KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[SharkClub]

Another good one is the objective on the Rec Deck in System Shock 2. Send a distress signal to Earth to tell them the Von Braun has been compromised. Seems like the entire crew involved (via audio logs) has forgotten just how far they are from Earth, they're in deep space after jumping with the reality-folding FTL drives (and orbiting Tau Ceti V still?), seemingly unaware that the ship they're on can go faster than the distress signal they plan to send and will always beat it back to Earth if the forces that have compromised the Von Braun so choose. Maybe the theory of relativity dabs on me here, actually, probably depends on how the Von Braun's FTL travel actually works (lol). Also where are Tommy and Rebecca planning to go in that escape pod that clearly can't travel at FTL speeds? Even if SHODAN takes over Rebecca's body in realspace there what can she even do without the Von Braun's FTL drives? Cosmic distances are hard!!!

I wonder what the hacker spent his time doing on the bridge waiting for a TriOp rescue shuttle to show up after he purges/fixes SHODAN at the end of SS1?

 

[Neuromancer]

Thank you for reminding me of the mining laser-arguments I took part in some years ago, when the remake was first announced.

I'm curious what your (or anyone's) conclusion was on the matter.

I brought up the distance (as a minor point) and no one was seemingly bothered by that, but my main point was the possibility that the Earth would be occluded by other celestial bodies in the Solar System at that particular date (as that can be calculated) and far too many people lost their minds over that.

It basically amounted to "Looking Glass Studios possibly did something wrong? Heresy!"

I couldn't care less about the story, but this discussion is interesting.


The distance from Saturn and Earth would be of course a problem.

But the chance that the earth would be occluded by other planets, moons etc. in general is extremely low considering the immense distances between all these bodies. Even Jupiter's size is small compared to that.
The only celestial body that could occlude earth with a little higher probability is the Earth's Moon.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Also where are Tommy and Rebecca planning to go in that escape pod that clearly can't travel at FTL speeds? Even if SHODAN takes over Rebecca's body in realspace there what can she even do without the Von Braun's FTL drives? Cosmic distances are hard!!!

The escape pods are equipped with cryogenic chambers, they say in an audio log it will take 30 years to get back to earth, and will program the ship to "wake them up" when they get there. Tau Ceti is about 11 light years from earth, so I highly doubt an escape pod with a small engine would get them there in 30 years.

As for the transmitter, radio travels at the speed of light so it would indeed not be fast enough. It wouldn't work unless it was a "subspace transmitter" of some kind, which is never mentioned in the game anywhere.

 

[SharkClub]

The escape pods are equipped with cryogenic chambers, they say in an audio log it will take 30 years to get back to earth, and will program the ship to "wake them up" when they get there. Tau Ceti is about 11 light years from earth, so I highly doubt an escape pod with a small engine would get them there in 30 years.

Forgot that audio log, but yes, traveling 11 light years in 30 years in a tiny escape pod is absolutely not happening without another wormhole asspull. Cosmic distance is just too hard for LGS and Irrational Games. The System Shock universe would have to have made some extremely massive strides in conventional near-light speed travel for the trips from Earth to Saturn or Tau Ceti V back to Earth in tiny shuttles like that to ever make mathematical sense. Why would the Von Braun being the first FTL capable ship even be that impressive if near light speed travel has already been standard enough to be usable by small shuttles for decades by the time System Shock 2 rolls around.

According to a quick google, the fastest man-made object was the NASA Parker Solar Probe that used the Sun's gravity to get to 535,000km/h. A single (one) light year is 9,460,000,000,000km. Doesn't take a genius to figure out how stupid System Shock's idea of space travel and cosmic distances are. For System Shock 1 & 2 to make sense you truly have to ignore everything that happens in space outside of Citadel Station, Earth, the Von Braun, the Rickenbacker and Tau Ceti V, (ironically) viewing them in a vaccuum.

 

[lightbane]

brought up the distance (as a minor point) and no one was seemingly bothered by that, but my main point was the possibility that the Earth would be occluded by other celestial bodies in the Solar System at that particular date (as that can be calculated) and far too many people lost their minds over tha

I think you guys are obsessing too hard about this. Regarding possible obstructions with the kill laser, this is Shodan. She would not care any less if she has to cause additional collateral damage and would probably account for it. At worst she could have used the station's resources to create sci-fi lenses to empower the laser through the way. If she managed to kill nearly everyone in the station without anyone noticing until it was too late, she too would have time to ensure the laser works. She also had backups if that plan wasn't enough.

 

[Average Manatee]

I brought up the distance (as a minor point) and no one was seemingly bothered by that, but my main point was the possibility that the Earth would be occluded by other celestial bodies in the Solar System at that particular date (as that can be calculated) and far too many people lost their minds over that.

It basically amounted to "Looking Glass Studios possibly did something wrong? Heresy!"

The chance of something being in between the station and earth is miniscule and if it was then you'd just wait a few seconds for it to no longer be blocking the laser. Unless its some how in a very specific orbit which tracks the path between the station and Earth, which would be weird.

