System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition

[674215b6c3ae0Hikari]

Then there is the minor inconvenience on the fact they tend to sue fan projects into oblivion. Doesn't take that much of a stretch to go 'this is a perfectly legal ting we are doing, but it still touches what they have done and they have shown a disturbing degree of willingness to sue people into oblivion with those lawyers.'

Having another publishing house literally going 'we are looking for these people' would probably offset that.

[674215b6c3c85icemann]

Back in the early 2000s, I briefly attempted a Thief conversion mod for SS2. I thought it'd be the right thing to do, so I contacted the tech support people, for whoever owned Thief by that point. Eidos was it? I forget. I contacted the tech support department, as I couldn't find a contact email for them anywhere else.

Anyways. Got a response back a week later, giving me the all clear and that it sounded like a cool mod. So you never know.

[674215b6c3fb8ZylonBane]

Back in the early 2000s, I briefly attempted a Thief conversion mod for SS2.

Thief in the Dark Engine. That would have been interesting.

[674215b6c40d3icemann]

As you know though, there are differences, despite the engine being the same.

Was more just to see if it could be done. I only got as far as trying out hybrids in various textures and meshes from Thief, placed along a hallway.

[674215b6c431cZylonBane]

Was more just to see if it could be done. I only got as far as trying out hybrids in various textures and meshes from Thief, placed along a hallway.

So just this then: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49482

[674215b6c441cicemann]

I actually put together a quick level which was just a hallway with alcoves for each hybrid, but yeah essentially what you see in the 1st post.

[674215b6c4529Hikari]

Isn't shocking ruins a port of a thief fan mission to shock?

[674215b6c465bNameless Voice]

More or less, yes.

[674215b6c472bicemann]

Yes it is. It has some extra bits added, I think.

[674215b6c48adStingm]

Yes it is. She told me it was done to help her learn to edit shock 2. She ported it over and then made changes as needed because you can't do the same thing in shock2 as you can in thief. The big cavern is a good example. In thief you had to use many rope arrows to get across. Obviously in shock2 that won't work so she changed it a bit. There were other miner things as well but it is mostly the same as far as I can tell.

[674215b6c4a4clgs]

SS2 co-op is a very different but fun experience, it completely changes the atmosphere from survival horror to comedy, which probably upsets a few people. I can see a niche for this, how it could attract a new audience to shock games in time before SSReboot drops.

But gameplay wise, co-op gets very easy as it's not balanced around several players. Secmod Co-op plays better since it's generally harder, but it's more unstable to the point of being uplayable (we coldn't get past a certain bulkhead due to crash).
Since Nightdive makes multiplayer a priority for SS2:EE i would like to ask if and how they plan to balance the co-op difficulty.

P.S. i'd love to have some dynamic shadows and a flashlight in EE.

[674215b6c4b2bHikari]

Honestly looking forward t othe enhanced edition stability for multiplayer since Arena with four guys should be fun.

[674215b6c4c05icemann]

On the positive side it may lead to more multiplayer focused levels. That'd be interesting.

[674215b6c50c5sarge945]

I might as well throw in my 2 cents, for what it's worth (probably about 2 cents)

So, there are absolutely some positives for this for everyone involved, namely:

1. Source code release. So even if EE sucks, it should help us finally fix up the old shock.
2. Proper Mac/Linux support. I'm a linux gamer so I am probably biased here.

That said, my current opinion is that remasters/EE's are - for the most part - a waste of time and money. I know a lot of consoles get rereleases because they don't have the option of playing the older games on the new hardware, and community patches and fixups just don't exist at all. But on the PC platform, virtually every remaster has been a letdown - Doom 3 BFG, Blood remaster, Metro: Redux, Dark Souls Remastered (this was the biggest scam ever in gaming in terms of remasters, IMO) - they have all been flawed and in almost all cases worse than the original game with a good source port or community patch. Probably the only good EE's I have played have been the Beamdog ones, and even they have problems (some of which is related more to politics than gameplay, but it's still relevant)

I personally think this remaster is going to be nothing special, and likely won't be worth my time if it doesn't allow me to play the already existing collection of SS2 mods (I'm not really into FMs). Some features of it could be nice, but I can wager some parts of it will be so flawed that they will make the actual enhancements not worth it (and not being able to load mods is a flaw). The only thing I am semi-excited about is the MP rework, since I honestly believe the multiplayer could be improved significantly in terms of it's atmosphere with a survival aspect - things like players dying and remaining dead unless the other player can reach a QBRM, or something similar. BUT I also don't care that much if the MP gets left alone entirely, as it's really not the focus and the game is already legendary without it. If MP takes development time away from enhancing the single player, it could be a real issue.

That said, there's always a possibility of poaching some of the EE stuff. If terri records that new audio log, for example, but the EE itself sucks, I guarantee you someone will poach it for a mod (whether or not it's legal for them to do so).

[674215b6c521eicemann]

Having played the SS1 Remaster (enhanced edition), there is pros and cons about it.

Pros:
* Game runs natively in Windows
* Mouse look (available via fan mod earlier)
* Support for higher resolutions (you could do this via fan patches prior)

Cons:
* The music does not sound right. Played via a virtual midi thing.
* Music and sound does not always work. I sometimes had to run the game twice before the sound would work.
* Whoever it was that rewrote all the text logs should be taken outside and shot. Almost none of the audio logs match the text at all. It's quite jarring. Note this one could be my memory playing tricks, but I'm pretty sure the original fairing far better.

