do you like the 'humor' in the new system shock game?

[673598299a5denotaavatar]

Do you like the humor they added in the new system shock game?

It seems that they did not want to take the story seriously and added ALOT of really obvious in your face humor.

I personally see it as someone being unable to take the plot seriously, or to make it plausible, so they bombard it with 'campy' meme things. I felt a little irritated, I thought the system shock story was fairly serious and they really put some brain power and creativity in trying to make it somewhat believable and serious, but this one just felt like "i can relate to nerds lol"... I guess it might be a symptom of lack of concept artists and story writers and zero vision. 

[673598299a897ZylonBane]

Night Dive put their own logo in the game as a collectible object... TEN TIMES. That's infinity times more than Looking Glass, Irrational, Ion Storm, or Arkane ever hid their logo in their own games. It's pretty damn obvious Night Dive didn't take this game seriously. They were more interested in "modernizing" it into a goofy self-referential retro FPS.

Fun story: In the original, pre-patch version of Thief II's first mission Running Interference, one of the mappers added a hidden shrine area with his signature symbol that he'd put in previous projects. When it was discovered by his bosses they patched it out (replaced with a Mechanist gear), because "it was a symbol unrelated to the Thief universe." *

That's how real game developers take immersion seriously.

[673598299ad4esarge945]

Id is a real game developer and they have put the dopefish in multiple games, as well as having the NIN logo on the quake nail ammo, and the id brick/PDA in Doom 3.

Real developers usually do it with a bit more class than night dive, admittedly, but it seems you're largely looking for things to complain about. I get it. The remake isn't that great, just kinda average, but this isn't a good hill to die on either.

A better argument is probably that night dive is kind of drawing attention to it. The dopefish was usually an unmarked secret in one level. Here we have a full achievement, complete with sounds, which is uhhhh.... Obnoxious, to say the least. But the problem isn't with "developers inserting unrelated things". That's a standard trope across the entire industry.

[673598299aef0Gawain]

There is no hill to die on. notaavatar is right.

Since @sarge945 mentioned Id software. What I have read whole 90's Id software wasn't very serious developer. With serious I mean, they weren't so keen on immersion or serious game plots or settings. They made fun and good games, but not believable like Thief or System Shock tries to be.

[673598299b18esarge945]

There is no hill to die on. notaavatar is right.

I'm required by law to pick at least one fight per week on this forum. I don't make the rules.

[673598299b445ZylonBane]

Id is a real game developer and they have put the dopefish in multiple games, as well as having the NIN logo on the quake nail ammo, and the id brick/PDA in Doom 3.

I thought it was sufficiently obvious that I was talking about immersive sims, not silly arcade style shooters, but apparently not obvious enough for everyone.

[673598299b533sarge945]

Doom 3 is a silly arcade style shooter?

[673598299b67dvoodoo47]

Doom3 is Doom trying to be System Shock2 (and failing).

also, to answer the original question, no.

[673598299b86fZylonBane]

Doom 3 is a silly arcade style shooter?

Doom 3 is an immersive sim?

[673598299b9e5JDoran]

Whatever you think of id Software and their games (I personally love a few of them, and am largely indifferent to the rest) they do deserve much respect and praise for making their game engines open source. Not only did that allow the games to be ported to all kinds of computers and consoles by fans, but of course it allowed the original game engines to be expanded and improved upon too.

If only more developers were so altruistic.

[673598299bc2cJDoran]

Doom 3 is an immersive sim?

Doom 3 is a Doom game? Half the gamers say "Yes!", whilst me and the other 50% say "No! Too slow player movement, too few enemies onscreen, almost no monster-infighting, having to read/listen to logs to eventually gain ammunition, having areas that look like real world areas such as labs and offices (alright, so this one is actually a good thing), etc".

[673598299bd0dZylonBane]

How are you so completely missing the point of this thread?

[673598299bedaJDoran]

How are you so completely missing the point of this thread?

I thought I'd improvise, and go off on a tangent. You know, because it's something that no one has ever done before.

[673598299bff6sarge945]

Even if we all disagree on a lot of things, I think we can all be glad that the System Shock Remake wasn't written in that awful Marvel "everything is a quip" style where every second line is a joke and nobody takes anything very seriously.

[673598299c1c7Join2]

I've still not played this lol. Really not a fan of remakes. But if there is any game in the history of gaming that was to be remade, this is the one, so I have to play it at some point. Maybe.

On the nose fourth wall breaking has no place in an Immersive Sim, few exceptions apply.

Once again a reminder that the last true Immersive Sim was Arx Fatalis, 22 years ago. It's dead, sold out to the mediocre masses just like every once great dev or concept.

[673598299c2a4sarge945]

Prey comes close in quite a few places.

[673598299c373ZylonBane]

Don't feed the troll.

[673598299c553Join2]

Prey comes close in quite a few places.

I agree, but not good enough. I think you and I agreed on that before. ZB cried. It was a joyous day.

[673598299c6e8notaavatar]

Easter eggs are out of the way and hard to find. The intro to the game already felt like a clown show without the punch line. I kept thing I would see Leslie Nielsen play Diego.

Again to me that is the developers saying "there is no way we can take this story seriously at all".  I under stand computer programmers might not understand the nuances of... hardware hackers/engineers, criminal behavior/tendencies (of hackers) and bioengineering and stuff like that but I think they should have did some research on trying to make a believable scene


NOLF did this kind of humor OK. It was kind of cheesy but even when you were shooting a midget on a tricycle, it still felt less slap stick then this game.


But then again, I did not see the reason WHY it even had to get so cheesy. Actually the "set" for system shock is more real then ever. You keep reading about AI, advanced bio engineering, international espionage in the news way more then the 90's. Its almost like getting uncanny real. So why not leverage this to make the game more immersive ????

[673598299c839notaavatar]

And how does it make me feel?

Like someone is totally scared they will lose my attention unless I am constantly entertained by little comedies everywhere.

I think about a game like natural selection 2, how much work they put into making the environment realistic. WOW. They put little doodads of technology that seemed plausible but out of reach. I could spend a day just thinking about one of those props they put on the map (like the big drill, some package machine, crane, terranium, etc). It felt like they were smart people that made me think "wow so is this one possible future?" . Viewing just the environment in that game made me feel like I was reading a prophetic scifi book.

[673598299c9denotaavatar]

And all the system shock games felt to me like someone cut the idealistic bullshit out of star trek. Because their technology really was too good. Kind of like if star trek still had kinetic technology in it (mechanical devices). And anticipated the 'real life' part of advanced technology that they missed, which is that it had some serious down sides. The smart thing about system shock is that it basically saw that normal SciFi has a 'magic bullet' mentality to the solutions and factored that in. Star trek felt like really over optimistic. System shock (particularly 2) felt... realistic, and a show like battle star galactica was very pessimistic (the amount of technologies they rejected in that show, 20 years after the show was made, already makes it feel strange (I call it "hating lasers and plasma technologies"
, sorry I feel like lasers and plasma are here to stay and actually quite simple).


maybe the developers of the original system shock games were a bit more nefarious and had some more experiance with 'technology hacker stuff', so they can imagine the universe without just relegating to micro comedies everywhere to hide plot holes.

[673598299cac3sarge945]

By the way, there's an "edit" at the top of each of your posts.

[673598299cbafZylonBane]

IIRC posts made while not logged in can't be edited.

Lord only knows why he doesn't log in if he's going to be this active.

[673598299cd7bJDoran]

IIRC posts made while not logged in can't be edited.

Lord only knows why he doesn't log in if he's going to be this active.

Can posts be made by someone not logged in? Doesn't that allow any random non-member to post spam, then?