SSR: System Shock Kickstarter

[673f7d55a67a9ZylonBane]

Sure is, I just don’t think you get my point, or at least you aren’t trying to.

You're asserting that in first-person immersive sims, equipped weapons take up more of the screen than is typical for first-person games.

[673f7d55a6a0bla0s]

That was not what I meant, what I was trying to say was, that I dislike that the weapons in this remake are so clunky and take up so much space, and it seems to me like it goes against the immersion. Maybe only a bit. But it feels like there's a huge chunky gun between you and the game world. This seems like a style choice that started with Bioshock, which had this chunky aesthetic (I'm sorry if chunky is the wrong word to use), Prey also had this style. System Shock 1, I will admit had an interface between you and the game world, but the guns were never overly large or obtrusive, and in full screen mode, you had the game world open to you. This seems visually to go in the small FOV, huge gun, shooter style, that doesn't feel shock-like to me. Maybe I'm just old.

[673f7d55a6c84bigfatfrog605]

Gotta love the fact that they are taking pre-orders on a game that doesn't have a release date, is being sold exclusively on online platforms, and probably isn't big enough storage-wise to justify pre-loading.

Probably just a metric to show potential publishers that there is still interest in this title, but kind of a  move regardless.

Interested in seeing their take on the other SS2 models and weapons.

[673f7d55a6e0eNameless Voice]

The guns don't seem much larger to me than, e.g. those in Doom 3, as a random example?

And System Shock 2 had large weapons long before Bioshock.

[673f7d55a6fa1edx]

February 2021 Kickstarter Update

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/3080200

New demo should be live, but I think not yet.

[673f7d55a70a6ZylonBane]

Let's see if they fixed it not working on Windows 7 this time.

[673f7d55a721evoodoo47]

they did. performance seems a bit better, save/load is available, logs work, mutants drool.

pixels still ugly as sin.

[673f7d55a7427ZylonBane]

Cool,  I'll have to give it a shot then, see what's changed since the first (second?) demo.

Looking at the KS update, I can already say I'm not a fan of the neon-looking SHODAN portrait on all the screens. I think I shall call this "Spencer's SHODAN". Or "Sharper Image SHODAN". Whichever reference is less dated.

And this still from the newly released trailer... Christ, the pixelation on just this gun texture looks so bad.

Not only is this a choice of aesthetic that I fundamentally disagree with, it's not even done well. You've got this blocky-textured gun being held by an HD-textured hand. It's visually jarring to say the least. It doesn't look intentional, it looks like a mistake, like the engine is accidentally rendering the wrong MIP level for the gun texture.

[673f7d55a78fdprengle]

ok cool, i'll believe it's actually done when people can buy it on steam/gog/etc. and actually download and play it and smush their faces into their monitors without a nightdive representative coming along and taking the game away from them. whether or not the released game will actually resemble a finished product remains to be seen 

Let's see if they fixed it not working on Windows 7 this time.

i'm probably far more bitter about microsoft burying win7 than you are, but we've been living in a windows 10-only hellworld for several years now and i doubt they cared enough to fix support for an os that most mouthbreathers now instantly discredit. of course, there's always an alternative.. 🐧

[673f7d55a7a80voodoo47]

it usually takes a while for (new) games to stop working completely on a windows os that just went out of official ms support, so I wouldn't be too worried, windows10-or-no-deal games should be fairly rare for the next year or two.

and yeah, oddly enough, some objects look much more pixelated than others, making everything look glitchy and just wrong. ah well.

[673f7d55a7f4eNameless Voice]

Tried the demo, works well on Windows 7.

The atmosphere and art direction is great, but it's still let down by the truly awful texture quality, especially on creatures and characters.

Gameplay is mostly solid.  Guns are good, melee combat still feels a bit weak and lacking impact.

Voice acting and logs are pretty good now, too.

Cyberspace is...  confusing, to say the least.  It looks visually impressive, but there's too much going on, which makes it very hard to get and keep your bearings.  Enter/exit animation is a bit long and would probably get annoying quickly (though not as annoying as a bug I encountered where the loud cyberspace "exit" whoosh kept playing on loop and I had to reload to make it stop.)

