SSR: System Shock Kickstarter

[6740f31075792ZylonBane]

Shhhh. If you respond it just encourages him.

[6740f31075920Briareos H]

The trailer music made it painful to watch, which is a shame because I absolutely adore the visuals. For the first time since the original announcement, I think I'm looking forward to the release.

[6740f31075cb8edx]

vurt
Kind of related, last week they locked down the backerkit orders, charging for any add-ons, extras, etc. that backers added to their original pledges.

[6740f31075e40fox]

At a glance, this looks and sounds pretty good to me. Like something I'd actually want to play. It's just a trailer though.

[6740f3107609cTwist]

I still don't like the pixelated textures and the music in that trailer -- with its bombastic punctuations -- felt inappropriate for System Shock, but on the whole this looks like something I can enjoy.

[6740f31076213voodoo47]

yeah, but lets not beat that (pixelated) dead horse anymore. it is what it is, and the ship has sailed a long time ago.

anyway, it's going to be ok I'm guessing, but too bad they didn't really take all the suggestions into consideration (or so it seems).

[6740f31076314ZylonBane]

It's such a divisive choice, at this point I'm almost convinced that not making it optional is an ego thing.

[6740f31076730RoSoDude]

I know I always bring up the wire puzzles, but seriously, what is going on with the wire puzzles? They've seemingly removed the color-mixing aspect which is great to see as a red-green color deficient person (along with 8% of the male population), but now it's pixelated to a comical degree and I'm still not quite sure what I'm looking at. Now in addition to placing the wire plugs, we seem to have have junction splitters and combiners as well as knobs that direct the flow in a particular direction and switches that turn it on or off. The result is a logic puzzle that is nearly indistiguishable from the new tile grid puzzle in how it actually plays. I once again ask -- what was so wrong with the original wire and grid puzzles that merited total replacement? They were simple and clever designs that could be easily generalized to higher levels of complexity, plus they were nicely differentiated from each other; the grid puzzle was a purely logical affair while the wire puzzle was more touch and go and had to be "felt" out.

New:

Old:

The SMG (Skorpion? RIP Flechette) sounds really pitiful, could just be the muffled audio in the trailer though. Some of the art assets are rather cool though, shame about the choices made on rendering and high-contrast lighting. I also think it's funny how much emphasis the promotional materials still put on the Medical level and animations we've seen since 2016.

[6740f310768d9ZylonBane]

I just noticed that at several points in the video, the ammo counter on the player's gun (which is depicted as a seven-segment display) goes all scrambled like a video screen. Think about that for a second. That's physically impossible.

"But wait," I hear you chirping, "What if that's a bitmap display on the gun, but displaying a seven-segment ammo counter?" In that case, that would merely be stupid instead of impossible. Nobody uses seven-segment numerals for their legibility. They're used because they're cheap and reliable. If a gun's ammo counter used a bitmap display, it would be using a more legible font.

It's like these people take pride in not thinking anything through.

[6740f310769ccfox]

It's clever foreshadowing of the big plot twist: the hacker was just dreaming all along. Uh, spoiler warning.

[6740f31076b29icemann]

I think the important thing is that they make this moddable. Otherwise how are we going to have a SHTUP and lighting mod for it in 10+ years time .

[6740f31076cafZylonBane]

So Night Dive's Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition was released this week, and apparently it looks worse than the original.

[6740f31076dfavoodoo47]

it is not easy to clean up these old 2D games and not mess them up at the same time, off the bat, the steam release of Chrono Trigger being a good example.

less is sometimes more is a lesson NDS are yet to learn, it seems.


//also, I'd assume it's crystal clear the QA person approving the release (the infamous "yes this is fine, I'm sure nobody will notice and there is simply no way internet is going to drag us around the mud because of this, go ahead and release" guy) should be relieved of that particular duty, right?

[6740f31077083NeilHoward17]

The graphics are the least of the "enhanced" editions problems. Many shots have been cropped, even more are just flat out missing. The seamless transitions from one video background to another in places where the camera moves are completely undermined by a cross-fade effect leading to ghosting and awkward effects. Shooting is broken, mouse input and hit-feedback animations are broken as all get out. Music is missing in several locations. Frame interpolation is hit and miss. Esper machine noticeably slows down during zoom ins.

I don't remember all the original promises made pre-release, I did hear the store page was edited shortly prior to release. But I do seem to remember talk of improved character models. Either way they seem the most unchanged and also more broken as certain lighting effects don't work. Foreground and mid-ground occlusion masks (I'm not sure what the technique is called) seem to be the same resolution they always were. So the characters and the backgrounds are even more detached from each other.

Who knew that Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition would have so much in common with The Jesus of Fresco: Enhanced Edition?

[6740f3107745cshabbadabba]

ZylonBane
What if it's not the gun's ammo counter display got scrambled, but the Hacker's vision implant is? I'm not sure if his eyes/retinas/whatever human vision apparatus was electronically enhanced, but if it was - that might sound like a justification.

[6740f310775dcZylonBane]

Did you not look at the screenshot I posted? If the Hacker's vision was scrambled, it would affect his entire field of view. In the screenshot, only the digits are scrambled.

[6740f31077918icemann]

New update dropped today (for the KS):

Screenshots only of Delta Grove.

[6740f31077aecZylonBane]

Yup, ridiculously dark compared to the original maps.