The laser dissipating with range is an obvious problem though. We can assume that the citadel station mining laser is meant for mining things something like a few miles away at max. If it was powerful enough to destroy earth civilization (also through an atmosphere), we're talking many orders of magnitude overbuilding. You'd think someone would have asked "why does the laser need to be a trillion timers stronger than we need to mine with?"

 

[Grampy_Bone]

You still need to hit a moving target with a 40 minute lead time while you are also moving. There are also many, many asteroids in the solar system--the asteroid belt is more of an asteroid cloud, and computing all their positions simultaneously in real time is pretty much impossible.

Edit: here's a calcutator for the beam divergence, If I had more time I'd hunt down these specs myself for fun.

http://www.pseudonomen.com/lasers/calculators/diameterCalculator.html

 

[Average Manatee]

You still need to hit a moving target with a 40 minute lead time while you are also moving.

I mean that's trivial, orbital movement is easy to predict and a PC from 30 years ago could do it just fine. You need some precise motors or directional jets for citadel station to aim it but that can be assumed with sci fi tech.

There are also many, many asteroids in the solar system--the asteroid belt is more of an asteroid cloud, and computing all their positions simultaneously in real time is pretty much impossible.

It's not like movies where there's a huge field of asteroids. The Asteroid belt combined contains about 3% the mass of the moon, spread out across a vast distance. It's so sparse that you can essentially assume it doesn't exist for all intents and purposes. The worst that would happen is a single grain of dust being in the path of the beam, which would just momentarily make the beam very slightly weaker.

The first spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt was Pioneer 10, which entered the region on 16 July 1972. At the time there was some concern that the debris in the belt would pose a hazard to the spacecraft, but it has since been safely traversed by multiple spacecraft without incident. Pioneer 11, Voyagers 1 and 2 and Ulysses passed through the belt without imaging any asteroids. Cassini measured plasma and fine dust grains while traversing the belt in 2000.[108] On its way to Jupiter, Juno traversed the asteroid belt without collecting science data.[109] Due to the low density of materials within the belt, the odds of a probe running into an asteroid are estimated at less than 1 in 1 billion.[110]

Edit: here's a calcutator for the beam divergence, If I had more time I'd hunt down these specs myself for fun.

http://www.pseudonomen.com/lasers/calculators/diameterCalculator.html

Yeah this is the big thing. The bigger the resulting beam size on the earth the more energy you need to pump into the beam at citadel station. I'm not gonna do the math but it could very well be the case that the resulting beam is the size of a city or greater. At that point you're basically asking Citadel station to output enough heat to cook the entire earth at once.

 

[goregasm]

So what's the consensus on this?

Is it worth it for someone who hasn't given the original a proper playthrough?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I wouldn't touch the game unless I've played the original. Going in 'blind' robs you of so many of the nods and references. I'd also hold off until they actually 'finish' the game, that is a patch or two away as they fix the major bugs and add in the Kickstarter-stretchmarks.

Anyway, I'm making progress and I'm making my way through Executive. This floor looks really nice, much better than in the original. The Exec-Bots are cool, but I'm a little disappointed with the Cyborg Warriors - a skull on a Sec-Bot's torso? How original. The clear winners here are the groves, though. The tram-ride out to them is nice, but it's even better to climb to the top and catch the view through the domes, once you have the V2 jet boots. I had a couple of goes at the chess game - SHODAN is good at chess.

One sidepoint about how complicated Storage is like - I had to look at the map for a few minutes to find the last unexplored room - and there I find another LoaderBot that wants to play! Sadly for it, it decided to pick up and toss some useless equipment at me, instead of a volatile canister.

Exploring the Executive-floor took a while, but my awareness made me figure out the passcode for a locked door tucked away in a corner, and this leads to The Crawl, a part of this floor that's one straight and long crawlspace. It's also the way to the CPU nodes and such, so it must be crawled. And wouldn't you know, there's yet another LoaderBot in the room with the nodes. Too bad I was quicker on the draw this time, you'll know what I mean when you see it.

But now I'm at the most tense and hard part of the game - Beta Grove. Constant health drain, constant battery drain to compensate for the health drain, plenty of baddies, plus blurred vision due to the funky stuff floating in the air. It reminds me of the Downside Up from Stranger Things. My first foray ended in death as a Tigrilla-mutant jumped me, but I'll return another day.

Finally, I spent way too much time admiring the view in Executive - and is it just me, or is it about a floor too low? The groves are right in front of me, yet I'm looking at their undersides. If the mag-trains go along the bottom of the arms leading to the groves (which they seem to do) then the view is accurate, for once.

 

[Tweed]

I admit I liked the redesigns to executive and the groves, amazingly enough the groves are well lit, too bad about executive though. Flight Deck wasn't too bad either. I also really despised the crawlspaces because they waste so much time. In the original you can turbo boost through them, but these are just needlessly slow and painful.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I mean that's trivial, orbital movement is easy to predict and a PC from 30 years ago could do it just fine. You need some precise motors or directional jets for citadel station to aim it but that can be assumed with sci fi tech.

You're talking about hitting a specific spot on the planet (some big city) which would require precise timing. Even if somehow this laser could maintain beam strength, firing it randomly would almost certainly hit ocean or empty land.

