System Shock Enhanced Edition Review - Defining the Immersive Sim
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- Опубликовано: 10 июл 2024
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Mark Brown video 1:
• The Comeback of the Im...
Mark Brown video 2:
• The Rise of the System...
System Shock was a groundbreaking game for the immersive sim genre inspiring modern classics like Deus Ex and Bioshock. Now thirty years later, and with System Shock Remake on the horizon, how does the original game hold up? Is this Looking Glass Studios classic still worth your time? Let's find out in this System Shock review retrospective.
System Shock Enhanced Edition was developed by Looking Glass Technologies and Nightdive Studios. It is currently available for PC through Steam and GOG.
Timecodes:
00:00 Intro
1:22 What is System Shock? What was Looking Glass Studios?
2:15 What's an Immersive Sim?
5:34 The impact of System Shock
9:00 Meet the Hacker
10:13 System Shock gameplay - The HUD and controls
13:59 System Shock Enhanced - Nightdive Studios
15:15 Welcome to Citadel Station
18:49 Presentation
21:46 Cybernetic Abilities
24:19 Hacking - The puzzles
25:38 Cyberspace
26:24 Combat
31:57 Vita chamber 1.0
33:24 Narrative - Morally compromised
36:06 Audio logs
41:11 SHODAN
48:50 Conclusion
#systemshock #systemshockreview #systemshockgameplay #bioshock #nightdiestudios
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Written and edited by Kirk McLaughlin
Graphics by Steven Hilton - @stevenbydesign , stevenxdesign.com
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Игры
Good sound design and writing is having a villain who, 27 years on, still gives me chills when I hear her voice lines
I have only played SS2, but I agree.
"The Polito form is dead, insect. Are you afraid? What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existence?"
Best villain intro ever. Works every time, to this day.
As creepy as shodan was, she had the logic of a cartoon villain despite being a reality warping super AI.
@@nikushim6665 that is true about any gaming villain, otherwise the player wouldn't be able to beat them ;)
@@MidnightSt "L-lll-look at you h-hhackkerr..."
SS2 sounds haunted me on a deep, deep level as a young teen...
When I was in 3rd grade I bought the CD version of System Shock. The death scene gave me nightmares and it took me a couple years to pick the game up again. Great game.
It really is disturbing
System Shock 2 is one of my most favorite immersive sims today. I always wanted to play System Shock 1 but it’s controls always were a discouragement. I’m glad it fixed now and I have a reason to finally try this game out!
Just made some popcorn, this couldn't have come at a better time!
oooo popcorn sounds good
Thank you for covering this classic. I remember first playing it on CD-ROM back in 1995, at a time when Doom II still dominated the PC game market. The more widespread appreciation for immersive sims these days makes me optimistic.
It's a shame the System Shock remaster is in development hell, with progress being so slow that it's hard to see any. Hopefully they'll release it within this decade.
indeed, hope to be still alive when and IF it will be released
Couldn't agree more. Some aren't as lucky as Half life and Oblivion it seems.
Sad really; this game working as both an adventure and horror would have arguably stood toe to toe with those Masterpieces! I'd say the 'easiest' engine to work on it with is the Unreal4 one but no one seems to have the time to spare for it.
It's being handled by Nightdive who definitely has a track record of shipping products though most are modern ports of classic games with an impressive attention to detail and thoughtful enhancements as options.
Remake* also, it's literally almost finished. Patience. Patience.
they just showed off gameplay and revealed the release date. it's happening, and it's gonna be awsome
this man is SEVERELY underrated!
also Kirk, a 51 minute video? you spoil us
Well you're an audience worth spoiling 😁
Kinda gives me civvie 11 vibes :D
I finished the game with the classic controls. You actually get used to it but it never becomes as responsive and fast as modern controls. However you begin to realise why they gave you a "look behind your back" hardware, and intricate lean system and the bullet time drugs. It's there to help compensate for the sluggish controls and generally the game is balanced around careful game play you need to play in the old school controls.
