[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0beVkxu--M[/media]
This is a seriously deep critique on the design of System Shock 2 and most first-person games in general. A good view if you're interested in game design or System Shock 2 or whatever.
[I]Frobbing~[/I]
Man I'm so happy I played SS2 a year or so ago, now I have this awesome story how my friends and walkthroughs suggested you stay away from Psi because guns were better, but I proved them all wrong by going heavily into melee and psi and smashing everything in one hit with my Crystal Club of Destiny.
I think my favorite part was the tutorial, where you mix and match your character's history.
i am really enjoying this renaissance of longform in-depth reviews and explorations of games and game design and it is kind of igniting a passion for game design in me
[QUOTE=Qbe-tex;52643390]I remember when I saw the Fallout 3 posted here by hbomberguy I thought "wow, who'd wanna watch an hour and a half of that?"
But then I started watching it, you know, just so I coud see what it was all about. Then I watched more. And by the time the video was done I was hooked. I have loads of respect for anyone who does this types of things (hbomberguy, Joseph Anderson, Noah Cardwell Gerdais) and it's always good to see a new face in essay type scene. The longest videos I've seen on youtube was Joseph Anderson's 3 hour long Uncharted and Last of Us review and I loved it.[/QUOTE]
oh boy do i have a video for you
[video=youtube;Vp4-9G47uF0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp4-9G47uF0[/video]
[QUOTE=Levithan;52639584]Man I'm so happy I played SS2 a year or so ago, now I have this awesome story how my friends and walkthroughs suggested you stay away from Psi because guns were better, but I proved them all wrong by going heavily into melee and psi and smashing everything in one hit with my Crystal Club of Destiny.
I think my favorite part was the tutorial, where you mix and match your character's history.[/QUOTE]
I think I'd recommend doing Psi on a second playthrough to most people. It's fun and really good once you've unlocked a bit of it, but it can be a total pain in the ass in the start if you don't really know what you're doing.
Kinda excaberated by the interface being clunky as shit; but also part of the charm.
[QUOTE=Tobba;52643436]I think I'd recommend doing Psi on a second playthrough to most people. It's fun and really good once you've unlocked a bit of it, but it can be a total pain in the ass in the start if you don't really know what you're doing.
Kinda excaberated by the interface being clunky as shit; but also part of the charm.[/QUOTE]
PSI playthroughs are really fun if you know what you're doing, but the rationing game is [b]hell [/b].
PSI hypos cost a lot of nanites to buy and are rare out in the field, so if you're not conserving them like a drug dealing Ebenezer Scrooge you're going to run out before you finish the Rickenbacher. And when that happens, you're [i]fucked [/i]!
I still yet to find a game that creeps me out in creative ways like the annelids or the cyber-midwives did.
The whole terrifyingly consuming cyberpunk/bodyhorror atmosphere of SS2 is still something I cannot find replicated in any game made after it.
[QUOTE=eatdembeanz;52643612]PSI playthroughs are really fun if you know what you're doing, but the rationing game is [b]hell [/b].
PSI hypos cost a lot of nanites to buy and are rare out in the field, so if you're not conserving them like a drug dealing Ebenezer Scrooge you're going to run out before you finish the Rickenbacher. And when that happens, you're [i]fucked [/i]![/QUOTE]
I prefer to pretend everything from the Rickenbacker up until you get to the cyberspace part never existed and something that wasn't completely awful was in place of it.
That was clearly the point when the devs ran out of money.
[editline]3rd September 2017[/editline]
That's actually a big part of why SS2 is interesting from a game design standpoint though. Many aspects of the game are absolutely [i]awful[/i], yet it's still somehow actually an incredibly good game.
[QUOTE=eatdembeanz;52643612]PSI playthroughs are really fun if you know what you're doing, but the rationing game is [B]hell [/B].
PSI hypos cost a lot of nanites to buy and are rare out in the field, so if you're not conserving them like a drug dealing Ebenezer Scrooge you're going to run out before you finish the Rickenbacher. And when that happens, you're [I]fucked [/I]![/QUOTE]
If you hack the dispenser near the engineering bay elevator, you can get cheap(er) psi hypos. Coupled with the recycler, a full PSI run is not difficult after the first levels. After that, it's a walk in the park, even on the impossible difficulty.
Coincidentally, [url=http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-09-03-the-making-of-system-shock-2s-best-level]Eurogamer put out an article today[/url] interviewing the designer of MedSci about its creation and evolution.
[QUOTE]Take the basic layout of Med/Sci, which again has two sources of inspiration. The first, as Vogel explains, is Star Trek. "I would spend hours with Star Trek blueprints and I would just think about how a game level might be constructed, and I would look at where they put the toilets and I would look at where they put the research and I would look at how they built the decks relative to each other." Submarines and battleships were also useful references. Vogel wanted to imbue Med/Sci with a "dark and functional" feel and these naval vessels, both real and imagined, provided that cold and logical pragmatism Vogel sought.
But the other strand of inspiration for Med/Sci, as hinted at by the first part of the name, is a hospital. "If I go to a doctor here in Seattle, I'm usually shepherded down to a basement floor somewhere where there's tons of labs and there's signs but I still get lost. And there's 15 intersections along the way and I've already taken a left when I should have gone right, and now all of a sudden I gotta ask a nurse how to get to damn X-Ray and it was right in front of me the whole time," Vogel says. The point is, as Vogel further explains that hospitals aren't always built efficiently. They're vast, bustling and confusing places, almost hive-like in structure.[/QUOTE]
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