How do these knuckleheads not understand that the groves were so nerve-wracking because they were brightly lit? They forced you to wander around in wide open areas with no cover where any hostile creature could clearly see and attack you. Looking Glass knew exactly what they were doing with the lighting. They could have made the groves dark and shadowy, but they chose not to.

Now it's just more gloomy haunted house bullshit, exactly like every other level in the remake.

[6740f31077ed5sarge945]

Well it certainly has high fidelity, but I don't understand the purpose of the chessboard

As long as the sightlines themselves are far and allow for the sort of open gameplay that they had in the original, I don't really care how moody they are.

[6740f3107812bJDoran]

I'd always imagined that that area would, if Looking Glass were writing for modern hardware instead of 1993 hardware, have looked really pleasant and welcoming, with a lot more plants, and grass on the floor, with wooden benches. Basically as though the designers of the Van Braun had intended this area to be a reminder of Earth's natural beauty spots. Somewhere where members of the Von Braun's crew might go to relax, for some peace, and maybe even to imagine they were back on Earth, under the protection and beauty of nature, and not light-years from home, trapped in an artificial environment in a vulnerable space-craft.

That is *really* not what those screenshots say to me.

[6740f310784a7ZylonBane]

Van Braun

What.

[6740f31078671icemann]

I agree on the darkess / haunted house look. I don't get the reasoning with the groves. Should be super bright, with loads of vegetation, since the SS1 originals were based off plantation groves that you'd see in loads of old school sci-fi. Whats shown in those screenshots is not that at all.

Theres a distinct lack of vegetation if anything. That chessboard is super out of place also.

[6740f31079231sarge945]

Yeah, the Groves (on CITADEL, not the Von Braun lol) were comfy and bright areas. In the original game there's grass everywhere, like they were designed to be big open "outside" areas where people could travel to a virtual earth landscape. The designers of the remaster could have very cleverly juxtaposed those 2 things together. SS2 does this very well, it's why the pleasant garden music in recreation deck is so unsettling - you have that peaceful music which only emphasizes the bloodbath before you. As a result of this, I have seen multiple lets players nope right out of there upon hearing the pleasant music, because the unnerving nature of it heightens the tension.

And that was done in the Dark engine with barebones graphics and low quality sound. This is still effective after games like Fear and Dead Space have been out for a long time, games with much better graphical fidelity.

This tension was obviously something that was difficult to get across in SS1, because of the extremely low graphical fidelity, so in many ways the groves unfortunately just seem like another area. This is one of the areas where a remake should be able to genuinely improve on the original. When people tell me all remakes are inherently bad, I usually make some sort of argument about how in really old games the designers may not have been able to get their intent across, and now, without limitations they are more free, which should be a good argument for remakes actually improving on things.

But this completely undermines all that. I don't feel any effort has really been put in to making the area overly (possibly exagerattingly) pleasant to be in, so that they can undermine that happiness. Instead, it just looks like a standard blocky area with some plants and some dim, moody lighting. I feel they will just come across as yet another generic spooky location as a result. They will probably be fun to play in terms of the actual gameplay, but I don't see them being something special.

It's almost as if the designers of this don't understand the original intent and have no idea what they are doing. Almost.

I think the important thing is that they make this moddable. Otherwise how are we going to have a SHTUP and lighting mod for it in 10+ years time .

IIRC this is made in Unity, so don't expect any form of modability unless they specifically build it into the game, which I wouldn't count on.

If you ask me, the original puzzle designs were much better. Particularly the wire puzzles -- while the grid puzzles were pure logic puzzles (use the on/off switching rules of the current grid to connect power from one end to the other), the wire puzzles were intentionally fuzzier. Doug Church's design goal was to approximate the feel of lockpicking, where you iteratively make progress by feeling out the device through trial and error. One thing that's especially interesting about it is that the power progress bar gives "partial credit" for correct wire orientation and correct pin location for a given wire color, so it's possible to get stuck in a local maximum where any single pin change will decrease the current power. This means you have reconfigure the entire wire setup to untangle it and then try to guess at what was correct about the "hill" you were on. It's also cool that the power fluctuation can sometimes be enough to just barely get you to the required power amount even if you didn't get the wires in exactly the right place yet. The new minigame captures none of these subtleties, instead being a rather confusing logic puzzle about combining colors with the extra annoyance of being performed in the 3D world instead of a clean abstract interface.

On this note in general, I really don't like how the system shock UI design of having mini-windows (which was also prevalent in other games throughout the nineties, including Descent, etc) has largely fallen out of fashion for the sake of design that "fits into the world more", because in many cases using a mouse-driven interface is quite novel, and adjusting things like power level for the SPARQ are a lot more intuitive with a bar you can use your mouse to manipulate, compared to some in-game knob that would never really be accurate, especially if keyboard driven. I believe this is partially the reason why so many gameplay elements have moved from mouse-driven multi-state systems with granular controls to being largely binary. If a modern game has power levels like the SPARQ, it's usually controlled by a button and just selects between 1-2 presets.

[6740f310794ebJDoran]

What.

Sorry, lack of sleep (heat-wave related) and lack of intelligence (missing-brain related ) means I wasn't concentrating.

My point still stands, though. Surely the space station's (not the space-craft's, thanks) designers, when adding the grove area, would intend for it to look and feel like an area of nature, so that people going there would hopefully subconsciously feel removed from the stress of living in the artificial world of Citadel.