System Shock 2: Hybrid Lack of Vigor
System Shock 2 is a game I was hyped about for years. I kept running across tantalizing bits suggesting something unique and interesting above and beyond the actual praise directed toward it, painting a picture of a game with high replay value, a dark story, and the potential to play through the game by hacking the technology around you instead of fighting everything. Then I happened to get a hold of and play the original System Shock, and it was a fantastic game that could easily be a precursor to the System Shock 2 people had painted in my head, raising my expectations still further.
And when I got to System Shock 2 itself...
Well.
It turns out basically everything ever implied or claimed about the game to me over the years was a big fat lie.
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Now, part of the reason I'm covering System Shock 2 after Bioshock is that I experienced them in that order. The majority of it, however, is that Bioshock is not very impressive of a game on its own merits -bar the handful of things I praised already- and then gets worse when you properly contextualize it by looking at System Shock 2 and finding that the development team is reiterating the same errors in the same way, with little improvement-by-learning to be found at all. This being the case even though the goal of Bioshock was to do System Shock 2 Again, But Better. The counterpart to this is that System Shock 2 is also Not A Very Good Game, regardless of the critical praise it's received ever since its release, and many of its flaws become more damning when you look to the future and see that, yes, they just repeat these same flaws for no good reason. It's not that System Shock 2 was trying to do something novel and difficult and its flaws are an understandable outgrowth of tackling such a challenge. No, its flaws are idiosyncratic to the development team, and the evidence -particularly when you look even further forward to Bioshock Infinite, but I'm not touching that just yet- is that the development team is unable or unwilling to engage in the self-reflection necessary to properly acknowledge and address these issues.
More damning than making a mistake once is making it over and over again. And more damning than that is doing so for no benefit whatsoever, which is a recurring element in the 'shock series failings.
More damning than those is that the root cause of many of these flaws are obvious, whether in the sense that someone on the development team has a pet issue the team really should know better than to indulge or in the sense that a fundamental systemic decision was made where it was obviously all but inevitable that the final failing would occur, and yet the development team not only failed to notice this ahead of time the first time but went on to do it again. Twice, in many cases.
Usually I devote 1-3 posts to 'this game is Not Very Good, here's how'. System Shock 2 merits a rather more involved discussion, partly because its issues are genuinely that numerous, partly because the game is routinely touted as an ideal to strive toward, and partly because its issues are so obvious. Usually it's not clear whether a given issue in a game is the product of
A: Personal wonkiness of the development team or
B: Some aspects of the game being rushed, where a non-rushed version wouldn't have had that issue or
C: The issue not being obvious from an internal development perspective for reasons opaque to an outsider or
D: The issue being an acceptable casualty in pursuit of some desirable trait the game does have or
E: Something I would never guess or
F: Some combination of the above.
This lack of clarity normally makes it difficult to talk constructively about the issues a game has. Brutal Legend, for example, has a number of issues with its plot where I suspect the issues would've existed even if the game hadn't been rushed... but it was rushed, it leaks into the entire game, and then the whole thing is made murkier by things like it having the unusual distinction of rock star voice actors who don't normally do that.
With System Shock 2, it's a lot more obvious what went wrong where, and why.
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Mechanically, one of System Shock 2's foremost problems comes from how extremely obviously the game was constructed first as a fairly stock shooter game of the time, and then RPG elements were tacked atop this after the fact. This is a particularly stark contrast with the first System Shock, which meshes the two genre elements together into an interesting and coherent whole, but it's a poor approach in general.
Let's start with...
Weapons
System Shock 2 has thirteen different weapons, and their general design would be vastly improved if you ripped the RPG elements out and simply assumed a typical FPS carry-all-the-weapons-and-all-the-ammo-effortlessly sort of design. There'd still be some problems, such as how the Viral Proliferator and Annelid Launcher share an ammo type and that ammo type is extremely rare and not purchasable or otherwise grindable, but just stripping the RPG elements out would magically make the weapon design essentially competent.
But with the RPG elements slapped in... well.
Let's start with the category problem: there's four categories of weapon type and more specifically weapon skill. Each category has three weapons, with the exception that the Wrench is (sort of) classified as a Standard Weapon and thus that category strictly has four weapons.
The categories in question are where some of the breakdowns occur right away, in conjunction with the problems introduced by other RPG elements.
First of all, the Energy category is garbage. Its basic laser pistol is flatly inferior to the conventional pistol under Standard Weapons, having half the base damage and lacking the specialist ammo types available to the conventional pistol, which is particularly appalling since two of your three 'classes' will automatically start with enough Standard Weapon ranks to be able to use the conventional pistol, where the laser pistol requires you either work for it in-game or pick the Marine and choose to specialize in Energy Weapons. In theory the laser pistol is advantaged against enemy machines, but it only does double damage to them so the fact that it has half the base damage of the conventional pistol directly cancels that out. Worse, since the conventional pistol can break out AP ammo to do four times damage against machines, in actual fact the laser pistol has no niche at all.
It's tempting to think the laser pistol justifies itself on the basis of being an energy weapon. In System Shock 2, the laser pistol and EMP rifle have internal batteries instead of relying on external ammo supplies, and these batteries can be fully recharged unlimitedly for free via recharge stations sprinkled throughout the game. This should contrast with how other weapons have to burn actual ammo, particularly considering how System Shock 2 is designed so that your overall supply of ammunition throughout the game is fairly limited and precious, particularly on higher difficulties where enemies drop ammo on death much less often.
Unfortunately, this runs into the weapon durability mechanic.
