KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[schru]

Play the original. It's really not as difficult to get used to it as it may seem at first.

Main thing to know is that the 90s interface has a minimalist mode that makes it much more palatable. Though play the EE if you want WASD controls and mouselook.

I wouldn't say that modern controls trivialize it, the combat is still incredibly deadly on maximum difficulty and abusing corners to shoot enemies when they can't shoot you back is how you mostly play the game unless you are in melee (or willing to backtrack constantly to heal). Arguably WASD makes melee stronger because you have better movement control, but that's also fun and not utilizing super speed skating turbo lightsaber mode is not playing SS1 right.

I think the full interface is one of the indispensable features of the game, so I prefer to keep it on.

As for the controls, SZXC isn't that different from WASD. It's true that the combat doesn't change that much, but for a variety of reasons I think it's universally better to play original versions of games (cases of upgrades created by the original developer or compatibility patches aside).

 

[Average Manatee]

Is it SZXC? I thought it was something like QWEX, with AD being turning and S being crouch.

 

[schru]

Is it SZXC? I thought it was something like QWEX, with AD being turning and S being crouch.

S – walk forward
X – walk backwards
A – turn left
D – turn right
Z – side-step left
C – side-step right
Q – lean left
E – lean right
W – negate lean
T – stand
G – crouch
B – prone
R – look up
V – look down
F – centre view

 

[RoSoDude]

My criticisms of the System Shock Remake Demo (February 2023):

