SSR: System Shock Kickstarter

[6740a44789b36JDoran]

Apparently, SSR's release date has been set back to the 30th May 2023.

https://steamdb.info/app/482400/history/?changeid=U:36755218

[6740a44789cf2icemann]

[6740a4478a4fdNameless Voice]

I finished the SSR Backer Beta.  Here's my feedback that I sent to Night Dive:

Honestly, I liked most of the game.  It's a faithful remake, much closer to the original than I'd expected it to be.  The level layouts are the same, just much more detailed.  The enemies, weapons, items, and story are mostly the same. There are a few changes and additions here and there, but mostly they're neutral or good.
There are a few major issues, which sadly I suspect are too big to actually get changed / fixed at this point, but the core of the game is solid.
I'm a bit surprised that there's still no objective screen though.  SS1 doesn't exactly tell you what you're meant to do next, which I do kind of like, but is likely to confuse modern audiences.

Biggest issues:
 - The music (or lack thereof.)  The game is now very quiet, with the music mostly replaced with background ambience or very light music.  I had expected reworks of the original tracks, maybe toned down slightly, but not this almost complete lack of music.  Even the cyberspace music, which is a rework of the original track, is only half of the track and has removed the high-tempo "exciting" second half.

 - The intro.  This version has really bad pacing and the characters don't act naturally.  The hacker doesn't actually do any hacking, he just runs "battering ram.exe", which breaks in instantly (it does mention a battering ram in the original, but it's less prominent and it still takes him ~2 hours).  When the TriOp forces appear, they just randomly walk into his apartment without saying a word (in the original, they break open the door and immediately point their weapons at him.)
 Diego comes across as a bit of a cartoon villain, threatening and intimidating rather than initially sounding charming and making a deal like in the original. The way he appears through a hologram as if he has better things to do is also just weird, as are the guards attending, rather than the more clandestine meeting where he leans over the back of the hacker's chair in the original.
 SS1's intro is cool, this thing is...  not.

 - The finale.  I don't even know what to say here. The original final fight with SHODAN was not exactly great, but this manages to be worse somehow.  It's set in cyberspace, but unlike every other cyberspace, you are walking.  You find a "gun" at the start for no explained reason, and then proceed to shoot cyberspace enemies with it, before taking on SHODAN by...  randomly shooting at her through strange windows?  The whole thing doesn't fit with the rest of the game, it doesn't follow any of the previously established gameplay, and just feels totally random.  It's not even fun, as you have to repeat the same thing three times, plus you seem to be invulnerable during the sequence anyway (or, least, have no health bar).  Oh, and the music cuts out 1/3 of the way through and never comes back.
 I did like the exposition from SHODAN at the start, from when she was first hacked, though.

 - The ending cutscene.  At the start, it shows SHODAN's face between the columns, and you'd expect it to be destroyed or disappear, but it just stays there for the duration, slowly turning to blue.  After that, it has no writing or exposition.  Nothing about being offered a job by TriOp and turning it down, no iconic "Old habits die hard" line, no mentioned of hacking into TetraCorp (the screen is blank).  Also, the hacker is then back to hacking via a keyboard, instead of using a cable into his cybernetic interface like he does in the original.
 It's also missing the awesome ending music from the original, which was one of that game's best tracks.

 - Maintenance deck.  A dark and spooky deck in the original, filled with invisible mutants.  It was frightening to come here and you wanted to just run between the two lifts on your early visits.  In the remake, it's brightly lit and has almost no enemies.  It's not frightening in any way.  Most of this deck (outside of the maintenance tunnels) feels like it's just missing from the game.

Other major issues:
 - Cyberspace.  It mostly plays great, but there are a lot of bugs. Lots of software that you can pick up that either does nothing (the hourglasses), or gets added to your inventory but can't actually be used in any way (recall, quad damage, etc.)
 - Game softs (minigames) - these seem to be missing entirely.
 - The cyberspace level on Engineering seems to have no enemies at all?
 - The groves also feel really empty, there were almost no enemies in any of them.
 - The self-destruct sequence is extremely lacking - there are no alarms, no warning speech, no frequent rumbles and screen shakes.  The game seems to just ignore that the ship is about to blow up until you are at the entrance to the bridge.
- Melee combat feels very un-impactful - enemies tend not to flinch, stagger, or react much in any way
- On the Bridge, Bianca Schuler's body is missing from the detention cells. This was originally where you found the Isolinear Chipset. Nothing wrong with moving it to the Cortex Reaver, but her body should still be there (maybe with a log indicating that the chipset has been taken and is now being guarded.)
- The line at the top of the screen, which describes what you are looking at, is also used for when items are picked up, which temporarily breaks its main purpose and forces you to wait for the message to clear before you can see what the next item is. It would work much better if the item pickup prompts were printed to the left, like other interactions.  It also seems like the terrain descriptions (e.g. looking at walls) disappear on later levels.
- The markers on the map are very hard to read. They all look extremely similar (small and white), and there's no tooltip when you mouse over them.
- Some logs are very quiet:
   - Rebecca's email just after jettisoning Beta Grove, you can barely hear it over the grove launching
   - SHODAN's email when you try to use the escape pod
- Also, Rebecca's email just after destroying the antennae is oddly ... detached.  She sounds disinterested, and just starts talking out of nowhere, unlike the original where she at least starts with "I managed to convince the suits to blow the station"
- There doesn't seem to be any way to view your current power drain (it also seems to drain slowly all the time even with nothing but the map enabled? Does the map use power?)
- There's no way to switch off the night vision mode on your headlamp once you've found it.  Would be preferable if you could switch between lamp and night vision modes.

