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

[anvi]

I am in between :D

 

[Yosharian]

There's also the fact that gamers have become so used to being spoonfed by popamole slop that a game that actually requires you to manage ammo, hp etc is just incomprehensible to them

This is a real review

Started off really good but game got frustrating towards the second half of the game. Developers just decided to spam so many enemies throughout the maps while having a resource system that makes it impossible to have enough ammo or consumables to deal with it. It’s unfortunate and got too frustrating for me to finish it.

Yes it's 'Impossible' to deal with enemies while managing your resources

Here's another review, this guy rated it a 1:

ok game. Over rated by people. It is full of glitches and icky stuff, just does not feel right to play. Difficulties are a joke. I played on hardest with survival boxes checked. The game felt boring and easy You will have an overwhelming amount of resources. WHich what you can craft an overwhelming amount of AMMO. Enemies are very limited and all easy to take down. The most annoying are repeated and the hardest ones are easy escapable. ( you can ignore events) This game does not offer anything special or particular about games. If you have NEVER EVER played a game in your life and really could not care for a story, this is "maybe" for you

So one guy cries that the game is impossible because no ammo, the next guy says it's way too easy on the hardest difficulty

Also why the fuck does everyone hate the story so much?

 

[cvv]

And in my opinion System Shock 2 was an endless backtracking and respawning gameplay nightmare and didn't deserve the hype it got!

SS1 has always been the superior game. SS2 isn't bad tho, especially compared to 99% of currentday slop, but the respawning was really, really, really bad. So fucking annoying. There is respawning in SS1 but it's way more limited, tied to certain quests or states of the game, not the brainless "clear up the mobs, turn a corner and they instantly respawn behind your back".

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

respawning in ss2 is *extremely* limited. it's there just to remind you to never unclench your ass, it's like 1 or 2 mobs per map at worst, you're often free to return and never meet anyone else.

 

[flyingjohn]

but the respawning was really, really, really bad

Not really. In 30+ minutes of play time you ain't gonna see the respawn effect more than 3 times unless you trigger every alarm. And that is on the highest difficulty. I am not a fan of it but it is not a huge issue.Late stages are different but by that point the respawn enemies pose no threat.
Now, if you wanna see bad respawning check out far cry 2.

 

[Wesp5]

but the respawning was really, really, really bad

Not really. In 30+ minutes of play time you ain't gonna see the respawn effect more than 3 times unless you trigger every alarm.

Maybe you and MadMaxHellfire played the patched game, where they toned the respawning down, but I remember using the wrench most of the game because I had no ammo and usually I have thousands of shots at the end of any game I play. This was especially stupid because they create this interesting SF setting and then force the player to fight with a contemporary tool. Also another issue was that because of your character class you couldn't use all weapons, because you obviously never learned how to spot and use a safety and a trigger! Yes, I can understand that without good stats you might be not good at using some weapons, but not being able to use them at all was another stupid SS2 gameplay decision! I can't remember SS1 or Prey doing that. Speaking of the later, I don't really believe it flopped because of the name, the original Prey wasn't that famous, but endless respawning and endless retracking through the same dozend maps became boring very fast...

 

[flyingjohn]

Maybe you and MadMaxHellfire played the patched game

Why wouldn't I? The last patch wasn't even released a year after.

but I remember using the wrench most of the game because I had no ammo

Weird. Unless you are going for exotics early, there is plenty of standard weapon ammo around and energy weapons have recharge stations. I used the wrench a lot because it is effective even though i had plenty of ammo.

Also another issue was that because of your character class you couldn't use all weapons

It is controversial but i like hard restrictions in my rpg's. Plus, with the game balance, you really wouldn't have any incentive to just not fall back to standard the majority of times.