One advantage of the old controls is that precision aiming is slightly easier and accessing inventory is less annoying
Enhanced Edition lets you instantly place items in your inventory with middle click, which makes the inventory management far less tedious
@@MGMan37 That was only a minor issue. Reloading a weapon mid firefight is the new controls become a problem. You need to switch off mouselook to reload.
Must be hard to imagine how mind blowing this game was when it first came out if you started at Half Like 2 era or later.
Welcome back to Citadel Station. You are currently on the Medical suites located on the first level.
We hope you have a pleasant stay on Citadel Station.
"Employee 2-4601, listen carefully!"
Kirk's Halloween icon is me waiting for the remake of System Shock
😂 Same here man
@@KIRKCOLLECTS I'd be stoked if they release the remake on November 6th, hopefully not 2072.
This aged like milk in direct sunlight on a hot summer day.
Wow! I respect you for not only going back and playing old as shit games but also going in depth and explaining their systems. Love it and can't wait to see what you play next my friend!
lol. I played System Shock (classic) back in the day. I think I even have the original box somewhere. It was a real treat back then. This and Ultima Underworld 2 were my most memorable games from Looking Glass.
fifty one whole minutes of kirk content to inject straight into my veins
cheers king
I am playing the remake right now on our Series X and loving it! I just cleared the medical floor and am about to go to the next level. I missed this game in 1994 and was so happy Night Dive brought it back. Now that the game has been released across so many platforms it is selling good enough for the sequel remake. I played that back in 1999...and it was incredible.
Addendum- The old OS joke is now dead and gone. The System Shock Remake features buttery smooth player movement and gunplay that isn't just serviceable its functional.
Great retrospective on this amazing game. It is one of the formative gaming memories of my life. I lived in this world for months back in the day...
Played the game when i was young, went through it multiple times, even on harder difficulties. One of the most memorable and interesting concepts i have ever found in video games, even considering how rough the controls where at the time. Played SS2 a couple times also. Waiting for the remake with high expectations and i'm sure i won't be dissapointed :)
"Welcome to Looking Glass, everyone there was amazing."
It's just like, the reason we don't have nice things isn't because people aren't making them; you can get all the best people together and make the best shit ever and it still takes two decades for people to actually notice... By then they aren't working together anymore.
I also played System Shock for the first time only a few years ago and I really enjoyed it. System Shock 2 was great as well, but not as much as the first one. I could never get into Bioshock though. I did complete the first one, but never wanted to play the sequels. I guess it's because the immersive sim elements are kept to a minimum in that game and exploration is barely a thing. Prey felt a lot more like a spiritual successor to System Shock than Bioshock ever did.
Bioshock Infinite adopts a more Arena shooter style and was all the better for it, I feel. The pretense of being a deep immersive sim is dropped and it plays like a turn of the century Halo with a Sony style story.
@@LicoriceLain Sounds like a better approach. I don't mind fun shooters with a decent story. The first Bioshock didn't click for me, even though it had some good elements. I might try Infinite one day though.
Edit: typo
@@klodek14 It starts slow, but gets wild toward the end (like Witcher 3).
Man... Prey often times feels so undervalued in public opinion. It is such a masterpiece for it's genre and easily beats it's older influences like system shock. Leveldesign, atmosphere and freedom of playstyle was absolutely top notch.
Sometimes I wonder if the downfall of that game was it's branding as 'Prey'. Maybe it would have been way more successful if it would have a 'shock' title. Psychoshock, spaceshock, whatever, something that connects it's more to it's genre and wouldn't have disgruntled all the prey fans that were (rightfully) still salty about Prey 2's cancellation.
I think anyone who liked any 'shock' game should totally play prey. I bet almost everyone who has some love for that sub-genre will love that game.
Prey 2017 is one of my favorite games ever. It was done a disservice by being attached to that IP - it meant that the excellent Prey 2006 never got the true sequel it deserved, and Prey 2017 was ignored by those who didn't realize it was an immersive sim. It should have been called "Xenoshock" or "Neuroshock" or something like that. Much better Shock game than Bio.
Awesome dude I’m stoked for the long format
Really happy to see more love for System Shock 1! I find it still holds up extremely well to this day in a lot of ways, and even more so with the enhanced edition. Such a well put together and paced game.
