oversight/exploit would be correct.
I wouldn't call it an exploit. That's one of the most expensive psi powers you can get and you usually get it late in the game. Using it on the brain was a decent reward for it, especially considering that if you're playing as pure OSA, it's a bit more complicated to hit the stars than it is with a gun - you have to use projected cryo or pyro.
It was a clever use of the game system. A hallmark of an immersive sim like SS2. Its loss just makes the game more like a boomer shooter.
Last edited by Ryu Connor; 1st Jul 2025 at 10:43.
I don't think it was an exploit either. The original game manual said it works on anything organic. In the original game, it worked on anything organic except swarms. Not working on swarms seems to be a bug/oversight. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work on the brain if it works on other annelid forms and hybrids.
It's a tier-5 psi power, so it's an expensive late game investment and should have a good payoff. The tradeoff of building an OSA character is that you're going to suffer early but later on you'll get powers that make BotM easy. This is one.
I was never a big user of exotic weapons in the original game, but I already gave them a try in the new version and they also appear to have been changed a bit. The Viral Proliferator now causes damage over time. Did this also happen in the original? Because I can't remember it.
It's a change from SCP.
We'll be gaslighting/questioning ourselves about how the game used to be for the forseeable future.Viral Proliferator
○ Degrade rate decreased from 3 to 1.5.
○ Explosion base damage decreased from 15 to 10.
○ Viral infection effect added that damages target by 1 every half-second until death.
○ Fixed having no reload animation.
Yeah, SCP is a mod, not just a patch. It messes with the gameplay and balance, so it should be skipped for a vanilla experience. The New Game screen includes a Mods submenu where you can "remove" SCP from the list of installed mods. However, I don't know whether that effectively disables SCP for existing saved games or just for new games.
Keep in mind, the entire remaster depends on SCP as a base, as does over 90% of all decent mods out there.
In fact, without SCP, there's little to no reason to play the remaster, as the underlying version of Dark they're using is significantly inferior to NewDark. The list of bugs and missing features in AE's version of Dark compared to NewDark is long and growing.
Every improvement in level design and every new environment detail comes from SCP, not any work that NightDive did. They readily admit that.
I'm not trying to defend the changes you don't like; I'm just saying that unless you want to learn how make mods yourself to undo those changes, it would be pretty stupid to play without it.
In fact, there is a Revert SCP Changes mod over at SystemShock.org. It only reverts a handful of things, but you can look at it if you want.
The reason that Revert mod exists is that people paying attention know it would be ridiculous to play SS2 without SCP at this point. Virtually every mod depends on it. So rather than disable the mod, they created a mod to revert the specific changes they didn't like.
You're welcome to do the same.
Edit - To answer the one question directly: You would have to start a whole new game after disabling SCP. This is because SCP makes significant changes to every level. Depending on where you are, you might get lucky when you first load your save game, but you'll eventually run into crazy jank or outright show-stopping bugs. In some cases, your save may not even load because your save data is based on a completely different version of the level.
Last edited by Twist; 2nd Jul 2025 at 16:33.
Disabling SCP and keeping AE active results in weird glitches and game breaking bugs that soft lock the game. I've tried it, I've filed the bug reports, and I've had a brief discussion with the lead Dev about it. AE not being disabled when SCP is disabled is marked as a bug to be fixed. Nightdive fixing AE to be independent of SCP will only happen if there are development dollars left over after they fix all the existing serious bugs... of which there are many.Originally Posted by heywood
Yes, I've filed at least one graphical flickering bug in classic mode that was confirmed as a self inflicted wound from Kex having a different camera position than the original game. It also feels like the physics, input systems, or both are modified in some way too, but I didn't report it as a bug, because I couldn't objectively prove it. Classic/NewDark just feels different when interacting in the world versus Kex.
Twist: I hear you and I recognize that you're just talking with us and not defending a position. So don't mind me in what follows. I'm gonna complain to clouds.
I am not an inflexible purist about preservation. I use NewDark rather than putting Retail on a retro PC or using dgVoodoo as a fix for the compatibilty problems. What has always impressed me with NewDark patches was how it focused purely on technical issues. Double checking the NewDark patch notes on the wiki and the number of gameplay adjustments it has fit on a single hand. Of those changes some explicitly detail how they prevent crashes, like stopping equipped implants from being recycled.
Anniversary Edition (AE) and SCP does not maintain that balance. SCP has waded deep into level and system design changes that Le Corbeau appears to have made an effort to avoid. Many SCP changes are open to serious debate about if Irrational would have done that. Perhaps more egregiously the changes, right or wrong, directly erase the work of Ken Levine, Scott Blinn, Matt Boynton, Michael Thomas Ryan, Ian Vogel, and Shawn Shaft out of the game.
AE doesn't present a menu option, like a blu-ray film, between classic and AE. Even if a user is knowledgeable enough to understand the difference, the UI has a lot of friction in this regard. Additionally this thread has detailed how classic is a worse experience on Kex. Wanting to see classic effectively means you bought the wrong product.
Changed gameplay, obfuscation of the original, and a broken implementation on top. That's not even a token effort at trying to preserve classic inside AE. The SCP mod dependency has also distilled player choice in SS2 into an all or nothing scenario of classic versus SCP/AE.