 

[Ash]

Maybe you and MadMaxHellfire played the patched game, where they toned the respawning down, but I remember using the wrench most of the game because I had no ammo and usually I have thousands of shots at the end of any game I play. This was especially stupid because they create this interesting SF setting and then force the player to fight with a contemporary tool. Also another issue was that because of your character class you couldn't use all weapons, because you obviously never learned how to spot and use a safety and a trigger! Yes, I can understand that without good stats you might be not good at using some weapons, but not being able to use them at all was another stupid SS2 gameplay decision! I can't remember SS1 or Prey doing that. Speaking of the later, I don't really believe it flopped because of the name, the original Prey wasn't that famous, but endless respawning and endless retracking through the same dozend maps became boring very fast...

We need a filthy casual gamer button! Imagine having to use the wrench for the majority of SS2 and not running and gunning 90% of the time past deck 2 as intended. If anything I think the respawn rate should be slightly higher or possible in more areas of the levels instead of plenty safe zones.

"Yes, I can understand that without good stats you might be not good at using some weapons, but not being able to use them at all was another stupid SS2 gameplay decision!"

Nope. It's game design perfection in this context. It's partly a survival horror. Being able to use all the weapons would make it easy and not so tense, among other things.

"Also another issue was that because of your character class you couldn't use all weapons, because you obviously never learned how to spot and use a safety and a trigger"

MUH REALISM. One of many forms of declinefaggot brain worms in gaming. Game design is allowed to be abstract to optimize an intended play experience. That gaming as a whole leant so hard into realism post-2000 is one big reason of many why gaming sucks hard now.

I can't remember SS1 or Prey doing that.

Well, Prey only had like 3 weapons lol. And is a casualtard modern game anyway. SS1 is also pretty casual in some ways too (being able to turn all game elements off on new game, infinite free cyborg conversion chambers, infinite free healing from medbay, among other things).

usually I have thousands of shots at the end of any game I play. .

Casual slop for simps? Yeah, those games do be like that.

Sorry, but I have to gatekeep real, intelligent, synergistic game design. Someone has to do it among the sea of mediocrity that is gamers.

 

[Dayyālu]

but not being able to use them at all was another stupid SS2 gameplay decision!

Would you complain that in Bloodlines a character that is not specced in melee or firearms could use them with any efficiency at all?

SS2 is in the end a RPG and what you do depends on your build. Sure, one can argue that SS2's balance is completely out of whack because the game feels like it's built to be played with a soldier/hacker hybrid (Standard Weapons and Hacking are so useful and present, not getting them feels like a nerf). To play with a character focused on anything else (bar maybe a Heavy/Hacking hybrid?) requires knowledge of how the game works and what weapons/enemies you encounter. The idea that your character "should at least be capable of firing a gun" works fine when we're discussing Standard Weapons, but what about Exotic? Or the Fusion Cannon? Or close combat builds? Those would require training if we go for a "realistic" explanation.

The entirety of SS2's balance is insane and it's a miracle the game works as well as it does. I have rarely seen anyone complain about the respawning, though, traditionally the complaint is about durability that forces you to wrench a lot of things in the early game when your resources are scarce, up until you get to the Cargo Bays and the Protocols teach you can't wrench everything.

Respawning was in theory significantly worse in SS1: the typical example is are the Inviso-Mutants camping on the elevator areas, I still remember them years later and it's tied to the number of enemies in a level, so it's quite punishing or forces the player to "trap" some annoying enemies to avoid them in high-backtracking areas. SS2 is almost completely devoid of this, methinks your memories are influenced by the relative scarcity of weaponry&ammo particularly at the beginning.

In the endgame with Standard Weapons SS2 is easy as pie, Rumblers drop in three shots of Anti-Personnel.

 

[Atlantico]

Imagine having to use the wrench for the majority of SS2

I used it for the entire game, the wrench becomes so stupidly OP you don't need another weapon tbqh

One-shots just about anything and doesn't cost ammo.

 

[kangaxx]

SS1 has always been the superior game. SS2 isn't bad tho, especially compared to 99% of currentday slop, but the respawning was really, really, really bad. So fucking annoying. There is respawning in SS1 but it's way more limited, tied to certain quests or states of the game, not the brainless "clear up the mobs, turn a corner and they instantly respawn behind your back".

