This was one of the first reviews I saw; I like this guy's stuff about Doom Eternal. I really don't understand his problem with reviving. He wanted to have all enemies back and alive if you were killed - when you are revived it's not as if time goes back. You kill some enemies and you die, then obviously if you are revived and return to the same spot, the enemies that you killed are still dead. It wouldn't make sense that you would have to fight everyone all over again. This is actually my problem with cyberspace, it's annoying to me that if you die, you have to clear every room all over again. Also, puzzles aren't all the same as he says. I've been playing with puzzles set to 3 and having fun solving them. I haven't used a single logic probe so far. As for lack of handholding and level design, well, this is a remake. Fans of the original were the ones who payed to get it done, and I'm sure that they wouldn't appreciate many changes to these.
I get what he's saying RE: respawning. It makes it too easy! Once you've activated a respawner, death is no longer a punishment, it's a reward. You get your health refilled while the enemies stay dead. Sure it makes sense within the logic of the gameworld, but from a gameplay perspective it's not great. Honestly I never even use the respawner, just hit F9 when I bite the dust.
Enemies respawn too. With combat set to hard, they respawn a lot. It's a shame you can't change at least the combat and puzzle difficulty settings mid-game, because if using the restoration bays is making it too easy, you should be playing on a harder combat setting.
Every time I circle back to play SS1 or SS2 again, I have to overcome my save scumming urges at the start. But once I settle into using the restoration bays, I really prefer the gameplay with them. If I'm playing on hard difficulty, there is always tension & difficulty around areas with a lot of enemy respawning, likewise when exploring a new level before finding the bay, when ambushed, etc. Especially in SS2, where your own life bar is often not your most precious resource.
The restoration bays feel like a half-implemented system to me. Honestly, first time I died and revived in one, I went straight to the achievements to see if there was one for getting through the game without using them. But nope.
When I realised that there were no in-game or meta punishments for dying and reviving, it kind of trivialised the game for me, which is probably partly why I've put it down for the time being.
It also meant that I did the whole reactor without any protection, as what was the point in waiting if I could just go in, grab the stuff I need, die, then revive with it in my inventory?
I can understand trying to push mechanics forward beyond simple Quicksave/Quickload, but there has to be some penalty for death.
They really dropped the ball on enemy respawns (on normal), the tension is completely gone. Its almost pointless having the puzzles happen in Realtime when you're as safe as you were in BioShock with the game paused
; Unlike SS2 where you'd have to find quiet places to hide and research (playing some owz), waay more immersive and creepy.
I really do prefer the original after playing for many hours. The archaic controls commanded respect, this is kinda just parading as something its not with its flashy "fps" looks
Last edited by dylan barry; 5th Jun 2023 at 13:15.
The original was an FPS too, WTF are you trying to say?Originally Posted by dylan barry
If the level designer had wanted to make you bring a certain MacGuffin to pass the level, they could have done that. But the point of the radiation hazard is not to force you to fetch something, or invest in an upgrade, it's to increase the tension of the level by giving you another stat to manage while you're playing. Note there's a decontamination booth in that level. Radiation protection is designed to be optional, since you can always go and get yourself cleaned up in the decontamination booth whenever your rad level gets too high. You didn't need to spam the restoration bay.
IMHO, the penalty should be two-fold:I can understand trying to push mechanics forward beyond simple Quicksave/Quickload, but there has to be some penalty for death.
a. You've lost most of your health and need to find a surgery bed immediately and/or use med kits before resuming the fight.
b. In the time it takes to heal up and get back to where you were killed, you should be facing newly spawned enemies.
However, I think the original design got the balance wrong, because you almost always revived with high HP and/or with easy access to a surgery bed. It never bothered me though, considering there was plenty of challenge at higher difficulties. The remake seems easier so far, but I didn't choose Mission difficulty level 3. I'd like the option for permadeath, but not the 5 hour time limit.
All this demonstrates that you have failed to become immersed, and you're just thinking of it as a game instead of thinking like a person actually in this situation would, which would be to minimize the DEATH they experience.
Ok I finished it! 25h in total, played on Difficulty 2 across the board.
Looks and sounds
Looks great. Sounds good too, tho the action-music often seems to go on for too long. And once, on the Engineering level the action music just kept going and going forever even when there were no enemies around.
