Past related topics:
- Too Long; Didn't Play: System Shock 2
- System Shock 2 coming to GOG.com
- System Shock 2 rated best single-player FPS ever?
System Shock (2023 remake)
The beleaguered, long-delayed System Shock remake is finally scheduled to release on May 30th. Kickstarted way back in 2016, the game was put on hiatus in 2018 after the project strayed too far from its original vision. The game was originally being developed in Unity, and a pre-alpha Unity demo was released to support the Kickstarter. But the project switched to Unreal engine before the hiatus. Development resumed a month after the hiatus, and later a demo of the Unreal engine version was released. The resumed project was slated for 2020 release, but delays pushed things for another 3 years.
System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition
Also on its way is System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition, which is being included for free with preorders of the System Shock remake. When SS2:EE releases is less clear. Originally it was to release alongside SS remake, but the phrasing on the SS remake release date announcements make it sound like SS2:EE will now be arriving at an unspecified later date.
SS2:EE is slated to include 4K support, higher fidelity textures, integrated mod support, improved (ie. working) co-op multiplayer, as well as VR support. It is being implemented in Nightdive's KEX engine, which has powered Nightdive remasters from Blood and DOOM 64 to Turok and Forsaken.
System Shock: Enhanced Edition
Of course, we already have System Shock: Enhanced Edition, the goosed-up version of the original game. If you're like me, you might have missed on the fact that SS:EE was essentially released twice. The first, 2015 release was basically a wrapper around the original DOS version, hacking in some functioning mouselook as well as upping the resolution to 1024x768. Then in 2018, Nightdive ported it into the KEX engine, bringing full 4K and widescreen support, variable FOV, in-game control rebindings, and all those other creature comforts. The KEX version was pushed as a free update to the old wrapper version, which was easy to miss if you weren't paying attention.
System Shock 3
Ah, the tragedy of SS3. At one point, the game was in development, releasing trailers and being shown off in a GDC keynote. But the rights got passed around and development of the game at Warren Spector's studio OtherSide ceased in 2019. Tencent holds the rights and that seems to be where things are stuck for now.
System Shock 2 remake
When discussing the state of System Shock 3, Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick revealed that Nightdive holds the rights to remake System Shock 2. No such project yet exists (Kick described the SS2 remake as "potential"), but once the studio is wrapped up with the SS1 remake and SS2:EE, perhaps a full-blown SS2 remake will be on the table.
I played System Shock 2 when it came out, and I have periodically replayed it over the years, each time confirming that it is one of the absolute best games of all time.
But I had never given the original System Shock much of a try, until recently. After doing a little bit of control rebinding, I found them acceptable enough to use, and finally got over that initial hump. The game is absolutely superb, and even with the primitive visuals, it succeeds at putting me on edge and instilling a sense of danger. I always thought it would be too kludgy to press the same buttons in me that SS2 did, but it turns out I gave it too little credit.
To anyone else thinking of giving SS:EE a try, I recommend the System Shock Music Augmentation Project, a MIDI sound font that is much better than the awful default Windows one, and the Better Keybindings guide. Also, the log text mod recommended on the game's PCGamingWiki page.
SS2 is a masterpiece…in some ways even better than Deus Ex. I found the original SS just to clunky even when it was initially released.. I have high hopes for the remake that I can finally enjoy the story and game with modern controls
The first System Shock is in my original holy trinity of all-time favorite games, along with Planescape: Torment and Star Control 2.
YouTube reviews I've seen on the Shock remake have been pretty good so far. Frustrated that I have business travel the day after release. Something to look forward to when I come home.
One thing I did like is that I immediately recognized rooms and areas when watching those video reviews, even fairly nondescript, non-notable rooms.
I think System Shock 2's going to be the first game I stop counting how many copies I've owned.
Check Out: System Shock Remake
Waiting for it to unlock.
I own the original (bought it off eBay 20 years ago for too much money), but have never played it. The promise of archaic controls kept me away; the remake promising to remove that barrier for me got me to pre-order it.
Put in 1.25 hours into the remake so far and am liking it quite a bit. The tension isn't exactly high yet, but it's definitely there. Keep filling up my inventory with stuff because I don't always know what I can safely vaporize. The occasional lo-fi textures are a bit jarring, even though they are intentional. The sparse music kicking in at just the right times really helps the atmosphere.