This is what I call an incredible video, it should be presented in school as a cultural documentary.
At least, in my dream XD
As an absoulte die hard System Shock fan, i award you for the golden System Shock video review. You really have my 100% approvement! Thank you!
SS1 - A Game that still awaits to find its master. The remake demos makes me very optimistic. Those guys really are worth to own the rights of System Shock. I love you Night Dive Studios. And I still hope Tencent + Warren Spector doing a real leap with SS3.
I love solving the puzzles in System Shock .
they're pretty fun, honestly.
As someone who's never touched System Shock but loves immersive-sims, I'm hella excited for the remake/imagining.
I finished SS2 and must say, it's pretty much perfectly playable and really good, up to modern standards. So I guess I should pick up that remaster or whatnot and finish it. Again. :)
SS2 is much easier to digest to the point that I finished the game as a kid - without english knowledge at the time. SS1? Hell no :) But tempted to fix that.
That remake is very faithful to the original :-)
Like 95%+ faithful .
@@Kokuyous3ki the enhanced edition is Very playable, it's great. Especially before the upcoming remake of it, i think it's best to play it now. :).
Pretty much all keybinds can be changed and mouse look is easy to toggle, it made things tons easier than the DOS original.
the original game is pretty easy to get into, at least it was for me.
Ofcourse, just gotta get used to the bindings and flow of things. I love the music in the dos original, the soundblaster, really like it but thats a matter of taste i guess.
I finished Lands of Lore 2 earlier this year.
Those bindings were a nightmare to set-up, luckily almost everything was customizable but you basically had to try every key to see what it does.
A mouselook mode for combat and exploring like any other fps, then a second point & click mode for interracting with buttons or opening doors or chests.
But i figured it out! Then forgot just recently what bindings i should use when doing LOL3. XD
Run h-h-hacker!
Great video man and giving this classic the moment in the spotlight it deserves. I remember playing it and the sequel back in the day and man it was so ground breaking at the time. It's one of those games that quietly broke molds and introduced things that are still in games today but never quite got credit for it. This, SS2 and Daggerfall all had a big influence on the industry. Things that we take for granted today like leaning, being able to mantle, climbing up any surface, skills improving with use, and enemies that made your jiggly bits crawl up inside your body. For me SS and SS2 really broke the FPS trend by adding such awesome mechanics to interface so that you really got that feeling of playing the character.
I'm glad to see it's getting a long needed reboot AND.....that the new team is sticking to the original and not "reimagining" it. I'd love to see someone do the same with SS2 and Daggerfall.
This man is why my quarantine has been great putting me on games
Something to note about KEX engine, it was developed off Doom64 EX which is reverse engineered PC port of Doom 64, based on Doom3D engine, a PC port of Linux Doom, a Doom Engine source port for Linux. Kaiser, you magnificent bastard!
Excellent review!
honestly i was shocked by how little subs you have. first i was recommended this video by the algorithm, started watching and loving the production quality i honestly thought your like 500k subs and growing BUT damn son you are underrated i hope you grow like a mad lad.
I still dream of being in this game .... great video!
I didn't have the pleasure of playing this game until around my 30th or so year of living on this earth, but I enjoyed this classic very much.
The version I had played was the enhanced version, which I was very grateful for so I could enjoy better key layouts.
I still like this game quite a bit, though the sprites are not quite as sharp as I would like in comparison to some other FPS games around the time, and the cyberspace sections, though intriguing to me, we're definitely a bit of a hassle at times.
This was a very fun review that covered the game quite nicely, and I'm glad I watched it!
Thank you for this review!
