KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[Infinitron]

 

[PrettyDeadman]

It seems they still haven't be able this to look at least as good as unity demo.

I've played it. It's not terrible, but still pretty bad.

 

[MuscleSpark]

It still commits one of the Unity demo's cardinal sins: First person animations for fucking EVERYTHING! Take a story-relevant item? Enjoy the player admiring said item for 5 seconds. Want to heal yourself on a surgical unit? Enjoy the first person mini cutscene! Want to apply a freaking medpatch in the middle of a fight against multiple mutants? Yuup, there's a 3 second animation for that as well - EVERY SINGLE TIME. Every single time you're forced to watch the player open up his powder compact, remove the patch and then apply the patch to his arm, before the hitpoints start regenerating.

Yeah, god forbid an immersive sim attempt to be immersive. I guess not punishing the player for abusing surgical units or spamming heals during combat is a much better idea.

 

[HansDampf]

There's nothing "immersive" about those animations.

 

[Raskens]

It still commits one of the Unity demo's cardinal sins: First person animations for fucking EVERYTHING! Take a story-relevant item? Enjoy the player admiring said item for 5 seconds. Want to heal yourself on a surgical unit? Enjoy the first person mini cutscene! Want to apply a freaking medpatch in the middle of a fight against multiple mutants? Yuup, there's a 3 second animation for that as well - EVERY SINGLE TIME. Every single time you're forced to watch the player open up his powder compact, remove the patch and then apply the patch to his arm, before the hitpoints start regenerating.

Yeah, god forbid an immersive sim attempt to be immersive. I guess not punishing the player for abusing surgical units or spamming heals during combat is a much better idea.

Personally I think that animations like that makes it less immersive. The action doesn't really correspond to the input you are doing, and it feels like the game is taking over, and thus less immersive.

What's strange that it doesn't feel unimmersive in TP games, only in FP games.

 

[Wunderbar]

Fancy "i've just picked a new item and i want to inspect it" animations need to go, but gameplay-related animations like applying a medipatch are good.

 

[soulburner]

Too many animations are annoying and have nothing to do with immersiveness. I often play a game and there's a long animation of what my character is about to do, which causes that character to die in the process. I miss the immediate reactability in games like, I don't know, Quake. You press a button something awesome has to happen you get an action.

I can imagine a situation in this SS remake, in which you are running away from an enemy, find a weapon and die while looking at the weapon pickup animation. Just picking up the item, going into inventory, assigning a quick access button to the weapon, exiting the inventory screen and pressing the assigned button would probably be quicker than the damn animation of a pixelated crowbar or whatever.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

There's nothing "immersive" about those animations.

I believe King's Field and Shadow Tower did it right -- when you pick up an item, you can look at it as much as you want and decide if you want to keep it or discard it with a press of a button.

It's less expensive to pull off compared to full animations and way less intrusive/distracting from the gameplay.

 

[RoSoDude]

Something unique about the original System Shock is that managing the user interface in real time can abstractly simulate the player character performing actions in the world. Take reloading as an example. You need to mouse over to the weapon tab, unload your gun of any remaining rounds, and select the desired ammo type. Each button press in the sequence is instant, but the process will take a variable amount of time depending on the user's familiarity with the controls and preparedness in combat as they mouse to the correct buttons. This simulates the player character opening an ammo pouch, either ejecting or retaining the magazine in case of a dry/tactical reload, and inserting the new magazine. Someone with minimal experience with firearms will perform this sequence rather clumsily, but a trained user will keep their ammo stores ready and be able to efficiently reload their weapon in the heat of battle, just as the player can improve their speed at reloading in the UI. A reload hotkey streamlines this process and thus requires animated delays for magazine capacities to retain any purpose.