The weapon durability mechanic is straightforward: a weapon has a durability from 1 to 10, and each time it's fired it has a random percent chance of losing a point of durability. (You can easily test this yourself by acquiring a 1 durability weapon, saving, firing until it breaks, and then reloading and doing it again: the number of shots it takes for it to break is random) If the durability lowers from 1, then the weapon 'jams', and you can't use it until you repair it, either via the Repair skill or via an 'auto-repair device'. (Which there's a fixed, small number of in the game world)
Now, the percent chance of failure is actually defined per weapon, with eg the Annelid Launcher and Viral Proliferator breaking down much more rapidly than most other weapons, but the laser pistol and the conventional pistol have similar breakdown rates... and since your breakdown rate is defined by volume of fire, the laser pistol having crippled damage output leads to you needing to fire more shots which leads to it breaking down faster which means it simply replaces 'burns ammo and less often disposable maintenance tools' with 'burns disposable maintenance tools at an appalling rate'. (You use disposable maintenance tools to increase weapon durability, avoiding jams entirely)
(Also note that melee weapons never break. This ties into stuff I'll be talking about later)
So in practice, the laser pistol is 100% inferior to the conventional pistol. This is all before considering that inexplicably the laser pistol fires a slow-moving projectile, where the conventional pistol's shots are hitscan. It's much easier to avoid wasting shots with the conventional pistol, which further worsens the durability issue, and there's other issues this brings into play; for example, if you fire on a camera that's in yellow alert mode and miss, the conventional pistol will have more than enough time to adjust your aim and hit the camera before it transitions into red alert mode. The laser pistol? Unless you're basically on top of the camera, by the time you see that the shot has missed it will be too late.
Thing is, though, if you stripped out the skill investment system and ripped out the maintenance mechanic and also ripped out the inventory system -all examples of RPG elements grafted atop the core shooter experience- the laser pistol would be fine. It would be an excellent weapon for letting you attack at range without wasting your precious supply of proper ammunition, and its poor damage would function to avoid it being your staple offense weapon. It would be a way to wear down melee enemies from safe positions, snipe cameras without wasting ammo, take out turrets that you've managed to get an angle on where they can't shoot back, etc. It's only thanks to all these RPG elements being stacked on top that it's garbage.
Skipping ahead to the Energy 6 weapon (Excepting Psi being more complicated, all skill/stat ranks max out at 6 points for buying purposes), energy gets the dual-circuit EMP rifle. What's it do? Well, it fires a slow-moving projectile that does very high damage to mechanical targets in an area of effect. In trade, it's completely worthless against fully organic targets, and it's technically only partially effective against cyborgs. (Though cyborgs are an extremely limited list) Okay, that doesn't sound bad, right?
The problem comes when I compare it against Standard Weapons' own rank 6 option: the assault rifle. The assault rifle uses the pistol's own ammunition supply, but is flatly superior to the pistol such that there's no reason to carry a pistol once you can use an assault rifle. More relevantly to this particular point, this means it has access to the same armor-piercing rounds as the pistol. How much damage does an assault rifle do with armor-piercing rounds?
Exactly as much as the EMP rifle does.
This makes it extremely difficult to justify investing far enough into Energy to unlock the EMP rifle. For the same Cyber Module count, you could've invested into Standard Weapons instead and gotten a weapon that's just as effective against machines (More effective, actually, since it's much easier to miss with the EMP rifle) and then also useful against everything else in the game.
Much like the laser pistol, this is very specifically the RPG mechanics at fault. If you stripped out all the RPG mechanics, the situation would be flipped in some sense: your default earliest access points for the assault rifle and dual-circuit EMP rifle are very similar (They're both found on the Hydroponics deck), and without the RPG mechanics in place the only reason you'd want to use armor-piercing rounds would be if your EMP rifle was completely out of battery and you'd just encountered a serious mechanical threat. The EMP rifle would still be a bit specialized, as the vast majority of enemies in System Shock 2 are immune to it and the toughest part of the game in particular has no pure machines and only a handful of cyborgs, but this specialization would be functional instead of essentially worthless.
There's an additional wrinkle here, also caused purely by RPG mechanics: leveling up a weapon skill is not only how you unlock the ability to wield weapons, but it also improves damage on weapons if you progress above the the weapon's unlock requirement. (That is, Energy Weapons 6 raises the laser pistol's damage by 5 steps, since that's 5 ranks above its base requirement) The relevancy of this is that the Wrench is, uniquely, a weapon that doesn't require any weapon ranks to be equipped, but nonetheless scales its damage with Standard Weapons. As such, investing in Standard Weapons has the additional benefit of making your default melee weapon even stronger, unlike investing in Energy Weapons.
This is offset some by Energy's rank 3 weapon, the Laser Rapier, as the Laser Rapier is 100% superior to the Wrench, and by a sufficient margin that even though it's a rank 3 weapon and thus benefits less from leveling Energy than the Wrench benefits from leveling Standard Weapons, generally if you're going to bother to unlock the Laser Rapier at all it will automatically replace the Wrench. On higher difficulties where your Cyber Modules don't go as far, though, it's generally questionable to unlock the Laser Rapier. There's better ways of becoming competent in melee -the only unique advantage the Laser Rapier has is that for some reason the final boss is immune to all other melee weapons. This isn't important unless you're specifically doing a gimmick pure melee run, though, as the final boss is fairly trivial to shoot to death once you've dealt with their primary gimmick.
And once again, this is entirely the RPG mechanics at fault. Without them, the Laser Rapier would be an early-midgame upgrade to your melee capability, simple as that, and in general what is currently the worthless Energy field would all be perfectly viable, useful weapons.
This issue doesn't impact the other two weapon categories -Heavy and Exotic- as aggressively, with Heavy in particular actually being plenty strong on the basis of the Grenade Launcher being arguably the best weapon of the entire game and it's the basic Heavy weapon, but it's still relevant. Exotic's two more advanced weapons very much suffer from the issue.
The key issue in Exotic's case is that System Shock 2 has a research mechanic. The research mechanic is based on the Research skill, and serves two-and-a-half purposes: the first purpose is that many enemies have a chance of dropping an 'organ' named after their type, and if you research these organs this will, barring a couple exceptions, have the benefit of increasing your damage against that enemy type. The and-a-half purpose is that every object in the game can be 'queried' to get a text log of variable usefulness, and with researchable items you can't access these logs unless you've successfully researched the item. This being how a typical player would learn that Annelid enemies are resistant to energy weapons. The final purpose, however, is that all Exotic weapons, some Implants, and one plot-related special item are impossible to use unless you've researched them. In the case of Exotic weapons, this is in addition to meeting the Exotic skill requirement, making Exotic more burdensome in Cyber Modules than any other one weapon tree.
