Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

OMFG System Shock "remake"?!?


teh_saccade

Recommended Posts

13 hours ago, chakkman said:

The gameplay and atmosphere (including, and, epecially, the game's soundtrack and audio) are, in my eyes, much more important that high definition graphics (my best example for that would be System Shock 2.

I agree with you mostly, but I do have a certain minimal requirement nowadays considering graphics. I think for example Metro: Last Light is graphically for me still good enough to fully immerse me.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

i would say as long as i dont need special equipment to play it that is the minimum requirement for me :) not meaning wrappers for older directx or opengl bungles though the casual user might have some trouble getting things to run that i have had running for years. visually im more than satisfied with how system shock 2 looked the interface however can be a bit daunting for players of today. strangely atleast some older games can rival modern games in fidelity one example being timeshift which ran on the saber engine (yes the same engine powering the newer halo offerings). Try it in 4k and be amazed at the detail 😄. the game itself is not widely known as it came out at the same time half-life 2 came out so it was overshadowed which is a shame as it is actually rather fun to play as a protagonist with a suit that is actually a working time machine. The story is newer fleshed out all that much but in essence you were a scientist working on the suit you wear when one of the other scientists jacks an older prototype to change history and tries to murder everyone in the lab your fiance included (well actually succeding atleast untill you get to take him down and travel back to just before the bomb went off), but theres a catch the suit does not allow paradoxes so it yanks you away from your own time after saving everybody. I guess the followup would have shed some light on how to get back to your own time again but the game flopped due to not having the big exposure the devs hoped for so it newer came to pass.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Btw. anyone seen this other System Shock remake? It's now in beta. Made in Unity:

https://www.indiedb.com/games/citadel

It looks even more old-school:

15Mar2023_02_47_26_v0.93.png

I thought some of the dead animations look cool, because they look quite like the original sprite-based animations, but now in 3d form. I don't remember seeing anything similarly done elsewhere,

https://www.indiedb.com/games/citadel/videos/citadel-enemy-status

 

Edit: found a gameplay video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1onXeWRwxch7GWyb7UksnZxem5sE3685W/view

Edited by datiswous
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

tbh more ports have used the quake engine than i can remember 🤣 though strictly speaking darkplaces is so far removed from the original source that it may as well be a whole new engine. lord havoc or as it turned out lady havoc (long story) really did a number updating the aging quake engine. you can actually make some truely amazing things with it even today.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

xash3d a half-life clone engine was also based on darkplaces though on a much much older version than what is currently up for grabs. had they used the newer engine then xash would be close to source engine levels of photorealism but the newer engine sources are pretty hard to work with if you are not into toying with the darkplaces source code regularily mostly because the code no longer resemble the quake source code anymore. It was also the first quake engine to support portal culling though not the first to support real time lighting and bumpmapping that honor goes to tenebrae, havoc did catch on quickly though and his implementation was far superior to the tenebrae model which used hacked entity lights (sprites basically).

darkplaces uses rtlight a variant of the old lighting tool from quake supporting real time light sources, quake itself does not however support realtime lighting so the lightsources are parsed from an external rtlight file containing the positions of lightsources in the map if you dont have these it can approximate the lightsources much the same way as tenebrae did but it is very very VERY slow, in mods it can be compiled into the map. it also supports bsp2 a new map format allowing much more complex levels and a skeletal model format instead of the blocky mdl1 format. havoc has not had much time to do work on darkplaces in later years (works for ID software now) and got married some years back to one of the other devs from the now defunct inside3d where i used to frequent, but i heard she would probably take up work on it again shortly.

Would be rather cool to see where that might lead having worked with the ID dev'ils she might actually make an engine that becomes a serious contender to them 🤣

 

zymshot1.jpg

 

heres a shot from quake 1 with all the mod bells and whistles on skeletal models real time lights hd textures you name it it is probably there.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

aye quite a load of scrapped mods over the years, most mappers dont seem comfortable in the editors avaliable for the quake engine and either choose something well known like unreal or drop it. The darkplaces engine itself is more than fine for making quality games but the mapping tools are sometimes a bit lackluster.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

heh just noticed they actually kept the blocky dos age gfx in the remake try going close to a wall 😆 much better gfx though. still a pain to find your way in and objects can be a little dauting to find due to the hitbox being so small, atm im stuck in engineering 🤣

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Being 60 to 70% through, I can safely say that this is the game of the year for me. :) Didn't have such a fun time since, well, Prey, I guess. The game doesn't hold your hand at all, which is so refreshing after all these dumb AAA grahics demos. I can only highly recommend this, if you're remotely into this kind of setting (I guess most of here are anyway).

Edited by chakkman
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
On 6/5/2023 at 8:41 PM, chakkman said:

Being 60 to 70% through, I can safely say that this is the game of the year for me. :) Didn't have such a fun time since, well, Prey, I guess. The game doesn't hold your hand at all, which is so refreshing after all these dumb AAA grahics demos. I can only highly recommend this, if you're remotely into this kind of setting (I guess most of here are anyway).