Cyberspace though...whoah. Didn't know I was going to be playing something like that.
Did they really have a Descent-like in the original?
This is the first game I've day-one'd in as long as I can remember. Not disappointed so far.
A question for those who have played the original:
Does it help to never let the cameras focus in on you? Does Shodan not know you're there as long as you stay out of sight? I'm assuming probably not, but I also can't discount the possibility. Is it even possible to always stay out of sight?
Spoiler:Did they really have a Descent-like in the original?
The original cyberspace was... not exactly a Descent-like. Imagine something more like being underwater in a first person shooter, except you don't run out of breath, and the W key is being held down all on its own. And you can't strafe. On the flip side, it usually wasn't THAT challenging, and the hardest part was actually discerning where you're going, because the entire thing was wireframe, without filled-in walls or having the walls occlude the other areas. The hard part was figuring out what was a solid wall, and what was an opening to traverse to the next area.
Based on watching reviews, the new cyberspace seems like it might be the biggest improvement from the original.
A question for those who have played the original:
Spoiler:Does it help to never let the cameras focus in on you? Does Shodan not know you're there as long as you stay out of sight? I'm assuming probably not, but I also can't discount the possibility. Is it even possible to always stay out of sight?
No. The cameras don't do anything. They just sit there waiting to be destroyed to lower the floor's security level. If you don't know what security level does yet, well, in the original game you stumble across that pretty organically.
...Keep filling up my inventory with stuff because I don't always know what I can safely vaporize.
When you mouse over an item it'll show if its "junk" or not. Can throw those in the recycle bin to get some coin.
A question for those who have played the original:Spoiler:Does it help to never let the cameras focus in on you? Does Shodan not know you're there as long as you stay out of sight? I'm assuming probably not, but I also can't discount the possibility. Is it even possible to always stay out of sight?
Answer:
Unless they changed something it doesn't matter. But you should be destroying all the cameras you come across.
Still playing through Dead Space but had to pick this up since it was a little bit off on GMG. So will be going from one bad space station to another.
Last year I ended up playing through most of the Enhanced Edition of System Shock. So, looking forward to seeing some of the later levels and what they do with it here. I had to check with a walkthrough a few times as it was unclear of what to do or where to go in later levels. So will see if Nightdrive dealt with any of that.
There is definitely not much hand holding. Even after playing the original and the demos a few months ago that first circuit puzzle had me scratching my head.
Only 40 minutes in no major changes from the demo but its a very good remaster. It will be interesting to see opinions of newer gamers on this as underneath the updated graphics its still based on a bit of a clunky game.
Enjoying the remake so far. I tried replaying System Shock original awhile back and I couldn't get past the clunkiness of the controls (some games I have a harder time going back to than others), but this is before that 2010 fan mod that streamlined them a bit.
I think it looks great. Controls on a gamepad aren't bad, but could be better. Managing your inventory/vaporizing stuff is clunky using the analog stick as a mouse, but I'm playing on the Steam Deck so the touchpads are helping in those situations.
How you lean is not clear at all, on a gamepad. You basically need to:
1) be using "aim down sights".
2) hit the lean button, which seems to toggle the leaning action. I thought you had to hold it down initially, which meant I was trying to hold down around three buttons just to lean.
3) then use the left analog to lean left/right.
It's pretty clunky in practice. I enabled the settings for using crouch/aim as a toggle, which makes it a bit more manageable. It seems unnecessarily inelegant compared to if they had just bound the bumpers to lean left/right. By comparison, keyboard controls just have keys bound to "lean left" and "lean right".
I tried remapping a bumper key to lean, but this ends up breaking your ability to navigate menus, since the bumpers are used for tabbing between parts of the UI when the inventory screen is open. It seems obvious this isn't how a control scheme should work. If you've mapped a bumper key to perform an action like lean, the bumpers should still function as expected when a menu is open.
I'm also several hours into the game and I have no idea what key is *supposed* to let you step away from a puzzle/keypad/etc. If you go to enter a password on a keypad and then change your mind, for example. You can bring up the options menu or inventory to kick you out of those screens, but this seems incidental rather than by design. It seems like there should be an actual keypress that will cancel them out when needed.
