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I do. It's honestly the perfect ending. SHODAN is busting your balls throughout the entire game, constantly chiding you and harassing you for everything, then she BETRAYS you. Your character's too much of a chad for her though and EASILY overcomes her pitiful attempt at betrayal. She's desperate, she's pulling out every bribe she possibly can, "PLEAAAAAAAAAAAAASE DON'T KILL MEEEEEEEEE", and all PC chad can say is "Nah". Fucking based. I rarely laugh out loud when playing a game alone but I laughed hard at SS2's ending. SHODAN gets completely humiliated, which is a perfect end for the character as an antagonist.
SHODAN wouldn't have worked as the antagonist again anyway because she was already toppled by the hacker in SS1, losing her sense of untouchable immortality, which is why SS2 replaces her with the Many for most of its duration, relegating her antagonistic section to a very short segment at the end of the game which is there to grant the player some catharsis after putting up with her insults throughout the rest of the game. This is all why SS3 is retarded for making SHODAN the villain yet AGAIN when she already got BTFO so hard (good thing that game is never ever coming out).
I recall seeing somewhere (but cannot find off hand) that SS2 was pitched as a successor more than a sequel. A lot of the game's thematic design speaks to less of a continuation of System Shock and more of a "Star Trek, but horror" vibe, with a bigger focus on Psionics than on Cybernetics. The "Cyber" parts of SS2 are vestigial at best, reduced largely to an explanation for stat growth, while the most fleshed out component of the RPG systems is Psionics, which can do everything with investment. The game's story is also heavily reliant on Psionics. SHODAN isn't really a main element of SS2 and you could've not had her, instead having Delacroix provide directions, and ended it after the Body.
I do. It's honestly the perfect ending. SHODAN is busting your balls throughout the entire game, constantly chiding you and harassing you for everything, then she BETRAYS you. Your character's too much of a chad for her though and EASILY overcomes her pitiful attempt at betrayal. She's desperate, she's pulling out every bribe she possibly can, "PLEAAAAAAAAAAAAASE DON'T KILL MEEEEEEEEE", and all PC chad can say is "Nah". Fucking based. I rarely laugh out loud when playing a game alone but I laughed hard at SS2's ending. SHODAN gets completely humiliated, which is a perfect end for the character as an antagonist.
SHODAN wouldn't have worked as the antagonist again anyway because she was already toppled by the hacker in SS1, losing her sense of untouchable immortality, which is why SS2 replaces her with the Many for most of its duration, relegating her antagonistic section to a very short segment at the end of the game which is there to grant the player some catharsis after putting up with her insults throughout the rest of the game. This is all why SS3 is retarded for making SHODAN the villain yet AGAIN when she already got BTFO so hard (good thing that game is never ever coming out).
That's one part of the problem I had with it, I suppose - SHODAN comes across as totally inept in SS2, which is obviously terrible when contrasted with SS1 but also makes SS2's plot pretty lame in and of itself.
SHODAN felt like it was actually on the brink of achieving some kind of transformation in SS1 - by its own definition, to godhood, from the Hacker's perspective, into something completely fucked beyond belief. The Hacker only wins very narrowly and the fnal cyberspace battle, especially if on a higher difficulty, is insanely close, with SHODAN very nearly consuming you as its face slowly fills the entire screen, potentially becoming the last thing you ever see. I love that part, especially since you can see the real SHODAN - the floating thing with claws coming out the top - but it still deliberately fills your vision with its human-given face that its designers birthed it with, as if taunting the fuck out of you even as you kill it.
To have the same character come back with an ultra-weak "here are your upgrade points, pitiful huuuuman" persona, be essentially inept, shoved into a female-looking robot body (fucking why?!?!?! it's explicitly trying to become less human) then have it be killed by a gun as it begs for its life (I don't believe SHODAN would ever beg for its life) just strips the character of everything that made it in any way appealing, IMO. I sound melodramatic but it's an absolute betrayal of SS1 and far from feeling cathartic it just made me completely hostile towards the game and annoyed at the writers.
SHODAN felt like it was actually on the brink of achieving some kind of transformation in SS1 - by its own definition, to godhood, from the Hacker's perspective, into something completely fucked beyond belief. The Hacker only wins very narrowly and the fnal cyberspace battle, especially if on a higher difficulty, is insanely close, with SHODAN very nearly consuming you as its face slowly fills the entire screen, potentially becoming the last thing you ever see. I love that part, especially since you can see the real SHODAN - the floating thing with claws coming out the top - but it still deliberately fills your vision with its human-given face, as if taunting the fuck out of you even as you kill it.
Imagine losing a space station and it's entire crew to an ice cream cone with four bobby pins glued on top, only stoppable by a hackerman armed to the teeth
To have the same character come back with an ultra-weak "here are your upgrade points, pitiful huuuuman" persona, be essentially inept... then have it be killed by a gun as it begs for its life (I don't believe SHODAN would ever beg for its life) just strips the character of everything that made it in any way appealing, IMO.
