KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[cvv]

Said it many times before but SS1 isn't a horror game.

Never said it's a horror game. Actually the reason I like SS1 more than SS2 is bc the first game is not a straight up space zombie horror, it's much more of a slick, edgy cyberpunk-in-space shooter.

But it does have survival/horror vibes at times, like the organic/garden zombie level and a few other places.

My point is the remake looks old and lame. Back in 1994 it's almost miraculous what kindda atmosphere they could conjure with the primitive 3D engine and sound tech, they were 10 years in the future. The remake feels like stuck 10 years in the past.

 

[Ash]

My point is the remake looks old and lame. Back in 1994 it's almost miraculous what kindda atmosphere they could conjure with the primitive 3D engine and sound tech, they were 10 years in the future. The remake feels like stuck 10 years in the past.

What do you expect? The game was made on kickstarter dollars, went back to the drawing board multiple times AND switched engine. Also only manchild bitch bois give a shit about graphical fidelity. Once a certain threshold of "not shit"/"looks decent" is passed. it's all wasted dollar that should be invested in systems, content, polish etc instead. If only the industry worked that way instead of becoming a producer of multi-million dollar bleeding edge sightseeing simulator simon says SHIT.

 

[Daedalos]

Imagine saying in 2022, that graphics doesn't matter much.
SS1 looks fine to me, I get the autists raging and all that, u can play the original SS1, nothing wrong with that.
Roll it on

 

[†††]

Imagine saying in 2022, that graphics doesn't matter much.

Graphics don't matter much.

 

[Ash]

Imagine saying in 2022 of all things that graphics DO matter much. I understood it way back in the mid 2000s when the internet was sperging over graphics and driving the industry into the ground. I didn't agree with it at all, but the passion for graphics sort of made sense, for example so virgin losers can whack it to hi-fidelity waifu.
But to say it in 2022 when we've already obtained mind-blowing gfx, lost everything else in the process, every AAA game now looks almost the same...YOU should be retardo'ed

Gameplay is king
Quality sound design, art direction is second. At this point, you can make an outstanding game.
Quality music, atmosphere & story is tertiary & optional, as much as I value all three.
Graphical fidelity is LAST.

 

[Daedalos]

Presentation is king.
Nobody wants to play some janky shit, that has shit audio experience, shit animation, shit story and worldbuilding and of course shit graphics.

Graphics help immerse you completely on what your eyes are looking at, draws you in, in cue with the rest of the stuff happening on screen.

Put another way. I don't care about moving ugly pixels around anymore.

Also your argument is so shit, because of broad universally used engines like unreal 5 etc. u act like the entire graphics budget is spent by licensing and using unreal 5.

nigger get real.

games with amazing graphics are usually not bad because all the time was spent on that

 

[Ash]

Dumbass confusing graphical fidelity with art direction, and the execution of said art direction.

Nobody wants to play some janky shit, that has shit audio experience, shit animation, shit story and worldbuilding and of course shit graphics.

I have played and enjoyed hundreds of games with no story or shit story. So not only are you a graphics whore decline enabler, you're a storyfaggot too.

As for presentation, I will reluctantly swallow a relatively ugly game (there's obviously some kind of threshold, but it's really low) if the gameplay is great. Not vice-versa. I will never play another game with shit gameplay. Got tricked into doing that one time too many when I was younger.

Also your argument is so shit, because of broad universally used engines like unreal 5 etc. u act like the entire graphics budget is spent by licensing and using unreal 5.

Graphics hog the vast majority of a game's budget BY FAR. The more pixels and polys, the more people and time you need spend on those pixels & polys.
Second comes marketing (sometimes first). This is also dictated by graphics. If graphics were not so expensive, marketing would not need to be too to get a ROI.

Scandinavian retard bitch

 

[†††]

nigger get real.

You wanted to cancel people off the internet and the codex for saying this word. Good to know you were trolling then.