The game is very un-hand-holdey, and it's a real mixed bag
Some of it I really liked, like piecing together how to get the System Authorization Code at the end, but often I feel like I'm just running around pressing buttons without really knowing what they do, assuming they're probably unlocking some door up ahead. Take "Destroying the laser" as an example. I was running around not know what my main object was supposed to be when I scrolled through my messages and saw one with that exact title. Sounds important! Ok so I get the isotope in Maintenance, go down to reactor, install it, go back up to the maintenance library, like the note suggest, to look for an Override Code. There it is, on a monitor! Was it there the whole time? Oh wait I remember, I did the cyberspace thingy in here earlier, blew up the node, and when I came out I was bewildered about what that had actually done. I guess displaying this code was it? Ok, so next I'm supposed to put this in the Safety Override, that'll probably be a keypad next to the big laser button, right? Nope! Maybe I gotta press the button first and then a keypad will pop up? Press button. Blow up earth. Reload. Nope, that wasn't it. Roam all of maintenance looking for the Safety Override, can't find it. Eventually just give up and google it, only to find out it's down on Reactor level! Was I supposed to just guess that? The note doesn't mention it. I guess what I'm really just supposed to do is just comb over every square inch of the station that's unlocked at this point, but, uh... that's not fun.
The combat tho!
Yeah the melee is weak, but the shooting is a lot of fun. The sounds and animations of the guns are top-notch and the way enemies slump over when getting killed is very satisfying. It's slow-paced enough to let you think about your options, and deploy grenades and stims and whatnot. Feels a lot like the combat in something like RE: Village actually. I saw someone on twitter suggest this is more of a survival horror game than an imm sim and yeah, I kinda see it. As much fun as the combat was, it did kinda start to wear out its welcome sometime on Engineering level when I was just plowing through droves of dudes. Parly that's on me because I was still using relatively low-level weaponry, because I'm a hoarder and I wanna save the fancy guns for later in case I really need em. Actually, I'd say the whole game stretches on for a bit too long.
The Finale
Going FPS in cyberspace was a fun idea, but the execution is so-so, with everything being a bit too vague and abstract. The initial room for instance, starts you off staring at a locked door. Until now the game has trained you to follow the line from the door to the unlock-orb and shoot it. There's a line going from the door, but it seemingly doesn't connect to anything. I shoot at things. All kinda things. Nothing works. Keep shooting, eventually the door disappears and I realize "oh I was supposed to shoot the door". Why did they break their own rule like this? Sloppy. And did this whole dang story really end with the hacker getting a job at TriOptimum? Uh... wha
Bottom line
I had a good time with this! At points I was thinking it was a 8/10 game, but the slog of the last ~10 hours dragged it down a bit so I'm gonna have to settle on... 7/10
edit: btw did anyone find all the Nightdive easter eggs? I found the ones on levels 0, 5, 6, and the bridge. I'm assuming something happens if you activate em all?
edit2: ragdolls kept acting up post-death throughout the game, but towards the end they really got outta hand!
Last edited by henke; 5th Jun 2023 at 17:05.
Found all of them so far, I'm currently in the security level. But you can only get to them once you have the v3 boots. I think that all you get once you find them all is an achievement.
oh btw guess what I figured out in the very final section of that game: if you hold down middle mouse you can aim down sights. Wonder if that might've come in handy in the preceding 25 hours of the game. We'll never know.
Here is what I did. Set difficulty to lowest, used a php app to hack into the data and renamed all the cyborg enemies to "zylonbane". Slapped all the cyborgs with my electro stick whilst shouting "WHERE IS YOUR IMMERSION NOW, WHERE IS IT?"
Something I find very disappointing is that there's absolutely no visual effect when we hit an enemy with the laser rapier. We don't even know if we're hitting them. There I was, slicing Diego up after knocking him out with an emp grenade, and he just stood there. Not the least bit satisfying. The rapier is my favourite weapon in the original (because it's an overpowered beast; in the remake it's still a strong weapon but not anywhere near the original) and even there the enemies react to getting hit.
Pretty sure this is how Nightdive intended it to be played.
Just came across a very annoying bug. In the final room, some cyborg spawned inside the walls. I can't kill it, but it can shoot me.
I can't actually finish the game, because I need to kill it, and I can't do it with it inside the walls. Now I'll have to go back to a much earlier save.
Edit: I actually managed to kill it by shooting the magpulse against the wall until it finally killed it, but I think I have a bug, because I'm still unable to finish the game. The force door to the teleporter is still active, and the third bar in the screen remains at 'charging', even though I have already flipped all the switches and killed every enemy. No idea what else can I do.
Last edited by D'Arcy; 6th Jun 2023 at 13:46.
Well, in the remake its primary function is apparently a fingertip-warmer.
What I found even worse was that there's no feedback for when you have no energy.