Personally disagree, but I think both games are right up there. SS2 was just more fun for me, had more atmosphere.

Prey was very good, got some unfair hate and is far better than most things released these days. There are some fantastic mods to fix the balance issues, one by someone on this forum in particular.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

SS2 did have places/sections where enemies were respawning constantly. Including ones where they would pop out of thin air in plain sight. That last part was probably a bug, which was explained to me by one of the codexers recently, but the point still stands. It wasn't building tension or reinforcing resource management, it was rather the other way round: immersion breaking and plain annoying. It's p much the only serious complaint I had about the game, which I otherwise absolutely loved.

 

[kangaxx]

I've got to say I never witnessed enemies spawning in front of me in SS2, having played it more times than I can count.

 

[cvv]

but the respawning was really, really, really bad

Not really. In 30+ minutes of play time you ain't gonna see the respawn effect more than 3 times unless you trigger every alarm.

Maybe you and MadMaxHellfire played the patched game

I don't even know there was a patch but I can absolutely promise anyone the release version was one of the most frustrating gaming experiences I can remember because of the insane respawn mechanic.

 

[Ash]

I've got to say I never witnessed enemies spawning in front of me in SS2, having played it more times than I can count.

I have. Maybe once or twice in my multiple plays over the years. It's such a minor issue, anyone making a big deal out of it is disingenuous at best, retarded at worst.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I've got to say I never witnessed enemies spawning in front of me in SS2, having played it more times than I can count.

That's cool and all, but it did happen. In fact the Xerxes column on the med/sci is already where you can experience it afair. Like I said, that's supposedly a bug, but it doesn't really change anything in this particular context. Also, the second deck you visit already has spots where hybrids will just respawn retardedly quickly, which does not make the game difficult or anything, but is annoying and does spoil the tension.

 

[Yosharian]

SS1 has always been the superior game. SS2 isn't bad tho, especially compared to 99% of currentday slop, but the respawning was really, really, really bad. So fucking annoying. There is respawning in SS1 but it's way more limited, tied to certain quests or states of the game, not the brainless "clear up the mobs, turn a corner and they instantly respawn behind your back".

Personally disagree, but I think both games are right up there. SS2 was just more fun for me, had more atmosphere.

Prey was very good, got some unfair hate and is far better than most things released these days. There are some fantastic mods to fix the balance issues, one by someone on this forum in particular.

Wait what. Prey has mods?

 

[RoSoDude]

but the respawning was really, really, really bad

Not really. In 30+ minutes of play time you ain't gonna see the respawn effect more than 3 times unless you trigger every alarm.

Maybe you and MadMaxHellfire played the patched game, where they toned the respawning down, but I remember using the wrench most of the game because I had no ammo and usually I have thousands of shots at the end of any game I play. This was especially stupid because they create this interesting SF setting and then force the player to fight with a contemporary tool. Also another issue was that because of your character class you couldn't use all weapons, because you obviously never learned how to spot and use a safety and a trigger! Yes, I can understand that without good stats you might be not good at using some weapons, but not being able to use them at all was another stupid SS2 gameplay decision! I can't remember SS1 or Prey doing that. Speaking of the later, I don't really believe it flopped because of the name, the original Prey wasn't that famous, but endless respawning and endless retracking through the same dozend maps became boring very fast...

Spawn rates were never patched in SS2. There was a patch that stopped monsters from spawning in your direct line of sight and provided config options to eliminate spawning and weapon degradation (for disgusting casuals), but the default rate was not altered.

What was more likely the case is that you experienced a bug in the vanilla ecology scripts that was only recently discovered:

So, some fun facts about ecologies that we've just discovered: They're supposed to work by executing at set intervals, usually every few minutes, to gradually repopulate the levels. But due to an oversight in the script that manages ecologies, every time the script starts, it starts a new timer for the next spawn interval, even if there's already a timer running. This means that every time you enter a level, or every time you save and load in a level, another duplicate ecology timer is created. So after a while it's pretty easy to get the game in a state where ecologies on some levels will fully repopulate all at once, due to the ecology script executing dozens of times more frequently than it's supposed to.

