Need your thoughts on System Shock 1994

[Dexiaz]

 

Hello everyone! I have a serious question for you, please, help me understand one thing.

 

What is the "System Shock" (1994) to you personally? I mean, I've heard an opinion that modern day gamers think about this game as a so-so FPS with tank controls and overloaded HUD/Interface (btw, doesn't matter if you play Nightdive's remastered version [don't be confused with Remake]). Now I've seen an opinion that it's a bad Doom clone with mechanics from the quest adventure games. Or on the contrary, this is a Doom clone with a cheezy inventory system and an understandable storyline (not like the Doom 1/2 txt file).

 

So, which feelings does this game leave you? It doesn't matter if you finished it or abandoned it after 2 minutes after the game started.

 

If you never played it, it's also ok. Just tell me, what do you think about this game even without playing it? But please, mention the fact that you never played it. Thanks in advance!

[Redneckerz]

I absolutely loved the game when i played it. Never finished it (Went half way, i believe) But i loved the exploration you could do in this game, and the backtracking. People say its hard but i found its all about planning ahead. Its a thinking game first and formost.

 

The remake ended up being mostly the same, but sadly, it has no physical console release (Well, XSX, PS5 get one, but not last-gen). Still, great title.

 

Anyone who calls this a Doom clone is trolling, straight up. They aren't comparable in the slightest.

[Dweller Dark]

I think System Shock '94 (I played Enhanced Edition to completion) is fine once you become normalized to how it plays and feels, and changed default settings to something you're comfortable with. While the FPS side of the game feels very Doom-like, the myriad of other things you can do make it way different and are sometimes necessary for reaching places and/or secret caches. The story is pretty good, even if some of the voice acting sounds bad. The cyberspace sections are kind-of okay, not bad but not great either. The music is pretty good for MIDI stuff. I played it with everything but Cyberspace on Normal difficulty, and I don't remember it being unfairly hard. Challenging, but not painful. The worst part for me was the Reactor section because I thought I hit the switch to trigger the next part of the story, but I didn't and had to go back once I realized. Overall, I'd say it was enjoyable for me.

 

Redneckerz' points are also pretty accurate to my experience too.

 

[taufan99]

Funny, I just bought it because it's currently on sale on GOG.com. I've been curious about it for a long time, and initially thought it was just a dungeon crawler version of FPS games for a long time. Against my own better judgement, I decided to buy it because it seems interesting enough actually, and because I've now got used to different kind of retro FPS games (*ahem* Rex Blade: The Apocalypse, anyone?).

 

Also, it has a much smaller but active community with currently just a few mods available for it.

 

EDIT: After having tried it for at least about an hour, I gotta say this is one of my best buys ever. Not exactly the same as my usual action-oriented preference, but this is fascinating enough to keep me sitting on the edge.

Edited April 26 by taufan99

[Ludi]

I honestly think it's a better and more engaging game than 2 or even the remake.

 

The remake is good, but I always found it too slow.

[NecrumWarrior]

I think that I really need to finish it. I liked the lite bit I played. Immersive sim type games are a joy imo. 

[june gloom]

SS1 is one of the all-time greats, a classic that was very ahead of its time in many ways.

 

I also think it's a product of its time, and you absolutely need to get used to its idiosyncratic control scheme. Be grateful for Enhanced Edition -- I still remember the old pre-mouselook days.

[Kinsie]

5 hours ago, june gloom said:

Be grateful for Enhanced Edition -- I still remember the old pre-mouselook days.

This is an easily forgotten thing - the original control scheme was... unfortunate. The new control scheme from the old pirate "Portable Edition" that was carried into Enhanced Edition is a hell of a lot better with its ability to toggle between a more modern control scheme at will.

[june gloom]

God, I remember the Portable Edition days. There were a few people who were not pleased about Enhanced Edition lifting those little QOL hacks for itself.

[mrthejoshmon]

The original was somewhat unassailable for most, and admittedly even myself.

The enhanced release was so much easier to make progress in, amazing what wonders small control changes do.

 

I got to engineering in both versions, engineering is confusing hostility incarnate until you realise you aren't even supposed to be there yet and you just run through it. After I learnt this in the remaster I've been considering another go at it.

[BeachThunder]

I only played a tiny bit of the original release, but I played through all of the Enhanced Edition. And then I also played the remake last year.

 

You need to play the game with the understanding of it is and what it's trying to be. It's an immersive sim / FPS from 1994. If you are going into the game with the expectation of just blasting down a hoard of enemies, then you've made a mistake - it's not that kind of game.

 

I played it (Enhanced Edition) for the first time in 2016, many years after I first played System Shock 2. I'd say that System Shock 2 is definitely the better game, but SS1 is still excellent and incredibly impressive. It's definitely worth playing, just don't go into it expecting a "Doom clone".

[Kinsie]

7 hours ago, june gloom said:

God, I remember the Portable Edition days. There were a few people who were not pleased about Enhanced Edition lifting those little QOL hacks for itself.

TBF, the initial release of Enhanced Edition was more or less "slightly updated Portable Edition with a pricetag". The proper KEX source port came a bit later.