Some minor issues:
- The wire puzzle solution is always (almost?) exactly the same for every single puzzle?
- There are very few corpse models, and it feels surreal when the same one is used many times in an area - especially when it's the distinctive one of a woman in her underwear.

Some Bugs:
- Ammo type indicator on the shotgun is broken, or can become broken, to always be red regardless of ammo type loaded
- Occasionally you fall through the floor in a lift and die (or fall forever)
- Restoration bays work across levels (very much a departure from the original)
- There's an invisible barrier that blocks you from entering any of the cells on Security and taking any of the items therein
- Broken assault rifles don't fit in the recycler
- The laser on the Magnum sometimes stops being drawn upon loading the game

Balance:
- Assassin proximity mines are pretty much instant death if they throw one
- Auto-bombs are now insanely tanky, move very fast, and have a very large explosion radius even if you do shoot them, making it very hard to avoid dying to them.
- The Mag-pulse feels a bit weak (against robots, compared to the original), especially later in the game when you have ammo for it, but it takes so long to fire. I do like the new pump action with multi-pumps, but it feels weak when you need to three triple-pumped shots to kill a single Sec-1 robot
- The cargo elevator is a nice idea, but it's too small to put much in.
- The recycling aspect seems to increasingly fall off later in the game, as the later levels (especially Engineering+) don't have junk or recyclers, and there's also not much to spend the money on later in the game.

[6740a4478afbfXkilljoy98]

Nameless Voice I agree with pretty much everything said but I do want to add a few things

I felt like the Groves could have used more grass and also on the bridge I would have put the virus in there somewhere as it isn't in the game at all. Though aside from those, I liked or didn't mind most of the level additions.

For music I will say that the Executive music I like, it gives off a similar vibe to the original, it is different but still inspired by it. Everything else though yeah I am not a fan either.

Also something else that is missing is the cyberspace timer and story difficulty 1 and 2

I also would have liked the Cyborg Enforcers to be more brown but that is a small thing I suppose

Also cargo elevator was in the original too so idk what you mean, unless you think it should be bigger

But yeah the game ended up being closer to the original than I expected too

[6740a4478b122Nameless Voice]

Oh yes, I did notice how the Bridge's walls aren't covered in virus, but the white walls always just looked weird in the original, so I was more okay with that change.

I meant the small "dumb waiter" cargo elevator that you put items in, not the big cargo elevator that you use to travel between Maintenance, Storage, and Flight.

[6740a4478b2b0ZylonBane]

Are we just not talking about how when you get close to a wall you inexplicably hold your weapon up in the air, preventing it from being used and obscuring the entire right third of the screen?

[6740a4478b644Chandlermaki]

Are we just not talking about how when you get close to a wall you inexplicably hold your weapon up in the air, preventing it from being used and obscuring the entire right third of the screen?

Maybe that’s their way of keeping you away from the god awful looking pixelated walls?

[6740a4478b8c7Nameless Voice]

Are we just not talking about how when you get close to a wall you inexplicably hold your weapon up in the air, preventing it from being used and obscuring the entire right third of the screen?

That's pretty standard in modern games at this point.  I'd also call it an engine limitation.
Old engines just draw the player arm on top of everything.  Modern engines with deferred rendering can't easily do that, so they use the "hold your gun up" trick to stop it from clipping into walls.

Anyway, it didn't matter much to me, I don't normally try to shoot into walls.

[6740a4478b9f6ZylonBane]

Wall-shooting is a distant second concern to the screen-obscuring, which is just visually obnoxious, and generally obnoxious in the way that any FPS is when your character automatically performs an uncommanded action.

I don't think I've ever encountered another FPS that does this, but then I'm not really into the Call of Duty scene. I know I've never played an immersive sim that does it, which is the target Night Dive should be aiming for.

[6740a4478bb4fNameless Voice]

I've seen it in a lot of first-person games in recent years, though I can't think of specific examples, just that I've seen it often.

