SSR: System Shock Kickstarter

[67415e3d4ed50lgs]

Blinking light doesn't help because everything in this game has at least one.
Welcome to the Christmas Tree Station, Hacker

[67415e3d4ef21Dark-Star88]

And that would work well as a gimmick for VERY SMALL places, but doing that to an entire level is the sign of a clueless/careless level development.

[67415e3d4f145Gawain]

SS1 levels are very maze like, but somehow that video makes them look even harder to navigate and perceive where to go.

Also the little lights on items are totally lost in the level's christmas lights.
Spotting items/important stuff shouldn't be as hard as it looks to be in the video.

It looks like the player knew exactly where everything is.
I can imagine players scanning and hugging the walls/tables/shelves to find target rectangle to pop up. Not a gameplay improvement.

I did like the mini boss battle at the end of the video. SS1 could use some of those.
Some of the best parts in original was the ambushes.

[67415e3d4f2d9ZylonBane]

Something else I just noticed, all the screen-filling visual effects on the Sparq when you fire make it unnecessarily difficult to tell where your shots are actually landing. Once again, Night Dive just slathering on "cool" stuff with no regard for gameplay impact.

[67415e3d5056b[Unidentified Hacker]]

ZylonBane
its surprising that while playing the demo myself never bothered about these details, instead i was gushing on the remake and the graphical glossing, but i can really see your interesting points towards the small bits. Looking back now, i agree with your view and it makes sense over the non-sensical changes and design choices on the game, there is still hope for these problems to be analized further but i really hope the devs decide to accept these complaints.

[67415e3d50783Join2]

I can agree some of these effects look overdone, both in the environment art and combat effects.

I preferred the sparq beam from the Unity demo, I think, though this looks decent still. The overdone effects can potentially remain, as there are many possible ways to relay hit feedback. If you look closely there is a electrical discharge effect surrounding the bot when it is hit, which may be good enough on its own. But there can also be sound feedback, or GUI feedback. The original already displayed a sprite "hitmarker" when you hit something as opposed to missed, maybe instead they can embed it into UI cybergrade interface rig whatever design like for example making interaction highlight boxes around enemies flash red when you hit them, instead of a crude impact sprite like in the original.

Ultimately I'm not ready to point fingers at nightdive over this. They may have it figured out it's hard to say from a short demo. Or they might very well be incompetent. That does seem to be the standard these days.

[67415e3d5090cZylonBane]

The overdone shot effect wouldn't even be (much) of a problem in any other game. The issue with SSR is that the environments are so dark and so high-contrast that enemies mostly blend into the backgrounds instead of standing out. Say what you will about the original's crude graphics, it was almost always pretty easy to visually identify the enemies in a scene. When it wasn't easy, it was a deliberate design decision, like what LGS did with the Maintenance deck.

The level lighting we've seen so far in the remake makes it seem like every deck is like Maintenance now.

[67415e3d50a29Gawain]

NVIDIA DLSS blog thing from couple of months back. Nothing new really.

System Shock Demo and The Fabled Woods Add NVIDIA DLSS At Lightning Speed Using Unreal Engine 4 DLSS Plugin

[67415e3d50bbcedx]

September Kickstarter Update:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/3236806

November update:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/3365652

[67415e3d50c9cZylonBane]

Jesus, even the hacker's apartment is lit like a haunted house.

[67415e3d50d79Gawain]

Well, at least the comments on kickstarter are funny.

[67415e3d50eabicemann]

There was more content in the comments than in the update itself.

[67415e3d5119dJDoran]

It is a little strange, and rather more than a little displeasing, how slow the System Shock remake seems to be going, and how little progress we are being shown when we were made to expect a reasonably open view of the game's production.

Night Dive Studios are very prompt with other remakes/remasters, and the results (in the ones I have bought, and so can judge) are very good. And it's very welcome, to me and lots of other people, that they often release these games on consoles as well as the PC. I even bought the Quake remake on the PS4, even though I'm not a Quake fan, as I want to support NDS's endeavours, and hopefully encourage them to port more older first person shooters to consoles.