What normal person is ever going to be able to parse what was a modder choice versus what is the classic game? What normal person will ever realize that Soma Transference not working on the Brain wasn't an Irrational Games decision, but the decision of the bourgeoisie who made the SCP mod?
New and old players alike will pick up AE because of some old YT video from MandaloreGaming, GManLives, or Lawrence Sonntag are gushing over how SS2 is a classic. Except those gushing reviews aren't from SCP, they're from memories of a now buried game. Yet others will be enticed by the tag line of, "Made by Ken Levine and Irrational Games of Bioshock fame. Packaged in an updated package with enhanced graphics and coop."
Except the original developers of System Shock 2 have less and less to do with the product new players will experience. The changes have become so extensive that fresh faces and their conversations with old-timers will increasingly run the risk of being divergent.
a. Was it this way?
b. I could swear this worked.
c. Gamer A: Try this to get past that situation | Gamer B: What do you mean? The game doesn't work that way? | Gamer A: Wait, what?
d. Gamer B: What's item X like? | Gamer A: You didn't have the item Y to try it out? | Gamer B: There were only so many of those, ran out. | Gamer A: That's odd, I don't recall them being scarce.
Hilarious part is, you can't even accuse this of being hyperbole. It happened right here in this thread.
The original SS2 isn't just being lost, it's being replaced. AE has created a packaged product that has and will dust the original game one mod at a time. At this point I'm fully expecting somebody to start changing the game script and dialogue.
The truly insidious part is that this obfuscation of who did what means that mods like SCP get to ride on the coat tails of giants. Every new accolade or disdain of an SCP change will be put at the feet of Irrational Games. No normal person is gonna give a fuck about a, "Well actually, that was a modder choice." Largely because nobody will ask, they'll live under the assumption, or simply believe in the appeal to authority.
Out of curiosity are Thief and Thief 2 dealing with bullshit like this? Hmm, Google spits out T2Fix and... it appears to be nowhere near as toxic as SCP.
Thanks to you both for answering.
I don't think it's ridiculous to play SS2 without SCP because I don't think it's ridiculous to play vanilla. That's how I started playing the game, how I fell in love with the game, and how I've played it the most. I think first timers should experience the vanilla game, maybe with graphical upgrades only. But I doubt many newcomers will, they'll probably get the remaster and go with SCP by default.
In hindsight, I think the community would have been better off breaking Straylight's Anomalies, Discrepancies and outright Bugs mod into two tracks:
1) Bug fixes, compatibility, hi-res graphics, and minor polish
2) Enhancements to gameplay, level design, and/or balancing
The first would be the modern playable version of the original art. It would be great if you could go back and play old saves with it. The second would be the community's attempt to make it a better game. Then everybody else's mods could be based on #1 and there wouldn't be these efforts to back changes out of SCP.
Easy for me to say though, since I'm not contributing.
TFix isn't controversial because you can turn off everything except compatibility and things no one in their right mind wouldn't want, like mouse wheel support.
Just to be clear, I wasn't saying it would be ridiculous to play SS2 Classic without SCP. I suspect you might be more disappointed than you realize if you did so, but I wasn't suggesting that at all.
I'm saying it would be ridiculous to play AE without SCP. This is because much of NightDive's work is literally built upon SCP, so you're basically disabling all their work aside from low consequence superficial work like interface and cutscenes. Once you do that, you're just left with their version of an unfinished and still-buggy version of Dark.
It's the engine code that's the problem -- not the Kex portion, for the most part, but the Dark portion. I don't think it's their fault. It's pretty apparent they never got access to the NewDark source, so they had to reverse engineer Dark again, probably from the same broken and incomplete leak that Le Corbeau used.
But NewDark has the advantage of over a decade's worth of iterations, refinements and optimizations. This may sound odd to System Shock 2 fans, but the prolific and highly engaged Thief fan mission community gave Le Corbeau a ton of data and feedback for refining NewDark. System Shock 2 greatly benefited from the Thief fan mission community. Go figure.
NightDive had none of that, and once they couldn't get the NewDark source, they probably only had a couple of years to reverse engineer Dark all over again and then pair it with Kex's renderer. (If I was less lazy, I could point to specific posts where Stephen Kick has outright pleaded with the author(s) of NewDark to come to him and how he claimed he'd protect them on any legal matters.)
Ryu: You don't sound unreasonable. I really do appreciate where you're coming from. And there are changes in SCP I don't completely like for one reason or another.
(Quick aside... I honestly don't know what you mean by Classic being a worse experience than Kex. The things people have pointed to liking in this thread are in Classic via SCP... aside from multiplayer. The things people have pointed out not liking are either SCP, not unmodded Classic, or Kex problems, not Classic played via NewDark. Aside from multiplayer and consoles, the most polished version of System Shock 2 right now is modded Classic, not the remaster. I sincerely hope NightDive keeps working on the remaster, but it's just not there yet.)
