System Shock 2 has been completed.
Special thanks to
Dayyālu for giving the game to me!
It was pretty good, I think. I'll have to let it sit for a while, but my impressions are mostly positive right now.
Some humorous notes:
I ran around for like 15 minutes in the Engineering deck, since I forgot that to get to the warehouse section you just had to walk into the door that is connected to the broken keycard reader. I right clicked on that keycard reader twice, but my mind went completely blank at the idea of just walking into that door and I didn't accidentally trigger the door either, so I was looking around for an alternate entrance that did not exist. It's even more embarrassing since I had already previously gotten to that section in a previous playthrough I dropped like 1 or 2 years ago, I just completely forgot.
Towards the end of the game in that part that you have to destroy the shuttles and you are ordered to build that thing with the Replicator, I had zero nanites. This situation meant to me that I had to either grind for about 15 minutes killing Hybrids in Medsci (who drop either 5 or 10 nanites roughly every 3-5 kills) which didn't sound fun to me, so I decided to just cheat instead and spawn 100 nanites to get the thing. I think it's arguably more immersive to cheat in that situation, than it is to grind for 15 minutes since it's a portion of the story where you race against the clock.
They should have just made that thing free to replicate or have them give you 100 nanites,
there was even a TTLG thread on this same issue back in 2005.
As per usual I will whine about everything I thought to be negative on the game instead of the positives, since the positives are already heard of plenty of times.
At times, the pacing felt off. Particularly during the Engineering deck. Certain resources were stupidly abundant, while others were non-existent. I was particularly butthurt about the lack of maintenance tools in that area, which meant my shotgun and pistol were basically around 2 or 3 quality throughout that entire area. Hybrids had a tendency to spawn in rooms that I had just exited in Engineering, too. On that note:
Randomly respawning enemies suck! And SS2 is not an exception despite how much you cunts love this game. In a game that is so heavily based around resource management, having randomly respawning enemies scale your resource drain (3 resources at once, meds, ammo and maintenance tools) up or down by pure RNG is pretty bullshit. They are also an immersion breaker quite often, as an example I had a Rumbler spawn in a room that I just left the exact same second. Having this massive pink flesh beast spawn in a room where all the entrances are smaller than itself isn't particularly immersive.
Some of the balancing around skills is weird. Just as an example, Hack skill 1 is entirely useless. I never found a single thing that could be hacked with Hack 1. Maybe you could hack security terminals? I'm not sure since I never tried, I just shot turrets and cameras.
It's also similar with weapons, where you have Pistol at Standard level 1, Shotgun at level 3, and nothing at all at 4 and 5, only getting the assault rifle at level 6.