• The animations for picking up objects are ridiculous. I understand animations for installing implants or grabbing a new weapon (though even these can be problematic as they slow you down and make you vulnerable to radiation/enemies in a frustrating way), but animating every audio log, flash drive, and key card pickup? Even for using a keycard on a door? Why not just a "Standard Access accepted" log message? Speaking of which, log messages in the upper left are really easy to miss, particularly with the blue/red HUD scheme I chose for my red-green color deficiency.
• Melee combat features excessive camera shake and poorly synced sounds, but more than anything suffers from a lack of hit effects. No hitstop on your weapons, and no stagger on enemies makes the feedback really poor. It's clear that melee combat basically works the same as Deus Ex (or even the original System Shock), where a certain frame of the swing animation does a range check in front of you for damage, which is a huge step back from SS2's melee combat in the Dark Engine which simulated the collision of your weapon over its swing animation. Things get a bit better when you acquire firearms, but ranged combat hasn't evolved much beyond the original's corner peaking, only now you can kill enemies even more quickly with headshots. The AI displays similar rudimentary behaviors as in 1994, save for the Cyborg Assassins which attempt to lay down proximity mine traps, though in my playtime they were more likely to blow themselves up with these than me.
• Movement is stiff and clunky. The original game was a playground for 3D movement, allowing the player character to jump, climb, lean, crouch, go prone, and of course speed through Citadel Station on rocket skates as governed by an original physics system. The remake's movement is mundane, featuring near instant acceleration/deceleration on the ground, a paltry jump, no ability to mantle onto ledges, and locking you into a paired animation whenever you touch a ladder. You can crouch jump, which causes your camera to jerk upwards in a strange way, but this is apparently intentional as it is the only way to reach a few secret items without mantling. I'm skeptical if the turbo motion booster will even be implemented under these conditions, as long door opening animations and added railings and other clutter make environments less friendly for speed skating.
• Cyberspace is obviously improved, though the original cyberspace was so undercooked that it's not much competition. Regardless, the new 6DOF arcade shooting is reasonably fun, though I had a bug which caused me to move at half speed until I used a recall software. When I loaded back into cyberspace, I discovered that enemies respawn, which seems a bad fit for the limited software resource system ported from the original. I'd suggest revamping this with cooldowns or data fragments found (and replenished) in each maze, so that decoy, booster, and hopefully other new softwares can be used freely and the cyberspace segments can be made more complex and challenging to match.
• The inventory interface is a pain to work with. You can't rotate items while dragging them; the only way to rotate items in the grid is to use the right click dropdown menu, which sends the rotated item to a new place automatically. Item icons are all tinted by the base UI color scheme, which makes them difficult to tell apart at a glance, and broken weapons for scrapping look the same as functional weapons. Junk items take up a huge amount of space (more on this later), such that carrying them alongside multiple weapons later on will be very tedious without inventory space upgrades. Right clicking an item in the hotbar removes it, while right clicking it in the inventory opens the dropdown menu, which tripped me up several times. You have to hold down a button to read item descriptions, which could just be displayed all the time instead.
• The new recycling mechanic is really ill-considered, both in terms of UI/UX and resource balance. The process of recycling items is painful, as you can only recycle a 3x3 grid of items at a time (presumably to ensure that the physical items all fit in the recycler bin, which is unnecessary effort as compared with e.g. Prey's UI-driven recycler), and then pick up the credits which trickle at about half the speed they should. Instead of stuffing your inventory with junk items taking up 2-6 slots and run back and forth to the recycler to slowly process them, you can vaporize junk in your inventory into 1 scrap slot for half of the credit payout later. I would submit that the decision to halve your resource gain to avoid tedium isn't a particularly interesting one, and this distinction should be removed entirely. Moreover, I'd suggest that the ability to vaporize junk be granted by finding a hardware implant early in the game, and that items be converted into scrap upon picking them up if the implant is turned on. Another annoyance is that 10 scrap pays 1 credit, with any remainder deleted. There's really no reason why the leftover scrap shouldn't stay in the recycler bin, which could also be the case when you recycle items that together yield some leftover scrap.
• The credit economy is all out of whack. I had over 100 credits by the end of the demo just from vaporizing everything I found on the spot, and that was after purchasing every ammo box and mod kit from the vending stations. I would recommend increasing all credit costs (excluding candy/soda) by roughly 10x if there is to be any sort of survival horror resource tension and decisionmaking. It also seems really bizarre to me that the ammo vendors just have two lockers for ammo which are never replenished, as compared with SS2 or Prey where you fabricate items from a list. The fact that mod kit stations will only ever have 2 options at maximum is also really disappointing, as it means the options to modify your gear will be linear and lack any real choice, especially if it's so easy to grind credits. These things should really be UI-driven with more options in a list.
• The puzzles are a straight downgrade from the original wire and grid puzzles, both in UI/UX and in gameplay depth. Particularly the wire puzzles; while the grid puzzles were pure logic puzzles, the wire puzzles were intentionally fuzzier. Doug Church's design goal was to approximate the feel of lockpicking, where you iteratively make progress by feeling out the device through trial and error. One thing that's especially interesting about it is that the power progress bar gives "partial credit" for correct wire orientation and correct pin location for a given wire color, so it's possible to get stuck in a local maximum where any single pin change will decrease the current power. This means you have reconfigure the entire wire setup to untangle it and then try to guess at what was correct about the "hill" you were on. It's also cool that the power fluctuation can sometimes be enough to just barely get you to the required power amount even if you didn't get the wires in exactly the right place yet. The new minigame captures none of these subtleties, featuring more complicated power circuits but simplified pin slots (only need to configure output, with 1 pin per slot). I found two wire puzzles which appeared to have identical layouts and the same solution, which I stumbled upon blindly on the first try. More layouts could be designed, but there's actually less potential depth here than the simpler original puzzle. Regarding the grid puzzles, the panel to activate the lift just out of Surgery used to be a simple introduction to the grid puzzle interface, where now it's a long chain of tiles you must rotate to make a path from start to finish. This is mostly just a waste of time, as the path forward is pretty obvious as long as you understand that the pulsing node is the goal and the other nodes are pointless. The original grid puzzles were driven by unique on/off rules that could be pretty interesting to work out as they went on, where I can't really see this rendition evolving much. In both puzzles, the circuit takes forever to light up to update your progress, and the wire puzzle didn't play nice with the "focus camera on puzzles" option (which should ideally be a separate keybind a la Prey), causing the selected wire to freeze in the middle of the screen instead of going where I dragged the cursor. The fact that these puzzles are in-world means that they are also susceptible to glare from nearby light sources, making them less readable than a clean abstract interface.
• Overall, the remake seems allergic to graphical user interface overlays, which is crazy considering how essential they were to both System Shock games. In System Shock, the Multi-Function Display was your window into the world, and manipulating it was how you tracked information, managed your character state, and even expressed your playstyle. I liked to have my minimap on my right panel and my weapon config on my left panel, so that I could quickly swap ammo types and tune my blaster's energy setting. Another player might like to display target information or the item display (which let you monitor dermal patches and tune grenade settings). Now, I have to tab into my inventory to manually count how many rounds I have, where before I could track it with my cyberware. Obviously, things like reloading and changing ammo types were always going to be streamlined, but there's less UI here than SS2, which translated the original functionality into a more automated and user-friendly package. Now I can't display the text of a log without going into my media tab, which is a pain to navigate. And to my previous points, there's so much potential interaction and improved usability that's off the table by insisting that all the puzzles and vending machines operate in the world instead of in UI.
• Sound design: either a ton of these sounds are placeholders, or they SHOULD be placeholders. Radiation sounds like something on a frying pan instead of a Geiger counter. The magpulse firing sound is pathetic, it sounds like turning on a CRT television instead of a powerful EMP, even the original sound would be better here. Speaking of original sounds, applying patches is clearly the same as the SS2 hypo injection sound which really isn't fitting with the animation. The audio mix is also really poor, as cyberspace was really loud compared to everything else and positional audio seems nonexistent.
• The aesthetics and music aren't to my taste at all and fail to capture any of the the atmosphere and essence of System Shock to me, but others have discussed that to death and it's not going to change at this point.
• A few things I actually liked about the remake demo:
  • New cyberspace looks cool and is generally fun to play
  • Enemies carry broken weapons which explains why you can't pick up and use them
  • The new cortex reaver cutscene when you die without a restoration chamber active
  • Some of the redesigns look cool, like the TriOp troopers or their Cyborg Assassin cousins
  • I appreciate the attempt to expand the original's systems with gear upgrades and the like, flawed as it currently is