 

[ciox]

There is little of atmospheric in linear corridor shooter like Dead Space, Bioshock or Metro. SS1 original is already superior to these only because it is not a linear corridor shooter. People need just to realize that SS1 is a fundamental different game from corridor shooters like Dead Space, Bioshock or Metro.

Agree.
It is more focused on exploration. Listening to crew logs,entering cyberspace to open locked doors and access information,finding ammo and supplies in secret areas etc.

Way to miss the point.

I was talking about the general vibe and feel of the game. From all the footage I've seen this remake looks and feels stiff, lame and obsolete.

It's not 1994, players now have a whole slew of experiences to compare. The games I listed aren't the same as SS1 in every single way but they share certain features - all are atmospheric, tense, sometimes horror-y SF action adventure games. And in those aspects all of them are miles ahead of this remake.

It's like shooting a modern remake of a 1950s SF movie with robots and keeping the ungainly, goofy robot design of that era (you know, a walking tin can with a lightbulb for a head), only with some spit and shine. It's ridiculous.

This is the result of the makers trying to hit all the bases at once.
The upcoming game is supposed to satisfy old System Shock fans, Bioshock fans, and the fans of goofy retro pixel boomer shooters, all at once.
I think we know what usually happens when someone tries to please everyone.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Imagine saying in 2022 of all things that graphics DO matter much. I understood it way back in the mid 2000s when the internet was sperging over graphics and driving the industry into the ground. I didn't agree with it at all, but the passion for graphics sort of made sense, for example so virgin losers can whack it to hi-fidelity waifu.
But to say it in 2022 when we've already obtained mind-blowing gfx, lost everything else in the process, every AAA game now looks almost the same...YOU should be retardo'ed

Gameplay is king
Quality sound design, art direction is second. At this point, you can make an outstanding game.
Quality music, atmosphere & story is tertiary & optional, as much as I value all three.
Graphical fidelity is LAST.

get fucked nigger all of those are equally number one. fuck your agenda hurr durr

 

[mkultra]

Dumbass confusing graphical fidelity with art direction, and the execution of said art direction.

Nobody wants to play some janky shit, that has shit audio experience, shit animation, shit story and worldbuilding and of course shit graphics.

I have played and enjoyed hundreds of games with no story or shit story. So not only are you a graphics whore decline enabler, you're a storyfaggot too.

As for presentation, I will reluctantly swallow a relatively ugly game (there's obviously some kind of threshold, but it's really low) if the gameplay is great. Not vice-versa. I will never play another game with shit gameplay. Got tricked into doing that one time too many when I was younger.

Also your argument is so shit, because of broad universally used engines like unreal 5 etc. u act like the entire graphics budget is spent by licensing and using unreal 5.

Graphics hog the vast majority of a game's budget BY FAR. The more pixels and polys, the more people and time you need spend on those pixels & polys.
Second comes marketing (sometimes first). This is also dictated by graphics. If graphics were not so expensive, marketing would not need to be too to get a ROI.

Scandinavian retard bitch

lol. no. "Pixels and polys", i can tell you have no idea what you're talking about. Pixels. lol. or like more polys is more expensive or would mean more work, nope, quite the opposite.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Immersion and atmosphere depend on gameplay and not on graphics alone. This is the reason why the original SS1 is still more immersive and a better game than bioshock or dead space. If the remake will respect the gameplay of the original, then it will be automatically more immersive and atmospheric too.

 

[Bad Sector]

But to say it in 2022 when we've already obtained mind-blowing gfx, lost everything else in the process, every AAA game now looks almost the same...

In 2022 it indeed doesn't make sense to say that but not for the arbitrary reasons you mentioned, but because there have been tons of successful indie games with low fidelity graphics, showing that the gaming audience doesn't put graphical fidelity to a pedestral as much as it used to do back in the midlate 90s to early 2000s.

