Ken Levine Says Multiplayer Hurt System Shock 2

[Formica Archonis]

Spoiler

As far as I know, Shodan never had a fake human form, rather she simply impersonated Polito over coms. Also, during that time there was an insurrection taking place, which resulted in a ship wide security lockdown, necessitating the soldiers constant need to hunt for passwords and keys. A single suicide during all this chaos could easily go unnoticed.

Yeah, what I meant by fake human, I really messed up my wording there.

But then the rest doesn't fit. Why is real Polito still doing research in the middle of a war?

And what was up with her office?

Polito is an AI expert, but Shodan was found light years away from her origin, so you can forgive her for being confused at first.

Well, I can forgive her for that because there's no logical way SHODAN got ten light years on a jettison rocket, but that's just spackling one plot hole with another.

Polito is an AI expert, but Shodan was found light years away from her origin, so you can forgive her for being confused at first. The Many was already causing problems at this time and this mysterious AI was aiding her, so she belayed her concerns to focus on the immediate threat. Shodan, meanwhile was already enacting plans for a ship wide takeover, which is halted before long until the Soldier arrives on scene. By the time Polito realises who the AI is (she does figure it out) it was too late.

Still.... She found Earth tech on Tau Ceti containing an AI and never thought to even air-gap it from the rest of the ship before running it? Just the circumstances of its discovery were suspect as hell.

But I'm splitting hairs. I hated the plot and that forces me into nitpick mode.

1. Repairing was meant to add to the tension. Granted it was a little overwrought given that a futuristic weapon falls apart after a couple of clips, but the idea behind it was that, for the majority of the game, your chosen firearm is an emergency weapon only. What's more, the game encourages you to settle on a specific weapon (psi amp, pistol or wrench) for large chunks of the game.

But the only 'encouragement' is that they keep throwing crap at you until you either give up or cheat, unless you got lucky enough to divine their intentions and optimize on your first run. I hate excessive handholding, but they're kicking me out of the tree before my feathers are in. It doesn't take that many misspent points before you're in an unworkable build. To crib Yahtzee's moral choice/upgrade argument, they might as well ask you on the opening screen what your endbuild will be because straying and experimentation locks you out.

I guess my problem is that they're not sure whether this is an FPS in which a super solider goes to kill zombies or a survival horror game where a hapless schmuck is clinging for life, and you can't have it both ways.

All classes are not fixed choices and a mishmash like Psisoldier or PsiTech or TechSoldier can be achieved, though spreading yourself too thin cause issues in the late game. But as a rule of thumb:

*The psi-amp would be your main weapon if you went down the root of OSI for obvious reasons.

If you can find hypos. I rarely did. Every attempt I had ended in me wrenching respawners to death, which wasn't fun in Hexen either. Except my first SS2 run, when I missed the wrench. Then I just died. Over and over and over.

As for the respawning enemies. Given that the game is FPS survival horror with RPG elements, simply spawning a set number of enemies would nerf the challenge and tension greatly. It would spoil the intended impact of ammo conservation, repair and maintenance, resource scavenging etc. The fact is, the game doesn't rely on closet horror, rather it sets a tone then let's the game dynamically generate the horror.

But because you have to retread the same ground over and over again, you can't easily run from fights. It's not about getting deeper and deeper into some sort of cesspit of evil, it's about down this hall again, wrench this zombie again. Less looping back would also remove the need for respawning monsters, since every fresh hall naturally has critters.

2. System shock was never about story. SS1 had a very generic rogue AI plot. AI went mad, kills everyone, you have to stop it. System shock 2 expands on the events of SS1 (oh my god, continuity in a sequel!?), so of course there will be plenty of references to SS1.

Except originally there wasn't, other than SHODAN. They bolted on Diego after the story was already written then screwed with the numbers to accommodate, even though him being from that family meant nothing and arbitrarily changing numbers without at least back-of-napkining them introduces more problems for a nitpicker like me to see and pry apart.

The thing that SS1 and 2 both do really well, is feed the very basic plot to the player in a very tense and dramatic way. Trough the audio logs you are piecing together the events that transpired, who the movers and shakers were and the motivations behind their actions which you are there to sort out. Essentially, the story has already happened and you are at the conclusion, but first you must figure out what happened before you can act.

We're gonna have to disagree there. A guy making an audio log while a zombie is raising three feet away just rips me out of it.

4. The elevator repair was to limit your movement around the ship early on, forcing you down a fixed path. Given the disrepair the ship fell into, the lack of able bodied crew, the infestation and other anomalies, a few DIYs are to be expected. I always felt that this section of the game was the most focused and entertaining. After the reveal the plot starts to go all "yeah we sort of made this up as we went along". Again, B-grade sci-fi.

But there's no sense of progress. You get a key from X to get a key from Y to open hatch Z and I'm going down levels when I need to go up. I was ten hours in and I was still trying to fix the elevator and wondering why in all this roaming I hadn't found a flight of stairs or ladder up.

 

[thiosk]

Cod should do away with single player for much the same reason.

 

[TsunamiWombat]

I generally agree that tacking multiplayer onto a game that doesn't need it hurts the game, but I played through System Shock 2 with a friend when it came out and it was some of the most fun I've ever had gaming, and there are still people who host this game online and play through it again and again.

