? If you're just gonna shut up everyone giving you harsh criticism, then who do honestly you think is going to buy your game or talk about it to their friends or others? Sorry to break it to you, but you aren't exactly a recognised indie studio by the majority of the people out there. The only people who know your past are the people who've played your previous games, your original fanbase, so if you're just going to tell them to drop dead, then what will you have left? Nothing, that's what. You have a good past-reputation, and all we're asking is that you please try to live up to it.

Wonder what it was about.

 

[Ash]

Michael Fry SS2 is still my favourite game of all time! I am very hopefully for SS3, I second the comment below about don't 'dumb it down', or 'consolise' it as I like to say lol. [...]

OtherSide Entertainment Has Warren ever dumbed anything down?

^Probably that.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Doing what he was paid to do (Disney) is not the same as fucking up something you might be interested in.

 

[Ash]

Uh, Deus Ex: Invisible War.

Epic Mickey was a perfectly acceptable experiment. If you read the "Spector's Soapbox" thread here you'll see me defending his choice to make that game even.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

For whatever reason, I don't associate him with IW... not sure why.

You know, I bought that game and played it for 20 minutes. 20 fucking minutes. I don't know fully how shitty it even is but I know 20 minutes was plenty.

 

[Ash]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVgEtXWAzwQ#t=01m48s

Invisible War was one of the earliest intentionally dumbed down sequels I remember. Sequels used to be bigger, better and deeper. Shortly after everyone was doing it, dumbing down for $$$.

Sure IW wasn't the first, but it was one of the most notable given how good the original game and the rest of the Immersive Sims were.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

I think they recognize their mistakes.

In 2007 at Warren Spector's University of Texas master class on game design, Project Director Harvey Smith felt the team did not do a good job designing Invisible War. stating the following;[33]

"This was a very difficult game for me... ...I feel like we fucked up the technology management of it, we had bad team chemistry, we wrote the wrong renderer, we wrote the wrong kind of AI, and then we shipped too early.

"And then the story was even bad... we moved the story into the future. We didn't understand it at the time but this undermined much of what made Deus Ex great: the familiarity, the groundedness... you're going through an alley, to jump up on a dumpster, to get to a fire escape, to break someone's apartment, and we've all seen that, so it's very powerful, it's very grounded. We moved [Invisible War] further into the future, and it started to feel like the Jetsons or some type of space thing...

"I feel we made an 85% rated RPG that was not a worthy sequel of the original game in terms of how interesting the original game was...

"It was also my first console game, and it is a different beast to work on a console game. You have to think about the interface and the memory differently and everything else."

— Harvey Smith (2007)
They then discussed some of the ways that Invisible War was specifically different from the original. From the outset Invisible War was intended to fix some of the problems seen in the original. Harvey felt that they spent too much time listening to hardcore players that did not like the original game, trying to change the sequel to meet their expectations. By doing this, they reduced the appeal of the game for the majority of players, trying to cater to the extreme views of this small minority.

"The lesson I've learned... is that you really need to talk to the players you are aiming at... It's not selling out to cater to an audience...

"You will have some hardcore friend who will tell you the most extreme version of what you're supposed to do, and that would be cool. And you will lose 90% of the audience if you do that... If you want to make an indie game, that's fine, sit in a closet and make an indie game and release it for four guys on the Internet... I highly recommend that if that is what drives you..

"If on the other hand you're taking $20 million of someone's money, and on the surface you are aiming for an XBox Live crowd, then going to some crazy extreme is probably not a good idea. Unless it's an extreme that will take your audience to some new interesting place. Then if you're going to do that, you're going to spend 80% of the project communicating with the user about this new thing that's interesting..

"So what I think we did with Deus Ex, is that we listened to our super hardcore friends who said Here's how I would fix Deus Ex. .. we had some good friends who told us how Deus Ex was just a giant disaster and here's what they would change. I love those guys, and we really felt sensitive about that.. We're not meeting the demands! or We're not meeting the standards of our very intelligent designer friends. So ashamed! Let's fix all that in the sequel. And we weren't listening to the players of the original game who liked what we had done.

"In trying to fix some of those.. redundant things, like skills and augmentations that were overlapping.. we eliminated that complexity, and boiled it down to one system that was easier.. on the console interface, easier to learn, but it didn't allow for some combinations, that even if they weren't mechanically interesting, they built a fantasy in the player's head.

"For example, [as a game designer] I could let you take the swimming skill, or an augmentation like aqualung, or I could give you a biomod for the sequel called Swimmer, and it has both built into it. They're mechanically the same... but it wasn't the same to the user.. who wanted the fantasy of saying 'I am going to be the aquatic guy, so I'm going to take up these slots [in skills] and these slots [in augmentations] to be the aquatic guy in combination.' Even though mechanically it's the same, in the fantasy it's different."

— Harvey Smith (2007)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_Ex:_Invisible_War

 

[Ash]

You're too optimistic for your own good, doc.

 

[Infinitron]

That sentence about "hardcore players" always trips people on the Codex up. "Hardcore??? No way, if he'd listened to hardcore players like us the game would have been GOOD!"

I think what he really meant there was "hardcore game design wonks" who attached themselves to the first game's development. For instance, Valve CEO Gabe Newell, who was a playtester.

 

[Ash]

Doctor Sbaitso: they do realize their mistakes. That being there's no money in making intelligent, envelope-pushing, all-encompassing, uncompromising works of art. Since they are indie and close to retirement I assume they're not going to make that mistake again. Can't blame them, if they weren't let down by the PC gaming audience time and time again in the '90s it would have never come to this.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Actually, what part did Spector play in IW? I don't see him holding a position of Director or Designer.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

That sentence about "hardcore players" always trips people on the Codex up. "Hardcore??? No way, if he'd listened to hardcore players like us the game would have been GOOD!"

I think what he really meant there was "hardcore game design wonks" who attached themselves to the first game's development. For instance, Valve CEO Gabe Newell, who was a playtester.

Yes that's right. In hindsight they realize they should have ignored their 'hardcore' peers and listened to fans of the original. Probably easy to say those things while they are counting shekels.

 

[Ash]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Spector

As Ion Storm studio director, he oversaw development of Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003) and Thief: Deadly Shadows (2004).

He was either the only means of defense against publisher pressures to dumb down the game, or the idea came from him directly, spooked by LGS' downfall and tired of making next level games that don't do very well financially and don't get id/valve-tier recognition. It's difficult to hold anything against him and the other Immersive Sim sellouts.