 

[Child of Malkav]

RoSoDude Where can I find more info about the Dark Engine and what exactly it simulates, mechanically? I'm asking because you mentioned this:

SS2's melee combat in the Dark Engine which simulated the collision of your weapon over its swing animation

Is there a documentation for it anywhere?
I want to know about what Ultima Underworld simulates as well as Thief and System Shock 1 because all these "hidden" mechanics are very fascinating to me.

 

[RoSoDude]

RoSoDude Where can I find more info about the Dark Engine and what exactly it simulates, mechanically? I'm asking because you mentioned this:

SS2's melee combat in the Dark Engine which simulated the collision of your weapon over its swing animation

Is there a documentation for it anywhere?
I want to know about what Ultima Underworld simulates as well as Thief and System Shock 1 because all these "hidden" mechanics are very fascinating to me.

I don't think it's really well-documented anywhere; someone made a video covering some of the basics, though.



I can also give you my perspective as an experienced SS2 modder. All of this stuff is a result of the Dark Engine having originally been built to support extensive swordfighting simulation before The Dark Project became primarily about stealth and spelunking (so everything I say here also applies to Thief and Thief 2).

The essence of it is that weapons are represented by simple physics colliders (cylinders, I believe) which become active sources of damage stims over a range of animation frames (they are nonphysical otherwise; you can see that the player wrench receives OnPhysMadePhysical and OnPhysMadeNonPhysical script events when the collider is turned on or off). This applies to both player and enemy motions (the name Dark uses for anims); if I load up the Pipe Hybrid's uppercut attack motion in ShockEd, I can see the start and end of these attack frames represented by the green flags (Trigger 1):

Spoiler

If the weapon collider hits something (level geometry, another physics object), it transfers any relevant damage stims defined in the Object Hierarchy to the target (for the player, this is based on their equipped melee weapon, while for the enemy it depends on their linked weapon archetype), then cancels the motion and tweens back to some other animation state. For player weapons, you reset back to the normal held position, while enemies might reset to the start of another attack motion.

The result is that a player weapon can collide with an enemy weapon while they're both in an attack motion and they'll "parry" each other. Furthermore, if you attack something while angling your view to the right of an enemy, you'll hit them in the earlier part of your swing, while if you angle your view to the left you'll hit them later. This can allow you to more deliberately time your strike if you aren't in range yet or if you want to increase your attack speed up close.