I don't know if this is a bug, but when managing data logs/audio logs, it says to press "B" to go back (to browse other logs, presumably). But on gamepad, the B button is used for crouching, so if you hit B you crouch and it kicks you out of that menu entirely. You can just use the analog mouse to click the "B" button in the text dialogue instead, which will back out of the menu as expected instead of crouching. But similar to there seemingly being no button to back out of a keypad menu, or how remapping the bumpers breaks navigating menus, it seems like this just simply shouldn't be how it works. IMO if you're in the data log menu, pressing B shouldn't trigger crouching.
The save file organization is baffling. When you save your game it gives the save a random number as a name. It also seems to sort them by timestamp, except when it doesn't (inexplicably, the two saves at the top of my list are old ones where I had basically just completed the intro). I keep accidentally loading the saves at the top of the list and thinking I've lost progress, when really it's just that the actual save I want is below them.
Again, unclear if that's a bug or just how they designed it for some reason.
The above nitpicks are because they seem more like bugs than conscious design decisions. I'm glad to have any gamepad controls, period (and I hope they also add them to System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition), but they could definitely be improved.
For the gameplay and design itself, in terms of how even for a game ahead of its time in 1994 it's going to feel dated, that stuff isn't bothering me. One example: it's funny to realize that I'm not used to having to manually open every door, every time. Nothing automatically opens when you approach like a modern game might.
I agree there's minimal handholding, because of that . There's no explanation of how in-game systems work a lot of times. I also found the circuit puzzle confusing at first, and I solved the jumper cable version essentially by accident, without even knowing what I did successfully.
Keycards or passwords you need to progress aren't particularly emphasized, you could easily overlook one if you're not thorough or careful. There's no waypoints, and not a lot of feedback on what your objectives are at any given time (beyond not getting murdered by SHODAN).
I think if you want a remake more in the style of FF7 or RE4, you're going to be disappointed. It has a few concessions to modernity like the recycler or gamepad controls, and the graphics are updated, but otherwise it seems to stick pretty closely to the spirit and design of the original. But if your expectations are more along the lines of a prettied up but still faithful take on the original, warts and all, it should satisfy.
I put a few hours into this last night, and (so far) I'm in love with what Nightdive put together here. I haven't tried with gamepad (the M+K controls work very well, I think), but I agree with ccoates's take pretty much across the board. It's not a modern game design by any stretch, some things could still use some refinement, but as a refresh of a very excellent but very old, very clunky game, it's marvelous.
It's been a good 25+ years since I played SS1 (more than once), and this evokes so many memories of that game, all in a good way. Everything about it feels familiar and surprisingly natural. I think the biggest hurdle for the game isn't 25+ years of game design evolution but 25+ years of player experience with things like audio logs and having a literal voice in your ear throughout. That stuff has been repeated to death in so many games that it's sure to feel pretty bog standard to anyone coming into it now. But gawwwd, that experience in 1994 was so jarring and novel, and I will simply never be tired of SHODAN calling me insect. For me, it all comes flooding back, and I'm playing it all with a stupid, goofy smile on my face.
I think for a lot of people, it'll be like growing up watching a bunch of modern movies that all went to school on Alien and then watching Alien for the first time. It's still great, and you can squint and understand why it was important and game-changing in its time, but it's very hard (impossible) to have that same impact now because you've still seen the formula many times already.
How you lean is not clear at all, on a gamepad. You basically need to:
1) be using "aim down sights".
2) hit the lean button, which seems to toggle the leaning action. I thought you had to hold it down initially, which meant I was trying to hold down around three buttons just to lean.
3) then use the left analog to lean left/right.It's pretty clunky in practice. I enabled the settings for using crouch/aim as a toggle, which makes it a bit more manageable. It seems unnecessarily inelegant compared to if they had just bound the bumpers to lean left/right. By comparison, keyboard controls just have keys bound to "lean left" and "lean right".
That's how lean works in Rainbow Six: Siege on gamepad/console. I imagine on some other games too.
Classic example of the dated/unforgiving design:
At one point you get an access code from cyberspace. But it doesn't get added to your notes or anything. It's literally displayed on an in-game monitor and you need to write it down.