Exotic's basic weapon, the Crystal Shard, happens to be sufficiently powerful that it can be worth jumping through the hoops necessary to research it. Mind, this is in part due to a bug that causes the Smasher OS Upgrade to increase its damage far more than intended, but even without that it's unequivocally the best melee weapon, with high base damage and significant ability to scale it because it's unlocked at Exotic Weapons 1. Particularly if you're playing on lower difficulties, where you have Cyber Modules to spare, achieving Research 4 -or, more likely, achieving Research 3 and using the Lab Assistant Implant to bolster your Research score to 4- to unlock the Crystal Shard is actually worth considering. It's powerful enough that it directly outclasses the Wrench if you have Exotic Weapons 3 and Standard Weapons 6!
In turn, Exotic's rank 3 weapon, the Viral Proliferator, is something you'll probably incidentally use if you elect to use the Crystal Shard in the first place, as it only requires Research 3, one less than the Crystal Shard. Since you'll want to invest some into Exotic to power up the Crystal Shard regardless, and in particular the second and third ranks of a weapon skill are dirt cheap (Indeed, for every stat and skill around 2/3rds of the cost of maxing them is concentrated in the fifth and sixth ranks), you'll be unlocking it anyway if you're serious about using the Crystal Shard. As such, the Viral Proliferator actually kind of works out. More or less. Well enough.
The Exotic Weapons 6 weapon of the Annelid Launcher, by contrast, is something that doesn't make any sense to pursue in real play. In addition to requiring Exotic Weapons 6, it requires Research 6, and it's the only thing in the game that requires Research 6. Worse, nothing requires Research 5. And remember: 2/3rds of the cost in maxing a skill or stat is in the fifth and sixth ranks. For the Annelid Launcher to be worth pursuing, it would have to be the best weapon in the game by a wide margin... and in actuality it's not particularly great.
Strip out all these RPG mechanics and the Annelid Launcher would actually be fine. It would still suffer from its ammo type being very limited and also from sharing that ammo type with the Viral Proliferator, but a non-RPG version of System Shock 2 would be one where you'd probably actually consistently use the Annelid Launcher in the hardest part of the game -it's basically custom-tailored to that part of the game.
But the RPG mechanics do exist, and they make the Annelid Launcher essentially invalid, even to a character who intends to max out the Exotic Weapons skill!
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So the weapon design suffers badly from the game being an FPS that skinned an RPG and is now wandering around, ghoulishly wearing it as an ill-fitting cloak. But wait! One of the most commonly-cited positive qualities of System Shock 2 is that it has high replay value, which is obviously caused by the RPG mechanics leading to the player being encouraged to use a narrow selection of weapons!
Surely that part justifies the existence of these RPG mechanics? Right? Right?... Right?
Well...
And when I got to System Shock 2 itself...
Well.
It turns out basically everything ever implied or claimed about the game to me over the years was a big fat lie.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Now, part of the reason I'm covering System Shock 2 after Bioshock is that I experienced them in that order. The majority of it, however, is that Bioshock is not very impressive of a game on its own merits -bar the handful of things I praised already- and then gets worse when you properly contextualize it by looking at System Shock 2 and finding that the development team is reiterating the same errors in the same way, with little improvement-by-learning to be found at all. This being the case even though the goal of Bioshock was to do System Shock 2 Again, But Better. The counterpart to this is that System Shock 2 is also Not A Very Good Game, regardless of the critical praise it's received ever since its release, and many of its flaws become more damning when you look to the future and see that, yes, they just repeat these same flaws for no good reason. It's not that System Shock 2 was trying to do something novel and difficult and its flaws are an understandable outgrowth of tackling such a challenge. No, its flaws are idiosyncratic to the development team, and the evidence -particularly when you look even further forward to Bioshock Infinite, but I'm not touching that just yet- is that the development team is unable or unwilling to engage in the self-reflection necessary to properly acknowledge and address these issues.
More damning than making a mistake once is making it over and over again. And more damning than that is doing so for no benefit whatsoever, which is a recurring element in the 'shock series failings.
More damning than those is that the root cause of many of these flaws are obvious, whether in the sense that someone on the development team has a pet issue the team really should know better than to indulge or in the sense that a fundamental systemic decision was made where it was obviously all but inevitable that the final failing would occur, and yet the development team not only failed to notice this ahead of time the first time but went on to do it again. Twice, in many cases.
Usually I devote 1-3 posts to 'this game is Not Very Good, here's how'. System Shock 2 merits a rather more involved discussion, partly because its issues are genuinely that numerous, partly because the game is routinely touted as an ideal to strive toward, and partly because its issues are so obvious. Usually it's not clear whether a given issue in a game is the product of
A: Personal wonkiness of the development team or
B: Some aspects of the game being rushed, where a non-rushed version wouldn't have had that issue or
C: The issue not being obvious from an internal development perspective for reasons opaque to an outsider or
D: The issue being an acceptable casualty in pursuit of some desirable trait the game does have or
E: Something I would never guess or
F: Some combination of the above.
This lack of clarity normally makes it difficult to talk constructively about the issues a game has. Brutal Legend, for example, has a number of issues with its plot where I suspect the issues would've existed even if the game hadn't been rushed... but it was rushed, it leaks into the entire game, and then the whole thing is made murkier by things like it having the unusual distinction of rock star voice actors who don't normally do that.
With System Shock 2, it's a lot more obvious what went wrong where, and why.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Mechanically, one of System Shock 2's foremost problems comes from how extremely obviously the game was constructed first as a fairly stock shooter game of the time, and then RPG elements were tacked atop this after the fact. This is a particularly stark contrast with the first System Shock, which meshes the two genre elements together into an interesting and coherent whole, but it's a poor approach in general.
Let's start with...