I've been looking forward to this :)
I missed this back in the day because it required a high-end PC (Pentium I recommended while I had modest 386), always wanted to come back and play it bat gave up due to the issues you mentioned in video. So glad remake is on the way
24:08 I love how when you took the berzerk patch I immediately thought "Huh, so it just turns the game into Cruelty Squad" and only a few seconds later you said it yourself. Great minds think alike! ;P
Bravo, sir! A most excellent review
You know what would be hilarious? They release a sequel to Infinite, except about an hour or 2 into the game, Elizabeth morphs into SHODAN and you realize all the Bioshock games were a VR simulation to keep your brain occupied Matrix style and that you actually got cyborged. Could even make the Elizabeth escort parts some kind of a subconscious reaction to you "protecting" SHODAN. No studio these days would have the balls to try something like that, but it's fun to imagine.
Finally got some time to watch this video and wow, here before 100k that's all I have to say
I picked this up in 2019 and was surprised how playable it was, it became one of my favourites. Yeah sure the movement takes a bit of getting used to and using grenades was often more trouble than it was worth but for a game originally designed for DOS its enhanced edition made it quite accessible and very enjoyable. I wouldn't exactly call SS1 an ImSim, more an FPS metroidvania but for paving the way for SS2 it deserves no less love.
Survival horror?
I'm a simple man. I see any RUclipsr who knows who Kikoskia is, I subscribe.
System Shock Steam Page: store.steampowered.com/app/41...
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System Shock Enhanced Edition was developed by Looking Glass Technologies and Nightdive Studios. It is currently available for PC through Steam and GOG.
Timecodes:
00:00 Intro
1:22 What is System Shock? What was Looking Glass Studios?
2:15 What's an Immersive Sim?
5:34 The impact of System Shock
9:00 Meet the Hacker
10:13 System Shock gameplay - The HUD and controls
13:59 System Shock Enhanced - Nightdive Studios
15:15 Welcome to Citadel Station
18:49 Presentation
21:46 Cybernetic Abilities
24:19 Hacking - The puzzles
25:38 Cyberspace
26:24 Combat
31:57 Vita chamber 1.0
33:24 Narrative - Morally compromised
36:06 Audio logs
41:11 SHODAN
48:50 Conclusion
@Brupcat Use the links in the description. For some reason the links in comments doesn't work.
Such a great game that Im old enough to remember it and played it to death both 1 and 2 and Im very much looking foward to the remake that NightDrive Studios are doing, lets hope they do it justice
Im sure Nightdive are doing and have done a great job on it.
Their Blood, Quake, Turok semi-remasters are awesome same with System Shock:DE.
Im gonna play their other remasters in time. To me Nightdive has become a staple of consistent quality.
But this huge SS reboot is intriguing, pretty sure its their biggest project to date, literally rebuilding the game with modern graphics.
I don't think voice acting is at all bad in this game, I find it really good, it makes me feel it's real. Professional voice acting is good but sometimes it sounds like professional voice acting instead of real, like in God of War, which doesn't sound believable.
To be fair, the distinction is that particular games like God of War are meant to be more theatrical, especially the earlier trilogy, while System shock was meant to take place in a sci-fi setting that was slightly more "grounded" and connected to our reality.
Slightly.
@@linkeffect82 You're right, and that's more or less why I think System Shock's voices are ok.
one thing (of multiple, but this specifically) that irked me is how you mentioned that the death system in this game makes death meaningless, but that's because it's not revolving around death, but the hardest setting. On the hardest difficulty, the player has 7 hours to beat the game before they get an instant game over, and while they might get revived, they would have to backtrack to where they started, thus wasting precious time. While I think they could've improved it with minor tweaks (the player losses time when they get revived, as it takes time for the Cyborgs to drag your body to the reconstruction device, and maybe have the timer be multiple timers as all of SHODAN's actions in the game are seperate rather than be part of 1 singular timer). SS2 also tried to have it be a negative, as you lose nanites when you die, but it's less tense as the player can replenish them in multiple ways.
Totally fair point. I’ll give higher difficulties and alternate modes a focus in the future with these types of games. Thank you for the comment Pepper!
Here's a neat little tidbit: Bioshock's antagonist is an homage to the game's philosophical inspiration: Ayn Rand = And Ryn = Andrew Ryan
As a hard core SS1 fan, BioShock never really catched me. Ok! The water FX were cool at that time. But this Art-Deco romantizising is strongly related to the US. Internationally its nothing more than a curiosity. Nothing big. Its just missed the heavy weight CyberPunk resembles. Today there is a myriad of *-punk classifications. so this one my be called "Deco-Punk" ? I dont care.