The other half of melee combat in the Dark Engine is the AI behaviors, which are a pretty complicated topic on their own. The most relevant bit here is that the basic AI behaviors are driven by the motion system, in that the AI code calculates the creature's response to stimuli which is executed via grouped sequences of motions with relevant tags (like "MeleeCombat", "Search", "Attack", "Locomote", "ReceiveWound") in the motion database. If the engine wants an enemy to move somewhere to search for the player, it'll tell them to execute the "Locomote" + "Search" motion group which will cause them to wander around, in some cases with motions that move one leg at a time. You can create unique AI behaviors just by tweaking the motion sequences, their tags, the distance scale that the motion group travels through space, and the time scale that speeds or slows the motion group down. The Pipe Hybrid executes a dodge in melee combat sometimes because it receives an attack signal from the player and activates a backstep motion group with a large scaled distance in a short timescale. Alternately, the Cyborg Assassin tries to avoid fighting up close (which the AI code determines from its object properties), and thus will trigger its LocoUrgent motion group to attempt to escape. This leaves the designer a lot of tools to tweak and add AI behaviors without ever touching the source code by tweaking their object properties and expressing their behaviors via the motion system. I invite you to see the possibilities for modifying the motion database to develop AI behaviors in my Scary Monsters AI enhancement mod.

Some other miscellaneous notes about SS2 melee combat (most of which also applies to Thief):

• The backpedal exploit affects all enemies who try to attack in melee, however it is more problematic on some than others. The exploit is based on enemies calculating that the player will be out of range due to their velocity (it's a static calculation that doesn't take into account animation timings). With base Agility, Pipe Hybrids can overtake you on the sides and attempt to attack, while Rumblers will stupidly walk forward forever even as they're continually hit with a wrench to the face.
• Enemies receive melee attack signals from the player, though I'm not sure if it's at the instant the player clicks the button or at the start of the attack animation. Hybrids will dodge or attack in response to these signals, for example. Rumblers never seem to respond in this manner, hence they are more vulnerable to the backpedal exploit, while Hybrids may attack a backpedaling player who attacks first.
• Rumblers will often instantly smack players who try to sneak up and melee them from behind because of their low turn speed and very early attack frames which begin right as their claw is being reared backwards for an attack to the front. Spiders notably have no attack frames assigned to their jump move, making it nothing more a completely harmless intimidation tactic.
• "Parrying" simply occurs when two active melee hitboxes collide and cancel each other. Parrying is possible with any player melee weapon and any melee enemy, though it is easier to see on Pipe Hybrids, Monkeys, and Rumblers.
• You can get the damage bonus from Smasher without actually executing the overhand attack. If you charge the strike long enough to start the transition animation to overhand (after pulling all the way to the left), it'll get full bonus damage even when it reverts to a normal left-to-right swipe. I believe this is also the case for the overhand attack in Thief, though I've not confirmed it.
• The Crystal Shard has an error in its property assignment that makes it deal 2.25x damage with Smasher instead of 1.25x damage as intended (basically, you get the Normal AND Smasher damage bundled together, instead of just the Smasher damage). This is fixed by mods like SCP.
• All melee damage bonuses are multiplicative, except for Strength which is a flat bonus added after all other multipliers. This means Strength has much more impact on the Wrench (due to its low base damage) than other melee weapons, which benefit more from weapon skills/Adrenaline Overproduction/Lethal Weapon/Smasher.

EDIT: Hopefully the above should make it obvious how much deeper SS2's melee mechanics are compared to this remake...

 

[Child of Malkav]

RoSoDude Whoa, thanks for the in depth response. Yeah the melee alone is enough to put other games to shame.
Also, about Thief: I read on TTLG a few years back, one of the more known FM creator saying something about "mechanics and systems interacting with everyting". He didn't explain it at the time. I know it's not exactly much to go on but it's not the first time I hear of this either.
For example, recently playing through the T2 Precious Cargo level I decide to try to shoot arows at incoming projectiles shot from the Iron Beasts and...they interact with various outcomes: water arrows stop and push back the bomb a little bit, moss arrows push it back more and fire and gas arrows push it back the farthest, if I remember correctly. This same thing I tried in Ultima Underworld: hitting the sling rock thrown by an enemy with my own rock causing both rocks to change directions. So at least this kind of interaction was present since UU.
So my question is, if you have any idea, just how in depth are the interactions in the Dark Engine between NPCs, Garrett and environment?

