Finally typed up all my thoughts on the latest demo...
THINGS I LIKED
- The ambient music.
- The additions to the original levels.
- The art style. It would look pretty great if it wasn't marred by the pixelation.
- The 3D modeling of the old sprite-based enemies.
- The absence of those silly TriOptimum-shaped screens we'd been seeing.
- The cyberspace movement controls.
THINGS THAT NEED IMPROVEMENT
STARTUP
You have to select each difficulty option to view its description. Would be more user-friendly if the description just showed on rollover.
Rolling over each difficulty category shows a plain box outline in the graphic on the right. This is ugly and unnecessary. It's just a decorative widget to fill screen space.
SHODAN incorrectly written as "Shodan" in all difficulty description texts.
After clicking Confirm, my screen always goes black and I hear beeping noises. Apparently there's supposed to be some sort of briefing playing during this part. Fortunately I can click to skip past it.
The opening animation is so low-res, it
looks almost exactly like the "Videlectrix" intro from those old
Homestar Runner parody games.
The bootup sequence... they're even pixelating the TEXT? The one thing that those old systems could display with perfect clarity? We haven't even started the game proper yet and Night Dive has already lost the plot on this pixelation obsession. This doesn't even make sense within the context of the game, because there's none of this pixelation on your HUD.
In all options screens, you have to click Save, then Done to apply any change. This is annoying and pointlessly complex. There should just be Done and Cancel buttons like every other game does it. We're tweaking game settings here, not configuring a server. If I make a mistake I just go back and change it.
In the options screens, the placement of the Reset/Save/Done buttons within each option frame implies to the user that they apply to that set of options only. Nope. Hitting a Reset button resets EVERYTHING to the default state.
The option setting "Screen Curvature" should be labeled "HUD Curvature", since it only affects the HUD.
The game mutes when you tab away from it, but doesn't pause.
If the color schemes must be given cute names, I think it'd be more in keeping with the game's cyberpunk theme to name them after retro technologies. Something like:
- Yellow: "Amber" (for amber monochrome monitors)
- Red: "Plasma" (for red plasma monitors)
- White: "Alto" (for the Xerox Alto's white screen)
- Purple: "Neon" (purple light is actually argon but oh well)
- Cyan: "Ice" (there currently isn't a cyan theme, but considering System Shock's heavy use of this color, there certainly should be one)
HUD/USER INTERFACE
Message handling is a mess.
- In SS1, there was a single line on the HUD that displayed both descriptions (when you clicked on an item) and interaction notifications. Simplistic, but it worked.
- In SS2, they improved this by having descriptions automatically appear in a dedicated space at the top of the screen, and notifications appearing below it in a scrolling area that allowed multiple notifications to be visible at once. This worked great.
- In SSR... hoo boy. There's a dedicated line at the top like in SS2, but it's used to display both descriptions AND notifications. But not all notifications! Some notifications appear in another area, that can only display one notification at a time. And that's just the layout. Let's talk about presentation. In the top line, messsages slooowwlly appear one character at a time. Forcing players to constantly stop wait stop wait stop wait for every item description to fully display is sociopathic design. As for the single-line sometimes-notification area, it's off to the left, uses a dark font, and is right underneath the constantly-animating biomonitor. This all makes it very easy to not even notice when a message appears here. It's all a usability disaster. They should have just swallowed their pride and copied what SS2 did. Description line. Multiline notification area. Text appears instantly. Done.
The compass has a couple issues. First, it stretches alllll the way across the screen. This is a useless waste of space, which becomes awkward empty space when the compass is disabled. Second, The compass doesn't display compass headings on the scrolling part, just degrees. There's a separate sub-widget that displays N/S/E/W as you rotate toward those directions. This is needlessly complex. Trimming the compass display to just the center of the screen would allow moving the biomonitor and health bars up into the space it occupied, and moving the direction labels onto the compass would simplify reading it.
Here's a mockup.
The highlight reticle does this distracting expand/shrink animation as you look at and away from interactable objects. This is tolerable when it's just a single object, but when you have multiple objects clustered together, it causes the reticle to spastically thrash as you look around. The reticle is functional UI, it should immediately appear and disappear as objects are focused instead of wasting our time with pointless "cool" animations.