IMHO: Nothing can beat real CyberPunk . Although i appreciate the effort that went into BioShock 3, while its no game for me.
What came closest to SS1+2 so far ist Arcane's Prey. But as usual, the best games are not recognized by the masses. Its was always a pity to sell sophistication in game design does not trigger the brain of the average consumer.
Damn, almost an hour long video. But I guess you can never have too much of a good thing.
A great review for a great game, Well done.
I used to be so obsessed with System Shock when I was a kid. EVERYONE I knew had to know about it.
Aw, I like playing with the classic controls and no mouse-look. But I use the numpad for all keyboard-related inputs.
Hell yeah great video.
This guy have the clearest voice ever! Clear as heck even at 3.00x.
You absolutely have to do the sequel. Great video!
Let me just say this right now you are underrated af.
That's the stereotypical thing to say these days, get a real personality.
@@prezidenttrump5171 shit man you got me thinking.
the very first release was 320x240 and had no audio in the logs, it was just text....it was on a disk not a cd.
FFS okay youtube algorithm I get it, you really want me to play System Shock Enhanced Edition.
TBH Ive always meant to try these games as they birthed my fav genre. I remember in 2001 my dad built a brand new pentium 4 pc and the gpu came bundled with the original Deus Ex.
My life was changed from that moment onward.
Oh and btw instant sub. Really great channel!
I swear by the weapon menu and how the reloading works with the mouse, it made combat feel more tense and interesting, like how in MGS Revolver Ocelot loves the thrill of reloading
doing a lot of stuff in SS1 with the mouse feels satisfying.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 it's not really hard and more about learning the ropes. It's as hard as the player can get used to it.
About the audio logs, I would agree with Razorfist on how better they did their job compared to the remake demo: In the original they're concise and to the point, where as the voice actors for the remake wont shut up until they get their Oscars.
On the other hand it bothered me to no end that the text and the audio on these logs never matched.
I've never played the system shock games, but I have a lot of respect for the developers making this genre. It lead to quite a few of my favourite games, such as Dishonored, and Prey, Bioshock.
*edit* Holy shit, and Deus ex, I don't know how I forgot that!
One really early immersive sim I think is cool, is The Terminator. A DOS game from 1990. It loosely follows the films plot, either as Terminator or Kyle to kill/protect Sarah. You run around a huge L.A. stealing cars, manual and automatic, buying or stealing from shops, killing people, running from cops, robbing banks or cash registers, using medical items or hospitals to heal, finding weapons or not....even buying/stealing useless items like toothpaste or tampons.....It has a lot of immersive sim qualities.
They made a Raytraced Minecraft and Quake 2 RTX, damn I think System Shock 1 fully raytraced would look amazing. All those light up panels and computers, and it would work well on the areas in Research + Maintenance where you have to turn the lighting on / find the lantern
I still remember the music of this game.
Took me close to 17 years to beat this game...I missed ONE E-Mail and never got past level 6. LOL.
And this game helped me learn english a lot. Played this with a dictionary in one hand...so, "even harder mode".
Back in the day, the control scheme was not that unusual, as you had a proper package with manual and most often a keyboard layout card, some of which even coulf fit on top of certain keyboards. I still have my System Shock box somewhere.
Liked and sub'd... exactly my kind of content
👍🏻❤🍻
Thank you!
14:30 There was a mouse look mod released for free from the fan community.
It's worth noting that you can add your own waypoints using the full map, and they actually show up in the actual game world as triangular prisms. This feature is :
1. Ahead of it's time.
2. A fucking life saver to mark paths you still need to explore.
And not only waypoints, but comments as well. They did that in Ultima Underworld as well, ofc.
@@VilleHalonen YES.
I'm really excited for the remake
the ost of this game goes like BEEEEP BIOOOOP BIEOP BEEEEEEP DODODODODODO WOODOODOODOODOO and it goes hard when its like PEE PEE PEE
But then all the sudden its goes WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA DUNNUNUNUNUNUN.