But wait, there's more! Somehow, all these duplicate timers end up scheduled for the precise same moment. This is important, because the decision to spawn, and the actual execution of a spawn, are handled by different scripts on different objects. When the ecology script decides it wants a spawn, it dispatches a message to the spawner object, which gets shoved onto the message queue. So when the ecology script gets called dozens of times in the same moment, it's looking at the current monster population every time. So it dispatches a spawn request every time it runs. When the spawn script finally receives all those spawn messages, it happily executes them, potentially pushing the monster population on the level far above the maximum defined by the ecology.

This doesn't affect all levels, because some have their ecologies set up to limit spawning to one active monster per spawn point, but it definitely affects some levels.

Anyway, it's fixed now (probably).

In other words, every time you spam save & load or go back and forth across a bulkhead to use healing beds/recharge stations, the game will put a new spawn timer on the queue and you'll get swarmed with enemies a few minutes later. In a way this bug is actually kind of awesome, because it reveals that all the people over the years who have gone online to complain about SS2's spawn rates were trying to abuse degenerate strategies and got smacked for it.

SS1 has always been the superior game. SS2 isn't bad tho, especially compared to 99% of currentday slop, but the respawning was really, really, really bad. So fucking annoying. There is respawning in SS1 but it's way more limited, tied to certain quests or states of the game, not the brainless "clear up the mobs, turn a corner and they instantly respawn behind your back".

Personally disagree, but I think both games are right up there. SS2 was just more fun for me, had more atmosphere.

Prey was very good, got some unfair hate and is far better than most things released these days. There are some fantastic mods to fix the balance issues, one by someone on this forum in particular.

Wait what. Prey has mods?

Hi. It's in my signature. I haven't updated it in a long time, and it doesn't go that far to alter the game's design, just tries to fix the most glaring balance issues that hamper the RPG systems.

 

[kangaxx]

This is so weird, even playing on Impossible I've never felt 'swarmed' (apart from set pieces where they wanted it to happen)... how can I have missed these bugs after so many years?

 

[RoSoDude]

This is so weird, even playing on Impossible I've never felt 'swarmed' (apart from set pieces where they wanted it to happen)... how can I have missed these bugs after so many years?

It has happened to me only once over a dozen or so playthroughs, where I experience much more protocol droid traffic in the Cargo Bays than usual. I never abuse save/load and don't backtrack to Med/Sci excessively for healing, but it's still possible to get unlucky and experience a sudden glut of enemies due to stacking respawn timers.

In the next version of my SS2 balance overhaul mod I will be making this a feature instead of a bug, where higher difficulties have higher spawn rates so that Impossible mode is truly oppressive.

 

[AndyS]

Also why the fuck does everyone hate the story so much?

They want the game to yank control away from them so it can mash cutscenes in their faces. They can't really perceive storytelling unless this happens.

 

[Yosharian]

but the respawning was really, really, really bad

Not really. In 30+ minutes of play time you ain't gonna see the respawn effect more than 3 times unless you trigger every alarm.

Maybe you and MadMaxHellfire played the patched game, where they toned the respawning down, but I remember using the wrench most of the game because I had no ammo and usually I have thousands of shots at the end of any game I play. This was especially stupid because they create this interesting SF setting and then force the player to fight with a contemporary tool. Also another issue was that because of your character class you couldn't use all weapons, because you obviously never learned how to spot and use a safety and a trigger! Yes, I can understand that without good stats you might be not good at using some weapons, but not being able to use them at all was another stupid SS2 gameplay decision! I can't remember SS1 or Prey doing that. Speaking of the later, I don't really believe it flopped because of the name, the original Prey wasn't that famous, but endless respawning and endless retracking through the same dozend maps became boring very fast...

