“I start it up, and I just keep dying, and dying, and dying. Indeed Producer Warren Spector, playing it again, many years later, commented on the difficulty. It was a challenging game, it was a journey, a tale of survival against the odds. From the outset, on anything above the easiest difficulty setting, the player was set upon by hostile forces. System Shock was also a game had no intention of being a simple procession, it was not going to hold the player’s hand. Indeed these features would appear in many later games, such as Looking Glass’s own Thief series and Ion Storm’s Deus Ex eventually becoming de rigueur in the player-powered games we take for granted today. In an interview creator Ken Levine claimed the spirit of System Shock was this player-powered gameplay: the spirit of letting the player drive the game, not the game designer. The immersive first person simulation concept was relatively new in 1994 and combined elements from first-person shooters, survival horror and role-playing games to give the player a feeling that they very much in control of the story. Looking Glass’s System Shock was never going to win any awards for its graphics but it more than compensated for that with every other aspect of the game. What followed, on its release in 1999, was the game that would find itself appearing in lists of greatness from that moment on.Īt times it feels that those claiming its greatness have willingly overlooked, or have never played its ground breaking predecessor. SHODAN was never planned to return until Electronic Arts, the owners of the System Shock IP at that time (after purchasing publisher Origin) suggested turning it into the second game of the series. What is probably less well known, however, is that originally it was intended to be a standalone game, a Heart of Darkness in space. It was and it holds up well against many other greats even today, which explains why so many gamers still have fond memories of it. That’s not to say System Shock 2 wasn’t a very good game.
0 kommentar(er)