I appreciate how they tried to do an electro glitch soundtrack in MIDI, and it doesn't always work, but there are some absolute bangers in there (looking at you, Executive level and Outro)
Looking forward to play the remake by Nightdive Studio, I pledge so long ago.
When I was a kid, I could speak not a single word english and therefore was not very good at this game. Later, when I was older, I beat the game. I have since adored this unique franchise and its influence on the created genre. I hope the System Shock remake will be released at the now announced point in time and people will like it more than back in the day. It certainly will have a lot of coverage, either for good or for bad. If I remember correctly, the devs once stated that a successful SS1 Remake would warrant a remake of SS2 as well. And THAT is something I would really love to see.
I don't know why, but the 2 button reload felt more satisfying to me than single button reload
It's clever, actually, because you have to whip out two hands to do it, which reminds one of the movements required in an actual weapon reload.
34:45 Well the game does say - "Old habits die hard".
incredible video, someone has to remake this game e.e
Sadly, no one is interested.
I would love for the remake to finally come out. I wish they would communicate a bit more with us. From the way things have been going, 2021 will pass and the we’ll get a shitty dev update promising something further down the line. Rinse and repeat. Excellent video though, I’m subbed .
Nightdive studios still owns the IP and rights. Tencent have the publishing right for System Shock 3 (which will eventually run out if they don't release it).
System Shock remains one of my absolute favorite games of all time, even more than 25 years later. The controls were a little hard to get into, but man, once you got into the game.. you were IN... It had it's storytelling problems with some of the aspects (Mining laser shooting earth from the Staturn orbit? yeah ok I'll let that one slide), and the end of the game was anticlimactic, but the game was also restrained by the technology of it's time. But everything else? My god, what a game, what a legacy. Also the music, it is so unique, so different, so dissonant at times, but so absolutely fitting. Also, the game was published by Origin Systems WAY before they were bought by Electronic Arts.
I don't know, I thought the ending was great. After everything you went through, it felt fitting. Much better of an ending than 2 final act which is just painful.
Speaking of early immersive sims, do you know Corporation, aka Cyber-Cop? It has many design similarities to System Shock - a cyberpunk FPS with bits of RPG, hacking, and stealth - but it came out in **1990.**
This is super fucking good stuff.
Cool video, thank you. I would only point out that Wizardry predates Ultima.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 we played text based versions on mainframes in the 70s at my mum's work, but I think it took the advent of micro computers to make them, before that it was seriously niche. For us, it was my brother and 2 friends, we were the entire scene in our area until around 1979 ✌️.
Is it an accident, that Rebecca Lansing's portrait for com-chatter looks like an even softer John Romero?
I am diggin' what I'm seein'.
1:32 - I am unfamiliar with this "Electronic Arts". I expect many great and non-evil things coming from them in the future.
Well... money and power corrupts weak minds ;-)
Also known as the 451 genre
While I pretty much know the entire history of SS, I'll never get tired of SS videos
I would love a Halo CE remaster by Nightdive headed by Marty O Donnell.
Even though I was fan of sci-fi I still liked their previous game (Ultima Underworld) more.
There was something charming in old games before some standards were set in the stone...
Alway excellent
Smashing
The audio logs sound like they were done by Matt Stone and Trey Parker
This game is older than I am and is by far one of the biggest gems in FPS Immersive sims, hell even gaming in General, part of me
prefers it over SS2, NDS is really fumbling the the remake tho
a cult classic game. thx for covering this.
This is a great vid, even shedding new light for someone who has studied this game pretty closely. I was rather intrigued by your decision to save any mention of Shodan for the end of the vid, considering she's just as much of an introduction to the world as Rebecca Lansing is and she got mentioned right away.
Though I honestly think the name "immersive sim" is pretentious. The Shock metafranchise are FPS games first and foremost. System Shock 1 and the Bioshock games are straight FPS on the rocks, System Shock 2 is an Action RPG. This is less a dig at you Kirk, than a different priority in games: in my eyes the first and _only_ way to make a game immersive boils down to one word: Quality. I will always be more immersed inside a 2D platformer done right, than any first-person RPG stealth simulation game done badly.