Weapons
System Shock 2 has thirteen different weapons, and their general design would be vastly improved if you ripped the RPG elements out and simply assumed a typical FPS carry-all-the-weapons-and-all-the-ammo-effortlessly sort of design. There'd still be some problems, such as how the Viral Proliferator and Annelid Launcher share an ammo type and that ammo type is extremely rare and not purchasable or otherwise grindable, but just stripping the RPG elements out would magically make the weapon design essentially competent.
But with the RPG elements slapped in... well.
Let's start with the category problem: there's four categories of weapon type and more specifically weapon skill. Each category has three weapons, with the exception that the Wrench is (sort of) classified as a Standard Weapon and thus that category strictly has four weapons.
The categories in question are where some of the breakdowns occur right away, in conjunction with the problems introduced by other RPG elements.
First of all, the Energy category is garbage. Its basic laser pistol is flatly inferior to the conventional pistol under Standard Weapons, having half the base damage and lacking the specialist ammo types available to the conventional pistol, which is particularly appalling since two of your three 'classes' will automatically start with enough Standard Weapon ranks to be able to use the conventional pistol, where the laser pistol requires you either work for it in-game or pick the Marine and choose to specialize in Energy Weapons. In theory the laser pistol is advantaged against enemy machines, but it only does double damage to them so the fact that it has half the base damage of the conventional pistol directly cancels that out. Worse, since the conventional pistol can break out AP ammo to do four times damage against machines, in actual fact the laser pistol has no niche at all.
It's tempting to think the laser pistol justifies itself on the basis of being an energy weapon. In System Shock 2, the laser pistol and EMP rifle have internal batteries instead of relying on external ammo supplies, and these batteries can be fully recharged unlimitedly for free via recharge stations sprinkled throughout the game. This should contrast with how other weapons have to burn actual ammo, particularly considering how System Shock 2 is designed so that your overall supply of ammunition throughout the game is fairly limited and precious, particularly on higher difficulties where enemies drop ammo on death much less often.
Unfortunately, this runs into the weapon durability mechanic.
The weapon durability mechanic is straightforward: a weapon has a durability from 1 to 10, and each time it's fired it has a random percent chance of losing a point of durability. (You can easily test this yourself by acquiring a 1 durability weapon, saving, firing until it breaks, and then reloading and doing it again: the number of shots it takes for it to break is random) If the durability lowers from 1, then the weapon 'jams', and you can't use it until you repair it, either via the Repair skill or via an 'auto-repair device'. (Which there's a fixed, small number of in the game world)
Now, the percent chance of failure is actually defined per weapon, with eg the Annelid Launcher and Viral Proliferator breaking down much more rapidly than most other weapons, but the laser pistol and the conventional pistol have similar breakdown rates... and since your breakdown rate is defined by volume of fire, the laser pistol having crippled damage output leads to you needing to fire more shots which leads to it breaking down faster which means it simply replaces 'burns ammo and less often disposable maintenance tools' with 'burns disposable maintenance tools at an appalling rate'. (You use disposable maintenance tools to increase weapon durability, avoiding jams entirely)
(Also note that melee weapons never break. This ties into stuff I'll be talking about later)
So in practice, the laser pistol is 100% inferior to the conventional pistol. This is all before considering that inexplicably the laser pistol fires a slow-moving projectile, where the conventional pistol's shots are hitscan. It's much easier to avoid wasting shots with the conventional pistol, which further worsens the durability issue, and there's other issues this brings into play; for example, if you fire on a camera that's in yellow alert mode and miss, the conventional pistol will have more than enough time to adjust your aim and hit the camera before it transitions into red alert mode. The laser pistol? Unless you're basically on top of the camera, by the time you see that the shot has missed it will be too late.
Thing is, though, if you stripped out the skill investment system and ripped out the maintenance mechanic and also ripped out the inventory system -all examples of RPG elements grafted atop the core shooter experience- the laser pistol would be fine. It would be an excellent weapon for letting you attack at range without wasting your precious supply of proper ammunition, and its poor damage would function to avoid it being your staple offense weapon. It would be a way to wear down melee enemies from safe positions, snipe cameras without wasting ammo, take out turrets that you've managed to get an angle on where they can't shoot back, etc. It's only thanks to all these RPG elements being stacked on top that it's garbage.
Skipping ahead to the Energy 6 weapon (Excepting Psi being more complicated, all skill/stat ranks max out at 6 points for buying purposes), energy gets the dual-circuit EMP rifle. What's it do? Well, it fires a slow-moving projectile that does very high damage to mechanical targets in an area of effect. In trade, it's completely worthless against fully organic targets, and it's technically only partially effective against cyborgs. (Though cyborgs are an extremely limited list) Okay, that doesn't sound bad, right?
The problem comes when I compare it against Standard Weapons' own rank 6 option: the assault rifle. The assault rifle uses the pistol's own ammunition supply, but is flatly superior to the pistol such that there's no reason to carry a pistol once you can use an assault rifle. More relevantly to this particular point, this means it has access to the same armor-piercing rounds as the pistol. How much damage does an assault rifle do with armor-piercing rounds?
Exactly as much as the EMP rifle does.
This makes it extremely difficult to justify investing far enough into Energy to unlock the EMP rifle. For the same Cyber Module count, you could've invested into Standard Weapons instead and gotten a weapon that's just as effective against machines (More effective, actually, since it's much easier to miss with the EMP rifle) and then also useful against everything else in the game.
Much like the laser pistol, this is very specifically the RPG mechanics at fault. If you stripped out all the RPG mechanics, the situation would be flipped in some sense: your default earliest access points for the assault rifle and dual-circuit EMP rifle are very similar (They're both found on the Hydroponics deck), and without the RPG mechanics in place the only reason you'd want to use armor-piercing rounds would be if your EMP rifle was completely out of battery and you'd just encountered a serious mechanical threat. The EMP rifle would still be a bit specialized, as the vast majority of enemies in System Shock 2 are immune to it and the toughest part of the game in particular has no pure machines and only a handful of cyborgs, but this specialization would be functional instead of essentially worthless.