I do appreciate respecting the legacy of the original authors. But I think we could have a robust and reasonable argument with no clear conclusion about what exactly is the right or fair way to exercise respect for them or their work. I seriously doubt they thought their work was perfect and complete, or that they feel the best way to respect them or their work would be to leave it untouched on a pedastal.
I do think people underestimate and underappreciate just how much SCP does and how much it does so well.
You may find a handful of things you don't agree with, or a few situations where you don't like how it altered original behavior, but compared to that there are literally thousands of fixes and enhancements big and small that you may not ever notice or realize are SCP and not in the original game.
We have no way of knowing for sure without a very deliberate interview, but I suspect the folks at Irrational and LG would actually love and appreciate what SCP has done. Remember, they had to make that game in 2 years on a limited budget, and pedastals aside, they were, by their own admission in multiple interviews, young and naive.
SCP has been rigorously refined across multiple decades, with that insanely persistent work fueled only by pure passion for making their favorite game as polished as possible. That's exactly why NightDive chose to build their remaster upon it.
Again, I don't agree with every single change. I don't think it's possible to make everyone agree on exactly how every little detail should or shouldn't work. I bet if you interviewed multiple former Irrational developers they wouldn't agree with each other on every little detail.
But I've also watched voodoo, ZB and others argue and debate for weeks or even months over the tiniest of changes or additions in SCP.
Whether you agree with the result of each decision or not, almost every single change in SCP has been very carefully considered and thoroughly debated. You just can't try to improve something and simultaneously fulfill every single player's personal idiosyncratic preference. It's just not possible.
I could go on here, but I'm sure most people grew weary of my uniquely tedious verbosity before they read even half my post.
Soma Transfer does, in fact, work on the Brain of the Many. But you have to take out the stars protecting it first, just like with every other weapon. No more cheaty exploit for you.
Soma Transfer also now works on eggs, brains, membranes, worm piles, and the Many boss stars, so it's been buffed far more than it's been nerfed.
It's an impossibility. Soma Transfer can't work on swarms because swarms are particle systems. They don't have a physical model for the psi power to target. They can only be affected by AoE stims.
It's not cheating nor an exploit. It seems like a more than fair reward after spending 169 cybermodules to get it, especially considering that for a pure OSA character it's more annoying to hit those stars with projected pyro or cryo than it would be for another build using a gun. Removing this ability doesn't make the game harder to finish, it simply removes the main motivation to acquire that power. Or, in other words, it makes the game less fun.
Of course you don't consider it an exploit, because it's an exploit you really really like, and you don't want to think of yourself as the sort of person who uses exploits. But it's totally an exploit.
Let's consider the two possible options:
1. Irrational intentionally made it so players with a certain power could trivially bypass the one unique gameplay mechanic of the BotM boss fight.
2. Irrational forgot to add DrainStim to the Invulnerable metaproperty, thus making any AI with this metaprop vulnerable to Soma Transfer.
I'm gonna go with door number two.
The "fair reward" for buying Soma Transfer is having Soma Transfer, a ridiculously powerful ability. There's no need to justify the expense with a cheesed boss fight.
BTW you seem to have completely missed where I mentioned that it works against the Many stars now. So no, you don't have to use guns, or cryo, or pyro to take them out.
Fair enough, I'll give that a try.
But I always thought of the stars as some sort of physical shield, protecting the brain from damage coming from physical sources. Which I don't consider Soma Transfer to be one. That's why I don't consider it an exploit, and always thought that it was intentional that it worked the way it did.
[Edit]: After trying it on the stars, it's still totally worth getting it. It simply adds three more uses of it to get rid of the stars, but the fight is still quite easy. I actually think that the brain fight in the remake is easier than in the original, in the sense that even on Impossible there seem to be a lot less enemies - I'm usually only being chased by a single Rumbler and a spider, with low respawn rates once I kill them, whereas in the original there are usually multiple enemies pursuing us and constantly respawning. I do think that making every enemy die once we kill the brain was a very nice detail added.
Last edited by D'Arcy; 6th Jul 2025 at 08:27.
This boss fight is cheesy regardless. The first time I saw the stars I was like are you kidding me?
Anyway, you can breeze through that fight easily using photonic redirection and a decent gun that's not going to break on you.
Yeah, Photonic Redirection is always a must for that section. And I usually also get Anti-Entropic Field, so that I don't have to worry about weapon degradation. Although you really don't need to shoot that much anyway, not to the point where a gun would break on you.
A question: Has anyone figured out how to get the nanites and bullets hanging over a pool, right before the teeth? For some reason, Psi Pull doesn't work on them. That hasn't changed in the remake. In the original, I would just shoot them down, then grab them in the pool, but that is no longer possible because the pool will pull them down (and you, if you enter it, eventually killing you).
Calling that a "fight" is being generous.
You're right, looks like the ecology period for the Rumbler spawner was changed from 1 second to 5 seconds back in 2014. Oddly, this change isn't noted in the issue tracking topic.
Maybe it could be turned back up a bit. 1 second is just ridiculous-- Rumblers respawn so fast there's basically no point even killing them.
Expert bias is a hell of a drug.
That's exactly what happens, in the original we just run around with them chasing us and don't even bother wasting time killing them.
So true lil' bro.
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