I didn't use the rapier that much, but had a few occasions where I was wailing on an enemy for ages and wondering why it wouldn't die, only to realise that I had no energy and the rapier was doing 0 damage to them.
Given the fancy weapon visuals that the game has, they could have had the glow turn off when you're out of energy, or some similar effect to make it obvious.
These are the same people who programmed the Sparq in high-power mode to constantly spew electric arcs all over the place even when you're at zero power.
They do not care.
The forthcoming patch seems to address several annoying issues. But no mention of the rapier.
Just finished the game. Really enjoyed it, but what a terrible, terrible ending. The original ending made a lot more sense and was more enjoyable to play. We don't even get the 'Old habits die hard' line.
D’oh!
That’s happened to me before on certain retro console games, where I went an entire game’s length not using or even aware of some valuable attack combo or obscure ability that I had no idea about, but which could have potentially been of benefit.
Personally, with PC games, though, keybinds are the first thing I comb through before playing. Call it OCD, but, especially with Immersive Sims, I tend to have a preferred setup. Had to make sure it was configured for that with this, too, thus how I saw the “aim via mousewheel click” binding. It’s a bit pointless, I think, as I completed the original game without it and you did so with this remake, so I rebound that button to the “gun mode change” action. Feels more natural keeping all attack/action-related things near each other on the mouse. Changed “T”, the original mode change key, to one of the hardware attachments. I forget which.
Aim down sights has a bug. Left and right mouse button clicks are ignored when you're holding down the mouse wheel, so you can't shoot while aiming unless you have enabled the Toggle Aim Down Sights option. After figuring out the toggle, I tried using it early on, but it was nothing more than a slight zoom. It's NOT aiming down the gun sights as you would expect from playing other games. It didn't seem to affect accuracy or damage, at least not enough to notice a difference. So I never bothered with it afterward.
Also, not sure if this was mentioned before, but the intro is mostly skippable. The cut scenes can be skipped by pressing Esc, and you can get the Y/N prompt at the computer by interacting with it, so you don't have to wait around. The intro didn't bother me anyway. It was OK. But I was disappointed with the ending. It's supposed to be a remake, why change it?
Anyway, I enjoyed the game a lot, but I kind of rushed through it. I know I missed some things and didn't use a lot of the game's arsenal. So I started a slow completionist playthrough, but I'm thinking of setting that aside to address performance before continuing.
For some reason, this game taxes my GPU like none before it. I'm running an MSI Radeon 5700 XT in a 10-year old PC build with a Haswell i5-4670K. I thought the CPU would be the bottleneck, but it's not. The monitor is a 3840x1600 LG ultrawide that maxes out at 75 Hz. I played the first time on medium settings, with FreeSync enabled, which caps the frame rate at 75Hz. GPU utilization was in the range of 75-90%, CPU 50-75%. It was a smooth experience, but I didn't realize how much I was missing until I tried high settings. It makes a huge difference in the atmosphere of the game. Unfortunately, when I play on high settings, the GPU is staying near 100% and I get occasional system crashes. And on Ultra, my system will crash within seconds after loading.
I thought maybe the 10 year old power supply was going bad. I currently have Mankind Divided and Cyberpunk 2077 installed, so I gave those a try, the former on max settings, the latter on medium settings. Both games are dropping the frame rate more than System Shock, but neither game pegs the GPU at 100% and neither game crashes. So I don't think my system has changed, there's just something about this game that is really hard on this GPU.
I'm not sure whether it's worth underclocking the 5700 XT (technically undoing the factory overclock), or just go straight to an upgrade.
GUYS I found some kinda System Shock Demake on Steam check it out!
It looks like some kinda old 90's game!
First impressions:
-WHAT is this music
-THREE repair bots instead of TWO in the room next to where you start THIS DOESNT MAKE ANY SENSE!!!
-I like that you can smash videoscreens. Could you do that in the new one? Not sure I even tested it.
-puzzles are easier.
-when I whacked a crate it MOVED! PHYSICS BOXES! (genuinely impressed)
-did a second puzzle, the wire one, but all that did was (SOMEHOW) make the music get even worse.
-HOW DO YOU LOAD THE DARTGUN HELP THEY ARE BEATING ME TO DEATH AASASHAJHSAKJSHJASHJGASHJGHJADGAHJDGKJSAHDKJAHDJKSHAJKSLHAS
Don't worry, I hear they're working on a mod to port that music into the Night Dive version.
I've never played System Shock, but I just checked out the soundtrack on YouTube, and it's fucking great. Cool new wave vibes as opposed to SS2's 90s drum-and-bass madness (which is also great).
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