There's an additional wrinkle here, also caused purely by RPG mechanics: leveling up a weapon skill is not only how you unlock the ability to wield weapons, but it also improves damage on weapons if you progress above the the weapon's unlock requirement. (That is, Energy Weapons 6 raises the laser pistol's damage by 5 steps, since that's 5 ranks above its base requirement) The relevancy of this is that the Wrench is, uniquely, a weapon that doesn't require any weapon ranks to be equipped, but nonetheless scales its damage with Standard Weapons. As such, investing in Standard Weapons has the additional benefit of making your default melee weapon even stronger, unlike investing in Energy Weapons.
This is offset some by Energy's rank 3 weapon, the Laser Rapier, as the Laser Rapier is 100% superior to the Wrench, and by a sufficient margin that even though it's a rank 3 weapon and thus benefits less from leveling Energy than the Wrench benefits from leveling Standard Weapons, generally if you're going to bother to unlock the Laser Rapier at all it will automatically replace the Wrench. On higher difficulties where your Cyber Modules don't go as far, though, it's generally questionable to unlock the Laser Rapier. There's better ways of becoming competent in melee -the only unique advantage the Laser Rapier has is that for some reason the final boss is immune to all other melee weapons. This isn't important unless you're specifically doing a gimmick pure melee run, though, as the final boss is fairly trivial to shoot to death once you've dealt with their primary gimmick.
And once again, this is entirely the RPG mechanics at fault. Without them, the Laser Rapier would be an early-midgame upgrade to your melee capability, simple as that, and in general what is currently the worthless Energy field would all be perfectly viable, useful weapons.
This issue doesn't impact the other two weapon categories -Heavy and Exotic- as aggressively, with Heavy in particular actually being plenty strong on the basis of the Grenade Launcher being arguably the best weapon of the entire game and it's the basic Heavy weapon, but it's still relevant. Exotic's two more advanced weapons very much suffer from the issue.
The key issue in Exotic's case is that System Shock 2 has a research mechanic. The research mechanic is based on the Research skill, and serves two-and-a-half purposes: the first purpose is that many enemies have a chance of dropping an 'organ' named after their type, and if you research these organs this will, barring a couple exceptions, have the benefit of increasing your damage against that enemy type. The and-a-half purpose is that every object in the game can be 'queried' to get a text log of variable usefulness, and with researchable items you can't access these logs unless you've successfully researched the item. This being how a typical player would learn that Annelid enemies are resistant to energy weapons. The final purpose, however, is that all Exotic weapons, some Implants, and one plot-related special item are impossible to use unless you've researched them. In the case of Exotic weapons, this is in addition to meeting the Exotic skill requirement, making Exotic more burdensome in Cyber Modules than any other one weapon tree.
Exotic's basic weapon, the Crystal Shard, happens to be sufficiently powerful that it can be worth jumping through the hoops necessary to research it. Mind, this is in part due to a bug that causes the Smasher OS Upgrade to increase its damage far more than intended, but even without that it's unequivocally the best melee weapon, with high base damage and significant ability to scale it because it's unlocked at Exotic Weapons 1. Particularly if you're playing on lower difficulties, where you have Cyber Modules to spare, achieving Research 4 -or, more likely, achieving Research 3 and using the Lab Assistant Implant to bolster your Research score to 4- to unlock the Crystal Shard is actually worth considering. It's powerful enough that it directly outclasses the Wrench if you have Exotic Weapons 3 and Standard Weapons 6!
In turn, Exotic's rank 3 weapon, the Viral Proliferator, is something you'll probably incidentally use if you elect to use the Crystal Shard in the first place, as it only requires Research 3, one less than the Crystal Shard. Since you'll want to invest some into Exotic to power up the Crystal Shard regardless, and in particular the second and third ranks of a weapon skill are dirt cheap (Indeed, for every stat and skill around 2/3rds of the cost of maxing them is concentrated in the fifth and sixth ranks), you'll be unlocking it anyway if you're serious about using the Crystal Shard. As such, the Viral Proliferator actually kind of works out. More or less. Well enough.
The Exotic Weapons 6 weapon of the Annelid Launcher, by contrast, is something that doesn't make any sense to pursue in real play. In addition to requiring Exotic Weapons 6, it requires Research 6, and it's the only thing in the game that requires Research 6. Worse, nothing requires Research 5. And remember: 2/3rds of the cost in maxing a skill or stat is in the fifth and sixth ranks. For the Annelid Launcher to be worth pursuing, it would have to be the best weapon in the game by a wide margin... and in actuality it's not particularly great.
Strip out all these RPG mechanics and the Annelid Launcher would actually be fine. It would still suffer from its ammo type being very limited and also from sharing that ammo type with the Viral Proliferator, but a non-RPG version of System Shock 2 would be one where you'd probably actually consistently use the Annelid Launcher in the hardest part of the game -it's basically custom-tailored to that part of the game.
But the RPG mechanics do exist, and they make the Annelid Launcher essentially invalid, even to a character who intends to max out the Exotic Weapons skill!
------------------------------------------------
So the weapon design suffers badly from the game being an FPS that skinned an RPG and is now wandering around, ghoulishly wearing it as an ill-fitting cloak. But wait! One of the most commonly-cited positive qualities of System Shock 2 is that it has high replay value, which is obviously caused by the RPG mechanics leading to the player being encouraged to use a narrow selection of weapons!
Surely that part justifies the existence of these RPG mechanics? Right? Right?... Right?
Well...
Ah, System Shock 2, perhaps one of the top 10 most overrated games of all time. It's been a really long time (like 15+ years) since I tried it. I never played SS1, instead I got into it by way of really enjoying Deus Ex, so I looked up what people recommended to folks who liked DX. And everywhere on the Interwebs everyone was like oh, play SS2. It's cyberpunk, shooter+RPG "immersive sim" elements, and it was developed by the old team of Warren Spector (of SS1 and DX fame).
