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I mean, you don't just put something like that into a game unless there is some deeper meaning, now do you?
exactly, no backstory anywhere.
Where did you read that? I've never heard that before. And, the number of decks supported in ShockEd is exactly the number of decks we ended up with.
Shock reduzier/ shock reducedaccording to alpha-plan the cruiser "von Braun" should have 16 decks. Only half made it into the final game
SS1's engine was a raycaster right?
System Shock 1: Was the Cyborg drone inspired by cpt. Picard as Locutus?
Do you have any cool stuff left from System Shock 1/2 and the other games you worked on. Like unstripped maps, artworks, scripts etc.?
MAHK, how about the PDA games? There's a great quote from Warren Spector somewhere about how freaked out he was that people were wasting time writing these minigames for SS1. By the time of SS2 I guess you guys felt like it was something you had to do as part of the Shock tradition? It's interesting to get into the editor and enable the unfinished minigames, like the Donkey Kong and Tempest clones. And Overworld Zero genuinely impressed me. If that had been released back in the early 8-bit days it could have been considered a full commercial game.
How did the SS1 cyberspace come about and what were the reasons, besides time restrictions, that it was changed so drastically in the sequel? Can you share some rejected ideas? If you could change the implementations in both games, what would you do (if you wanted to)?
As you mentioned id Software, how were you influenced by them, other than on a technical level? System Shock was years ahead of its time but lost commercially to its contemporary "simpler" ego shooters. Did you guys ever wanted to, or were you ever pressured into sacrificing elements of the game in order to cater to pure shooter fans?
I don't think we ever thought about catering to pure shooter fans, and I certainly don't think we really wanted to dive into the red ocean with everyone else.
I know you're answering a question about SS1 here, but this does remind me of the 1999 E3, where due to Columbine you guys were apparently forbidden from showing any gameplay that involved guns.
We knew we didn't want to do conversation trees because we felt like those were unsatisfying and immersion-breaking, which is why you never meet any live humans.
Ok, I know this is probably way too speculative for this Q&A but I can't resist: Do you think it can be done with current technology or conceivably in the near future?Maybe you could even hint at what you think the biggest obstacle is and if you would ever consider trying to implement NPC conversations in a project of yours?Your solution of avoidance plus audio logs is still benchmark in my opinion.
Mahk, are you registered on the Quarter to Three forums? There are a lot of System Shock fans over there, and I know they'd enjoy watching the livestream.
Oh, I just remembered another question I meant to ask!If you look at the gamesys entry for Cortex Reavers, they have two attacks: one short-range machine gun, and one that, from the stats, looks like some kind of long-range explosive weapon. But the only Reavers in the game are placed so that you engage them at close range and never see their long-range weapon.Was this deliberate? Was the weapon deemed too nasty to expose the player to, or were there technical issues related to it? Or did things just kind of end up this way accidentally?I've toyed with the idea of replacing the sec-1 bot at the end of that long hall in Deck 7 with a Cortex Reaver to see what it does, but my tooling isn't powerful enough to do that easily yet.