I, of course, forgot and had to go back to the second level, when I realized it I had to enter it into a keypad and it wasn't anywhere in my data logs, ha.
I also spent an embarrassing amount of time looking for a keycard, only to discover it was all the way back on the starting level. It wasn't hidden, just casually sitting on a counter and I totally missed it.
Great game, but I'm also glad certain things like this have gotten more forgiving in modern games!
At one point you get an access code from cyberspace. But it doesn't get added to your notes or anything. It's literally displayed on an in-game monitor and you need to write it down.
I, of course, forgot and had to go back to the second level, when I realized it I had to enter it into a keypad and it wasn't anywhere in my data logs, ha.
So, uh... how do I say this non-spoilery?
Writing numbers down is a smart thing to do.
ccoates wrote:At one point you get an access code from cyberspace. But it doesn't get added to your notes or anything. It's literally displayed on an in-game monitor and you need to write it down.
I, of course, forgot and had to go back to the second level, when I realized it I had to enter it into a keypad and it wasn't anywhere in my data logs, ha.
So, uh... how do I say this non-spoilery?
Writing numbers down is a smart thing to do.
Yeah, I'm just saying I don't miss the type of game design where important stuff isn't logged automatically. If the Remake had some sort of allowance for that, you wouldn't have seen me clamoring for the purity of making that aspect harder!
Especially since some of these are randomly generated each playthrough and I couldn't even be lazy and just look it up.
I really like how they've updated the enemy designs. Just got to the level with the flying mutants.
The improved lighting really threw me on one of the junction puzzles. The lights were actually... blowing out? The colors on part of the board, so I legit couldn't see where the highlighted marks were for adjusting the voltage.
I just had to randomly flip switches on and off in that entire range until the puzzle completed.
The openness of exploring the levels seems ahead of its time. I can't really think of examples from this time period with this kind of traversal.
On Flight Deck 4, there's a room you can get to if you activate switches and hop across a partial bridge to find jump boots.
But across from THAT room, you can see another room, and a red thingie where an energy bridge should be.
I cannot figure out how to either cross the gap (even with the jump boots, you can't seem to make the leap from the jump boots room) or turn on the bridge. Does anyone how to get there?
On the map there's a little gun vendor icon, so I'm curious what's there.
Oh no, I lied. You can make the jump with the jump boots if you run fast enough first.
Loved the original games but haven't replayed them so bought this and am several hours in but have only just finished medical.
Enjoying the experience so far, quite like hearing little snippets of the story, the ominous comments from Shodan and the various puzzles/lack of hand holding.
I'm rubbish at shooters though so will get my money's worth 
Would someone who bought the game on Steam mind uploading the manual somewhere? Apparently it's just in your install directory.
On GoG it's only provided via a separate product:
https://www.gog.com/en/game/system_s...
Which now just says "Coming Soon" and only people who visited that page in the first two days got to download it. Apparently it was supposed to be available until the 6th, but even if they accidentally pulled it early, making a manual for a game a limited time extra is extremely stupid.
I want to support GoG and DRM free, but when they pull crap like this it's frustrating.
The GoG version seems to have a bug where the cyberspace node you hack to open the CPU room on the maintenance level crashes the game.
Unfortunately, it does this in the final room where the node to open the door has to be destroyed.
Tested it on my Deck and my desktop, same results. Also tried lowering the graphics, no change.
Folks in the GoG forums are running into the same bug, and unfortunately you kind of need to destroy the CPU nodes, so it's not like you can just skip it.
If anyone else runs into this, you can workaround it by shooting out the node that opens the door without entering the final room in that cyberspace level, then just run for the exit.
The game may still crash, but hopefully you can manage to save before that happens (I was able to, barely).
With the way cyberspace works, you can't save during the level, and if it crashes before you exit and save, anything you do in the level doesn't count. So it's quite a non-optimal bug.
Would someone who bought the game on Steam mind uploading the manual somewhere?
Here you go. (This is my upload, not some other rando's)
ccoates wrote:Would someone who bought the game on Steam mind uploading the manual somewhere?
Here you go. (This is my upload, not some other rando's)
Many thanks!