[674215b6c5378voodoo47]

the text not matching the log audio is a vanilla thing, actually. there is a mod that corrects this, and I was strongly recommending it to be integrated into the release when talking to the EE devs, but you know, purists..

[674215b6c550dhemebond]

A better way to use and bind PSI powers to keys would be great.

[674215b6c578cRocketMan]

What do you think about a secondary key (shift, alt, ctrl) + the wheel to cycle psi powers?  I hate fucking around with the mouse when something is shooting at me.

[674215b6c59a8hemebond]

What do you think about a secondary key (shift, alt, ctrl) + the wheel to cycle psi powers?

Depends on how much they can/want to change the UI. Having a customisable hotbar that can also contain PSI powers would quite well (similar to Dark Messiah). Otherwise using a modifier with a customisable hotbar just for powers in parallel to the weapon hotbar could work. The mouse wheel would scroll through the hotbars (while holding the modifier key for the PSI hotbar).

[674215b6c5f0aJDoran]

I'd love a weapon-wheel method of choosing PSi powers, and anything else as it's so much more convenient , if you ask me.

Regarding remasters, on the consoles at least, they tend to be half-hearted and cheaply done, at least that's how they often appear. None of the ones I've played have added anything of any real significance other than 'better' graphics. I know that's the point of a remaster (duh!), but even a given game's most ardent fan can always find a few little things that they'd love to see changed, and when those changes are genuinely pretty trivial to implement, or at most wouldn't take too long or too much effort to do, then it really is a pity that the companies never bother to add these improvements.

I mean, in the Batman: Arkham remasters, why couldn't  they have randomised the starting points, the direction and the destination of every enemy? As it is, every enemy in those areas has his own preset starting point and path to follow, meaning that after a few play throughs of the game, you can predict where they will start and where they will go, making stealth and getting the enemies alone is far too easy. Just randomising the starting positional and walking directions would have make the games so much better.

And why not add Survivor mode (the extra, highest difficulty mode) to Bioshock 2, when they made the Bioshock remaster collection? And also move the Drill Specialist tonic much earlier into the game (and add a similar tonic to Bioshock). If you don't know, Drill Specialist prevents you from using any weapon except for the drill and your plasmids, but makes your plasmids use much less Eve, meaning it alters the gameplay so you must use just plasmids and the drill. The problem is, it appears at around two/thirds of the way through Bioshock 2, when it would be much better if it appeared much earlier. Also, it's not in Bioshock 1.

And if I recall correctly, the Bioshock remaster doesn't even fix the bots' less than perfect path-finding (in the first game the bots can get lost or confused, whereas in the second game they never (in my experience) has any trouble finding their way around.

So console remasters tend to focus entirely on the graphical upgrades, but even that can be fraught with disappointments, as some remasters change enough of the 'feel' or aesthetics of the game's characters and/or environments that hardcore fans of the original game can feel that the remastered version is overall inferior because of the graphical or audio changes. That's how I feel about the Perfect Dark remake on the XBox 360 (which also runs on the XBox One), some of the graphical changes ('improvements', as they'd officially be called)  are for the worst, plus there are some minor gameplay changes that I don't like at all. So for me the N64 original is still the version I prefer, and I've not played the remastered version in years.

Finally, console remasters always seem to have noticeable bugs and glitches on release, though to be fair so do original console games nowadays... But you'd think that since a remaster is basically a recomplied copy of the original game's source code, but ported to a different machine and with better audio/graphical data, that problems that didn't exist on the original game, wouldn't exist in the remaster either. But no, you can be playing a remaster and your player character falls through the floor, or the secondary mode of a particular weapon doesn't work, or the sound cuts out for no reason at all. If you're lucky then most or all of the bugs and glitches will be patched out, but it's by no means certain.

And regarding Doom: BFG Edition, on the PS3 (and I presume the XBox 360) it was less than stellar too. It had problems like (for some staggeringly stupid reason) one game save bank shared amongst Doom 3, Doom 3: Ressurection of Evil, and the Doom 3 Bonus mission pack (I can't remember if the Doom 1 and 2 ports also shared that save game bank), in game checkpoints that seemed to be randomly chosen and would stop the gameplay for seemingly half-a-minute whether you wanted the checkpoints or not (I didn't), tons more ammunition and you could carry much more ammunition now (which was no doubt preferable for some people, but it did make the game less survival-horror than the original designers intended), and I think there were other changes for the worse, but I can't recall them off hand.

[674215b6c5ff9sarge945]

EDIT: derp. Ignore this

[674215b6c60d3voodoo47]

native functionality is always better than relying on a 3rdparty application/tool.

[674215b6c62e4sarge945]

native functionality is always better than relying on a 3rdparty application/tool.

That, and I also GROSSLY misunderstood how it works, so I nuked my response.

[674215b6c63f9Hikari]

Honestly I love the idea of holding a key down to swap the mouse wheel to cycle psi powers, and having middle click being to cast psi. That would greatly simplfy OSA playstyles by making you not have to fight the interface.

Lack of psi hypos on the other hand. You're on your own there buddy