System Shock is one my favorite series, but considering the lack of quality from Underworld Ascendant I can't say my exceptions are very high for this. Hope I'm wrong though.
Not really sure about Shodan's voice there. Shodan sounded much better in SS2. Still looking forward to trying this, but Prey did fill that gap in my heart quite capably.
Pleased to hear something about it. I'm a little skeptical though. That felt closer to horror than I associate with SS, and something about Shodan I don't quite like. It might be the 3d ish rendition. It makes her seem to exist physically in the world.
Considering the ending of SS2 where she escapes her supposed demise and possessed a human body to escape that might be the point.
is it the old prey or new prey people say is good
old prey is good and new prey is good, for different reasons. new prey is basically a system shock game, mechanically
prey is an amazing game and I hope ss3 can live up to it and it's predecessors
I hope hacking is akin to cyberspace in SS1, really wasnt a fan of SS2's hacking right after completing SS1 for the first time. I don't know why i didn't complete it before other than being afraid of the controls, they were quite fine actually, with
mouselook, atleast
The System Shock games were heavily steeped in horror though.
Not saying the game looks bad or anything but it looks a heck of a lot like Doom 16, though that could be because of the chunky graphics on the first and second game
The friend I co-oped SS2 with and me joked about how I fancied Jessica from her voice logs and then she got possessed. God damn it - I always get the crazy ones.
I don't disagree. It may just be the delivery that has changed. SS2 made me uncomfortable and very cautious. This teaser I feel leans more into trying to scare me.
Personally I feel discomfort and vulnerability is more compelling which SS2 and Prey 2017 succeed at. Perpetual low tension as opposed to bursts. However it's challenging to judge and draw conclusions on 30 seconds.
I'm with you there. Prey created a sense of paranoia that was palpable in me. I find that much scarier than more in-your-face horror.
What about the System Shock Remake?
Isn't that a remake of the first game?
That's being developed by Nightdive, Otherside is working on 3
I said it in the Retro thread but I honestly don't think I've ever been bored by a 30 second trailer like I was by this. It just doesn't really seem all that interesting, it's like they cherry-picked atmospheric and aesthetic details of System Shocks 1 and 2 (which were very different products that shouldn't be directly mixed together) without understanding anything about either, and since Warren Spector is on board that probably means the project is all kinds of off-track. It might be overjudgemental to some but the sheer fact such a short teaser has inspired nothing but apathy in me when it should entice me is something to say the least. Without the creative force of Harvey Smith I honestly cannot see much being clever or fresh about this.
System Shocks 1 and 2 are, like I say, very different from one another (in fact SS2 started life as an original IP) and blending their elements doesn't make something better than either one of them, IMO, it actually misunderstands the fundamentals of the games and blows out the fresh feeling a new take on the angle could have. Prey was effectively System Shock 3 in spirit and it nailed it so fucking hard because it went for a completely new spin on a similar concept, and intentionally played into and against the strengths and clichés of the Shock-Alike subgenre.
This is probably just going to be a retread of SS1 with elements introduced in SS2 brought in alongside it, on a clunky engine with a completely uninspired visual style. The Cortex Reavers and Mutants in SS1 were bizarrely iconic in their unusual, slightly-illogical sprite design and almost cartoonish proportions, whereas here the hyper-realistic hyper-detailed sci-fi design just comes across as generic, and that's honestly not in retrospect of recent sci-fi games, because the original SS1 designs are still iconic and still original because they were actually inspired rather than derivative or generic.
The station/ship design is also way too gloomy and way too over-detailed and TECHNOLOGY!!! for the SS setting. System Shocks 1 and 2 took place on highly-advanced space superstructures but they were, of course, living and working spaces. They felt like legitimate environs even within the constraints of their primitive graphics because the developers went about actually visually designing them to look like places that you could safely and feasibly walk through, albeit fallen apart and decrepit as a result of the chaos that had torn through Citadel and the Von Braun respectively. When you leave the secret med-suite at the start of SS1 you enter into the atrium of the medical labs, and you come across a whole room strewn with decapitated heads, bones, and tumbled carcasses from a mass slaughter that occurred when SHODAN's robots ripped through, and even though it's in a tiny window and rendered by sprites, it's still very evocative because it looks like an actual medical wing rather than a sci-fi movie set design that's grossly under-lit and strewn with all this extraneous, needless deckplating bollocks to make it look "futuristic".
It's why Alien Isolation was also such a good worldspace. It's why Prey was so fucking fantastic too because Prey really, really felt like an actual space people worked and lived in. It's why SS1 and SS2 inspired those games so heavily - along with Deus Ex, which did the same philosophy inside a more conventional urban setting with the odd lab and secret base here and there. They created world spaces.
This doesn't look like a world space. I cannot see people of the far future working on what has been presented in these photos, just like the earlier footage/photos of the SS1 remake. It looks like an overcomplicated "sci fi" design.
It's a lot for me to take from a short clip but it honestly strikes me so vividly despite being so utterly unenthused by the trailer that I can't shake these thoughts from my head.
As was said above, it's being made by a different studio. They also restarted development on the game a while ago because they felt they were straying too far into making System Shock 2 in System Shock's levels, they pointed out that both games are actually very different and while SS2 fans probably would like the changes it wouldn't be an authentic remake like they originally set out to do.