ReplyDeleteAnd then I abandoned it about halfway through because it was just... bad. The little of I remember of it was desperately trying to bash everything with a wrench, because each time I used my normal weapons they broke. Then I picked up this exotic, super powerful melee weapon, and... I can't use it! I have to invest points into its weapon class first, which means I can't invest into the skills for repairing the normal weapons or prevent them from breaking, or sometime. I don't remember all the details, but the progression system was really bad. You had to invest a lot of resources just to _use_ something, with little to no reward for actually doing so.
I mean, in Deus Ex, if I don't invest in Heavy Weapons, I can still use the GEP gun, it just means I'm reduced to a snail's pace. If I don't invest in melee weapon skills, I can still use the Dragon Tooth Nanosword, but it just means I can't use it to break down doors and slash down security bots, etc. I mean, DX's progression system was its own brand of janky and unbalanced, but all weapons and items were at least _situationally_ useful even if you don't invest in the right skills and augmentations; it's not an all-or-nothing affair like SS2. Or rather, SS2's progression system is more of "not-much-or-nothing"...
I haven't played Deus Ex yet so I can't speak to its quality, but yeah, System Shock 2 is... disappointing, given how it's one of those games that gets into Top Ten lists and whatnot regularly. The amazing thing is System Shock 2 actually does have team overlap with System Shock 1, and in fact is a collaboration between some of those people plus a bunch of people who were big fans of System Shock 1. It makes it very confusing how totally SS2 mishandles... everything... given the failings are what I usually see in cases where a series got passed off to a completely different studio with little or no prior familiarity with the series. Not 'half the team worked on the immediately prior game, and half the team loved said game'.
DeleteI remember back then that a lot of people recommended messing through the game files to dial back or even turn off the weapon degradation for System Shock 2. A quick Google shows that it's pretty much still the case. I never got around to doing that myself, but honestly, why does removing a core mechanic make the game _better_? And if so, why have it in the first place, besides throwing in a thin veneer of "genre hybridization"? It perfectly demonstrates the point that you are making in this post.
DeleteSomething kind of similar happened with the Deus Ex series' first two entries. The sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, although more commercially successful than the first DX, is widely considered to be inferior. The developers of DX:IW was largely the same team as that from DX1. Harvey Smith, the lead designer of DX1 was promoted to Director, with DX1 director Warren Spector moving to an oversight role. Granted, in retrospect a lot of it had to do with the transition from PC to Console (IW was targeted for the original Xbox), and everyone was still in the process of figuring out console shooters at the time. That said, in recent interviews, Smith and Spector admitted that many of the flaws of DX:IW stemmed from them "listening to the wrong people", namely the extreme hardcore fans of DX1, in getting inputs for many of the changes. Spector also mentions not giving Smith enough direction for his new position at the time. So I wonder whether half the team working on the sequel being big fans had something to do with it. Maybe "big fans" of games have strong opinions about things they like about a given game, but often don't actually know _why_ it works and how they fit in? I dunno. That said, I've never gone around to playing DX:IW yet, but as far as I can tell it might actually be a somewhat ok game. System Shock 2 really... wasn't.
Ironically, the 2010s era DX prequels, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, are much more highly rated than IW and are considered to be much more faithful to the original, despite being developed by a brand-new and completely unrelated team who just happened to inherit the IP.
I found it telling that, at some point when I was digging around online in relation to System Shock 2, that one of the team members responded to complaints about how nonsensical the durability system is by commenting that there was supposed to be an audio log explaining that somethingsomething gases on the ships accelerating decay, but said log got missed and didn't actually make it into the game before release. (Or something along those lines; it's been years and I'm not digging it back up)
DeletePoint being, at least one member of the team reacted to 'this is insane nonsense' by saying 'we have an excuse for justifying this mechanic!' Which is consistent with, among other things, the game introducing ghosts, and then trying to make it 'realistic' by mumbling vaguely about psychic emanations, which doesn't actually explain anything or fit with what the game actually does with the concept. SS2 is full of these kinds of problems: bad decisions the game attempts to provide in-universe explanations for, where those explanations just raise further questions (What could possibly happen to believably lead to super-breakdown gas being a thing aboard the ships??), rather than stepping back and interrogating whether the decision makes sense from an out-of-universe standpoint.
And this continues into Bioshock 1 and Bioshock Infinite...
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if SS2 having half the team be fans of 1 was part of the problem -especially that soon, fans of a thing often can't properly articulate to themselves (Let alone anyone else) why they like the thing, operating off really general impressions. So you absolutely get a lot of stuff like 'I love this villain!' where they just know the villain is compellingly awful, and then they just... give them Generic Bad Person actions without really grasping that they liked the villain due to the villain's philosophy or the like, where said Generic Bad Person actions contradict that. 'Inmates running the asylum' is a term because, yeah, fans getting to take a thing over can easily result in distortion and loss of the 'magic'.
Mostly, though, I suspect those team members had very dubious mental models in general. There's just too many decisions in their own entries that are what I call 'gratuitously bad' (eg 'the Many infiltrate us psychically, and thus secretly!' alongside 'we have literal thought police explicitly aboard this ship' problem: this isn't a subtle problem. It's difficult to believe they just overlooked it, or something else sympathetic) for me to buy that there isn't an aspect of these games externalizing broken mental models.
I did some quick Googling today out of sheer curiosity, entered "system shock 2 is overrated" and got two decades worth of forum posts complaining about all the things you and I are complaining about here, which are all followed by replies stating "no ss2 is a good game you're just a troll and a bad player". I also came across some other claims (which you can really find anywhere SS2 gets talked about) that System Shock (the first) an innovative but flawed experimental game, and SS2 is the real classic. Unfortunately, I've never played any of the other *shock games, and a good part of that is SS2 giving me such a bad taste in the mouth. That said, I think your System Shock series clearly demonstrates that SS1 is not simply a groundbreaking game but one that actually gets most of the things right, while SS2 took all that made the first game great and ended up mangling everything - story, mechanics, you name it.