To this end, new animations can be a good thing in the context of a remake with a modernized control scheme if they add to gameplay (you wouldn't decry reload animations as unimmersive or time-wasting), but in the case of medipatches, we're already talking about an item that heals slowly over time. If having them assigned to player hotkeys is a problem, then the healing effect can be slightly reduced. If there must be an animation, it should just be the part where the patch is slapped on the the arm. Besides, the interaction paradigm in Thief/System Shock 2/Deus Ex/Arx Fatalis has a lot of interactivity occur without animations, but sound effects and even mouse gestures are usually enough to sell what's happening on screen. I don't need to see my character grabbing every item with meticulous and overdone first person animations like in THI4F; it's enough for the item to disappear into my inventory with a sound effect to imply that I grabbed it, even if my viewmodel shows me holding a weapon with two hands. Same principle applies for a lot of the interactions in the SS remake. Don't waste the player's time unnecessarily with repetitive animations unless it's intended to be a deliberate hindrance during gameplay.

 

[MuscleSpark]

RoSoDude you make a good point about how the user interface can work as an abstraction, but if the developers removed reloading and healing from the hotkeys you'd have a bunch of idiots asking why they have to manually do things that other games do for them. I'd be okay with them supporting both types(paradigms?) of play actually. I don't care much for the picking-up-shit animation, but there is no logic in a surgical unit healing someone that isn't in it, and there is no logic in a medipatch magically disappearing from the player's inventory and applying itself to the player character (at the press of a button).
Also, on the topic of THI4F, an issue with the hand animations is just that there was too much shit to pick up in the first place. If anything they didn't go far enough with the hand concept, they could've easily made health/focus/lightgem a diegetic bracelet that Garrett wears - like how Dead Space shows resource information on the suit - a missed opportunity.

 

[DraQ]

For some reason new Sparq effect looks much worse than the old one.
I really wish the industry would learn its lesson of never swapping engines mid-project (even Unity) - is there even a single case where it has worked out just fine?

Something unique about the original System Shock is that managing the user interface in real time can abstractly simulate the player character performing actions in the world. Take reloading as an example. You need to mouse over to the weapon tab, unload your gun of any remaining rounds, and select the desired ammo type. Each step in the sequence is instant, but will take a variable amount of time depending on the user's familiarity with the controls and preparedness in combat as they mouse to the correct buttons. This simulates the player character opening an ammo pouch, either ejecting or retaining the magazine in case of a dry/tactical reload, and inserting the new magazine. Someone with minimal experience with firearms will perform this sequence rather clumsily, but a trained user will keep their ammo stores ready and be able to efficiently reload their weapon in the heat of battle, just as the player can improve their speed at reloading in the UI. A reload hotkey streamlines this process and thus requires animated delays for magazine capacities to retain any purpose.

To this end, new animations can be a good thing in the context of a remake with a modernized control scheme if they add to gameplay (you wouldn't decry reload animations as unimmersive or time-wasting)

That's a good observation and I fully agree (and I liked how inventory - and grenades - worked in SS1, I only didn't like lack of custom bindings and no ability to switch to more modern mouselook scheme).

but in the case of medipatches, we're already talking about an item that heals slowly over time. If having them assigned to player hotkeys is a problem, then the healing effect can be slightly reduced.

Why would you prefer introducing meta-effect if adding animation of what actually happens works just fine and aligns both with game being immersive sim and devs being able to allocate resources for that?

If there must be an animation, it should just be the part where the patch is slapped on the the arm. Besides, the interaction paradigm in Thief/System Shock 2/Deus Ex/Arx Fatalis has a lot of interactivity occur without animations, but sound effects and even mouse gestures are usually enough to sell what's happening on screen. I don't need to see my character grabbing every item with meticulous and overdone first person animations like in THI4F; it's enough for the item to disappear into my inventory with a sound effect to imply that I grabbed it, even if my viewmodel shows me holding a weapon with two hands. Same principle applies for a lot of the interactions in the SS remake. Don't waste the player's time unnecessarily with repetitive animations unless it's intended to be a deliberate hindrance during gameplay.

Seems like that's what they are doing actually.
New weapon/hardware animation is something that happens at most once per item per game - that's by definition not repetitive.

The animations also arguably serve gameplay purpose - the PC is NOT some trained spec ops type, they are hacker trying to find their way and survive in a very hostile environment. It makes perfect sense for him to at least briefly examine a gun he has never held in his life, same with a new piece of hardware he's about to plug into his brain.

