In case anyone else is nostalgic about System Shock 2, I can highly recommend checking out Prey [0]. It's a much more recent game designed by a different studio, but it's very much inspired by the old Looking Glass Studios' games and managed to re-create the atmosphere and gameplay of System Shock 2 very well.
By the way, Prey was the subject of a next generation revamp by Microsoft, they used a new technology allowing them to boost FPS from 30 to 60 without any programmer input with no clock errors.
I don't think there's any magic going on here, the series x/s is just more powerful than the one x/s, so the game can run at a higher framerate.
The game already ran fine at 60fps (and above) on PC at launch, so the engine can handle it fine already.
"FPS Boost" is just marketing speak for "we've decided to prioritize framerate on the next gen consoles rather than improving visuals and keeping things locked at 30fps"
This lines up with my unverified theory (I can't seem to find hard information about FPS boost online).
My theory is that it detects a list of certain compatible games and then "lies" to the game engine through syscalls for clocks or vsync or whatever the game uses to determine frame timings (this would trick a game locked at 30 to run at 60, for example).
If this is indeed how it works, it could well break other things that relied on those timing systems, like the scripted events you're describing.
Forgive me for thinking that the marketing blog of a video game console might not be a paragon of journalistic integrity. There is nothing in the post that invalidates the "just run the game faster" null hypothesis.
As we detailed in October, with the increased CPU, GPU and memory from our new consoles, all of your existing games look and play better. With certain titles, we can make the experience even better, all with no work required by the developer, and no update needed by the gamer. To that end, the backward compatibility team has developed FPS Boost, which employs a variety of new methods for nearly doubling (and in a few instances, quadrupling) the original framerate on select titles. ... And while not applicable to all games, these new techniques can push game engines to render more quickly for a buttery smooth experience beyond what the original game might have delivered due to the capabilities of the hardware at the time.
It clearly distinguishes "with the increased CPU, GPU and memory from our new consoles, all of your existing games look and play better" from "FPS Boost, which employs a variety of new methods for nearly doubling (and in a few instances, quadrupling) the original framerate on select titles". Further, FPS Boost has to be manually
IANAL but it seems like offering a feature and blatantly lying about it is fraud and that everyone who participated at Microsoft is guilty of both fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. Do you have evidence of this?
(Ed. “Further, FPS Boost has to be manually” is a typo - but it’s too late to edit my post. (FPS Boost has to be manually enabled only for some titles.))
They don't, and it is. Prey is a good game, with some really neat techniques I've never seen anywhere else. I enjoyed it and I think it's worth playing. But there's nothing remotely resembling SHODAN, and in that way it's very much not the same. Closer to Bioshock, really.
"Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?"
Truly that entire section of the game with inverted gravity is some of the best game design ever. The palpable frustration when you come across the inverted medbay really left an impression on me.
I never understood how/why Bioshock got that reputation besides for marketing.
It's not a bad game, but putting it next to System Shock as a "spiritual successor" only sets people up for wrong expectations which can ultimately lead to a lot of disappointment.
Imho the immersive sim and RPG elements in Bioshock are very minor parts of the game compared to System Shock, Bioshock doesn't even have an inventory.
Personally that really soured my experience with Bioshock, I was expecting something like System Shock, yet ended up getting a FPS game that was rather "of it's time" mechanics wise, which I was a bit tired off at that point.
If that forced them to go into a different direction with BioShock, I guess it was for the best! Not saying I didn't enjoy System Shock 1/2 (I did), but BioShock with its underwater retro-futuristic art deco style is also a very compelling world...
Prey is a valiant effort but it never manages to fully recreate the loneliness, isolation and claustrophobia of system shock. Having said that, for me Prey comes closest to SS as the true successor. I always thought that SS2 was a huge step down from SS...
I'll take this opportunity to plug Shamus Young's Free Radical [1], a fan novelization-cum-quasi-reimagining of System Shock's story which I regard as being, in some respects, more faithful to the setting and characters than even the original creators were able to be.
If, based on that, you're not sure whether or not you'll like it - just click the link and try Chapter 1. It's a fast, fun read and an excellent intro to the novel; at the very worst, you won't have spent too much time in vain. At best, you'll enjoy it as much as I do!