DeleteI do have a theory as to why SS2 is considered to be the classic game, when it should be SS1 that really deserves the accolades. SS1 came out in 1994, SS2 in 1999. A lot of things happened in those five years, and a couple of important developments might have been the rise of the Internet and the growth trajectory of the video game industry. During the time SS1 was released most people still thought of PC games as, well, Doom, basically. Meanwhile SS2 would have come out in a time when video games would have had way more media attention and perhaps it was just at the right place at the right time to get lots of good press, all of which simply gone memetic.
I find that many nowadays chalk up SS2's bad quality as being a product of its time, but nah. Half-Life is a contemporary game I remember playing about the same time I tried SS2 (which was a few years after either game actually came out) and was much better quality. HL had the usual jank of the era but still holds up reasonably well and you can see how it influenced modern shooters. And of course SS2's direct predecessor was also better! I also played the first Command and Conquer many years after I played Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2, and C&C 3, and managed to get through both sides' campaigns, so it's not like I couldn't go back to an older game because I'm already spoiled by all the modern quality-of-life refinements, etc.
Unfortunately, criticisms of popular things seem to be prone to generating bad faith arguments instead of 'well, I like it for X, Y, and Z reasons' responses in general. I've never really understood why -my favorite games all have flaws I'll readily complain about. Even some games I'm willing to characterize as 'perfect' have, in actuality, imperfections I will readily acknowledge. (eg Super Metroid's clunky weapon changing system) So I just don't get the mentality.
DeleteBut yeah, I could see SS2 benefiting in no small part from timing. I was too young to have a good sense of what things were like with the industry back then, but it certainly felt to me like somewhere in the vicinity of the mid-90s games got a lot more... mainstream, or something, where games from earlier tend to be 'cult classics' at best, even if they're actually really good and I have trouble finding actual negative reviews. (eg Master of Magic) And not just because DOS-era games spent a long time a huge pain to play on vaguely modern systems.
I've actually been working through C&C Remastered, and it's been... interesting, in that the original C&C and, to a much lesser extent the original Red Alert, are actually pretty badly constructed as far as the campaign mission design goes, with a lot of 'wait, how does the mission expect you to figure out the intended answer here?' issues and in the original C&C a lot of missions being deliberately designed around the AI having unlimited construction ability while you have a very limited budget. The later games aren't just better technology, they're also better design. (Though some of this is just the technology 'catching up' to the design -the mission where Seth insists GDI presence will be light would work SO much better in a modern version, where you'd get in-mission characters going 'Seth lied to us! Let's go set up a base', instead of having to figure out the idea on your own with minimal info)
Of course, part of what feeds into my perspective is actually future games: I'm as harsh as I am on SS2 because it's not 'well, clearly the devs were early in learning their craft', as most of the worst problems come right back in Bioshock. Whereas I'm tolerant of C&C's problems in part because the devs didn't spend the next three games going 'having the AI massively, blatantly cheat and building missions around this is the thing to do!' So either they learned, or they at least weren't actively committed to the bad design once the technology improving took away the original impetus behind the bad design.
Well, the problem with popular video games is the same problem with any popular work of modern pop culture, which is that cults tend to form around them. And I don't mean "cult following" as in "somewhat obsessive people who really like the work", I mean an almost literal cult of people who made the work into an actual religious idol. The religious angle goes quite far too, in the sense that many defenders of such works aren't even necessarily fanatical devotees, but people who are of the "couldn't be arsed to get up on Sunday morning"; those who are at best casually familiar with the work but still defend it by reciting the usual mantras because it somehow makes them Better People to do so.
DeleteI haven't touched C&C Remastered yet (probably never will given time constraints). I did find the AI of the original C&C, errr, memorable, and will post my thoughts in your devlearning post about it.
I've tried playing System Shock 2 a number of times, and this blog sums up everything wrong with the game that I could never put into words. Like the other commenter, I had heard so much stuff over the years about SS2, with many claiming it's better than the first. So I was hyped to try it and kept trying it to see if I was missing something.
ReplyDeleteI played the first game a while back and was blown away by it. The levels were labyrinths and you could take any route you wanted. If you were having trouble in a level, there was always an alternate route somewhere. SS2's levels are so linear and the story is more centered around fetch quests to repair the ship, rather than in SS1 where you were clearing out floors of the space station to take it back from SHODAN. Ammo was hard to find in SS1, and thus felt rewarding. In SS2 it is the opposite. You'll find tons of ammo but all broken weapons. How come the wrench never breaks btw? LOL.
The weapon breakage is by far the most frustrating thing in this game. The shotgun wielding hybrids drop shotguns that are always broken. 5-6 hours into the game, you start routinely coming across spare pistols and shotguns that are always near the breakpoint or broken. I never had a problem running out of ammo. More so all my weapons keep breaking. This is made even more tedious that you can't just manually repair them if you have the repair and maintenance skill. You need a specific item for that, and it only repairs it 1-2 levels. As the game progresses, you'll find new weapons and get excited, then realize you can't use them cause you don't have the stats or they're broken.
I could never finish this game cause it's just so frustrating. I always resort to just using the wrench as my main weapon and whacking everything. There is no fun in that. Like melee weapons in many FPS games, it tends to completely miss the smaller enemies like monkeys. The RPG mechanics outright ruin this game above everything. The level design deserves criticism too for how linear it is and so many hallways that look the same (without the mini map, you are running around in circles not knowing where you are). But it's all the RPG stuff that ruins it for me. It's easy to screw up not knowing the difference between repair of maintenance, or what does research do? Even the benefits to research require a fetch quest through the levels to find the right chemicals.
This game could've truly been special and built on the original one. The gameplay issues are what breaks it, but as your other blogs have pointed out, there's major issues with the story too (glad I am not the only one to see how badly SHODAN was written in this game!) and some other design choices. The levels are all too linear and don't feel as memorable as the first. So many times I get lost running around hallways and areas that look indistinguishable to one another and that can't be blamed on the era. Half-Life as mentioned by the other commenter, had far better level design and mechanics.