Imagine you pick up a completely unknown gun (assuming no prior firearm training) and try to fire it immediately:

• fuck, the round was not chambered
• shit, now the safety is still on and you don't know where it is exactly
• damn, you tried to flip the safety but accidentally ejected the magazine
• AAGH!...CRUNCH!...gurgle... you died horribly while fumbling for the magazine you dropped

So, the gameplay impact is that instead of making a beeline for that energy shield or good gun you have just noticed, and using it to fight off the obvious ambush that follows you now need to consider your vulnerability as your gifted but untrained character figures out how to use it.
Again, imagine you have this shield generator module that will shield you from most harm, but to use it you need to both secure it somehow to your person and plug into your cyber interface - presumably via USB port. While being shot at.

The animations for stuff like containers can be middle ground, repetitive, but not hindering the action - and that's how they are already.

Throwing grenades sucks massive balls, though. It's much more cumbersome than even in the original interface and not even 1% as versatile or useful.

 

[Tacgnol]

I really wish the industry would learn its lesson of never swapping engines mid-project (even Unity) - is there even a single case where it has worked out just fine?

An engine switch is usually a sure sign of project mismanagement. Things like engine should be evaluated and signed off early in development.

If the project has a competently put together specification then there should never be a need to switch engine.

This is incidentally why feature creep (and extreme KS stretch goals) is bad. You shouldn't be adding radical new unplanned features midway through development.

 

[LESS T_T]

Cyberspace teased on Discord.

That looks like neon-decorated air vent than some virtual edges or circuits or something.

 

[Bad Sector]

The important part about the new cyberspace segments is to navigate without feeling like you want to throw your mouse out of the window (be it out of frustration for the controls or because you vomited on it and now it stinks).

As for the demo, i want to try it but my internet connection is slow for some reason so now i'm waiting :-/

I do not remember having much of an issue with the first person animations in the Unity demo, if anything they add a bit of character, as long as they are not overdone.

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

there is no logic in a surgical unit healing someone that isn't in it, and there is no logic in a medipatch magically disappearing from the player's inventory and applying itself to the player character (at the press of a button).

Hard lesson I learned from witnessing the backer forums of various other Kickstarter games: Only retards care about realism in video games. If you start caving in to their demands, it will be at the expense of making an enjoyable game.

Look, System Shock had instaheal surgical units, System Shock 2 had instaheal surgical units. Has anyone ever complained about how they just "dun broked muh uhmershion!" because they weren't forced to sit tight while the game takes controls away and force you to watch a 10 second cutscene? Besides, it's not like you can "abuse" the surgical units anyway. They take a while to recharge and they are few and far between. When you're on the other part of the map and could use a good health boost, you'll still think twice about running all the way back and potentially running into more enemies (especially if there are still respawning enemies - say, will the SShock remake even have respawning enemies?). As for medpatches, don't kid yourself: That animation is purely there for vanity ("Look at our fancy animations! At least the KS money was put to some good use!"), not out of some gameplay balancing considerations. Medpatches are already gimped by restoring health points slowly over time instead of instantly. No reason to triple punish the player by playing a mini-cutscene that a) makes you completely defenseless while the mini cutscene plays, b) adds an additional 5 seconds before your health starts restoring and c) wears out its welcome by the second or third time you see it. If they want to improve player immersion, there are dozens of better ways to accomplish that other than taking controls away from the player and forcing him to watch the same first person cutscene over and over.

 

[Curratum]

Nightdive should really stick strictly to remakes / remasters. The game will not release this year and when it does, it will be an unoptimized ramshackle mess that will make everyone cry a lot.

 

[Lemming42]

RoSoDude is 100% right.

Lengthy animations for anything and everything are less immersive, surely. Watching your character do something outside your control - fondle a weapon for 5 minutes, go through an absolute saga to apply a medpatch, piss around with a healing booth, etc - are a reminder that you're looking at a screen. In SS1, switching frantically between all the different augs and interface screens, scrambling to reload your weapon as enemies approach and manually fucking around with the sparq's strength setting makes you feel much more as if you actually are the hacker.

