I'll admit to playing this with the mouse-look introduced in the Enhanced Edition. My brief and unsuccessful stint with Ultima Underworld indicated that I wasn't quite ready for that level of dedication. System Shock's Enhanced Edition seemed like a good middle-ground, modernising the movement and looking controls while retaining the original release's intricate and modular management of all other things.
And that's the core of System Shock, isn't it? It's a game that envisioned a much deeper level of connection to and interaction with the game environment than had been done before, achieved through minute-level interaction with objects and the environment; the player doesn't simply click on the spot where they must plant the plastic explosives, but must find them in the inventory, drag them out of the inventory into the game environment, and double-click on the spot they must be placed. This creates a sense of physical space and immersion, bolstered by level-design less concerned with the player's convenience than with creating a space that approximates a real place where people actually worked, with some rooms serving no purpose other than to be rooms.
Where System Shock is at its weakest is in the elements that don't gel with this goal. The sense of physical, believable space is undercut by a degree of abstraction in the game's visuals, aged and pixelated as they are. In addition, the lack of 3D models for the items and enemies in these 3D environments, instead represented as 2D sprites as was the standard for PC games at the time, stick out as an ill fit when compared to subsequent immersive sims.
The overall impression the game leaves is a great one, despite these flaws. Its dedication to its core goal marks System Shock as a visionary game, one which inspired many excellent successors and influenced 3D game-design as a whole. As for its other strengths and weaknesses, there's a lot I could get into, but frankly I'm just looking ahead to that remake to see what gets improved. I'm interested to see if positive changes could be made regarding the aforementioned criticisms, as well as to inventory and cyber-space. Only a few months until we find out, according to the Steam page.
And that's the core of System Shock, isn't it? It's a game that envisioned a much deeper level of connection to and interaction with the game environment than had been done before, achieved through minute-level interaction with objects and the environment; the player doesn't simply click on the spot where they must plant the plastic explosives, but must find them in the inventory, drag them out of the inventory into the game environment, and double-click on the spot they must be placed. This creates a sense of physical space and immersion, bolstered by level-design less concerned with the player's convenience than with creating a space that approximates a real place where people actually worked, with some rooms serving no purpose other than to be rooms.
Where System Shock is at its weakest is in the elements that don't gel with this goal. The sense of physical, believable space is undercut by a degree of abstraction in the game's visuals, aged and pixelated as they are. In addition, the lack of 3D models for the items and enemies in these 3D environments, instead represented as 2D sprites as was the standard for PC games at the time, stick out as an ill fit when compared to subsequent immersive sims.
The overall impression the game leaves is a great one, despite these flaws. Its dedication to its core goal marks System Shock as a visionary game, one which inspired many excellent successors and influenced 3D game-design as a whole. As for its other strengths and weaknesses, there's a lot I could get into, but frankly I'm just looking ahead to that remake to see what gets improved. I'm interested to see if positive changes could be made regarding the aforementioned criticisms, as well as to inventory and cyber-space. Only a few months until we find out, according to the Steam page.