It's one of the three recommended ways of preventing weapons from clipping into walls when you are close (the other two are to make the gun model tiny and really close to your face, or to put it on a separate rendering pass, which is somehow meant to be more expensive to do in modern games.)


In SSR's case though, like Chandlermaki said, I'd rather not get close enough to walls to see the pixels, so I don't see this much either.

[6740a4478bcd7JosiahJack]

Did they nerf my favorite gun, the magpulse?  It looks like a dinky handgun, and blue now too.  Well at least they didn't turn SHODAN blue too...

[6740a4478bddfZylonBane]

I'm still salty about them dropping the flechette gun, the single most legitimately "cyberpunk" weapon in the entire game. But of course they kept the TNG Type-2 Phaser ripoff.

[6740a4478becbNameless Voice]

The new shotgun does have fletchette rounds at least.  Not that you can really tell other than the name and icon.

[6740a4478bfc4Xkilljoy98]

Yeah it sucks that they removed some weapons, the Flechette especially, though at least there are flechette rounds and function wise the shotgun sort of fills the void left by its spot though it does feel different to fire

[6740a4478c0bcicemann]

So there's not been a single post or KS update (unsurprisingly) from Night Dive since the Atari takeover.

I doubt the remake is dead, and so wonder how long it will be till we hear anything.

[6740a4478c304Twist]

This post-Atari interview is the latest and most I've seen:

The Difficult Journey of Remaking A Classic, From Guatemala to Atari

[6740a4478c7a6sarge945]

ZylonBane
I have seen some other games handle this by moving the gun back, rather than moving it up and in the way. They should do that here.

[6740a4478c8aeZylonBane]

Or y'know, they should do what every FPS until recently has done, which is nothing.

[6740a4478c99dNameless Voice]

Or, more accurately, went to a good deal of work to make it appear that they did nothing.

[6740a4478cce0sarge945]

Or y'know, they should do what every FPS until recently has done, which is nothing.

From my understanding, this is not really much of an option anymore because deferred rendering has made drawing in layers very bad for performance, so your gun would basically clip through the wall.

That said, there's definitely an obsession in modern games for very over-the-top animations to play whenever you do anything (including moving your gun out of the way of walls), which for some reason someone decided need to block all input and generally interrupt the game flow.

So you're right that this is more of a game design problem.

Hell, even if developers said "fuck it" and just didn't render the weapon model at all if it would clip through a wall, that's still a vastly superior solution to the modern "we're gonna play a big long animation oh and by the way you can't shoot anymore for a bit" garbage.

Unrelated, but the irony is not lost on me either. Developers are afraid to render in layers because of "performance", but will still ship horrendously unoptimised, buggy messes that chew through memory like crazy. It reminds me of the C programmer who's projects are buggy, unmaintainable messes, who doesn't spend time actually fixing their code but instead spends their time inlining everything so they can save 3 CPU cycles per function call, because "they only care about writing fast code". People will seriously micro-optimise to the highest degree while utterly failing to do the basics required to not ship a bloated, broken mess.

[6740a4478ce27icemann]

Nightdive just can't do a thing right recently:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/80.lv/articles/players-cancel-system-shock-remake-pre-orders-over-ai-generated-art-controversy/%3famp=1

[6740a4478d22bJDoran]

Nightdive just can't do a thing right recently:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/80.lv/articles/players-cancel-system-shock-remake-pre-orders-over-ai-generated-art-controversy/%3famp=1

"Numerous players have reportedly canceled their pre-orders for the System Shock remake following a tweet from the developers featuring art created using Midjourney."

The following is the text and the image from the Tweet:


"Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone. Your body, weak, fragile.
How can you challenge a perfect machine?
Imagine, how would my immortal body look like?
Designed by an immortal machine for an immortal machine."

I think that the people cancelling, or threatening to cancel, their pre-orders are really over-racting, if you ask me. I mean, it's not like NDS' Tweet is saying "We're scrapping all of the man-made art that is already in-game, and replacing it with all A.I. made art instead, and from now on we'll only be adding A.I. art". It's just one image (which does actually look good), with no sign that NDS are necessarily going to incorporate it into the game.

And since it's only about three weeks to the (latest) release date of the game, I would love to see a post from NDS confirming that that date is still valid, and saying whether or not the console versions will release then, too.

I would have thought that, since they are now owned by Atari, that Atari would force NDS to be more public with news of upcoming releases.

[6740a4478d3d9fox]

In any case, I'm glad that we're training AIs with Shodan-related content. Role models are important, they say.

[6740a4478d56aNameless Voice]

So, is anything actually happening with the game itself?

I was hoping (though not really expecting) that they'd address some of the bigger issues that were reported by the beta testers.

I haven't heard anything, though I'm not on their Discord, so maybe something has been happening there?