Little Known Facts About System Shock 2's Gameplay Design

[681024629cd1bRoSoDude]

I spend a lot of time fixing what I assess to be shortcomings in SS2's gameplay, but while digging around in the the game files and tinkering I frequently encounter subtle design decisions that illustrate the thoughtfulness of Irrational/LGS when design gameplay systems and scenarios. While a lot of tribal knowledge is focused on speedrunning exploits and the like, I tend to fixate more on smart intentional design. I doubt I'm the first person to notice any of these things, but they don't seem to be common knowledge either.

• There are a few items and objects that are tied to certain difficulties. It's pretty well known that the number of French-Epstein Devices scales with difficulty (7/7/6/5 on Easy/Normal/Hard/Impossible), but it extends a bit further. Numerous Security Computers are removed on higher difficulties to make it more difficult to cancel alarms and keep security down while exploring, and there are some extra Grenade Hybrids in Ops on higher difficulties and multiplayer. Two pistols and several clips of pistol ammo also get removed from Med/Sci, but resource distribution is otherwise fixed (since cyber module cost and replicator price scaling on Hard/Impossible already tamp down the player's resources as they progress).
• There are at least two instances of enemy spawn tables updating as you progress through the game. In particular, when you are tasked with revisiting Ops and Engineering to reset the core and help SHODAN take over the Von Braun, new monster ecologies are set in both of those levels [1][2]. Both levels get Rumblers (31.25%), Midwives (18.75%), Spiders (18.75%), and Cyborg Assassins (31.25%) at spawn points close to the new objective so as to scale the threat to your acquired power level while backtracking. Additionally, a new ecology is set up along the hallway to the autopsy room in Med/Sci which can spawn Pipe Hybrids (60%), Shotgun Hybrids (35%), and even extra Maintenance Bots (5%) after your ill-fated meeting with Dr. Watts.
• There are only 6 hand-placed portable batteries in the entire game! All others that you'll find are random drops from midwives, turrets, and bots. Even more interestingly, 4 of these 6 are located in the Rickenbacker in a few crates and enemy inventories, which is certainly no accident as it's also the only level without a power station (it's also why you can get 2 batteries from one Midwife). Irrational knew they were tightening the squeeze on the player's resources, so they made sure to throw the player a bone to keep things fair (the other 2 batteries are in the Med/Sci armory lockup, if you were curious).
• Similar to the last point, there are guaranteed drops for most researchable organs. Med/Sci has a Hybrid Organ (1329) on the Pipe Hybrid walking towards the unpowered door to Med; Engineering has an Annelid Healing Gland (165) sitting on the healing bed in the Security Station on the way to Cargo Bays; Recreation has a Swarm Pod Organ (286) inside an egg in the infested medical ward, a Rumbler Organ (287) on the Rumbler in the Basketball Court, and an Arachnid Organ (152) on the dead Spider in the mall. This is to ensure that players investing into Research can still get most of the organs even playing on Hard/Impossible, where there's a 30/75% chance for loot to be deleted from each enemy corpse.
• Damage calculations in Dark use weighted RNG to counteract decimal rounding error. For example, say you fired a shot that does 10 base damage, but you had a 15% damage multiplier on it and were shooting an enemy with 50% resistance to your damage type. That's 10 x 1.15 x 0.5 = 5.75 damage. In many other games, the resulting damage would be 5 (if the damage is simply truncated down to an int) or 6 (if the damage is rounded "properly"). Dark's implementation is more clever -- it's 5 damage with a 75% chance of having 1 more point of damage, leading to an expected value of 5.75 (with more variance on low damage shots which naturally need more trials so it averages out nicely). @sarge945 did the empirical testing on this and confirmed this is the case for stacking multiple sources of protection, and it's equally the case for the player's damage bonuses -- the randomized rounding occurs after all multipliers have been taken into account through the stim and response. Notably, this is the exact same fix I implemented for Deus Ex's truncated damage bonuses to rectify low base damage weapons needing to hit harsh thresholds for any benefits from increasing weapon skills. There's a whole thread on TTLG where users express endless confusion about SS2's damage calculations, so this seems to be pretty obscure.

I'm sure other more accomplished modders have discovered cool things along similar lines. Feel free to add anything that you've noticed.

[68102462a1baasarge945]

Thanks for the shout out! Here's my original research based on letting some very lucky pipe and shotgun hybrids beat me to death a bunch of times (UwU)

Please note that this testing was done in RoSoDudes mod, not vanilla, so Tank gives 10% damage resistance rather than HP.

[68102462a66cfvoodoo47]

a new ecology is set up along the hallway to the autopsy room in Med/Sci which can spawn Pipe Hybrids (60%), Shotgun Hybrids (35%), and even extra Maintenance Bots (5%) after your ill-fated meeting with Dr. Watts

*ecology senses tingling* yep, that is one broken ecology, to make it work, QB Name needs to be set to "wattsy", and its value to "0" on 1359. to the SCPmobile!

and the reset core quest bonus spawns actually don't work properly in cd vanilla, as they activate after the quest is done, instead of when it starts. all digitally distributed builds of the game have this fixed now.