 

[kites]

I’m fabulously optimistic. I played the demo a couple years ago? So I’ll just wait for the full thing now.. I have no hope it will match the original, and I’m not a huge fan of the look (and I’m probably one of the few people who liked the look of the original cyberspace) but it should be good fun for what it is

Is SS2 EE still coming out with it?

 

[randir14]

Is SS2 EE still coming out with it?

No, they announced awhile ago that it's now releasing sometime after SS remake.

 

[JBro]

Are we gonna have to pay for SS2 Enhanced if we own the OG version? I think they gave the SS1 source port for free, didn't they?

 

[Netch]

I don't even understand what SS2 EE is going to change. The original version on steam runs fine out of the box without any tinkering. I guess the co-op barely works so that's something they could improve but other than that what's gonna be different? I saw them talking about HD textures and VR but honestly I don't care about either of those things; the HD models they've shown don't look as good as the originals and personally I don't have much interest in VR.

 

[Latelistener]

This is an absolute blasphemy of a remake and if they didn't they spent so much time and money on things that weren't in the original game they could've released it already.

I don't even want to start ranting about why it's shit, but it only comes down to this: if you want System Shock play System Shock. If you want a modern take on that, play Prey.

They really want to sell this to the modern audience, but if Prey with all its production values wasn't enough what chance this game has?

If you want to understand what's wrong with it, I'll give you a glimpse: there are Bioshock-style vending machines that sell ammo for Trioptimum coins... on a research space station.

 

[cigaretteEnjoyer_despirit]

Just finished the demo. I'm positively shocked by how well made it is. I was a bit apprehensive about keeping the layout of the station relatively unchanged, because it seemed too unbelievable, too boxy. I was proven wrong - it has a unique feeling to it, like something in-between contemporary claustrophobic space stations, and what you'd normally expect to see in a sci-fi setting. I would not be surprised if future sci-fi games will want to copy this style.

I dont have many complaints. The AI is rather stupid and limited, but it does not impact the game that much. I'd like it to be more active, and chase the player, over multiple floors. Generally speaking I'm worried that the exploring/puzzling/looting formula will not be able to carry the game in its full extent, and by level 3-4 it will simply get tedious, boring. I suppose that's something more to do with the design of the original game, and SS1 fans clearly dont have a problem with it, so it wont disappoint them that way. Still, I think adding some mid-late game 'super-predator' enemies, that competently chase you, that behave intelligently, anticipate your moves, or at least are scripted enough to give an impression of doing so, would add unpredictability and some additional challenge to refresh the formula. I also dont like how you can detect all the enemies by sound, since they are quite loud and each of them makes some kind of distinct noise. I hope they'll be a bit more elusive in later stages of the game.

The other concern is this: the medical was remade and re-released multiple times over the years, so the rest of the game may not maintain that level of quality. But if it does, I'll be content with this remake.

 

[Spukrian]

This same thing I tried in Ultima Underworld: hitting the sling rock thrown by an enemy with my own rock causing both rocks to change directions. So at least this kind of interaction was present since UU.

Once I hit a wall in Underworld and the rock ricocheted back into my face and hurt me, now that's an interaction.

 

[ciox]

RoSoDude Where can I find more info about the Dark Engine and what exactly it simulates, mechanically? I'm asking because you mentioned this:

SS2's melee combat in the Dark Engine which simulated the collision of your weapon over its swing animation

Is there a documentation for it anywhere?
I want to know about what Ultima Underworld simulates as well as Thief and System Shock 1 because all these "hidden" mechanics are very fascinating to me.

I don't think it's really well-documented anywhere; someone made a video covering some of the basics, though.



I can also give you my perspective as an experienced SS2 modder. All of this stuff is a result of the Dark Engine having originally been built to support extensive swordfighting simulation before The Dark Project became primarily about stealth and spelunking (so everything I say here also applies to Thief and Thief 2).

