Oh, man, that interface looks great.
This is the one thing I absolutely hate. If I want to play pixelated System Shock Iâll play the original. The entire point of this remake is to bring the graphics and UI up to modern standards. Just⌠what the hell are they thinking with this? This is supposed to be an immersive sim, not some lolretro FPS like Strafe or Ion Fury.
I though it looked quite good tbh, I think with some of the pixelation it looks better than âclean crispâ 2070 4K textures or whatever - and it would take a lot more work to make that look good, imo. Since they on Unreal Engine 4 I guess they need to bump to 5 to get support for Raytracing etc?
And, being on GOG and with Unreal, its not like it cant be modded to look any way you want it to.
The 3D models look a lot better than the walls, also the corpses etc.
BTW, was there also an SS2 remake coming? I think I remember hearing something about that.
You might be thinking of System Shock 3, which was announced (from a different studio) and IIRC has since been cancelled.
Perhaps, but this comes from the Wikipedia page for SS2:
Night Dive Studios were able to secure the rights to the game and System Shock franchise in 2013 to release an updated version of System Shock 2 for modern operating systems, including for OS X and Linux, and announced plans to release an Enhanced Edition of the game.
So maybe not so much a remake as a remaster.
Ahh, yeah, sounds like the Enhanced Edition was announced a bit under a year ago. Wouldnât be a remake, Iâd think - you can look at the System Shock: Enhanced Edition for the sorts of things that they did to that and Iâd expect similar from a System Shock 2 versionâŚexcept of course 2 is newer tech, so wonât have as many weird idiosyncrasies to tweak. Maybe weâll get more GFX stuff instead or something.
LOL. System Shock 2 runs on an early version of the original Thief engine. Think about that for a second.
Like almost all of Nightdiveâs remasters, a remaster of SS2 would probably be built on community code. In this case, a mysterious update and drop of the Dark Engine source that happened some years back.
Yeah, but, look at System Shock 1 sometime. Without the Enhanced changes. :P
Oh, absolutely. The original controls killed it. The Enhanced changes (against, almost all two decades of community work) mainly focus on the controls.
Those worried about the graphics, since it is UE4 I guess it is not out of the realm of possibilities that this can be added somehow?
Not quite.
The Dark Engine was never delivered to the System Shock team as a finished piece of code, nor were we ever presented with a final set of APIs that the engine was to implement. Instead, we worked with the same code base as the Thief team for most of the project (excluding a brief window of time when we made a copy of the source code while the Thief team prepared to ship the game). Remarkably, it is still possible to compile a hybrid executable out of this tree that can play both Thief and System Shock 2 based on a variable in a configuration file.
Postmortem: Irrational Games' System Shock 2
The SS2 branch of Dark is more advanced than Thiefâs in a lot of ways, most notably that it supports colored lighting.
As for any theoretical System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition, I have no idea what Night Dive is intending with that. SS2 running on the NewDark patch basically already is SS2:EE
So the backer email on the SS remake posted some somewhat vague screenshots of cyberspace! I wasnât even sure if it would make it into the remake but glad to hear that part is still coming and looks good! Now if only they would make you put on VR googles to complete the experience.
From the still images, looks like they must have pulled the videos from YouTube: theyâre the ones with the white background and the ellipsis. Or maybe theyâre still listed as private?
I could see them earlier but not any more.
Looks awesome and I love the music! Canât wait.
Someone described it as âDescent on acidâ and I agree.
That may look pleasing as a passively consumed YouTube video, but actually playing that would almost certainly be a migraine-inducing ordeal. The backgrounds have far too much noisy detail. System Shockâs cyberspace is supposed to look like Tron, not this embossed, glitter-glued graph paper mess.
Thereâs no way to faithfully remake the SS1 cyberspace sequences in a way that doesnât suck because the originals sucked to a tremendous degree back in the day too. You would really need to change their design.
It had this arcade vector graphics quality that I sort of admire, but I agree cyberspace was the low point of System Shock but I still think it could be improved.
I think it has been improved. One of the biggest improvements is actually getting feedback when damaging the enemies. Another improvement is actually knowing where the walls are. Sure itâs going to be disorienting but thatâs part of the point. Itâs a timed maze trial.
Things I didnât see but would have liked to are software item pickups and different weapon types.
Hopefully they use this new cyberspace to make the ending actually interesting for a change.