Spawn rates were never patched in SS2. There was a patch that stopped monsters from spawning in your direct line of sight and provided config options to eliminate spawning and weapon degradation (for disgusting casuals), but the default rate was not altered.

What was more likely the case is that you experienced a bug in the vanilla ecology scripts that was only recently discovered:

So, some fun facts about ecologies that we've just discovered: They're supposed to work by executing at set intervals, usually every few minutes, to gradually repopulate the levels. But due to an oversight in the script that manages ecologies, every time the script starts, it starts a new timer for the next spawn interval, even if there's already a timer running. This means that every time you enter a level, or every time you save and load in a level, another duplicate ecology timer is created. So after a while it's pretty easy to get the game in a state where ecologies on some levels will fully repopulate all at once, due to the ecology script executing dozens of times more frequently than it's supposed to.

But wait, there's more! Somehow, all these duplicate timers end up scheduled for the precise same moment. This is important, because the decision to spawn, and the actual execution of a spawn, are handled by different scripts on different objects. When the ecology script decides it wants a spawn, it dispatches a message to the spawner object, which gets shoved onto the message queue. So when the ecology script gets called dozens of times in the same moment, it's looking at the current monster population every time. So it dispatches a spawn request every time it runs. When the spawn script finally receives all those spawn messages, it happily executes them, potentially pushing the monster population on the level far above the maximum defined by the ecology.

This doesn't affect all levels, because some have their ecologies set up to limit spawning to one active monster per spawn point, but it definitely affects some levels.

Anyway, it's fixed now (probably).

In other words, every time you spam save & load or go back and forth across a bulkhead to use healing beds/recharge stations, the game will put a new spawn timer on the queue and you'll get swarmed with enemies a few minutes later. In a way this bug is actually kind of awesome, because it reveals that all the people over the years who have gone online to complain about SS2's spawn rates were trying to abuse degenerate strategies and got smacked for it.

SS1 has always been the superior game. SS2 isn't bad tho, especially compared to 99% of currentday slop, but the respawning was really, really, really bad. So fucking annoying. There is respawning in SS1 but it's way more limited, tied to certain quests or states of the game, not the brainless "clear up the mobs, turn a corner and they instantly respawn behind your back".

Personally disagree, but I think both games are right up there. SS2 was just more fun for me, had more atmosphere.

Prey was very good, got some unfair hate and is far better than most things released these days. There are some fantastic mods to fix the balance issues, one by someone on this forum in particular.

Wait what. Prey has mods?

Hi. It's in my signature. I haven't updated it in a long time, and it doesn't go that far to alter the game's design, just tries to fix the most glaring balance issues that hamper the RPG systems.

Well shit now I have to replay Prey as well as the nu Deus Ex games, my next few months are gonna be busy

 

[Wesp5]

Spawn rates were never patched in SS2. There was a patch that stopped monsters from spawning in your direct line of sight and provided config options to eliminate spawning and weapon degradation (for disgusting casuals), but the default rate was not altered.

What was more likely the case is that you experienced a bug in the vanilla ecology scripts that was only recently discovered:

Interesting. Still I remember enemies spawning in places where they just couldn't have gotten into and this is what also annoys me a lot in games. Like you clear out a dead end room with only one exit, leave, reenter and it is full of enemies again. Yes, you didn't see them spawn but they must have spawned out of thin air anyway! In the new Spider-Man games e.g. they always provide doors in their arenas through which spawning enemies enter.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

there's only two instances of fraudulent, manual spawn of mobs in the whole ss2 that i remember of, one is on a narrow catwalk where you're ambushed by zombies, and the other after you find delacroix.

 

[Jadeite]

They'll never be able to recreate the magic of SS2. The voice acting alone is unsurpassable. I don't care if it's Otherside or Tencent,actually looking glass is the one who needs to pony up and make a sequel, or at least an HD remake of SS2. I'd pay hundreds for that. SS1 on the other hand is an unplayable relic from the jurassic era, let's not wish to go back to those dark days, eh? Old school with a capital O