I know that you couldn't really remake System Shock with the same control scheme and interface in 2020 because people would react overwhelmingly negatively, but I don't see how the game is going to work as just a standard FPS. The complex (but functional and easy to learn) interface and the clunky (but easy to master) movement are a big part of the game's identity and really made it feel as if you were a shit busted-up cyborg who'd just woken up from a six month coma. At the start of the game, you fumble as you figure out how to reload your guns, and quickly fill your inventory with trash as you don't know what you'll need - sort of like you're the hacker, who is an untrained civilian thrust into a nightmare scenario. By the end of the game, you're expertly flipping through screens and cycling through augs as you blast your way through SHODAN's horde with a hand-picked arsenal of the best weapons, and you perform tasks such as reloading with ease - sort of like the hacker, who has learned all this himself over the course of the game.

 

[Nano]

Fiddled around with the demo now that it's on GOG. My #1 thought: the new soundtrack sucks.

 

[Zombra]

Jeez, just let the protag look at a gun for a moment when he picks it up for the first time. If you're in that much of a hurry for a game to be over with you should really loosen up your schedule.

 

[Bad Sector]

So i played it for a bit. I really liked what they have there overall, there are a few minor issues if you are nitpicky (and i'll be in a moment :-P) but honestly this is clearly a product made by people who really like the original game and it shows. I was a bit skeptical of the environment art from the screenshots posted some time ago, but playing it now it looks perfectly fine and not as dark as i thought things would be (of course most likely they listened to feedback, which IMO also makes it important that if you have any comments on the game to simply communicate them to the developers - i twitted my comments below to Stephen Kick's post about it when he asked for comments).

I took some notes while playing. My negatives were:

• Graphics options do not seem to save. This is obviously an alpha version thing, but still annoying.
• There is a lot of mouse lag, even though the game is running at 180+ FPS, but especially if i enable Radeon Chill from the drivers which does some sort of automatic framerate limiting based on the current framerate and input to save power (and avoid having the fans blast loudly all the time). Note that i have this limited configured to at least 75 fps, so it shouldn't be an issue regardless.
  This is by far my biggest concern with the game since i'm afraid it might be something with the way they use Unreal.
• The hud model (weapons, etc) clip through the environment and the body. This might be fixed, but it wouldn't be the first game that went 'nah' and ignored it :-P. Also there are occasional tremors in the hud model which do not have any apparent reason (even if you are standing still).
• Having the body visible all the time feels weird, especially since it barely follows what is going on. Going up and down ladders, for example, has the legs just standing there. But talking about ladders...
• ...auto turning to ladders feels bad and less fluid. I'd rather have you autostick to the ladders like in HL2, etc. This also implies no body model (which would be an improvement IMO, i never liked bodymodels in first person games).
  
• Hitting enemies really needs some feedback as there is absolutely none until the moment they die.

Some improvements i'd like to see:

• Being able to push/shove enemies out of your way.
• More physics enabled objects in general. It shouldn't be hard to have some objects be physics enabled and if someone is running on a low PC to disable them via the options (so they become static objects at load time).
• Closing the GUI with the use key. This is just a small QOL improvement since you open the GUI with the use key on dead enemies, containers, etc to pick up items it makes sense to also use the same key to close the GUI quickly once you notice there is nothing you want to pick.
• Hide/holster/remove/dosomethingaboutitcoveringthescreen the weapon with a long press of the use or reload key or some dedicated key. The weapon takes a bit too much space on screen and when you want to just be a pack rat and explore every nook and cranny of the room you are in, it is annoying to have it in your face.

Things that i liked:

• The numpads being physical objects on screen instead of opening a separate UI. Diegetic interfaces are great, especially when they make sense in the environment. Doom 3 did it best, IMO, then everyone else ignored it because it doesn't work as nice on controllers :-P
• Also i really liked the new routing minigame. The old one always felt arbitrarily fumbling around with the wires until something happened (i'm sure there is some logic to it, i just never found it interesting enough to discover it).
• Some parts of the map have slight changes to make things make a bit more sense (since there isn't a grid-based limitation like in the original engine) without changing the claustrophobic look of the original. There was some area i vaguely remembered but at the same time it was different enough to have a feel of exploring a new space.