It feels a bit strange that there are so many useless items that you can pick up, especially when it's not immediately obvious what is a useful item and what is junk, as many of the junk items are glowy and shiny and draw your attention to them.  It doesn't help that the info text which tells you what you're looking at shares space with the message log, so you can't identify items until the "item picked up" notification has cleared.
I know this is kind of true to the original game's UI, but it probably should have been split into an identifier next to the object's selection brackets, and the log at the top of the screen.

I noticed a few minor bugs/issues/niggles in other areas:

• When you pick up a log, you can hold F to listen to it, but once the prompt indicating that you have picked up a log disappears, the F key also stops working.  I'd expect it to just play the oldest unread log, similar to how it works in SS2.
• If you pick up enough items for them to split into multiple stacks, both stacks can end up as different slots in the quick bar, which is really unintuitive.  The quick bar should only have one slot per item type, which should show the total number carried, rather than being a direct representation of an individual stack.
• It's a bit hard to tell the first two Sparq settings apart, as there's no clear indicator.  Only the third ("overcharge") setting has visible sparks to differentiate it.
• The pickup animations for items still greatly lower your move and look speed, which is extremely annoying.  When I first picked up a sparq, I was in the same room as a mutant, who was able to freely get several hits in on me because I couldn't move due to the slowdown while playing the animation.  The animations themselves are fine - they're much quicker and smoother than in the first demo - but that slowdown needs to be removed.

[673f7d55a80debigfatfrog605]

Does the game feel unusually dark (shadows wise) to anyone else? Turning down the graphics settings actually seems to make the brighter. I'm hoping we get a gamma adjuster for the final release.

Other than that, it's basically the demo we've had since December 2019 but more polished. They still probably have another 6 months to go so I'm hoping it'll get better from here.

[673f7d55a8509icemann]

Had a play of the new demo last night (and yep now I show my actual face in streams):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96uLdcyhvOQ

Pros:

* Hopper, security robot and repair robots implemented
* Cyborg Assassin now is quite challenging to take on due to some new moves it can do, like move super fast to a point and can now throw proximity mines which look like ninja stars
* Many of the rooms and areas have been changed. For returning players it adds in some new excitement from exploration.
* Music. Actual friggin music. Good too. The cyberspace music in particular is excellent.
* Cyberspace is finally in . Feels like a mix of Rez and Descent. The way the combat works in there is good.
* Exiting cyberspace back to the meat world, feels like a big disconnect. I wanted to jump straight back in.
* Saving / Loading in. Yay . Welcome addition.
* All of the enemies (other than the cyborg assassin) have new sounds added to them and some changed / improved AI

Neutral:

* You now add pin-points on the map. Catch is that you can't name them. If your going let people add pin points to a map, let them add notes to it.

Cons:

* The initial jacking in visual effect would definitely cause epilepsy in those susceptible to that. That bit is a visual extravaganza. Looks fantastic, but man that would really set some people off.
* It is very easy to get completely lost and disoriented in cyberspace and the time limit is too short. On all visits in there, I completely got lost within a few minutes, and whilst I knew where I wanted to get to, I couldn't find my way as I kept getting lost. Considering how massive they've setup cyberspace, I'd highly recommend getting rid of the time limit completely.
* Cyberspace does not save the state it's in when you leave. So if you come back, switches are back to being turned off (red) and all enemies are back. This is not at all how the original did this. Hope they save the state when you leave in a later update.
* Respawning bugs - Had several mutants respawn all clumped up together and they didn't patrol or anything. Just stood around idle. Not good.
* Some lighting errors. Like if a corpse was half in a lit up room and a dark one then all of it was dark.
* Audio logs - Now whilst I am very happy that the new audio logs are finally in, many lack the emotion and environment sounds that the originals had. For example, many of the original audio logs for medical had the sounds of gun fire, cyborgs dying etc. None of the new one's have that. So it sounds more like a person in a recording booth and not as like they were actually there.
* Portraits - Use actual photos of people or 2D artwork (like how SS2 did it). Not 3D models. Doesn't look good.

[673f7d55a860bla0s]

They certainly are acting a lot in the new logs, that’s for sure.