I love the fact that the first robotic enemy you see is the Cortex Reaver from the first game, what a morbid enemy.
I am glad they're back, since they tie into SHODAN's concept of humans as literal resources very well. It was something that I felt ehh about with SS2, since I felt it lacked as much of the cybernetic-horror angle that defined SS1 for me.
Holy hell that is a lot of assumption for 22 seconds of video. And really only about 12 given that the last half of the video is just a held shot of shodan. We saw, what, three scenes kinda?
Honestly the line itself feels a bit off, but I think it's also because it has been nearly twenty years since Terri Brosius last voiced the character, so obviously her voice has changed over the years. That, and the software to generate SHODAN's glitching is obviously now much different.
I hope that SS3 has another awful code hunt like SS1 with the computer stations and SS2 with the paintings just to give the modern era a proper display of what System Shock is all about. That being an incredible game then you're like "wait what the fuck do I do" for an hour or so then the game gets good again.
Also Cortex Reavers fuck yes my nuts are quaking
If you actually read my post instead of seeing the wordcount and tuning out you'd understand that I'm not making assumptions.
It's nothing more than an informed assessment. I took a look at what this teaser presents, and disputed what it presents and provided elaboration based on what I know of the series. It doesn't present a lot, for sure, but what it does present is that far off the mark by my understanding, and as a teaser meant to drum up hype in people exactly like myself, who love immersive sim games and the System Shock series, it says something that it completely repulsed me into making a fuckoff post about why it looks boring.
Also, Warren Spector is the creative director from all accounts, and he has a very poor track-record of recent games, and was not the creative force behind most of SS1's better elements, he said in the SS1 dev commentary that he was general oversight rather than the auteur people ascribe him as. He himself has said he isn't an auteur but people continue to put him on a pedestal as one, when in reality most of the successes of his works have been collaborative or inspired.
Just because there's elements of what made something good there, doesn't mean it is gonna be good, and what's present here from the past SS games, what they've presented to me, has looked so off-base that I cannot be anything but apathetic-to-cynical about it.
I'm not a System Shock kind of person, having played only a very tiny bit of SS2 and watched a few videos of a few bits of both SS1 and 2, with more emphasis on the latter. So I guess my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt, but...
This teaser, for how small it is, wasn't very well put together, for the kind of game that SS2 at least, seemed to be about.
For starters, theres waay to much light. Don't get me wrong, I might unironicaly enjoy Doom3, but that doesn't means I don't get turned off by a game thats way too dark for the sake of being spooky. This is doing the opposite though. Way too much shine coming from the places that could give off lighting. Textures also seem to help with that, in a bad way, and make it too well lit, instead of a more dark, decadent and dingy approach. This SHOULD supposedly be after SHODAN mucks up yet another space station or something of the sort, yet it kind of looks like a somewhat pristine place rolled right off the assembly line.
Right from the getgo, also showing too much. It feels like they put a couple of enemies and scenery right in the spotlight, and IMO, it didn't quite work. It didn't really build up suspense. Remember how Dead Space showcased a new enemy? From behind a glass, or in an unreacheable place? They did it, but they did it in a somewhat subtle way, not revealing way too much. Not showing the whole deal. The trailers were the same. They had this subtle approach to showing you things, in a very trailer-like way, yeah, but honestly, really well done. All this is missing though is a man going "we got this claw guy, and this robot, and even THIS guy here in a chair! Look at how its an experiment gone baaaaaad!", and it just lacks subtleness. It feels like a "featuring Dante from DMC3" sticker.
I did like the robot's animation. Looked nice, very fluid.
Worst of all was the music. Why did they put such an actiony soudntrack with that extremely dubious sound ending? Again, wrong feelings given, making me go "oh that darn shodan at it again gosh darn it! mo problems coming our way!". Fits more a cartoon or some lighthearted show more than System Shock.
And then we get to SHODAN's design.
don't reveal her, instead, use just her voice, which brings us to
her voice needed less of a human tone to it, more distortion was needed, a more artificial feeling
for the love of god, don't make her face so "lifelike", so human looking. It doesn't needs her face to move soo much, and to even smirk at you. IMO, it completely breaks the spooky vibe she has going for her.
I know, its a teaser, but imo, its a bad one at that. It lacks any of the atmosphere a level of SS2 can show you in half of the time this teaser had, or less, and I hope its very different from this.
Hi, I did read your post. Its filled with a lot of unfounded assumptions and is kinda actually useless. Thanks for fucking playing. You're interpreting all of this from two quick shots of probable enemies, and three sorta views of rooms. Out of a game that is most certainly going to be more than two fucking enemies and three fucking rooms. You've got no knowledge of gameplay mechanics, story, the broader setting, basically nothing. So you're just going, "Well I don't like it because mmplightinghmbmphpreybbpphwarrenspecterpshhh."
Do you mean the weird MIDI "pip" near the end of SHODAN's speech? That's a quote (or a reference at least, I can't place which iteration it would be) from the original SS1 OST, but it does feel out of place along with the other track they chose.
Looks cool, but for the love of god DON'T BECOME AN EPIC EXCLUSIVE!
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