Also your argument is so shit, because of broad universally used engines like unreal 5 etc.

Unreal gives you a nice renderer with mostly decent tools, but wont give you assets or use those tools for you to make the game. By far the most expensive aspect of AAA (and AAA-wannabe) game development is creating the game's assets.

Spoiler

yes i know UE5 has metahuman and Epic gives you free "megascans", but those are still a small part of the needed assets a game has, unless your entire game is about a bunch of dudes hanging out in a desert

 

[Morenatsu.]

The funny thing about high-fidelity graphics is that past a certain point, I can't imagine the process for creating assets should actually change all that much. Like, the difference in assets of PSX and PS2 games is massive, but not really so between PS3 and PS4 games. However, the visual style of games have changed despite this, probably to compensate for the lack of meaningful technical improvements, but also out of an increasing incompetency. Rather than realism of any kind, they're more interested in coating games in cinematic filters and layers of junk while out-sourcing all the work to random Indians or whatever it is they do. This was already starting back in the late 2000s, but those games seem rather tolerable now. Whenever I hear about fancy new things like PBR, RTX, LGBT, WTFBBQ, and then look at the games that actually use them, all I see is the developers going haha graphics printer go brrrr.

 

[JDR13]

Gameplay will always be king, but anyone claming graphics and presentation don't matter is kidding themself. They most definitely matter.

 

[Terenty]

Graphics and presentation matter for marketing and the hype cycle before release. Once you get you hands on the game and find out it's shit gameplay wise no fancy graphics will help it.

Also isn't it the very reason Raph Colantonio left Arkane? He said the industry is pushing for high fidelity and eye candy at the expense of everything else if I recall correctly.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

The only interesting thing about this remake is that it's probably holding back the release of SS2 EE, which looks much better and which I'd actually want to play.

 

[mkultra]

The funny thing about high-fidelity graphics is that past a certain point, I can't imagine the process for creating assets should actually change all that much. Like, the difference in assets of PSX and PS2 games are massive, but not really so between PS3 and PS4 games. However, the visual style of games have changed despite this, probably to compensate for the lack of meaningful technical improvements, but also out of an increasing incompetency. Rather than realism of any kind, they're more interested in coating games in cinematic filters and layers of junk while out-sourcing all the work to random Indians or whatever it is they do. This was already starting back in the late 2000s, but those games seem rather tolerable now. Whenever I hear about fancy new things like PBR, RTX, LGBT, WTFBBQ, and then look at the games that actually use them, all I see is the developers going haha graphics printer go brrrr.

Graphics is constantly changing, big time, but yes, it will be less about polycount now.
What still absolutely blows in games is 1) animation and clipping, 2) ""A.I"" (it's not even AI, it's just lame scripts). AI hasn't evolved much, if anything, since pac-man.

 

[kangaxx]

Presentation is king.
Nobody wants to play some janky shit, that has shit audio experience, shit animation, shit story and worldbuilding and of course shit graphics.

Graphics help immerse you completely on what your eyes are looking at, draws you in, in cue with the rest of the stuff happening on screen.

Put another way. I don't care about moving ugly pixels around anymore.

Also your argument is so shit, because of broad universally used engines like unreal 5 etc. u act like the entire graphics budget is spent by licensing and using unreal 5.

nigger get real.

games with amazing graphics are usually not bad because all the time was spent on that

Most "well presented" games these days are fucking terrible, with a few exceptions. I'd far rather replay SS2 for the 50th time (which I've just done) or Deus Ex for the 100th than a well-presented AAA borefest.

 

[Bad Sector]

but not really so between PS3 and PS4 games.