 

[JDR13]

That laser would take ~40 minutes to reach earth and would certainly lose most of its power by then.

The developers of the System Shock games have always had a very loose grasp on cosmic distances and how fast things can travel between planets/galaxies/etc. And by very loose I mean the grasp was basically nonexistent.

It is especially weird in the intro cutscene where you get taken from Earth to Citadel Station orbiting Saturn in a cop car in what seems to be a much shorter amount of time than would ever feasibly make sense both timewise and for Diego to bother doing. My favorite was always the absolute impossibility of Beta Grove somehow beating a faster than light traveling ship to Tau Ceti V in SS2, which they have now retroactively rectified with the subtle wormhole asspull that gets mentioned in the remake (let's just ignore the amount of coincidences that would have to occur to bring the plot of SS2 together).

Maybe the mining laser is aimed at a wormhole that is next to earth? Maybe the cop car used said wormhole to get to citadel super quickly? Tbh, short of moving Citadel Station to orbit the moon (like Talos One), this shit was never going to make sense and Nightdive would have had a hell of a task on their hands trying to write around it. Citadel Station is orbiting Saturn because that sounded like it'd be cool to Looking Glass Studios. Simple as.

You probably shouldn't be playing video games.

 

[potatojohn]

So what's the consensus on this?

Is it worth it for someone who hasn't given the original a proper playthrough?

No, it's full of bugs.

But there's potential. In another 7 years patches and mods will fix it.

 

[d1r]

Watched a friend of mine play this game for one hour and a half, and man, the missing music during map exploration takes a lot of the atmosphere away. It's just very subtle ambiance, and even during fights, the battle music doesn't immediately start to play. Disgusting.

 

[Eirinjas]

Just finished it earlier tonight. Great game. Very faithful remake. Cyberspace sucks (but it sucked in the original), and the intro and outro are both stupid. Incredibly stable game. I encountered very few bugs, and none of them game-breaking. Contrast that with (because I just replayed it recently) an unmodded Fallout: New Vegas, which shits the bed all the time even with the 4gb patch applied. Of the bugs I encountered in the remake: game pausing itself (fixed in recent patch), bodies refalling to the ground on a load or when walking into a room (mostly fixed by recent patch), and some other quirks of the physics engine (mostly twitchy dead bodies). Story seemed padded in places, but it's been awhile since I played the original. Though, I definitely don't remember the lesbian relationship drama audio log. It stood out. Most of the enemy designs I'm okay with, but the change to the invisible mutants on maintenance disappointed me. The door hacking puzzles are cool. I couldn't climb walls in any of the groves = disappoint. I died a lot. Recommend.

 

[SharkClub]

Yeah, actually. The puzzles I didn't mind in the remake. It's pipemania and some energy flow thing but they're way less shit than the two puzzles from the original. The wire puzzle in the original is incomprehensible garbage to me even after multiple playthroughs of the game. Seemed to just exist to eat Genius patches and Logic Probes.

 

[randir14]

One of the devs of the original game has been doing a let's play of the remake

 

[kites]

One of the devs of the original game has been doing a let's play of the remake

Interesting.. It’s too bad to see that he’s been at Riot Games (LoL, Valorant) the last decade

 

[Jaedar]

I mean that's trivial, orbital movement is easy to predict and a PC from 30 years ago could do it just fine. You need some precise motors or directional jets for citadel station to aim it but that can be assumed with sci fi tech.

You're talking about hitting a specific spot on the planet (some big city) which would require precise timing. Even if somehow this laser could maintain beam strength, firing it randomly would almost certainly hit ocean or empty land.

Ultimately shodan wants to hit all cities.
Doing the math isn't hard (relatively speaking), the precision in the parts that aim the laser is. And actually building a laser which would deploy enough energy to wreck concrete at those distances.

For context, to have an accuracy of 1km, you'd need a precision of at least 2.23 × 10^-9 radians in the angle.

 

[Trithne]

It's a Tachyon Beam Mining Laser. It's powered by technobabble. This is the least important part of the game to quibble about. If this is the best we have then the remake must be perfect.

 

[Eirinjas]

It's unknown what the laser does when it strikes earth. I imagine it has an impact similar to an asteroid strike. It would have immediate damage limited to a local part of a hemisphere, but it would also cause a yearslong worldwide blackout of the sun leading to global famine, pestilence, and conflict. Maybe the laser superheats the atmosphere causing death by thermal shock in most parts of the globe. Probably it destroys the ozone layer completely which leads to UV radiation decimating life. Maybe it causes the nonprocreative extinction of the species. It would be the greatest thing ever if NightDive could patch in a radio broadcast of Alex Jones yelling about how it's turning the frickin frogs gay.

 

[Neuromancer]

Story seemed padded in places, but it's been awhile since I played the original. Though, I definitely don't remember the lesbian relationship drama audio log. It stood out.

Maybe it was one of the Kickstarter's audio logs?

 

[Tweed]

I think it's just a new log and it's out of place, just like all of Nightdive's shitty rewrites.

 

[potatojohn]

Does the patch fix the flopping bodies?