[673f7d55a88e5la0s]

The pixelated textures look even worse than in the previous demo, or at least it seems like it. It really truly dislike it, it looks terrible, and I don't understand that decision at all.
There is a lot to like, but it seems like a toss up when their decisions are right and wrong (imho). For example, why is the item descriptions ironic? What purpose does it serve? I saw an object "a small standard round box", which is an ironic description of standard rounds as in ammo. I left it, since it obviously wasn't important. The beserker patch is described along the lines of "nothing special". This is color text, not the description of an item. If I can't trust the HUD in translating what I am looking at, since the objects aren't obvious in their appearances, then something is wrong.
Also, the first Honig-log, is placed in a way, that is easy to overlook. Originally it was placed with the corpse at the keypad, which told a story. This is Honig, he is dead. Now it is on a desk, a desk that is lit, however the log is placed beside the light not in it to direct player to know, this is an important item you will encounter often in this game (I also miss being able to read the logs). This is not at all an enormous mistake, but it is emblematic of questionable design decisions, at least to me.

Now I sound very negative, and I am somewhat, but there is a lot to like, it is still atmospheric, the mutants look great and I like the feeling of them doing things when you encounter them, the cyborg surgeons are great (although it a missed opportunity that they don't react).
It still miss the pulsing soundtrack, not that this atmospheric soundscape is bad, it just not that Shock-like to me.
Again, there is a lot to like, but also some very strange decisions... and again... the pixelation is very very bad. Immersion breaking almost.
The voice acting... I know the old ones weren't great, but I liked that they seemed mundane sometimes, it lent a sense of reality to the game, this is very much overacted and intense, I get the choice, and understand it.

Cyberspace was overwhelming and the time limit too strict, to be able to take it easy and take it all in, but that might be the point, looks great (and busy) feels confusing (due to the look), so I am undecided... but it does control great.

[673f7d55a89eeNameless Voice]

This game will probably have the dubious honour of being the only game in recent memory that needs a fan-made texture pack made for it the moment it comes out.

[673f7d55a8bd7voodoo47]

well, SS1 kinda was in the same boat (floppy version lowres, with the proper, the way it was meant to be played higher res cd version released later), same goes for SS2 (obj textures way too lowres, and pretty much requiring SHTUP from the get-go to look right), so if historical consistency is what they have in mind, then they are doing it right.

and as already mentioned, as far as discord goes, the attitude to the pixelization seems to be generally positive, oddly enough.

[673f7d55a8cdaicemann]

The true test is when the full game is out.

[673f7d55a8e25la0s]

But in some regards the engine in Shock 1 was, if not state of the art, then quite advanced, right? They didn’t purposefully try to make the game look like a 8086 game, they did everything they could to make it look good. I can understand the thought process, but not the decision to stick with it when you view it in-game, or the people on discord who actually like it.

[673f7d55a8f2evoodoo47]

yes, but iirc, the first release was rushed (no audiolog audio, 320*240 res max, floppy disks), with the later released cd version being what actually was intended.

[673f7d55a90e7ZylonBane]

In the end, it comes down to this...

Number of players who would have refused to buy the remake because it DIDN'T have pixelated textures: Zero

Number of players who will refuse to buy the remake because it does have this ugly half-assed pixelated aesthetic: Non-zero

So from a business perspective, it was an objectively bad call.

A near-straight remake of an ancient DOS game with a reputation for being infamously difficult to play was always going to be a tough sell, so you'd think Night Dive would have done everything in their power to make it palatable to modern gamers. But noooooo, they decided to be cute and go with the faux-retro pixelated look that just screams "perpetual Early Access indie game" these days. What the fuck, Kick. What. The. Fuck.

The tragedy is that this dumb controversy could have been entirely avoided if they'd just had the sense to texture the game normally, then throw in an optional retro mode that reduced texture resolution and turned off filtering.

[673f7d55a95a8voodoo47]

Number of players who would have refused to buy the remake because it DIDN'T have pixelated textures: Zero
Number of players who will refuse to buy the remake because it does have this ugly half-assed pixelated aesthetic: Non-zero

that.

also, if I understand correctly, the biggest problem right now is that as they created all the textures with pixelation in mind, they would have to redo everything from scratch if they wanted to add a "disable ugly" option. very sure that if the assets were normal, a simple algorithm would be able to create a pixelated pack in just a couple of minutes.

guess that ship has sailed.

[673f7d55a9702ZylonBane]

My understanding is that they've been doing model UV mapping with the big clunky pixels in mind. So they'd look fine with higher res textures. And they almost certainly have high res source artwork. All the low res textures I've seen have that scaled-down look, rather than having been natively drawn at low res.

[673f7d55a9824voodoo47]

whatever the case, the point is that getting the non-retro mode in would be too much work now, so it's not happening.