And I get that the System Shock remake is a more involved update than the games that NDS have so far released. But I just don't see why the updates are so sparse (a couple of sentences and four screenshots, and those four screenshots being generic screenshots at that, is in no way an 'update' worthy of a supposedly strong and productive project).

I am *really* looking forward to System Shock . But in all honesty, if it wasn't for NDS delivering on their other remakes, then I would have written this off as vapour-ware some time back.

NDS, if you could, could you perhaps add more to the November update, please? A fairly detailed look at the progress of the past few months, an estimate of what percentage of the game's world/locations are now complete, what in-game mechanics are complete and what still needs to be done, etc, and perhaps a rough ETA of the finished game's release date (such as "Q1 2022", "Mid/late 2022", or (I wish!) "We estimate less than five weeks now, so so just before Christmas" (that would be brilliant  ) ).

Please keep us System Shock fans updated of the game's progress.

[67415e3d51783icemann]

JDoran
Completely agree. As a backer project it's not the same as just a "game in development" style thing. And yet it's been treated as such. If this was a more standard investor project, the investors would have pulled out a LONG time ago, due to the lack of information and progress updates.

I've been noticing it with many of the projects I've backed on KS over the past few years. It didn't used to be like that. Shadowrun Returns and Satellite Reign + others, did an update every month or so, and were HIGHLY detailed. System Shock, Scorn and unDungeon though - Nope. Opposite. I've often seen updates after long periods of time with devs saying it takes resources away from development to put the time into making update content, dev videos etc etc. Well if you feel that way then you shouldn't have put it up on Kickstarter then. Oh you wouldn't have got the funding you needed to make the game then? Dayam. Try not to bite the hand that feeds.

Part of what I used to love about backing games on KS was seeing inside the development process, with in depth details on whats going on, the problems, the successes. That approach seems to have been changed to a - Well we want to save the surprise for release (Night Dive has said that one on multiple occasions). But that's not a backer project approach, that's just a responding to the public response.

What I would loved to have seen but have not with the System Shock KS updates:
* In depth details on music development
* Detailed look into the level design process across several KS updates
* Voice acting
* Q and A with the devs (text based, not a Twitch stream)
* Sound Design
* Game engine development

All of that has not been present at all. Instead we're given a few gif images and maybe a quick 10 second video every now and then. Very unimpressed, as it's far more in the way of a closed off not telling us anything at all practically approach, compared to the more open discussion approach that is the standard of KS projects.

Another super short KS update:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/3385696?ref=ksr_email_backer_project_update_registered_users

Has a few sentences on the SS2 enhanced edition also.

Be nice of they actually just said the full truth of where things are at, what's in etc etc.

[67415e3d51897Sectoid]

It still usually looks more like catacombs (too dark) than a space station... And that purple laser rapier ... has always been blue! It's Disneyland...

[67415e3d51992ZylonBane]

At this point I can only conclude that they're making the entire game so eye-strainingly dark out of spite. It's beyond obvious that it doesn't look good.

[67415e3d51a63icemann]

They must have a love for caves

[67415e3d51baavoodoo47]

very sure they are aware of everything that has been said (over here). the die is cast.

[67415e3d51cc3lgs]

Linked PC gamer article have screenshots with okay brightness, you can see everything now https://www.pcgamer.com/system-shock-remake-is-coming-next-year-so-heres-15-all-new-screens

[67415e3d51dc2edx]

February 2022 Update, mainly concerning physical goodies from the kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/3430402

[67415e3d51ea1voodoo47]

the most interesting bit is that SSR is now completable, that means early beta stage has been reached.

[67415e3d51fabicemann]

And finally a detailed KS update. Yay.

[67415e3d52289vurt]

...so i did back it, i wasn't sure lol. it's been a while.

[67415e3d523cbKolya]

Same.