The highlight reticle having two different ranges--identification range and use range--is annoying and confusing. The reticle should never show up unless the object under it is in use range.
I don't like the way the health and energy meters fill right-to-left. SS1 and SS2 (and practically every other FPS with horizontal health meters) fills them left-to-right. I feel like I'm looking at these bars in a mirror.
There needs to be a HUD display of your current gun's ammo, settings, etc. Currently the only way to tell is to look for vague differences on the object model or go into the inventory. There's a big blank space on the right side of the screen that would be perfect for this information.
The inventory should recognize when you're trying to drag-and-drop an inventory item instead of forcing you to click a second time to drop.
Why do I have to *HOLD* F to play an audio log? Just pressing F does nothing, so let me just press F to listen to audio logs. And it doesn't even work anymore after the prompt disappears! I can see the envelope icon indicating I have something to listen to, but holding F does nothing. Pressing (not holding) F should always play the most recently picked up log.
Why do I have to hold Alt for inventory item descriptions? Just display the description by default. There's plenty of room for it.
You apparently have to double-click logs and emails to play them, instead of single-clicking. Nothing in the UI indicates you have to do this. You shouldn't have to do this.
Forcing players to click on the door switch ONLY instead of anywhere on the door to open it is obnoxious. You know what I want, game. Just do it.
Being forced to watch a little animation that slows down movement and locks out picking up anything else every time I pick up a piece of "special" equipment is incredibly annoying.
The sequence when you die and get reconstructed is way too long. And not nearly as funny as in SS1.
I don't like the wiring puzzles at all. They're awkward to control, they're too slow to update, and they do a terrible job of communicating to the player how the colored electricity interacts and combines.
TEXT/TYPOGRAPHY
Most of the UI text is way too small, especially the compass heading text and the text under the automap. It's like Night Dive assumes everyone will be playing this on either a 32" monitor or a big-screen TV. At 1024x768, some of the text is basically illegible. This is unacceptable. Properly sized UI text should be clearly legible even as low as 640x480. (Let's also consider the irony of making a game with jumbo-sized retro pixels but then teeny-tiny text that requires modern resolutions.)
Right-clicking unusable objects produces random can't-use messages. This doesn't make sense. Everything on the HUD is supposed to be generated by the hacker's R-grade implant, which surely would NOT have been programmed to generate cutesy randomized messages. Everything displayed on the HUD should be diegetic. SS1 and SS2 got this right.
I really don't need messages like "Door opened", "Lever pulled", etc. I know those things happened. I'm the one who did it.
When you pick up an access card you already have, it just says "YOU GAIN NO NEW ACCESS". Well great, but I'd still like to know what I picked up.
When attempting to open a cyberspace locked door you get the message "IT'S LOCKED IN CYBERSPACE", which seems awfully conversational for your R-grade implant. Something like "CYBERSPACE LOCK ACTIVE" would be more appropriate. But even that would be a bit gamey, because cyberspace isn't what's locked the door. It's been locked by the station computer. Cyberspace is just an interface.
The station signage font works fine as a title font for simple words like "ALPHA", "GAMMA", etc., but for longer strings like "Neurosurgery" and the names of crew members, it gets a little overbearing. That's why the original DIDN'T use this font for everything.
Having puzzles literally labeled "Puzzles" on the map screen isn't very immersive. Again, the HUD should be as diegetic as possible. That's the entire reason Looking Glass made up the R-grade implant in the first place, to provide an in-game explanation for all this UI.
All descriptions of paneling have it misspelled as "panelling". I spotted at least three different ones.
MediPatch description: "Tolerance increased by 20%". Tolerance to WHAT?
GRAPHICS
Yeah, I get that Night Dive is trying to do some fashionably stylish faux-retro thing with the intentionally pixelated textures. Problem is, it just looks
shabby to me. This look should be an option, not forced on us. So that's all I'll say on that.
The level lighting is so freaking dark, I didn't even get much of a look at any of the new AIs, because it was too dark to see them. In fact it's so dark that I rarely had much sense of where I was going or where I'd been. I just felt like I was randomly stumbling around in the dark for most of the level. If not for the automap and having played the original many times, I'd have been lost most of the time. This is completely unlike the original, where Medical was, for the most part, well-lit.
