System shock 2 remastered demo9/11/2023 ![]() So 900k is enough to employ 10 people for just one year at 45k each. If you pay someone $50k a year, then it probably costs you close to $100k once you’re done paying for health insurance, taxes, equipment, unemployment insurance, and whatever else it costs you to keep them around. The amazing thing about these shots is that they're instantly recognizable as locations from the original game, matching not just the layout, but also the mood of the area.Īccording to the business types and executives I’ve worked with, it costs almost double someone’s salary to employ them. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was less than the budget of the original game in 1994. I have no idea how they planned to get all that done for just 900k. This is a big game with a lot of content. There’s a reason this game is considered a classic. And on top of all that, there are opening and ending cutscenes that have aged far better than many other games of the same time period, and doing them justice will be difficult without spending a lot of money. The game is non-linear and has a little Metroidvania in its DNA, so the player needs to be able to backtrack across the levels and have their changes to the environment maintained. The environments need to be dynamic and feature elevators, lighting changes, destructible objects, moving walls, forcefields, and several different types of doors. There are different movement modes that including flying, crouching, lying prone, leaning left and right, moving in low gravity, and cyber-skates that let you glide off the walls. Also, there are multiple types of ammo for some weapons. On top of the sixteen weapons are an additional eight different types of explosives. There are sixteen different weapons of all different types: Melee, tranquilizer, energy weapons, and traditional firearms. The game also has a hacking minigame, upgrades to your abilities, inventory management, and a fly-through cyberspace minigame. Sure, everyone is dead by the time the game starts so you don’t need mo-capped in-game cutscenes, but you still need character designs and portraits to go with the audiologs. This was one of the earliest examples of audiologs, which means you also need a bunch of voice acting. That means complex visuals, complex mechanics, and complex animations. This is an RPG shooter with very large environments. Keep in mind that this isn’t a 2D sidescroller. We didn’t know any better.”Ī screenshot from the Kickstarter pitch. And maybe this would give us a way to share this classic with the younger generation without having to explain “You can’t use the mouse to look around. What the Nightdive team seemed to be offering was a way to revisit the game with all those problems fixed. I didn’t notice those problems at the time because all of the technology was new and nobody knew how to do better. But then I launch the game twenty years later and discover the visuals are so blocky I can’t tell what things are, the font is illegible, the gameplay is awkward, and the interface is an abomination. The tricky thing about nostalgia titles is just how much we forget their faults. (Emphasis mine.) This was exactly what I was looking for: The game as I remember it. Many improvements, overhauls and changes are being implemented to capture the spirit of what the original game was trying to convey, and bring it to contemporary gamers. But what really made me glad to put my money in was this blurb from the Kickstarter:Ī modern take on System Shock, a faithful reboot it’s not Citadel Station as it was, but as you remember it. So when I saw that Nightdive Studios was crowdfunding a remake of System Shock, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. The sequel, System Shock 2, is often considered one of the greatest games of all time Particularly for PC gamers above a certain age. ![]() It’s a game I loved so much I novelized it. games, making it the progenitor of Thief, Deus Ex, BioShock, Prey, and (to a lesser extent) the Dishonored series. ![]() It was the first of the immersive sim This genre name is wonky and confusing now, but back in 1994 “sim” wasn’t so strongly associated with Will Wright-style simulations. It was bound to happen sooner or later, but it really is a shame it happened to this project in particular.Īs I’ve said before, the 1994 classic System Shock was a really important game, both for the industry and on a personal level. I backed a Kickstarter project that spent the money and didn’t manage to create a product.
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