Ah, yeah, I'd intended to talk some about the problems with the chemical system, and more explicitly touch on the level design problems, but there's so much wrong with the game I honestly forgot to fit them in. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting other problems at this point, too... I remain baffled to this day how much hype SS2 gets, especially relevant to SS1. I can only hope the SS1 remake actually did it justice...
DeleteI have not played the remake to be able to tell you if it's good or not. I have seen some fans of SS2 complain about design choices, though they did implement the stupid wrench into the game (main complaint I've seen). It has vending machines and item breakdown similar to SS2.
DeleteI agree with you though, I am so baffled by the hype of SS2 myself. I went into this game after playing the first and was expecting to be blown away after reading how it was supposed to be better. It just frustrated me to no end. Every few years I go back and try to replay it, but always give up halfway into the game due to how frustrating it is with the stat systems and constant breaking weapons.
I mostly play FPS games of the past, so it was only a matter of time I eventually tried SS2. I once seen someone compare SS2 to Doom 3 in a critique to trash the latter, since it's popular sport online to bash Doom 3 as some "bad game". I was confused, cause D3 is a game I can easily play from start to finish and never have issues with like I do with SS2. It has flaws with it's storytelling, but I greatly prefer it to SS2. The one thing SS2 has going for it with it's brooding atmosphere, Doom 3 does so much better. It don't have the RPG mechanics slapped on, and despite linear level design, I never get lost and feel like I'm running around in circles. If anything, Doom 3 took after SS2 and did a far better job by keeping it to basics as a shooter.
SS2 came out after Quake 2, Half-life and Unreal. All 3 of them have superior level design and are more fun to play. Quake 2 tends to get criticized like Doom 3, but I had way more fun with it than I've ever had with SS2.
I mean, you already had a crap melee weapon in SS1. I think it was a pipe instead of a wrench, admittedly, but 'you start with a crap melee weapon' was already there in the original, is the point. Mildly concerned by hearing it has item breakdown, though...
DeleteI don't like Doom 3, personally, but a big part of that boils down to 'classic Doom is an incredible game, and Doom 3 isn't really a worthy successor'. (And I'm pretty sure this is a pretty typical view, even if most people frame their feelings as 'Doom 3 is a bad game' rather than as 'I'm disappointed by Doom 3, because it doesn't live up to the Doom name') If Doom 3 had been presented as a FPS unrelated to the existing Doom games, I'd basically view it as somewhat above-average of an FPS, with some specific criticisms regarding eg the way it uses darkness being very poorly-considered... but all that's to say I more or less agree with the thrust of your comparison: Doom 3 and SS2 are both hugely disappointing as sequels, but SS2 is additionally just a terrible game on its own merits, where Doom 3 is a competent game.
And yet for some reason people praise SS2 way more than Doom 3... I really don't get that part.
You are correct that SS1 had a crap melee weapon at the start. It was indeed the pipe, though I'd argue it worked better than the wrench does in SS2. The remake uses the wrench, and there's some mechanic where if you hold the attack key down long enough, you're supposed to do more damage with a bigger swing. Item breakdown uses the vending machines much like SS2.
DeleteDoom 3 is a flawed game for sure. I can see it as a Doom game though having played Doom 64 and seeing the direction the series was moving in from there and the PSX port. The horror elements of Doom are completely forgotten about today with the reboot games going fully in the direction of a fast paced heavy metal fantasy. I never had a problem with how Doom 3 uses darkness. There's really no sections in the game where you truly have to choose between the gun or flashlight, except 2 areas where you follow a lightsource. Where Doom 3 fails for me is in the enemy variety and gunplay. It just don't feel satisfying to shoot things in it compared to other shooters out at the time. I tend to compare it to the games that came out before it, notably Unreal and Half-Life that it took major influences from. I'll forever be bitter that Unreal never got a true sequel from Epic and became more of a multiplayer based franchise.
I've seen D3 and SS2 compared before. Yeah they're both disappointing, but I can finish D3 without getting frustrated with wonky RPG mechanics. If SS2 was stripped down to basics like D3, I think it would be more playable, but still as disappointing as D3 was to the original System Shock.
An "enhanced" remastered version of SS2 is coming from Nightdive soon. They have nailed their remasters, but this is a game I don't think is fixable.
Oh goodie, they ported in the SS2 'charged' melee swings. That's... concerningly suggestive.
DeleteI'm talking about a very different thing as far as classic Doom vs Doom 3, but it's something I've spent years failing to figure out how to articulate for a post on this site (Which is to say I'm probably about to fail at articulating it), where classic Doom has a bunch of elements that fit together in a way rarely seen outside the much more recent 'Soulslike' genre, involving exploration, judgment calls about whether a given enemy is even worth the bother of fighting, rationing of limited resources, and other thought processes that are very non-standard for the FPSes that came in its wake, vs Doom 3 being much more like a typical Horror FPS of its time in the sense of being a guided tour of a theme park horror attraction where the player has very little agency and mostly just overcomes challenges in the linear order they encounter them in (Or fails to overcome them, at which point the player reloads and trys again, as many times as it takes to get past this hurdle) while the game has assorted superficial trappings of horror that don't really matter and don't really work as horror. Within that latter framework Doom 3 is okay, it's just a vastly different (and in my opinion vastly less interesting) framework from what classic Doom used.
As for the darkness aspect, my primary criticism of it is actually that Doom 3 did a bunch of really impressive things with graphics, where even to this day the game is shockingly detailed while running smoothly and whatnot, and then 90% of the time the environment is drenched in so much darkness that you can't see any of this, so it fails to really benefit from these feats. I have secondary criticisms, some of which other people have pointed out (Why do I have to choose between having a light out and having a gun at the ready? Actual militaries have a variety of solutions to exactly this problem, and something like duct-taping the flashlight to a gun is something anyone could think up and implement quickly and easily), but this 'waste our very impressive visual effects by hiding it' thing is very much my primary criticism.
And yeah, I've been aware of the SS2 remaster being on the way, and doubt it'll even try to fix any of the game's problems. Its problems are too fundamental and widespread, and it's too normal to think of it as a 'masterpiece' instead of as a disaster...