I generally like how SS1's blinky wall panels have been interpreted in the remake. But the problem is that they've been overused almost to the point of self-parody. There are now SO MANY
blinkenlights everywhere that it's often difficult to identify actual objects that can be used or picked up. Every other room looks like the
bridge of the Enterprise. It's too much.
Using power charge stations shoots bolts of lightning everywhere. This is nonsensical. It's not like the Hacker is grabbing a bare transformer. This is a piece of standard station equipment specifically designed for recharging things. If it's shooting out lightning, that means it's horribly damaged and I should stay the hell away from it. Imagine if your cell phone charger spat out sparks like that every time you plugged it in. You'd throw that thing in the trash. Worse yet, the game temporarily unequips your current weapon when using a charge station just so it can play a silly animation of the hacker shaking sparks off his fingers.
The new SHODAN portrait looks like the sort of cheesy neon display you'd find
at the back of a Spencer's Gifts, between the blacklight posters and the plasma spheres.
The dead crew members almost look more horrifying than the mutants. They look like albino department store mannequins.
The wall widget with four vertical red lines is animated wrong. In SS1 they don't ping-pong, they scroll.
The
screen-filling flash when you open most doors is beyond obnoxious.
The view of space out the windows is bizarre. It looks like Citadel is surrounded by
glowing blue cotton balls.
Equipped weapons clip into terrain.
The falling dust when you open some doors is a nice touch, but then the same amount of dust keeps falling every. single. time. you open and close a door. Where is this infinite supply of dust coming from?
Most of the light fixtures on this deck look like the sort of
harsh industrial lighting you'd normally see hanging from a warehouse ceiling, or mounted inside a paint drying station. They make zero sense for what's supposed to essentially be an office environment. These should be replaced with diffused fluorescent lighting,
like Irrational did when they redrew these textures for SS2.
The "soft paneling" is clearly
not soft at all. It's grids of very sharp edges that would shred anyone who stumbled into them. I'd recommend a different interpretation of the original textures, making them instead look like actual soft paneling, of the type that was
popular in 60s-70s sci-fi. This would actually be appropriate for a medical deck, and would fit with System Shock's theme of being packed with classic sci-fi references.
Those uncovered fingers on the Hacker's hand are driving me insane. I have no interest in spending multiple hours staring at someone's dirty fingernails. Those CONSTANTLY blinking lights on the Hacker's glove are also distracting.
The chromatic aberration all over the UI is annoying. It makes everything look blurry and hard to read. We should at least have an option to turn this off in the graphics settings.
Inventory icons have an unpleasant washed-out filter that tints them to the color of the current UI theme. This does not look good.
The unlit LED segments on keypads and guns
are so bright that it can be difficult to read what they're actually displaying. The unlit parts being a visible color doesn't even make sense, because they change color when a correct code is entered.
The original Medical level had quite a few video screens scattered around, displaying abstract "tech" animations, exterior views of the stations, static, Diego, etc. These are now strangely absent. We get a lot of non-animated TriOp logos and that's pretty much it.
OBJECTS
The "Rest Stations" need some external signage indicating their function, since from the outside they look like some kind of robot charging bay.
The overhead station monitors that rotate to face you don't make sense. If multiple crew members approach one of these things from opposite directions, how's it supposed to decide who to face? Yet another "cool but nonsensical" addition.
The container for patches looks exactly like, and is held by the player exactly like,
a makeup compact. This looks rather silly. Also, it's annoying to have to sit through that canned animation every time you use one.
Wall screens can't be smashed like in SS1, and make a metallic sound when struck.
The security cameras themselves have a laughably complex design, with multiple joints and dangling cables. They almost look like a mini-GLaDOS. Whoever modeled them must have been bored that day.
The surgery machine design is completely nonsensical. It's impossible to load a human being into one of these things without essentially folding them in half. Not exactly something you'd want to do with someone who might be gravely injured.
Too many useless objects you can pick up, and no apparent rhyme or reason to which ones can be picked up and which ones can't. If we're going to have all these junk objects, there should be a clear UI indication of what's junk and what's not, preferably before I pick it up.