(Or almost as much, maybe; at some point this year I intend to typeset, print, and bind it, so I can add it to my physical library as well as my electronic one. Considering the subject matter, doing that meticulous work to produce a physical copy strikes me as retro-cyberpunk in a way that's both appealing and apropos.)
His "Mass Effect Retrospective" series is an epic (in both length and detail) deconstruction of the story, setting, and writing of each game in the Mass Effect series:
Thanks for sharing this. Video games aren't really my thing (I'm visually impaired), but I like a good science-fiction story, so I'm glad I'll be able to enjoy this story in the form of a novel. An audiobook version featuring the voice of Shodan would be awesome, but probably will never happen.
Oh awesome, that'll save me a lot of work. Thanks!
(Granted I might do that work anyway, because as I think I may have mentioned somewhere here not too long ago, I've been looking for an excuse to turn my old Pagemaker skills into new InDesign skills. But that just means I'll have a professionally made copy to give away, and a handmade one to keep.)
man, the early/mid 90s was such a revolutionary time for video games, and being in college and having a 486dx-33 gaming rig that i worked my ass off to procure most definitely contributed to my dropping out and never finishing my degree(s). :)
system shock was such a great game. suspenseful, intricate, engrossing and just plain scary to immerse yourself into fully.
in a few years span, we had this, doom, warcraft, xwing/tie fighter, wing commander 3, command and conquer, civilization 1 and 2, myst, alone in the dark (now THAT was a fucking scary game), descent, and so many more that sucked my time away. it was amazing to be present in the golden age of PC gaming, where the confluence of cheap x86 hardware, improving gfx tech, directx and peripheral support all came together so quickly.
i recall fondly the 10base-2 network in my college house, and having friends bring over their computers for LAN parties. descent and warcraft were the best when played to the sounds of your enemies yelling in anguish from downstairs in the living room.
I think you see it most in 'eurojank' games these days but I really love the ambition of older games that include really unusual or deep gameplay mechanics that you'd never see in a typical AAA title.
Games like Gothic, Elex, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Two Worlds, Eye: Divine Cybermancy, basically most Deck13 titles...
The late 90s and early 2000s were such a great time for PC games like that.
AAA titles now have Hollywood budgets, and thus Hollywood's restrictions: no risky moves, play safe, be family-friendly, return the investment and produce a franchise to sell sequels and swag.
It leaves rather little room for art or innovation. This is why I mostly stopped paying attention to such games, and watch for what smaller, bolder studios produce on 5-10% of an AAA budget.
In some ways games of this period are similar to the movies of the 1920s and 30s, before genres had ossified into their more rigid modern forms. In the same way that you'll find the plot of a 30s movie moving strangely between murder mystery, horror, and gangster drama, there are 80s and 90s games that combine two or more oddly disparate genres in fascinating ways.
A good example is the game MEAN STREETS (1989), which is both a point-and-click detective adventure game and a full flight simulator as you move between locations.
This is exactly how I talk about those days with friends. Genre expectations were not so restrictive and it was more about exploration than exploitation, though the latter was increasingly common as the 90s came to a close. I worked as a lowly artist & level designer on one of the later genre hybrids (Battlezone II) amidst the realtime strategy boom of the late 90s and as a young creator it was so much more fun to work in the spaces between genres where things hadn't been tried. I would have loved to have worked in the early/mid 90s when genres were even less well defined.
Not GP, but Eurojank is normally referring to games like Metro 2077, S.T.A.L.K.E.R etc.
Made by European studios (usually east Europe), with grand ideas, but missing some of the polish you would expect from a AAA game. I be clear I think these games are fantastic, and personally consider the missing polish an asset rather than a detriment to these games, but it certainly impacts game play.
Interesting you could put forward the argument that Cyberpunk 2077 is a Eurojank game as CD Projekt Red is a polish developer, and well, Cyberpunk has more than its fair share of bugs.
As a European, I cannot help but to find the term extremely offensive if that's indeed the intended meaning. De-normalising a below-AAA level of polish with such language makes me uneasy, at best.