It's really well done. I think this would've helped me understand a few mechanics right off the bat, too.
I beat it! In... significantly more than 6 hours.
More like six hours per level, ammiright?
Definitely some spots where I was just flummoxed. At one point I had somehow forgotten to flip a switch in Alpha Grove, and I had to redo every Grove because I couldn't remember which one it was.
Also several times where I was just kind of walking by the door or key I needed.
I had been screenshotting
all the CPU nodes as I went, but I forgot to label them, and ended up having to try and figure out which was which from the mini-map in my screenshots.
I never finished the original, so it was satisfying. When this game came out I'm not even sure we had internet, so if I got stuck in a game, I just stopped playing it. (Thinking back, I remember playing MUDs, so we must've had a modem/dial-up, but I can't remember if we had actual service or just bounced between free trials). I'm not sure I'd have even finished the remake without being able to consult guides when I got stuck. Even if it was just to reassure me that I was on the right track, but somehow just overlooking an important item or area.
Still neat to see it get such good treatment, and how many games System Shock influenced, but I'm also grateful for some of the quality of life improvements we've gotten used to over the years. It doesn't have to be a glowing green arrow in every game pointing us exactly where to go, but... I do like having in-game ways to record objectives and important information.
Achievements are broken for the GoG version, but maybe when they're working again I'll try a hard run.
It doesn't have to be a glowing green arrow in every game pointing us exactly where to go,
This SS remake does have waypoints, if the Mission difficulty is set to 1.
That's how it should be in every game IMO, and absolutely in every immersive sim game.
And it's not good enough to just let you turn off waypoints in the options menu, but rather the games have to be designed to function without them first and foremost. Rockstar games let you turn off waypoints, but then missions expect you to go hit a certain mark, and there's no way to know, because nothing in-world was designed to navigate you there.
I started a hard run and noticed it says 10 hours.
Wasn't 7 hours the original limit? Kinda interesting they'd extend it.
Even with the extra hours, I'm struggling to clear levels quickly. Took me about 4 1/2 hours to clear Medical, Research, and the Reactor.
Six hours in, and I've only done medical and research (and there are still a couple of locations in research I haven't been able to access).
I've been saving whenever I start a new level, so I can go back if I lose too much time.
I got to Executive with only 90 minutes to spare, and I didn't think I could complete Executive and all the groves in that time.
So went back a few levels, made up some time on Storage and Flight Deck. Now I'm on Executive with 2 groves down, and 2 1/2 hours left. Think I can make it.
That's with the 10 hour limit though. I don't think I'd be able to pull off a 7 hour run.
Edit: I completely forgot about Engineering. No way I can finish in time. Argh.
It's definitely a challenge, but I wouldn't say level 3 difficulty is fun so far.
The time limit really punishes exploration, even having basically just played it through twice, I don't have all the best items memorized, and some of them are quite important.
Cyberspace on level 3 is absolutely brutal. Unless you're an achievement hunter, I think you can skip it.
I beat it on hard! I needed that full 10 hours. I went into the battle with SHODAN with 19 minutes and change.
The timer disappears, but I learned the hard way that it's actually still counting down.
Which matters, because even though the battle is
... kind of just going through the motions? Cyberspace 3 means the enemies do more damage. So they can actually kill you almost instantly, ON THE SPAWN POINT.
So you can end up getting off 1-2 shots, dying, repeat until they're dead or you run out of time.
tl;dr: Cyberspace 3 f*cking sucks. Don't play on Cyberspace 3. It is by far the most frustrating aspect of doing a level 3 difficulty across the board run.
Great game, great remake, Cyberspace could use some more tweaks to make it less frustrating. I'm never playing with it set above 1 ever again.
Playing this game so soon after playing the original's Enhanced Edition is an absolute trip.
It's so weird seeing rooms for the first time, but also knowing them exactly.
The decision they made to reboot development after the project started to become a "reimagining" instead of a remake was the right one.
This remake's gameplay is what BioShock should have been: an updated, more modern implementation of the Shock formula, but without streamlining away half the gameplay. It's been amusing to read some of the (fortunately relatively few) negative reviews that boil down to "I am scrub, where waypoint?".
SO GOOD
Pages