Edited April 26 by Kinsie

[heliumlamb]

must be played with some sort of four operator frequency modulation synthesis chip

mouselook and GM soundbanks kill the tone in a way that has irrevocably harmed the current-day perception of it.

and, to consider it a first person shooter ahead of anything else (namely, a real time dungeon crawler not unlike ultima underworld or eye of the beholder, but without any of the role-playing-game spreadsheets and rolls) is doing it a disservice. it is a near-perfect player-disrespecting, directionless dungeon isolate. its only contemporaries imo wouldn't come until a few months later, with the first 2 programs released by From Software for something that wasn't japan's agricultural industry.

re: controls. if you've used WASD, you can use SZXC

the only reason one should play it outside of the dos exe is if you don't want to crash when occasionally leaving map markers.

[OliveTree]

The ambitions of System Shock are anachronistic in both directions. It's one thing to say System Shock is ahead of it's time, but it's even bolder than that. It's ahead of somewhere else's time; we never got the future that System Shock predicted. A future where where gaming was focused on precision, fidelity of movement and avatar positioning, and a responsive, D&D-like freedom within an open and deadly playspace. Of course, we've seen glimmers of these things--I cant be the only one to think the only real way to adapt System Shock for modern audiences would have involved VR--but there haven't really been any true successors to its visions of what gaming could be, even titans like Deus Ex, Arkane's Prey, and Nightdive's remake release last year, all had to pick and choose what parts of System Shock's vision they would expand on, none of them could live up to all of its promise.

[Kinsie]

19 minutes ago, heliumlamb said:

mouselook and GM soundbanks kill the tone in a way that has irrevocably harmed the current-day perception of it.

when the tone is "being fucking unplayably annoying to get even the slightest thing done to the point where even the originally designers are like, yeeeah, in retrospect maybe we shouldn't have made the ui an entire operating system" i will transcend stamping all over it to break out the steamroller

 

11 minutes ago, OliveTree said:

I cant be the only one to think the only real way to adapt System Shock for modern audiences would have involved VR

I believe a VR version of System Shock 2 either is or was on Night Dive's docket at some point, but it's not clear whether it still is and, of course, their docket is currently about the length of the Great Ocean Road.

[june gloom]

2 hours ago, Kinsie said:

TBF, the initial release of Enhanced Edition was more or less "slightly updated Portable Edition with a pricetag". The proper KEX source port came a bit later.

 

IIRC weren't they not credited for it? Something similar happened with Aliens vs Predator '99, the Classic 2000 edition has a lot of fan-made QOL fixes that went uncredited.

[Tetzlaff]

I only played maybe an hour of System Shock in the late 1990s. I really liked the look of the space station and the ominous atmosphere.

But I also clearly remember that the overly complex control scheme put me off. I don't know if I remember this right but I think there were like special keys for ducking and even crawling on the floor and it felt really cumbersome. Doom's more simple, but elegant control scheme worked much better in a 3D environment.

 

Some time later I played System Shock 2, which adopted the FPS control scheme, and it was one of my all-time favorite games.

Edited April 26 by Tetzlaff

[taufan99]

3 hours ago, june gloom said:

 

IIRC weren't they not credited for it? Something similar happened with Aliens vs Predator '99, the Classic 2000 edition has a lot of fan-made QOL fixes that went uncredited.

Ballance (a 2004 ball puzzle-platformer game) just got rereleased by Ziggurat Interactive earlier in January this year and it lacks all the fan-made QoL fixes, which apparently pissed off many fans.

 

Kinda reminds me of Bethesda's Unity port of the 1993 hit we all know and love before it received major updates by major updates. Maybe I'm too much of a wide-eyed optimist, but here's hoping Ziggurat gets to feature those fixes and acknowledges the fans behind the effort.

[YeOldeFellerNoob]

Mid

[Hayden49]

System Shock is a masterpiece. More people should use SS midis.

[taufan99]

14 minutes ago, Hayden49 said:

System Shock is a masterpiece. More people should use SS midis.

That Medical MIDI tho. Truly such a banger.

[june gloom]

1 hour ago, Hayden49 said:

System Shock is a masterpiece. More people should use SS midis.

 

That Maintenance deck theme tho.

[Jaska]

It was mind blowing. Atmosphere was incredible. I was young back then so it was hard, confusing at times, didn't know what to do, controls were difficult.. But I loved it. I think I somehow even finished it. It felt you could do "anything". You always could find new cool stuff. It was very fun to explore. Those are my memories. Maybe I should really check the remakes.

 

it kinda irritates me when someone says it's "doom-clone".. Wasn't it in development way before doom came. And it's a whole different thing anyway.

 

GZDoom system shock? Wouldn't that be great? 

[june gloom]

A Shock-like in GZDoom would definitely be dope as hell, but I don't know how feasible it is, especially if you wanted to mimic the context-sensitive HUD.

[cybdmn]

On 4/27/2024 at 12:09 AM, Tetzlaff said:

I only played maybe an hour of System Shock in the late 1990s. I really liked the look of the space station and the ominous atmosphere.

But I also clearly remember that the overly complex control scheme put me off.

 

That's exactly my story with the game.

[Dexiaz]

Wow, thanks for so many insightful responses, friends!

 

I'm glad that you think the game is good or even a masterpiece, hehe.

 

To be honest, when I was playing it (2 years ago was my first time, so it was a Remastered version) I was clearly thinking "It's just like a GZDoom Total Conversion, but made before anything Doomish/Buildish released. I mean, slopes,HUBS, inventory you can find in Hexen, radio dialogues you can find in Strife, some polyoobjects and scripts are from the ZDoom era.

 

It was blowing my mind. The game was ahead of its time. Period.