System Shock Remake - aka "system shock appreciation thread"

Late cause no one cares anymore, but the Remake got delayed. Again.
Release maybe in May (?)

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I was hopeful, since many people were saying good things about the game's completion status from beta, but i honestly don't have high-hopes it will actually release by the end of May.
And even if, it will still have some major bugs, 7 god damn years in the making and they still can't organize and keep to the fucking schedule......

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New gameplay footage for System Shock remake has dropped.
Love how in the future the weather forecast (and awkward exposition) are delivered over loudspeakers mounted on skyscrapers like a techno version of medieval town criers. Must be really conveniant for the people living in the apartments closeby: they can get updates on the weather without having to waste time checking the instantaneous weather updates on their neural feeds that they have access to inside their brains 24/7.

Also, good to see how cup and bottle designs have evolved past the needs of ergonomics or spacial utility:

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I played the latest demo and I liked it a lot. I'm glad they fixed the lighting because it was much too dark. I also saw some footage of the beta and the quality seems to be consistent for the later levels so the game looks fun.

I like how they managed to keep the colorful environments of the original so that it feels like a 90s cyberpunk game.

The music is on the weak side, but it's inoffensive and it occasionally becomes more intense when encountering greater threats. The sounds effects are good and I liked listening to the various things the enemies would say. The Mantis Cyborg is especially cool.

Cyberspace is so much better than the original. It reminds me of Descent.

The recycling feature is nice but they should add a "vaporize all" button because it's tedious to do this piece by piece.

I do wish the organic creatures flinched more when you hit them with melee weapons. The melee still feels off, but I found myself switching to ranged a lot sooner than I did in the original so it doesn't matter that much.

I like the puzzles, though after playing BioShock again, just about any puzzle is fun compared to playing easymode Pipe Dream whenever I had to hack something.

The mag pulse rifle is definitely weaker than the original version. I found myself using the Sparq more often on the highest setting.

SHODAN is supposed to ambush you with a horde at the CPU room, but it didn't happen on Normal mode like the original.

I'm not happy with how many times they delayed the game but there is a playable beta now and the Kickstarter backers have said positive things about it so that makes me a lot more certain that they will release the game soon. Hopefully the Atari purchase doesn't fuck up future projects because they plan to release an enhanced version of System Shock 2 as well.
 
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Releases in 2 days bois. How are they going to fuck it up?
 
Releases in 2 days bois. How are they going to fuck it up?
Please select one or more of the following:
* Accidentally releasing a late-build demo instead of the full game
* "Accidentally" releasing a late-build demo instead of the full game
* Swarm of strung-out addicts break into the building in the dead of night and take everything that isn't nailed down, forcing a rebuild because ND has no offsite backups
* Last-minute delays out of fucking nowhere!
* Troon sabotaging the project because it will never be a woman SHODAN
* Gloriously staggering incompetence causing a power outage/system wipe/detonation
* Someone tripped over a cable and bricked the computer with a power surge
* Team blackout drunk after celebrations, game held ransom by hookers
* FBI OPEN UP
* King Jankenkhamen strikes the team down in the 11th hour for ignoring the Curse of Boomshoot
* Heaven's Gate situation
* Medical emergency due to some idiot trying to fit the entire bowling pin in there
* Total Internet Death
* Other (please specify/speculate)
 
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if i had to guess how they might fuck it up:
- bugs
- parts of the game somehow being worse than the original
- the 'expanded lore' annoying people
- unnecessary changes

to be honest I'm just surprised it's seeing a release at all after all the troubles
 
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One of the first reviews.
  • only minor bugs, nothing game breaking
  • faithful to the originals station layout
  • sound mixing seems off, enemy sounds and music overall too low in the mix
  • weapons and combat overall lacks impact
  • same problem as with the Black Mesa remake of Half-Life and XEN, their version of cyberspace is better then the originals but drags on for too long
  • good voice acting especially from Terri Brosius (SHODAN)
  • overall a good game but not great
 

One of the first reviews.
  • only minor bugs, nothing game breaking
  • faithful to the originals station layout
  • sound mixing seems off, enemy sounds and music overall too low in the mix
  • weapons and combat overall lacks impact
  • same problem as with the Black Mesa remake of Half-Life and XEN, their version of cyberspace is better then the originals but drags on for too long
  • good voice acting especially from Terri Brosius (SHODAN)
  • overall a good game but not great
this white pills me

this is literally all I wanted kek
 
They redid the soundtrack. My beef with the demos was that melee combat was floaty and dissatisfying; it was very difficult to tell if you were in range to hit something, if they were in range to hit you, and hitting them didn't make them react in any way. Apparently it hasn't been fixed, from the reviews.
 
They redid the soundtrack. My beef with the demos was that melee combat was floaty and dissatisfying; it was very difficult to tell if you were in range to hit something, if they were in range to hit you, and hitting them didn't make them react in any way. Apparently it hasn't been fixed, from the reviews.
The issue with getting a feel for the weapon range is how short it looks in your hand. The wrench looks pretty small so I feel like I have to get right in their faces to hit them but the guy I kill at the end of this clip was decently far away, outside of his melee range entirely. Its just a learn by experience kind of thing.



Unrelated but fuck Tor it took me like 15 minutes to upload this I want back on clearnet null pretty please.
 
The OG voice actress for SHODAN is back, the (remixed) elevator music is back and the visuals are gorgeous. I spent the morning playing the first and second levels with the dopiest grin on my face.
 
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It's definitely not bad.

Melee combat is the weakest point in my opinion. It's hard as hell to gauge your distance. I wouldn't blame people if they simply saved the wrench or pipe for emergencies.