I fully agree. And I also love the visuals. They are just fitting and perfectly resemble what I imagined Citadel to look like when I was a kid. 🙂 

Here's what I wrote about the game:

Quote

Modern open-world games give you the freedom to go where you want, but they don't give you the freedom to progress on your own. And here comes System Shock Remake, a game that leaves everything up to the player and that doesn't even have a quest log: You have to manually identify your quests from voice messages etc. in order to progress. It is so refreshing to see a game developer trust in the ability of the player to use their brain. Due to the personal nature of progression in this game, it feels like you are writing your own story while playing, and it is a really good one at that, if you look past the "AI wants to kill all humans" premise. The visuals perfectly capture the vibes of the original release. One thing they should have left in the Original is probably the Cyberspace shooting, which is just really eye-straining and boring. I recommend setting Cyberspace difficulty to 1 so that you're at least quickly finished with that crap. 9/10

 

  • Like 1
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

👍

It's also cool to see that the press and the players didn't trash it for what it is, but actually embraced (for the most part at least) the "I don't hold your hand" attitude of the game. Maybe there's still hope for the gamer audience. ;) 

Edited by chakkman
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

sadly us players have been hampered for years by games that hold our hands, actually took me a while to get used to it again 😅 but it was all worth it. Gfx arent to bad, style is probably nothing the ultra natural crowd will agree to but its they're loss if that is what holds them back :) to each there own... i also still play omikron the nomad soul from time to time though id wish the developer would do the remake thing on this title as well (the controls are horrendous) 🤣 gfx wise its not to bad for an allmost 30 year old game and it is also one of those that do no handholding. Recently picked up the new diablo 4 as well though that one has me a bit bewildered lots of handholding and some rather obscure bugs like a rare elite in the starting area who can literally oneshot a lvl 100 player (dont go there seriously...), if you play hardcore you might also get butchered in dungeons by the hmm butcher 🤣 which was kinda fun untill he became a nuisance and started trailing my chars after i escaped him (which is damn f... hard as he runs faster than you even with speed buffs and if you do happen to get out of sight he has a hook which yanks you back into his targeting range) best bet is to kite him around some object but he has a lot of life and does a ton of damage so ouch. another item in the game that is kinda lost on me is the scrool of escape... its a scroll you can bind to the emote bar for an instant teleport, the problem is most monsters scale to your level the few really dangerous ones will oneshot you (goes so fast you literally die the second they notice you) so its kinda useless.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

54 minutes ago, revelator said:

sadly us players have been hampered for years by games that hold our hands, actually took me a while to get used to it again 😅

Unfortunately, they wouldn't do it if the majority of players wouldn't want their hand to be held...

Every single game I played back in the days said "Figure me out and learn me". But, that changed at some point in the mid to late 2000's. I think it's safe to say that most don't want to figure out and learn stuff, but get everything spoon fed, or they will smash the gamepad to the wall after 5 minutes. Games like System Shock, or also the Cyan Worlds games (played through Firmament recently) surely will stay niche.

It's so unfortunate, because, the majority of players obviously totally miss what's fun about games. They want to watch a movie, and think and do stuff as little as possible, it seems.

Edited by chakkman
Link to comment
Share on other sites

true, i think it might actually be the older player bases at fault here because most of them now got wife and kids a job which lead them to just dont have the time for figuring things out themself sadly. well i was newer married got close once but no cigar, so im probably unfettered by those things to a degree (had several jobs though) and just that strain on your free time leaves a desire to just relax when playing a game even if unconscious. i suspect rasing a kid and keeping the wife happy while also working to make sure everyone has there needs satisfied really puts things into perspective.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/18/2023 at 4:52 PM, STiFU said:

I fully agree. And I also love the visuals. They are just fitting and perfectly resemble what I imagined Citadel to look like when I was a kid. 🙂 

Here's what I wrote about the game:

 

Downloading now! If I don't like it, I will come after you. With torches. And fire. And more fire.

  • Haha 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/5/2023 at 8:41 PM, chakkman said:

 The game doesn't hold your hand at all, which is so refreshing after all these dumb AAA grahics demos.

Yes, but for somebody who is only playing each other day I think it's almost too little. A quest log would be great, even TDM has a list of what you are supposed to do while not explaining where and how to do it! This is often hidden in one of hundreds of audio logs and you might have forgotten a few day later what you were supposed to do coming back to the game. Having more icons on the map and actually correct infos wouldn't hurt either! Otherwise a very cool game, in my opinion much better than System Shock 2 and maybe even Prey aka System Shock 3 ;)...

Edited by wesp5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, System Shock 2 is something really special and what I saw of the SS1 remake was not really on that sort of level. Played the free demo for half an hour and just couldn't get into it.

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, datiswous said:

How is it better than SS2? That game seems to have so much more to offer, except the graphics and cyberspace.

For example while you have respawning enemies you also have respawning energy so you won't need to play half of the game using a wrench only because you are out of ammo or your weapons have broken. Also the maze layout fits much better to a space station than a space ship and it is kind of reasonable that you don't meet anybody alive, while SS2 teases and disappoints you again and again with the same trick. Of course it is a matter of taste, but for me coming from Half-Life at the time SS2 felt like a step back, while I can understand now why SS coming closely after Doom is considered a classic.

Edited by wesp5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


  • Recent Status Updates

    • Petike the Taffer

      I've finally managed to log in to The Dark Mod Wiki. I'm back in the saddle and before the holidays start in full, I'll be adding a few new FM articles and doing other updates. Written in Stone is already done.
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      TDM 15th Anniversary Contest is now active! Please declare your participation: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22413-the-dark-mod-15th-anniversary-contest-entry-thread/
       
      · 0 replies
    • JackFarmer

      @TheUnbeholden
      You cannot receive PMs. Could you please be so kind and check your mailbox if it is full (or maybe you switched off the function)?
      · 1 reply
    • OrbWeaver

      I like the new frob highlight but it would nice if it was less "flickery" while moving over objects (especially barred metal doors).
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      Please vote in the 15th Anniversary Contest Theme Poll
       
      · 0 replies
×
×
  • Create New...