I think it's fine. SHODAN's time passed in SS1. That's her game and she's great there, but she is also stripped of her immortal menace at the end by virtue of being the final boss that is defeated by the player. So I don't think there's anything wrong with her being defanged in the sequel, especially since the Many were pretty cool in their own right. It's also just funny, made me laugh.
Bioshock was always a console-first development, thus it was guaranteed to be no better than, at best, the best console first SP narrative FPS (which it isn’t).
I get the feeling that after it became considered a classic, SS2's reputation continues to be degraded due to the negativity of people who haven't actually played it in a long time but just want to seem cool by saying SS1 is better
I've always thought that SS1 is the better game overall, both at the time, and the couple of times I've played both games since then. SS2's strong suit was mainly the more realistic (for the time) accelerated graphics, and the positional audio, which gave the game a slightly better sense of presence than SS1, but even that's not strictly true if you compare playing the games at the time of release. At the time of release, SS1 had incredible presence and immersion.
Nah, 2 is really good. To the point that it makes 1 and Infinite feel like dumpster fires if you go back and replay them. Not having a pretentious egomaniacle jew running the show did wonders for that game.
Anyways I'm going to try and squeeze some more play time into SS1 this weekend. Is anyone else playing it on Steam Deck?
While replaying SS2 recently, I got the sense the ending was less about SHODAN being humiliated and more that she was frustrated by her scheme being thwarted. She's never in any real danger from the player because she already has Rebecca as a contingency plan.
Bioshock is the first time i ever saw a developer, in this case Levine, talk in an interview about how they were updating the formula to reach more people, or something to that effect. I'm sure developers said things like that long before but it was the first instance i ever encountered of a developer being so explicit about the need to dumb their game down to try to reach more people. This was a year or two before the game finally released, but what he said in that interview put me off so much i still haven't actually played Bioshock to this day. And i'm sure dumbed down or not it's probably better than some of the trash shooters i played over the years but i just can't. I would endlessly compare it to System Shock and i would just be pissed off every step of the way about what could have been but we didn't get because of muh broader audiences.
Having nothing better to do I managed to finish the remake in those last couple of evenings.
There are some thing that bring it down somewhat, unfortunately.
- The ending and the final boss battle is a very disappointing affair and shows the game designers still should spend some more time on that last encounter. You just go into cyberspace, do some mindless pew-pew and then you are transported to the unskippable credits. The ending song has already been linked here and yet again I can't remember the name of the movie I've heard it for the first time, but it had one of the best trippy death scenes. Anyhow, that ties to my biggest gripe with the game so far, and taht is how they handled the cyberspace
- and the cyberspace sections are really weak. I guess the team faced a dillema on how to take on those challenges, and weather to stay faithful to the original concept. This approach to "hacking" with digits flying through the walls, encountering ICE and equipping icebreakers doesn't have to be boring and seen as obsolete if presented in a good way, but SSR(emake) does a poor job at it. Those are easily the most boring sections of the game and there is a couple of difficulty spikes early on. And it sometimes freezes (happend to me twice in one level, but apart from that one instance never again, so it might be a bug with that particular loading screen). Honestly I'd prefer if they ditched the cyberspace as a 3D space and implemented designed their own hacking minigame.
- Attack of the bloom. It's not so bad as in some previous demos and the dispaly configuration options are rather deep, but there are instances, where the game's lighting is actively hindering the gameplay, be that some badly lit puzzles or rooms.
- There is a manual, but in-game there could be better tutorials on what to do, especially what is the expected solution to some puzzle types, as this is the area in which people struggle the most, judging from the forums.
- You can mark your map, but can't write your own notes, which is a straight downgrade.
- Unskippable animations galore - fortunately there is alreay a mod to speed up at least some of them.
- You can't bind thumb mouse buttons.
- There are some issues with registering kb and mouse input e.g. when you change weapons and press the LMB too soon, or the game disables your weapons for a while to show you the boss you'll be fighting against.
- Visual clutter is real and can hurt you - I was running constantly with item radar turned on, as it is hard to discern what is important and what is not. Even worse, it also touches important intractable environment elements, like cabinets, leavers and various doors. Best run around pressing RMB on every suspiciously looking wall panel.
Then there is the addition of the junk management. I don't know if that's not some remnant of an idea to have a crafting system, that got aborted to the current shape and form; but as it is now collecting junk is mandatory, if you want to purchase weapon upgrades. By the end of the game, you'll be swimming in ammo, so you can skip ammo purchases, but those weapon upgades are nice to have.
Adding a "vaporize all" button would make the whole system trivial, so I understand why it is in this weird place it exists in currently.
Audio settings are also weird - the elevator music doesn't seem to fall into the "music" category in the audio options, so it can drown every other sound. And there will be instances, when you exit the elevator, get an e-mail with some character telling you what to do next, and start a combat immediately after stepping out and all this happens to this soothing, but deafening elevator chime. Yeah, you'll have to re-read those incoming messages a couple of times because of audio issues like this.