The essence of it is that weapons are represented by simple physics colliders (cylinders, I believe) which become active sources of damage stims over a range of animation frames (they are nonphysical otherwise; you can see that the player wrench receives OnPhysMadePhysical and OnPhysMadeNonPhysical script events when the collider is turned on or off). This applies to both player and enemy motions (the name Dark uses for anims); if I load up the Pipe Hybrid's uppercut attack motion in ShockEd, I can see the start and end of these attack frames represented by the green flags (Trigger 1):

Spoiler

If the weapon collider hits something (level geometry, another physics object), it transfers any relevant damage stims defined in the Object Hierarchy to the target (for the player, this is based on their equipped melee weapon, while for the enemy it depends on their linked weapon archetype), then cancels the motion and tweens back to some other animation state. For player weapons, you reset back to the normal held position, while enemies might reset to the start of another attack motion.

The result is that a player weapon can collide with an enemy weapon while they're both in an attack motion and they'll "parry" each other. Furthermore, if you attack something while angling your view to the right of an enemy, you'll hit them in the earlier part of your swing, while if you angle your view to the left you'll hit them later. This can allow you to more deliberately time your strike if you aren't in range yet or if you want to increase your attack speed up close.

The other half of melee combat in the Dark Engine is the AI behaviors, which are a pretty complicated topic on their own. The most relevant bit here is that the basic AI behaviors are driven by the motion system, in that the AI code calculates the creature's response to stimuli which is executed via grouped sequences of motions with relevant tags (like "MeleeCombat", "Search", "Attack", "Locomote", "ReceiveWound") in the motion database. If the engine wants an enemy to move somewhere to search for the player, it'll tell them to execute the "Locomote" + "Search" motion group which will cause them to wander around, in some cases with motions that move one leg at a time. You can create unique AI behaviors just by tweaking the motion sequences, their tags, the distance scale that the motion group travels through space, and the time scale that speeds or slows the motion group down. The Pipe Hybrid executes a dodge in melee combat sometimes because it receives an attack signal from the player and activates a backstep motion group with a large scaled distance in a short timescale. Alternately, the Cyborg Assassin tries to avoid fighting up close (which the AI code determines from its object properties), and thus will trigger its LocoUrgent motion group to attempt to escape. This leaves the designer a lot of tools to tweak and add AI behaviors without ever touching the source code by tweaking their object properties and expressing their behaviors via the motion system. I invite you to see the possibilities for modifying the motion database to develop AI behaviors in my Scary Monsters AI enhancement mod.

Some other miscellaneous notes about SS2 melee combat (most of which also applies to Thief):

• The backpedal exploit affects all enemies who try to attack in melee, however it is more problematic on some than others. The exploit is based on enemies calculating that the player will be out of range due to their velocity (it's a static calculation that doesn't take into account animation timings). With base Agility, Pipe Hybrids can overtake you on the sides and attempt to attack, while Rumblers will stupidly walk forward forever even as they're continually hit with a wrench to the face.
• Enemies receive melee attack signals from the player, though I'm not sure if it's at the instant the player clicks the button or at the start of the attack animation. Hybrids will dodge or attack in response to these signals, for example. Rumblers never seem to respond in this manner, hence they are more vulnerable to the backpedal exploit, while Hybrids may attack a backpedaling player who attacks first.
• Rumblers will often instantly smack players who try to sneak up and melee them from behind because of their low turn speed and very early attack frames which begin right as their claw is being reared backwards for an attack to the front. Spiders notably have no attack frames assigned to their jump move, making it nothing more a completely harmless intimidation tactic.
• "Parrying" simply occurs when two active melee hitboxes collide and cancel each other. Parrying is possible with any player melee weapon and any melee enemy, though it is easier to see on Pipe Hybrids, Monkeys, and Rumblers.
• You can get the damage bonus from Smasher without actually executing the overhand attack. If you charge the strike long enough to start the transition animation to overhand (after pulling all the way to the left), it'll get full bonus damage even when it reverts to a normal left-to-right swipe. I believe this is also the case for the overhand attack in Thief, though I've not confirmed it.
• The Crystal Shard has an error in its property assignment that makes it deal 2.25x damage with Smasher instead of 1.25x damage as intended (basically, you get the Normal AND Smasher damage bundled together, instead of just the Smasher damage). This is fixed by mods like SCP.
• All melee damage bonuses are multiplicative, except for Strength which is a flat bonus added after all other multipliers. This means Strength has much more impact on the Wrench (due to its low base damage) than other melee weapons, which benefit more from weapon skills/Adrenaline Overproduction/Lethal Weapon/Smasher.