I really think that Piranha Bytes are the most interesting game studio with regards to RPGs right now. I think they have the best blend of weird mechanics + plot driven gameplay out there, despite their relatively limited resources.
i dont think there were any games in 1994 that had support for 800x600, let alone FPS games. The SVGA enchanced edition came out many many years later.
The (rushed) original floppy release was 320x200 only. The (much better) CD-ROM version released later in 1994 supported 320x200, 320x400, 640x400, and 640x480. (Although good luck playing at the higher resolutions on typical machines of the time :-)
I played the CD-ROM version on an IBM PS/1000 with a "Blue Lightning" CPU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_386SLC#IBM_486BL_(Blue_Lig...) which was a "486SX3" 25/75 MHz - IIRC it did manage the higher resolutions, but the framerate got very choppy when there was a lot going on...
yes, i just went and fired up my cd rom version and 640x480 was the highest resolution. i am not sure when 800x600 became common in games. warcraft 2 was the other very famous 640x480 IIRC.
I think 800x600 only started to become common around the time 3D accelerators became a thing. Some 2D games may have had 800x600 or 1024x768 a bit earlier but doing higher than 640x480 in a detailed 3D game would really have pushed it without 3D acceleration with the CPU power available at the time.
IIRC Descent II (1997) allowed 800x600 and maybe higher even without a 3D accelerator, but you'd have needed a fairly powerful PC for running that. I'd kind of like to assume Quake would also have supported higher resolutions but I honestly can't remember.
By 1998 or 1999 so, when 3D acceleration was becoming more common, higher resolutions also started gaining more ground in 3D games.
Even after that, many 2D games (including the original StarCraft, I think) were still only 640x480, probably in order to avoid scaling issues with multiple resolutions.
Another problem was the lack of standards at the time. The standard VGA was 640x480 in 16 colors, anything above that you had to program the specific VGA chipset directly.
Then there was VESA, which was standard for high-res, but slow.
Then Windows 95 came and with it came drivers and DirectX, and the driver wars moved on to 3D accelerator territory...
I hadn't thought of the state of standards, but that's also true.
However, mid-90's games that did do 640x480 generally did that in 256 colours, so they already had to deal with going above standard VGA one way or another. Very few games that I can think of used the VGA mode of 640x480 in 16 colours, and they certainly weren't first-person shooters.
If you liked x-wing/tie-fighter, take a look at Star Wars Squadrons - it captures most of the feel of those games (but sadly without the special extra semi-evil missions for the empire).
You can find recordings online of two of the devs livestreaming the game. They got asked by a fan, 'what were some features you loved but ultimately had to cut out?' Response was along the lines of 'I mean, look around, do you think we cut anything out?'
They definitely seemed to think of that as a failing on their part, but it's IMO a big part of why the game is still engaging nowadays.
Goddamn, I loved System Shock. But if you try to play it in modern times, it's just impossible. Someone, please make a mod where it uses standard WASD + mouse controls.
Very few games set the imagination on fire the way System Shock did. I'm still not sure why. It was almost a standard-ish horror game.
It was a combination of story, mechanics, and art, I think. The old-style graphics really added to the immersion (though you can't say this without seeming suspect).
Some other mechanics that helped the atmosphere and kept you on edge were that you could never permanently clear an area of monsters. Some new critters would respawn and prowl through decks you had cleared. You could usually hear them well before you saw them. Resources were also scarce, so wasting ammunition on enemies or subjecting your ranged weapons to unnecessary wear and tear was often a worse choice than avoiding them, or trying to sneak up behind them to bash them to death. The game was built atop the dark engine (Thief) so it had a surprisingly good model of enemy line of sight, sneaking was often viable to close distance or evade.
To progress up the research tree required particular elements as inputs to complete research assignments, and the game would use this to send you on fetch quests to gather a jar full of rare elements from a chemical storage locker deep in a deck of the ship you'd hoped to never visit again.
There is something airy walking down these corridors, listening to the stories of your predecessors, wondering whether you would end up as such a audio-log.
All these lifes.. a audiobook on its own - and they should have turned it into one.
Right. Members of the band Tribe worked for Looking Glass. 2 of them went on to lead roles for Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
Tribe's music video for Supercollider[1] was filmed at the Superconducting Super Collider before Congress cut funding. It might be the most expensive music video set ever.