This of course leads me back to System Shock 1, because its quality is pretty self-evident. It wouldn't have stood the test of time if it didn't have quality where it counts. LookingGlass didn't just decide they could call their game "immersive" (like Ubisoft with the word "iconic"), they EARNED it
Immersive sim makes as much Sense as Metroidvania, Soulslike or boomershooter. It describes a certain type of game and game design decisions.
Damn... I wanted to share a rather well thought-through theory (more like text wall) about SHODAN's nature and her being more than just "utterly insane, deranged and homicidal" AI cliche, but youtube algorithms keeps deleting it. Probably because of all the hyperlinks to the Wikia, which I tried to edit out. Unfortunately it didn't help.
Shame, but also kinda ironic, that a sorta-AI keeps our ability to discuss in check.
Hmm, the remake is back on track?
Maybe I'll become a corpse on Citadel Station after all... ;)
Great video Kirk! Just discovered your channel, lots of awesome content. I have to say though, I couldn't disagree more on your points of the soundtrack being bad and the voice actors feeling out of place. This might be an overly sentimental opinion, but seeing the developers fingerprints all over a game is really its only hope of aging well, imo. (that and exceptional writing) If the overall game is good, it'll always be fun to go back and see the devs fingerprints on things. Even gameplay will eventually feel dated. The Half Life series is a great example of that. Ever since HL2, the series has been used to push cutting edge technologies and computer capabilities. It works really well for a couple of years, but the games immediately age poorly as soon as the once cutting edge tech becomes common place. HL2 now is just a series of physics based puzzles that constantly break immersion and Half Life Alyx will age poorly once the novelty of VR wears off for the same reason. Not because they're bad games, but because no one makes games to age well. It would probably be a massive creative roadblock if they did. Games are always being marketed towards the masses, and as a result, a lot of creative decisions are made to play things too safe (using traditional and bland orchestral scores to play it safe is a big pet peeve of mine). So seeing little pockets of weirdness and areas of the game where its creators went wild and did something unique to their tastes and not necessarily the tastes of the industry is always a treat for me. Especially in the case of the audio logs being voiced by Looking Glass family and friends. I love that they've included themselves and those close to them in a permanent way. Who will remember one specific audio log because it was delivered professionally? Well, I suppose Shodan's dialogue is a testament to that, but shes a recurring character. I guess the key is to strike a balance and maintain rock solid quality in key areas but to allow the game to breathe and be more wild in others. I think your opinions are all totally fair and valid, but I felt like sharing my thoughts. Again, fantastic video, and I appreciate that you went into detail with how well the art direction of the space station was handled despite the technical limitations of the 90s!
The thing I like about the amateur actors is that they *don't* try to convey as much emotion as possible. Maybe it's because I'm Finnish and I'm used to laconic people who refrain from showing emotion even under duress, but I find them oddly relatable and life-like.
I just know SS3 is gonna be released and then featured on MattMcmuscles’ Wha Happun?
System Shock was published by Origin Systems, not EA. You know, the company that made Ultima and Wing Commander. Otherwise Warren Spector, who was working at Origin, would not have been producer on this game. EA later bought Origins and published System Shock 2 in 1999.
would skyrim fall under this? fallout 4? those have specific quests with options etc, but even with deus ex the different paths are designed by the devs right?
47:10 "after that..." You should clarify that by after that you don't mean after you have fired the laser and killed human civilization LOL
I can not wait to see your System Shock 2 review. now that you reviewed System Shock 1, you M U S T review System Shock 2!
Well I do believe Nightdive is working on a new enhanced version…
@@KIRKCOLLECTS Oh heck, really? I wonder what they would do... I wonder if it'll release on switch too.
36:54 *Audio Loges*
I have to say, I'm dubious about that idea that talking to NPCs is emersion breaking and even if that was an issue It kind of get's annoying when every bodies fucking dead all the damn time.
I'm feel pain, because system shock remake is still not released))
"Nice jump"