|
Post by Null0x00 on Aug 25, 2017 5:35:29 GMT -5
The main problem with System Shock 2 is that the game is horribly unbalanced with regards to the classes and skills, such that the best builds to win are blatantly obvious and easily dominate. Picking Navy and then specializing in standard weapons and hacking makes the game a cakewalk due to the general ubiquity of standards guns and crates to unlock for supplies, while Psionics would go through hell due to the powers being so under-powered and highly situational. Let's not even talk about the pointless resource sink that is exotic weapons.
Also, it doesn't help that despite the amazing cyberpunk future technology in SS2, guns in the future seem to have all the durability of tissue paper.
|
|
|
Post by X-pert74 on Aug 25, 2017 14:29:07 GMT -5
I like the Body of the Many, personally. It's not perfect, but I thought it was a real trip to explore, and that ending fight before leaving is one of the most intense sequences I've dealt with in any FPS. I also remember liking Xen, though it's been many years since I played the original Half-Life. I like when games throw in something totally trippy and strange after a significant chunk of playtime, which throws everything you've come to expect about the game into disarray.
|
|
|
Post by Null0x00 on Aug 25, 2017 16:11:35 GMT -5
I like the Body of the Many, personally. It's not perfect, but I thought it was a real trip to explore, and that ending fight before leaving is one of the most intense sequences I've dealt with in any FPS. I also remember liking Xen, though it's been many years since I played the original Half-Life. I like when games throw in something totally trippy and strange after a significant chunk of playtime, which throws everything you've come to expect about the game into disarray. Totally agree.
|
|
|
Post by edmonddantes on Aug 26, 2017 6:55:36 GMT -5
Kinda shocked that there's more people agreeing with or at least meeting me halfway on this one. Not what I expected.
I think the people saying "It sounds like you just didn't get the game you wanted" are on the right track tho. In retrospect my own comments about wishing it were more like SS1 kinda hint that way.
I didn't bring up aesthetic points originally but there are some that bother me. SS1 makes me feel like I'm in some cool the-future-as-we-thought-it-would-be-in-1990 vibe, but SS2 feels... I'm not sure how to say it, too "down to earth?" too "modern trend towards realism?" Yeah you've still got psionic implants, but just for example, stimpatches suggest an exotic future drug technology that is useful but risky and leaves lots of potential for the imagination. Hypodermic needles are just plain-jane boring and standard by contrast.
Likewise, I'm not sure how this happens but SS1 really does feel like a place that has gone to hell, whereas so far SS2 has honestly looked kinda... I'm not sure what the word is. Too clean? Like I seem to recall early on in SS1 you find a room with LOTS of dead bodies which clearly communicate that THINGS HAPPENED, but at the equivalent point in SS2, you've just found some radioactive corridors.
In a lot of ways I preferred how SS1 worked, not just the ways I listed. For example I preferred having one always-shown-onscreen power supply that powers all my addons and drains faster depending on how much energy I'm using, vs everything having its own battery and me having to micromanage and check everything individually. I also still haven't figured out how to prime and throw proximity grenades in SS2, while in SS1 this was just a few mouse clicks.
I'm finding some of the class statements funny... though a little worrying. On my first time out I had tried a warrior/navy dude but kept running afoul of the weapons-clearly-made-in-China issue, which annoyed me to no end. The last official patch says in its readme that you can turn this off but I remember doing that and all it did was just slow it down substantially, unless I did something wrong. It also said you could use a line in the config to stop monster respawns but again, it seems to have just made them less common (I actually didn't notice a difference).
SS1 also respawned monsters, but I found it worked better there. To my memory, in SS1 the deal was they would only spawn in set locations and wouldn't seek you out, so it tended to be more a "you find new baddies in a place you haven't been to in awhile" ordeal rather than "I'm trying to hack this door and suddenly someone is hitting me from behind."
Having limited amounts of money (you're not garaunteed to get more from fallen foes except on easy mode) in a game where everything requires it and many of those things are random crapshoots is just dumb design tho.
After awhile, both back then and now, I resorted to cheating to give myself all the upgrades and psi powers (though I stopped short of using invincibility), but... that just further revealed to me how lacking the game is, because now the game had basically stopped involving me at all.
Like I said before, in the first game, hacking was something you had to actually puzzle out. In the second game, its all random. Most things in this game have a problem where they can basically be automated or nixed (even without cheating) so I wind up feeling the problem which, ironically, a lot of people have with JRPGs: My only role is to fight battles until the Player Character can get to the next plot point area. SS1, with its wide range of controls and things that actually asked things of me, made me feel like I was driving the story along, like I was literally this loose bolt in a machine-driven world. I just don't feel that in SS2.
|
|
|
Post by backgroundnoise on Aug 26, 2017 9:46:58 GMT -5
Money/nanites aren't too big of an issue, especially once you get a recycler and you can turn any objects (including useless things like magazines and plants) into currency.
|
|
|
Post by TΛPETRVE on Aug 27, 2017 9:43:28 GMT -5
I love both games, though neither has aged particularly well, and both were largely better in concept than execution. Arkane's Prey did a remarkable job revising the formula without dumbing it down to BioShock levels; a shame it lacked in the character department, though.
|
|
|
Post by edmonddantes on Aug 28, 2017 4:03:45 GMT -5
Only on HG101 could you get Woodruff, Lord Xeen, Death from Shadowgate, and that shopkeeper pig talking about the pros and cons of a cult favorite PC game ^__^.
|
|