Reviewers are right that the game retains some unnecessary oldschool elements, but they are wrong about which elements those should be. And the remake could use more of modern UI design sensibilities, as it can be unnecessarily clunky at times and easily could be more informative and helpful in many places (e.g. show weapon damage for all modes, not the currently selected one, filter logs by pickup date, etc). Hell, the game could really use a journal.
On the positive side, I enjoyed what remake had to offer:
- It runs exceptionally well and is relatively bug free, which is actually a pretty big accomplishment given the state of even the major releases from the recent years.
- Visually it's a very good and (tonally) consistent design, especially later levels - even when taking into account the foundation laid by the original it still deserves a praise.
- Combat is good, shooting is nice, only downside is the rapier, which indeed feels like your swings are not connecting with the enemies.
- Exploration is great, even though the game is rather linear
And yeah, I really enjoyed it apart from the cyberspace.
Regarding the junk management - the game doesn't communicate it properly, but you don't have to scrap all the junk you find, except for the first 2 levels perhaps. On later levels you'll encounter 2x2 items with high scrap value - small laptops, corporate awards, crystal skulls, vr sets and other stuff you'll be able to easily discern that can easily give you 25 scraps per item, so focus on these instead of going for every coffee mug and used toilet paper sheet, as this junk pursuit can wear you down easily and detract from the gameplay.
The upgrade for the pulse rifle is on the very last level, where there is no recycler to get money from, so if you want to get the most of that weapon, better save 20 (or 25 creds) before leaving for the bridge.
Is it a remake? A clone of the original with just a new coat of paint? Did they actually change the gameplay, or the level design?
I heard constant conflicting opinions about this and i remember they actually restarted development from scratch at least once so i'm completely lost at what this is.
Bioshock is the first time i ever saw a developer, in this case Levine, talk in an interview about how they were updating the formula to reach more people, or something to that effect. I'm sure developers said things like that long before but it was the first instance i ever encountered of a developer being so explicit about the need to dumb their game down to try to reach more people. This was a year or two before the game finally released, but what he said in that interview put me off so much i still haven't actually played Bioshock to this day. And i'm sure dumbed down or not it's probably better than some of the trash shooters i played over the years but i just can't. I would endlessly compare it to System Shock and i would just be pissed off every step of the way about what could have been but we didn't get because of muh broader audiences.
God I wish enough of these would release that we would ever get sick of them.
HL/SS2 clones were never really a thing. HL inspired the storytelling style of modern games, but that's just one small part of their design now. Gameplay wise, the big thing that took the world by storm was Halo styled games, Call of Duty, and dudebro games (gears of war etc). Since about 2010 all popular shooters have been brown tactical cover based games, or sci-fi bonanzas where everyone is shooting everyone else with light guns and there's no exploration, recoil or advanced movement, just guns and grenades.
Half Life did cinematics the proper way and it's kinda of funny how all the Half Life "clones" missed the mark completely.
In Half Life (and some earlier games that attempted this, like Unreal in the prologue), cinematics never make the gameplay come to a screetching halt. All the little scripted events just happened quickly and at no point does the game take the controls away from the player. At no point it feels like you are being taken out of the game to watch a tiny movie, scripted events just happen briefly while you are still moving around and interacting with the game.
There's nothing i hate more in a game than losing control. I hate quick time events equally and i even despise stuff like animations when climbing stuff etc, which supposedly is there to make you feel like you are doing the action in question where as for me it has the opposite effect since your controls are locked for the duration of the animation which takes me out of the immersion.
Meh.
You get some logs that you can sense are there to provide more meaningful story, than other logs; but you are not interested really in who is who or who made how far by investigating their bodies because of the retarded KS id tags.
There is also at least one KS log that mentions cat "Whiskers" and I really stopped caring after that.
The only meaningful bit is the Flight Deck resistance.
Oh, so the grenade launcher takes the place of the explode on impact mechanic.....BUT Y THO?!!! Why add yet another item to clutter up limited inventory space to do what grenades already did originally? WHY WHY WHY?!
Bioshock is the first time i ever saw a developer, in this case Levine, talk in an interview about how they were updating the formula to reach more people, or something to that effect. I'm sure developers said things like that long before but it was the first instance i ever encountered of a developer being so explicit about the need to dumb their game down to try to reach more people. This was a year or two before the game finally released, but what he said in that interview put me off so much i still haven't actually played Bioshock to this day. And i'm sure dumbed down or not it's probably better than some of the trash shooters i played over the years but i just can't. I would endlessly compare it to System Shock and i would just be pissed off every step of the way about what could have been but we didn't get because of muh broader audiences.
Meh.
You get some logs that you can sense are there to provide more meaningful story, than other logs; but you are not interested really in who is who or who made how far by investigating their bodies because of the retarded KS id tags.
There is also at least one KS log that mentions cat "Whiskers" and I really stopped caring after that.
The only meaningful bit is the Flight Deck resistance.