The audio log object looks like a toy Jetsons spaceship. I can see how they superficially resemble the original SS1 audio log sprite, but the interpretation is off. I believe the sprite is supposed to be a play on the various high-capacity removable disk formats that were popular in the early 90s (ZIP disks, Jazz cartridges, etc.).
Those ridiculous bouncy-bouncy doors on the elevator are still in, I see. I'm wondering if whoever did the animation for this has ever ridden an elevator in their life.
The repulsorlifts now look like
some kind of plasma blender. These things are supposed to be designed for people to walk and stand on. That means their surface should be flat.
AUDIO
Sound propagation issues between rooms. In the starting room, which is completely sealed, I can clearly hear a cyborg talking.
The vocal "HOOAH!" "HAAHH!" every single time you swing your pipe is ridiculous. Please just give us a swoosh sound.
Still using that cringey "You're gonna need it" message from Rebecca Lansing, I see. Please don't. The original log was so much more professional-sounding.
In the re-recorded SHODAN greeting, she mispronounces "somnolent" as "somnulunt".
The re-recorded audio logs are not, in general, an improvement. They sound too much like the people who made them are (dramatic flourish) "AAACTING!".
Even though the new music isn't bad, I'd still very much like the option to switch to the original music.
Security cameras make a loud annoying chirp when they spot you, and a quieter chirp when they lose sight of you. This indicates to the player that there's some gameplay significance to being spotted by cameras. But there isn't. It doesn't matter at all if a camera can see you or not, so these sounds are just an annoying distraction. Instead of being motivated to destroy them to lower the security level, I'm motivated to destroy them so I don't have to listen to them anymore.
LEVEL DESIGN
There's an
absurdly bright blinking yellow light in the starting room, which apparently serves no purpose whatsoever. This light did not exist in the original level. There are a couple more lights like this scattered around the level.
There are multiple places where a small corner of a room has been completely fenced off with railings for no apparent reason. Like, there's railing around an area that's literally just floor with nothing in it.
The pleasant little
relaxation garden from the original now looks like "
HAZARDOUS FLORA CONTAINMENT BAY - DO NOT DISENGAGE FORCE FIELD". That's not very relaxing at all.
CYBERSPACE
The cyberspace entry and exit animation is way too long.
Taking damage from colliding with walls is super annoying. Not even the original cyberspace did that.
While original cyberspace had the problem that it could be difficult to tell where the walls were, this version's cyberspace, due to the incredibly busy texturing, has the opposite problem that it's often difficult to tell where the walls are NOT. It's pure visual overload.
WEAPONS
Weapon overheating appears to have been removed. Booo.
When the Sparq is set to the highest power level, it constantly runs an animation of electric arcs spewing out from the gun, which a) is super distracting, and b) doesn't even make sense when it's not being fired. Its battery can be completely drained and it's still madly spitzing and sparking away.
ENEMIES
The Repairbot shoots FIRE at you? Why would a repair bot be equipped with a flamethrower? The original Repairbot used electrical attacks, which actually made sense for what it is.
The new name for the Hopper, "Mobile Laser", makes it sound like a weapon. Calling it something like "Mobile Welder" instead would better suggest its original purpose as a maintenance robot.
PHYSICS
Some of the props sitting on people's desks go wildly flying when you bump into them.
Trying to solve a puzzle while constantly bobbing up and down and sliding around in a repulsorlift beam is a gigantic pain.
The leaning motion is clunky and makes it feel like I'm banging against a wall even when I'm standing in the middle of a room. Needs some easing on the animation.
Destroyed things often continually make little jittery wiggling motions instead of just accepting that they're dead.
IN SUMMARY
It seems to me that every time someone on the dev team for this remake suggested a new "cool" thing, the response from management was always "Yes!" and never "Wait, does that make sense? How will it impact gameplay?"
A lot of the complaints above may seem like little things, and many of them are, but getting those things right is exactly why people still talk about Looking Glass games decades later. They understood that immersion comes from getting all the little things right. It doesn't even cost anything to get things right, it just takes devs who can be bothered to care and think things through.