Two things i'm not sold on is the pixellated look on everything - i just feel it doesn't mesh well with the otherwise high fidelity art - and the enemy models... or specifically their heads. I just think they took the original game's sprites a bit too literally when the sprite were low resolution renders of some artists' early attempts to make something that resembles a human using the crappy 3D modelling packages of the time.

 

[Nano]

Also, the UI tells you to destroy the cameras you come across *before* you pick up the audio log that tells you this. Lame.

 

[LESS T_T]

From Discord they say hit reaction anims for enemies exist but not included in the current version, probably will be patched in soon. Similar for ladder anim I think. And iirc physics will be enabled to some objects later in development.

 

[DraQ]

Hard lesson I learned from witnessing the backer forums of various other Kickstarter games: Only retards care about realism in video games. If you start caving in to their demands, it will be at the expense of making an enjoyable game.

Easy* lesson I learned from hanging around here for over a decade and witnessing a lot of crap on internet in general is that yours is exactly the kind of post a subnormal would make when thinking himself insightful and clever.

*

Because I don't suffer from learning disabilities.

Look, System Shock had instaheal surgical units, System Shock 2 had instaheal surgical units. Has anyone ever complained about how they just "dun broked muh uhmershion!" because they weren't forced to sit tight while the game takes controls away and force you to watch a 10 second cutscene? Besides, it's not like you can "abuse" the surgical units anyway. They take a while to recharge and they are few and far between. When you're on the other part of the map and could use a good health boost, you'll still think twice about running all the way back and potentially running into more enemies

Yeah, we should never improve upon anything. When remaking SS1 surgical units musty be instaheal. When remaking SS2 we should carry over shittily implemented damage types and hard skill reqs for stuff like firing a pistol when typical toddler in thirdworldian shithole can fire assault rifle.

(especially if there are still respawning enemies - say, will the SShock remake even have respawning enemies?)

You might have been able to answer this question yourself if you bothered to play the demo. Or you might not, it's hard to tell with subnormals.

As for medpatches, don't kid yourself: That animation is purely there for vanity ("Look at our fancy animations! At least the KS money was put to some good use!"), not out of some gameplay balancing considerations.

In case you haven't noticed and no one spelled it out for you:
This whole remake is there purely for vanity. It seems to adhere, for better or worse (IMO the former), strongly to the original up to and including original level design and visual design (even when it's counterproductive to gameplay because relevant stuff gets lost among all the blinkenlights), so all that you can count on is cosmetic upgrade and maybe some minor gameplay updates.

There is nothing stopping you from just firing up the original System Shock.

Medpatches are already gimped by restoring health points slowly over time instead of instantly. No reason to triple punish the player by playing a mini-cutscene that a) makes you completely defenseless while the mini cutscene plays, b) adds an additional 5 seconds before your health starts restoring and c) wears out its welcome by the second or third time you see it. If they want to improve player immersion, there are dozens of better ways to accomplish that other than taking controls away from the player and forcing him to watch the same first person cutscene over and over.

Anything that makes the player disinclined to get shot at is a net incline in my book.

 

[kangaxx]

Played the demo.. my thoughts on it. Am a big fan of both the original and Shock 2, so I'm biased and want it to succeed.

- I haven't played Shock 1 for ages and the level design hasn't stood the test of time very well IMO. It feels more like a maze than how you'd actually design a space station. Compare it to Talos I in Prey (acknowledging tech constraints of course).. even the Von Braun was far better.
- Sounds are probably placeholders at this point? Atmosphere isn't bad considering.
- Feels clunky to move, swing with the pipe etc. at the moment.
- Doesn't look as bad to me as some people are saying, but the very high contrast can be jarring.
- It isn't always easy to tell the difference between environmental decoration and interactive objects. Especially bad for people who don't know the layout from the original... it will mean a lot of fruitless right clicking.
- Enemy model clipping when you kill them is atrocious... that needs fixing.
- As someone else pointed out, enemy AI is meme-worthy at the moment. Hopefully they can fix it.

It could be a good trip down memory lane if they polish it well enough.

 

[gurugeorge]

Wow, that looks incredible, the art design and graphics are perfectly pitched to look like System-Shock-with-updated-graphics! Kind of like what I imagined would be done with the game when I first played it.

Amazing dedication and focus there.