What hurt System Shock 2 the most was two things:

Internet and meme culture was in its infancy at the time, the only place you would hear about a game was either from other people, by seeing an unfamiliar box in the store, or in a magazine that did a review. System Shock 2 didn't get rave reviews at the time because it did have a lot of bugs, and graphically it was behind the times. A game like this that attracts a hardcore following does a heck of a lot better today. You'll see memes cropping up, let's plays... A game that is great just underneath the first glance can be recognized as such before the earnings reports are due today.

HalfLife came out a month after SystemShock, and that pretty much ruined its chances to pick up in sales. Let's face it, everyone was swept up in HalfLife and how awesome it was, and how good it looked and how smooth it played. System Shock 2 is one of those games where you have to explain to people why its good if they haven't played it for very long or haven't really thought about it yet, HalfLife is one of those games where from the moment you pick it up you know that it's good.



The box art for System Shock 2 was also weak. It just had SHODAN on the front and a gigantic 2. Marketing guys today would cringe at that, since the package design was obviously meant to have insider appeal to the players of the first game, but didn't at all take into consideration that it had to reach a much broader audience that had no idea who SHODAN is or particularly cared about buying 2 without having played 1. Buying PC games in 1998 was a bit different than today, sometimes you just went to the store and looked at shiny boxes and picked one that looked cool. Some stores had PCs with product demonstrations set up. I remember that I got Mechwarrior 2 because on the shelf that hulking Madcat that was just loaded for bear with weapons looked like it would eat all those other games' lunch.

This is a well thought out and logical argument that raises points and then supports them. Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my internet?

 

[Pyrian]

How do you miss the wrench? You have to jump down a pit, grab some stuff so you can get out of the initial section, get the wrench, and then use the wrench to smash some debris blocking the ladder to get out of said pit. I didn't think it was possible to get out of there without it.

Ya but if you boil it down all AI dose that.

Dishonored's AI's do a lot more than that.

The difference being SS2 AI had a greater radius of sight and hearing...

That's not better AI, that's a couple of constants in an initialization file. Corvo's just quieter than goggles.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

How do you miss the wrench? You have to jump down a pit, grab some stuff so you can get out of the initial section, get the wrench, and then use the wrench to smash some debris blocking the ladder to get out of said pit. I didn't think it was possible to get out of there without it.

Ya but if you boil it down all AI dose that.

Dishonored's AI's do a lot more than that.

The difference being SS2 AI had a greater radius of sight and hearing...

That's not better AI, that's a couple of constants in an initialization file. Corvo's just quieter than goggles.

Actually it is better AI since it didn't forget you were there once it found you. Also the AI could look up something the AI in DIS has vast trouble doing.

The AI in DIS(and BS) is simple compared to Batman AA/AC, Dark Messiah, Any dues ex game,ect Its so simple it constantly breaks any semblance of stealth which is rather bad for a stealth game.

 

[Pyrian]

Actually it is better AI since it didn't forget you were there once it found you.

First off, that's not true; Dishonored AI never completely forgets you were there, and will continue warning other guards of your presence indefinitely, as far as I can tell. Second off, that's additional behavior, so better AI, not worse. Third, I'm pretty sure eventually standing down is a feature of every single game you've cited, anyway.

Also the AI could look up something the AI in DIS has vast trouble doing.

Dishonored AI's are perfectly capable of looking up, although they're certainly not in the habit of it.

The AI in DIS(and BS) is simple compared to Batman AA/AC, Dark Messiah, Any dues ex game,ect Its so simple it constantly breaks any semblance of stealth which is rather bad for a stealth game.

No, it's not "simple" at all, and certainly not compared to any of the games you're citing. It's default settings are relatively easy to stealth, yes, but that's a design decision, not a consequence of the AI being simple or bad.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Actually it is better AI since it didn't forget you were there once it found you.

First off, that's not true; Dishonored AI never completely forgets you were there, and will continue warning other guards of your presence indefinitely, as far as I can tell. Second off, that's additional behavior, so better AI, not worse. Third, I'm pretty sure eventually standing down is a feature of every single game you've cited, anyway.

Also the AI could look up something the AI in DIS has vast trouble doing.

Dishonored AI's are perfectly capable of looking up, although they're certainly not in the habit of it.

The AI in DIS(and BS) is simple compared to Batman AA/AC, Dark Messiah, Any dues ex game,ect Its so simple it constantly breaks any semblance of stealth which is rather bad for a stealth game.

No, it's not "simple" at all, and certainly not compared to any of the games you're citing. It's default settings are relatively easy to stealth, yes, but that's a design decision, not a consequence of the AI being simple or bad.

Just because they have more lines of script (and have more idle/worthless scripting) dose not make up for the very limited hearing and sight they have not to mention lack of caring about other guards, opened doors, door sounds, sounds other than the 5 they have been programed to hear. And the alert cool down time is insanely fast.

Sorry but any of the Deus ex games and even Batman AA/AC have much smarter more realistic difficult to blindly ghost past AI.

 

[Mullac]

I didn't actually realise the game had a co-op element until I bought it off GOG. I was planning to have a run through of if co-operatively after I finished it single player.

However, now I have finished the game by myself, I can see that doing it with friends just wouldn't be the same. All the horror, suspense and general atmosphere would be very obsolete.