There have been changes actually. Even ignoring the whole PBR thing (which is more of an artist pipeline change than a technical one - from a technical perspective it is just a slightly different lighting equation in the shaders), during the PS3 times a lot of textures were made using 2D tools like Photoshop, often with some plugins or external helper tools for normalmaps, with artists working with the unwrapped textures directly and often each one individually which was still possible with only having 2-3 textures per material (and pretty much all of them being based, in one way or another, on the diffuse map texture). Nowadays textures are almost always made using 3D painting tools that work directly on the target model and often manipulate several textures for different purposes at the same time, treating the entire material as a single "brush" that paints using a "source material" instead each texture individually. Also 3D scanning has helped with making the "source materials" and while photosourcing is still a thing, it is almost always used together with a 3D modelling tool to replicate the underlying geometry instead of using the photo as a heightmap like you'd see in most PS3 era games.

These are big things, in fact since the tools involved are dedicated to this, they are a bigger change than the PS2->PS3 era switch as in the PS3 era artists were still using the same tools (3dsmax/maya/whatever and Photoshop, really) that they used in the PS2 era - and the focus was still on the diffuse map that was used as the "master" texture from which everything else was derived.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

The thing about graphics is not that they’re irrelevant, but we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns. Sure, you can keep adding polygons, but do you really need to?

 

[Luka-boy]

Looks p. bad, goofy at times. Who's this for? Fifty-year old fans of the original?

Pretty much, yes.

Remember the shitstorm when they heavily deviated from the original and they had to reset much of their progress to make it much more like the original SS1?

Whether that was a good call or not is a matter for debate, but the current look and feel of the game is what is it because it's deliberately meant to resemble the original in certain aspects.

 

[Morenatsu.]

but not really so between PS3 and PS4 games.

There have been changes actually. Even ignoring the whole PBR thing (which is more of an artist pipeline change than a technical one - from a technical perspective it is just a slightly different lighting equation in the shaders), during the PS3 times a lot of textures were made using 2D tools like Photoshop, often with some plugins or external helper tools for normalmaps, with artists working with the unwrapped textures directly and often each one individually which was still possible with only having 2-3 textures per material (and pretty much all of them being based, in one way or another, on the diffuse map texture). Nowadays textures are almost always made using 3D painting tools that work directly on the target model and often manipulate several textures for different purposes at the same time, treating the entire material as a single "brush" that paints using a "source material" instead each texture individually. Also 3D scanning has helped with making the "source materials" and while photosourcing is still a thing, it is almost always used together with a 3D modelling tool to replicate the underlying geometry instead of using the photo as a heightmap like you'd see in most PS3 era games.

These are big things, in fact since the tools involved are dedicated to this, they are a bigger change than the PS2->PS3 era switch as in the PS3 era artists were still using the same tools (3dsmax/maya/whatever and Photoshop, really) that they used in the PS2 era - and the focus was still on the diffuse map that was used as the "master" texture from which everything else was derived.

Beside the point, don't care. 3d scanner go brrrr

 

[ciox]

Looks p. bad, goofy at times. Who's this for? Fifty-year old fans of the original?

Pretty much, yes.

Remember the shitstorm when they heavily deviated from the original and they had to reset much of their progress to make it much more like the original SS1?

Whether that was a good call or not is a matter for debate, but the current look and feel of the game is what is it because it's deliberately meant to resemble the original in certain aspects.

Well it was one hell of a ride given how the original look of the game (Unity demo) was more faithful to the original, but the gameplay they were planning and building was not.
Now the look of the game (Unreal build) is darker and less faithful to the original, while the gameplay is a little more faithful, arsenal changes aside.

Makes sense. (not really)

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I backed the kickstarter years ago and haven't really paid it much attention after that. I never played the original and backed it because I'm too much of a techno-elitist to play the original but I still recognize it's influence because Wikipedia told me (I guess I'd make a great video game journalist, eh?). I would've preferred if the original devs worked on it, like how Cyan remade Myst a bunch of times, but I guess fan consensus would be close enough. I don't mind the pseudo-retro style (or whatever you would call it) because, if nothing else, it at least distinguishes the remake visually from the countless other games influenced by SS1.