Thief scared me far more than SS2 did, for sure. The atmosphere and design was spot-on. So much so that I could never really get into the game as much as I probably should have, as each mission was waaay too stressful.
I played both. I was spooked by both, for different reasons. Thief: Return to Cathedral - The dragging chains. Yeah, I am there with you. Audio design was better. Flat out.
Although I am still trying to figure out how you are trying to make this ZERO-SUM.
I guess for me it’s zero sum because SS2 didn’t do much to me. Having gone through Thief, I saw through most of their shtick. They took the spiders from Thief, the ‘monsters saying creepy things’, the vulnerability, and added very little. The fact that the game looked worse using the same engine didn’t help. I guess it was just me though.
I played through Thief slowly. I bought it at launch, and finished it a year later.
System Shock 2 I started and finished in a week. I thought it was a lot less intense and easy to get into compared to Thief. It definitely looked worse than Thief despite using the same engine, but for me the audio really made up for that. The audio in Thief was superb, but the audio in System Shock 2 was just so exquisite. I looked forward to finding each audio log so much. It had a much more cohesive and well written story compared to Thief, and told through those audio logs. I loved both games, but System Shock 2 as an overall package was just so much more compelling a place.
Saw this on Wikipedia’s In the News list today. System Shock 2 was released 20 years ago today. Happy B-day.
This has also reminded me how old I am…
Happy Shock-day!
System Shock 2 remains my #1 game of all time. So good.
I couldn’t finish it, the game is pretty stress inducing. I think I stopped on a level where everything was crooked or upside-down. Another reason why I mostly play turn-based games.
Aaaand as if by magic…
Considering that SS2 in the NewDark engine + the various community audiovisual patches pretty much already is SS2:EE, I’m puzzled what more Night Dive could bring to it.
I echo this sentiment. It probably comes in at #3 for me, (after Star Control 2 and DiRT Rally 2.0) but it’s one of the best ever videogame experiences still.
If that’s all they did, I’d probably spring for it again anyway.
Errr… my point is that this already exists. It wouldn’t be something new.
That’s a little silly. There’s a mod manager built by the community, and the GOG version already has newdark.
What I expect them to do is make better 3d models for the enemies than what the community has done, which is pretty mediocre. Bringing some balance to the systems would also be good.
SS2 is the one game I regretted never finishing as I’m a huge fan of LG studios. Looking forward to the enhanced edition, whatever that may entail!
System Shock 2 is one game that helped me get into my part time writing career. It will always have a special place because of that, and because it’s an incredible game. I got to play some multiplayer with Rob Fermier and having him explain some of the design and decisions they made and point out lots of interesting tidbits as we played was one of my best gaming moments ever.
Very jealous of this.
Nevertheless, personally I feel the game is overrated. Deus Ex came out just a little later and blew me away, whereas most of the cool stuff in SS2 was imported either from Thief or System Shock 1.
Thief and System Shock 2 were basically in development at the same time, in two studios without a ton of separation between them. I wouldn’t say they “imported” things from Thief and SS1… but of course as a sequel to the first game it was going to have a ton of things familiar from the original.
There’s some good info here about development tbh…
Yeah I listened to game dev club on SS2, including the interviews about it.
SS2 imported the engine (obviously) from Thief, including the crappy visuals and awesome sounds. It imported the giant spiders. But because they upped the engine to 16 bits and probably due to time limits, they couldn’t maintain the same size of levels the Thief engine supported (which is part of what made it great), and stealth is pretty much half-assed in SS2 – it’s in the engine, but it’s very hit or miss. From SS1, SS2 got the diaries (which were novel at the time), the survival-horror atmosphere, backstory, the concept of enhancements, and SHODAN.
The RPG system was new, but I also think it’s incredibly lacking. Mostly, I think the project suffered from not enough development time – it feels rushed everywhere, and it suffers from the worst malady of RPGs – you need to make choices about your character before you know what you’ll need, and making the wrong choice can doom you to failure.
Uhh… the only thing that got upgraded to 16-bit was the lightmaps (RGB565 vs Dark Project’s 8-bit grayscale), but Thief 2 got that same upgrade and its levels were even larger than Thief’s.
If I had to guess, I’d say they kept the level size down because the player frequently transitions between map segments. In Thief it doesn’t much matter if a map takes minutes to load, because you’ll be in that one map for hours. Also, SS2’s automap system only supports a single map page, so they had to keep the levels within the scale of the map. Tellingly, the one truly massive level in the game, the first segment of the Rickenbacker, has no automap.
It’s actually possible, using the editor, to merge the split-up decks into a single map, and the engine handles it just fine.
Thief 1 supported only 8-bit textures. Shock2 transitioned to 16-bit textures, which was later incorporated into Thief 2.
It’s fine now, after both NewDark and the arrival of faster CPUs. At the time, System Shock 2 was extremely sluggish, and the loads between segments took forever.