EDIT: Hopefully the above should make it obvious how much deeper SS2's melee mechanics are compared to this remake...

As far as I know collision is done with the limit planes that are included in the melee weapon's mesh, typically the bigger the melee weapon the bigger your reach, though this is only obvious with mods.
These planes need to hit the two collision spheres that are used for enemy collision, they're in the upper body of the enemies so you can easily miss if swinging at an enemy's lower body.
Enemies can also begin an attack where their limbs or melee weapons start dealing damage when they are already "inside" you, which makes it impossible to block or deflect them in any way, giving all enemies an advantage if they are too close.

When playing Thief:
- once your weapon collides with something its collision is disabled until you either attack again or block again, this can be awkward because if your weapon touches any object that isn't an enemy melee weapon, the block animation will continue, but the collision will stay disabled and enemy attacks will just go through
- letting go of the block key as soon as you've blocked an attack will cancel the animation sooner and increase the rate at which you can block attacks, making it easier for you to defend against an enemy with high animation speed like the haunts
- you can cancel a charge attack into a block, and then keep charging up until you get an overhead swing, blocking all the while
- you can cancel into a block as soon as you hit something
- you can block projectiles which is possibly unintended but enjoyable, this triggers the collision disabling effect from above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0F1rHWOka0

 

[Jenkem]

This is what Kickstarter backers wanted.

 

[SharkClub]

One of the worst parts of Thi4f was the developer's obsession with showing an animation and the player character's hands for picking up every single item in the entire game, so it's sad to hear that this remake has for some fucking reason taken a leaf out of that book.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

One of the worst parts of Thi4f was the developer's obsession with showing an animation and the player character's hands for picking up every single item in the entire game, so it's sad to hear that this remake has for some fucking reason taken a leaf out of that book.

Is it immersive if you can't see your guy's hands?

 

[Fargus]

One of the worst parts of Thi4f was the developer's obsession with showing an animation and the player character's hands for picking up every single item in the entire game, so it's sad to hear that this remake has for some fucking reason taken a leaf out of that book.

Animation for every fucking thing was one of the worst aspects of this pos abomination of a game. One of many reasons why i never finished it.

 

[Latelistener]

One of the worst parts of Thi4f was the developer's obsession with showing an animation and the player character's hands for picking up every single item in the entire game, so it's sad to hear that this remake has for some fucking reason taken a leaf out of that book.

Is it immersive if you can't see your guy's hands?

Immersive is just a buzz word that frankly has nothing to do with immersive sims and is highly subjective.

Seeing your character's hands doesn't add anything to systemic gameplay and in the end brings nothing to the table other than the potential of being annoying.

 

[Daedalos]

System Shock really brings out the biggest autists in this community doesn't it?

Ah well.

 

[KIss My Ass]

2023 is looking like a good year for horror games.

 

[Bad Sector]

Seeing your character's hands doesn't add anything to systemic gameplay and in the end brings nothing to the table other than the potential of being annoying.

Same with your character's legs when you look down. I don't understand how there can be people out there who want to have some badly animated model obscuring their view when looking down (not to mention how to make the animations make sense almost all games with them limit how you can interact with ladders).

 

[Average Manatee]

- you can block projectiles which is possibly unintended but enjoyable, this triggers the collision disabling effect from above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0F1rHWOka0

Is that possible in System Shock too?

Would be awesome to be parrying laser shots with a rapier. Probably impossible to reliably pull off, but just the idea is cool.

 

[ciox]

- you can block projectiles which is possibly unintended but enjoyable, this triggers the collision disabling effect from above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0F1rHWOka0

Is that possible in System Shock too?

Would be awesome to be parrying laser shots with a rapier. Probably impossible to reliably pull off, but just the idea is cool.

It probably would be possible if you could block like in Thief with a block key, but not even modding could do that from what I recall.