Also, sometimes I think the game gets a bit irritated if you start spanking bad guys. I got jumped by three cyborg guards out of the blue and they beat my ass up pretty soundly. The game DOES respawn enemies in cleared areas -- I've actually seen floor lifts appear, carrying a mutant or guard, and when they step out, the floor lift drops back down and can't be seen again. Annoying and amusing.
 
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Full disclosure: I am a little bit "weird" about the Shock series. I think Bioshock is the best one. Fight me, nerds. System Shock 2 is a good game but the pacing is slower than Bioshock, the plasmids in Bioshock are fun(er), and the combat with the Big Daddy's is mostly brilliant. My only problems with Bioshock is that it's a little too on the easy side with the regeneration units or whateverthefucktheyare and I have to play on the hardest difficulty for an actual challenge but as you make your way through the game enemies just get spongier and spongier until the the basic mutants need 1-2 grenade rounds to put down. That can be seen as good or bad. Not a big fan of the Pipe Dream mini hacking game and that's the only thing Bioshock 2 improved on was the hacking.

System Shock 2 is a good game but it's much slower and it really fucks you over if you fuck your upgrade path and you can't really have best of both worlds, you go all in on one thing or the other. I really fucking hated the Minesweeper hacking game.

I never liked the original System Shock. It dated like rotten milk left out in the sun. Fight me again, nerds.

Bioshock 2 I hated immensely but everyone and their mother swears up and down that the DLC Minerva's Den is better than the base game so I have to play that.

Bioshock 3 I didn't like as much. I didn't like the 2 weapon limit and how linear and hand-holdy it was. And I didn't really care for the story after a while. If, and never say never, but IF a director's cut of Bioshock 3 were to ever happen that reintroduces all the cut content and removes the 2 weapon limit I am all over that.

Now you now where I'm coming from so here's my pleb thoughts:

Overall I like this more than System Shock 1 or 2. It improves on pretty much everything I didn't like about the original games.

Side note: I don't know what in the fuck all these baby bitches are complaining about regarding the weapons not having weight (and yeah, I'll call them a baby bitch right to their manchild "muh nostalgia" Channel Awesome reject faces). Have you actually played System Shock 2? In that game, using melee on enemies felt like you just smacked them with a rolled up newspaper FFS. I don't care how many faggot nerds get upset, suck my fucking nuts, the melee in System Shock 2 sucked fucking dick. And they might hide behind the old "Well, you know, the game came out in 98 and..." No, fuck you, Half-Life came out the same year and it's still fun to use the crowbar to this very day. The only issue I've noticed using melee weapons in the remake is that sometimes it passes through enemies but might still register as a hit but that's it. That's patchable. The rest of the weapons aside from the plasma gun are fine. The basic bitch pistol is a basic bitch pistol. Do you want the fucking pistol to sound like the Doom 2 Super Shotty? Kill yourself.

... That all said. I am enjoying this. You can build up a very decent arsenal in the first level. I had plenty of ammo just taking my time and explore and use the pipe/wrench on mutants. And yes, enemies randomly respawn and I'm fine with that because the melee isn't a tedious chore like in System Shock 2. Or at least enemies randomly respawn on the hardest combat difficulty that I'm playing on.

There are some glitches. These are not deal breakers but they are annoying but can be patched out. Enemies could hear you but are above or below you might get stuck on a corner. A.I. sometimes just doesn't detect you (this happened maybe 2-3 times in the first level). I've had two freezes after loading a quicksave where I had to go into Task Manager. But after allowing myself to die and the full cut scene to play I no longer experienced the glitch. The weirdest one is when I died and regeneration tube brought me back and all my pistol ammo was gone. I was swimming in about 80 pistol rounds but I found all my ammo on a corpse in a room I died on.

Nitpicks: if you've searched a thing or a body and don't find anything the game shouldn't allow you to interact with the body after that. A.I. is a little basic even when you fight stronger enemies. I went into this room:

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I wandered into this room, I'm listening to the audio logs but I get a little distracted during combat or looking for shit, I had no idea you had to destroy those things. I luckily destroyed cameras as soon as I could AND IF YOU DON'T DESTROY EVERY CAMERA YOU SEE YOU WILL BE FORCED TO BACKTRACK AND DESTROY THEM IN ORDER TO MOVE ON. Once I figured this out, by relying on the old "shoot something and see what happens" Boomer Shooter method it was fine. I don't know if I overlooked a switch to disable those things but I just melee'd them and shot at them from a distance because I had TONS of pistol ammo.

It's not quite Bioshock 1 but I do like it. So far I'm hovering around an 8.5 rating. It's a very well optimized game as well and is only just barely over 8 gigs. Recommended.
 
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I haven't had a ton of time, but I've put in a couple hours in and the only big complaint I'll mention is that I was disappointed when I got off of the first elevator. Having played the original, I was ready for what the original does there, and the remake flopped it. I'm guessing technology limitation probably prevented doing the same encounter at the same scale; however, doing the same encounter on an austerity budget simply highlights the issue.

Melee feels a bit jank, I think it has something to do with the differences between quick swings and full charge swings combined with there being more than one swing. Then the berserk patch makes it even weirder. It is all effective, hit registration is conveyed, but it all just feels weird.

As a minor complaint, one of the hacking/rewiring puzzles I got had me confused for awhile to the point of thinking it was broken. It had some tiles with a thingy above them that caused a bunch of nearby tiles to rotate when you rotated that one. Fine, but I didn't notice it still had a conduit pathway underneath that, barely visible. Other than that the puzzles have mostly fallen into that lovely category of "puzzles I solve on accident while exploring their ruleset and testing how they function".

I suspect at this point I will enjoy finishing a playthrough in the remake, but still prefer the enhanced edition overall.
 
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