I've played SS2 for the first time last year and there were parts that scared the shit out of me, I had to take breaks just to cool off - ambience in this game is absolutely amazing! Nowadays I rarely pick up new games let alone finish them, but SS2 hooked me so hard that for several days it was the only thing I could think about, something that hasn't happend to me in a long, long time.
I did the same a few years ago, played SS2 and then continued with the three Bioshock games. The first two Bioshock games have a truly amazing atmosphere as well. The third didn't really do it for me.
I've revisited SS2 several times (couldn't play it due to REALLY ENORMOUS stress level) and I was able to finish it some 10 years later. What an atmosphere. What a story. What an absolute gem...
I finished it, but I still think about the haunting sounds of the "Cyborg Assassin" characters sometimes. Their tendency to ambush made them particularly terrifying.
Neato! I've got the GoG version installed on a PC on my network here. I just discovered that the ".CRF" files that contain the game resources are all ZIP files. Now I'm awash in System Shock 2 sounds.
The original, CD-ROM enhanced version of System Shock can be picked up at GOG[1]. First CD-ROM game I got, for my birthday, and wow did it blow me away. The atmosphere the game managed to create was just amazing.
It was the first 3D POV game that I recall with effectively true 3D. Doom had "fake" 3D, you couldn't have two floors on top of each other, but in System Shock you could. It also had different stances and fairly realistic head movement (leaning would tilt the view too).
There's a remake underway, from some of the original devs, also over at GOG[2].
I was going to say the first 3D POV game with real 3D was Decent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(1995_video_game)) but according to wikipedia System Shock came out about 6 months earlier. I probably got System Shock afterwards and thus thought it released later.
Both are great, had some huge fun playing both. Especially Decent after hours at work. I own both on GoG and should crank them up again.
I'm not an expert on 3D engines, but both System Shock and Descent (and the early Tomb Raider titles) also had a "limited" 3D technique which had sloping floors, but a map based on squares, which only allowed rectangular walls (unlike the Doom engine, which had non-rectangular walls, but no sloping floors).
I’ve not played System Shock but Doom’s walls are as rectangular as they get - straight up and down with a flat top and bottom (gaps are permitted for windows)
Edit: ah do you mean the floors can be non-rectangular?
If you look at Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, etc, they all have level geometry that could be drawn easily using graph paper. Rectangular walls means that everything has a 90° angle. Doom on the other hand can have all sorts of interesting level geometry, as long as each individual node in the binary tree doesn't have any convex elements.
> DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still had a lot of respect for the simplicity and focus of [the id] games
I haven’t played system shock, but the classic doom still holds up as one of my favourite games of all time. I played a ton of it in 2020 using gzdoom: the level design and pacing is still almost unmatched all these years later.
Doom had levels that were built for first-person-shooting gameplay and the general feel. Otherwise they are almost random in their architecture. That was a great move.
System Shock unfolds on a space station which has a consistent architecture, each level has a plot-defined purpose, a layout consistent with the purpose, and dovetails with levels above and below it. That was a great move, of a different nature.
System Shock should not be lined up with Doom, but rather with Deus Ex and maybe Half-Life.
https://www.playdosgames.com/online/system-shock/ - Play the original game in your browser. The emulator is buggy. Sound doesn't work in Safari. Sound works in Firefox but the game freezes. I suppose it would work better in local DOSBox.
Many of the same people listed also worked on Thief and Thief 2, still my favourite games of the genre - and probably favourite PC games period.
The Thief story is much more structured, less driven by dropped notes - and there are no interactive conversations - but the cutscenes are fairly well done, the sound design amazing - the Brosius's work - and the character you play is very well drawn, a cynical reluctant antihero.
I remember System Shock. Definitely had no way to play it on my 386, but I remember going to my friend's house who had a 486 that it played somewhat decent on. The world of "true" 3D games before Voodoo 3dfx cards were released... Wing Commander Games, Ultima Underworld (1 and 2). Games that you could look up and down and not have the world skew like crazy. Fun times.
Its time has passed, but System Shock 2 was one of the greatest gaming experiences for me .... played it for months and months.
System Shock 1 could have been good - I don't know - its controls were unusable - they were before the time of the mouse being used for looking around.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2017_video_game)