Line #70 Headscratchers/SystemShock


1	* How come nobody remembers [=SShock=]? It had a better atmosphere, enemy design, story, and was more cyberpunk so whats the deal with that?
2	** It had terrible controls!
3	*** It had ''versatile'' controls. You had more degrees of freedom in System Shock than in other [=FPSes=] of the time. Apart from turning and moving in all directions, you could look up and down, lean left and right, and stand, crouch or go prone, all while simultaneously using your mouse to aim at and interact with any part of the screen. It does take some getting used to, but it's not that hard, and it's well worth the effort.
4	*** Versatile? OK. Configurable and not clunky? Definitely not. Many functions that today are performed just moving the mouse were reserved to a lot of a keys or on-screen interface elements. A mouselook mod (also included in the version linked below) does wonders, though.
5	** Horrible truth, but: 2 had a better publisher, better distribution, better box art, the list goes on. On top of that, the streamlined FPS-oriented controls made it more approachable to the layperson, meaning those that picked it up were more likely to stick with it. All in all, SS1 didn't have a chance.
6	** However hard it is to get the 1999 SS2 that ran on Windows 98 to run on modern machines, it is even harder to get the 1994 original that ran on MS-DOS to run. Also copies are like platinum-coated gold dust (actually, that's true of both titles).
7	** [[http://www.systemshock.org/index.php/topic,211.0.html This]] might help. And if you can't play it the normal way (because of the black screen) you may try the UsefulNotes/DOSBox executable that is included with the package (you may need to launch it several times to play).
8	** And if you do happen to have the original, it runs flawlessly in UsefulNotes/DOSBox. See [[http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/GAMES:System_Shock here]] for details.
9	** Nah, [[http://www.systemshock.org/index.php/topic,211.0.html this]] is much better than Dosbox as it has an internal compatibility layer, so no lag at all.
10	** Speaking of running on modern systems, someone [[http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140085 released a patch]] for [=SS2=] (and ''Thief 1'' and ''2'') that allows it run on Windows 7.
11	** System Shock isn't remembered for two reasons. The first time around, SHODAN [[VideoGame/{{Doom}} faced the demons of Hell and lost]]. When The Many came around, followed closely by SHODAN, [[VideoGame/HalfLife An armored scientist with a crowbar put both of them down fairly quickly.]] Games that fail to much better games tend to be forgotten.
12	** That outright falsifies history. Never mind that 'much better' is in this context entirely subjective. Both games were dismissed at the time for similar reasons. The first was too far ahead of its time; it was myopically dismissed as a Doom clone and its system requirements were too steep to reach as wide an audience as Doom. The second was also ahead of its time in design terms, but the engine powering it was outdated and visually unimpressive. A great deal of Half-Life and Doom's success is predicated on the size of their mod communities. The Dark engine is far less pleasant for amateur developers to work with than either the Doom or Quake engines. In any case, both games are hardly forgotten. Doom 3 cribbed more than a few ideas from the series. The games are just more talked about than played. They belong to history now.
13	** Additionally let us keep in mind that they've led to so many good games being made during present times. Spiritual sisters, brothers and successors, as well as inspired.
14	** System Shock having a "better story" than System Shock 2 is extremely subjective and I'd even go as far as to outright disagree. The first game had a crazed AI, a space station, and some mindless mutants, maybe a couple of memorable human characters but mostly they were poorly voice acted and one-note - pretty generic stuff with the exception of SHODAN. The sequel throws you into a power struggle between a crazed AI that goes from totally dependent on you to all-powerful and a sentient and terrifying race of radically evolved, merciless parasites. The Many actually have a reason to exist and be doing what they're doing, rather than being cardboard cut-out monsters. The humans on the ship are also arguably far more fleshed out than anyone on Citadel Station, with developed characters and character interactions for the most part. Think William Diego's militaristic pride versus Korenchkin's corporate weaselling, the implied oppression of the UNN versus the hyper capitalistic freedom but sleaziness of Tri Op. Diego's internal struggle against The Many versus Korenchkin's fall. The suspenseful side-plot with Tommy and Rebecca trying to escape, etc.
15	*** On the other hand, though the second game's audio logs provided a much more compelling character-driven narrative than the first's, its overall storyboarding and conclusion were sloppier than the that of its predecessor; [=SS1=]'s plot was tighter and had a better through-line, and its ending was a lot better than [=SS2=]'s. The mutants in [=SS1=] also had a reason to exist, but that reason was simply to incubate a biological weapon. The game only had one antagonist, but it was a very memorable one. Meanwhile [=SS2=]'s entire premise hinges on a huge headscratcher, that being how in the hell beta grove ever crash landed on Tau Ceti V. But like you said, "better" is quite subjective.
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17	* I have just completed the first title, and one thing just doesn't leave my mind: why the hell was it [[PlayerCharacter YOU]] who played the role of the OneManArmy? You are ''just a hacker''. That uber-advanced neural interface does not do a thing to your body, and you can be shot to death just as everyone else on the station, if not easier. The station personnel, on the other hand, had experienced security, and the access to just as much healing/energy/weapons as you had. Even considering that SHODAN killed most of them by surprise, there were still quite enough survivors to take her on. Not sure if they could defeat her in cyberspace without the implant you had, but nobody had even got that far. '''[[PunctuatedForEmphasis What. The. Hell.]]'''
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19	** ONE, SHODAN has no idea who you are or even if you existed before you woke up, because Diego wiped the records.
20	** TWO, the main reason the resistance failed is, again, Diego, who sold them out.
21	*** They got betrayed by Diego on Level 6, but they had already repeatedly failed to make inways against SHODAN's forces or even to simply defend themselves against the mutants before that.
22	** THREE, one person who destroys every camera he comes across is harder to track than a resistance group.
23	*** A person who destroys every camera they come across should be trivial for SHODAN to track, since every time a camera went out SHODAN would know exactly where that person was. And indeed, SHODAN seems to have little trouble springing traps for you regardless of how many cameras you destroy (e.g. the laser area on Level 2).
24	*** She'd know where they were when they destroyed the camera, but immediately after that she'd have no idea where they were. It's a temporary risk that allows greater advantages in the long term.
25	** FOUR, SHODAN, as you may have noticed, has a very big ego, and does not think you are a threat until you enable the jettison switch, giving you a chance to collect weapons first.
26	*** SHODAN sets its forces on you every time you destroy a node cluster for the first few levels of the game and again when you attempt to destroy the mining laser. It isn't sitting on its hands until you jettison beta grove, it's trying very hard to kill you.
27	*** No. It's making a half assed attempt to kill you. If SHODAN was taking you seriously she would have just sent an overwhelming number of robots to kill you.
28	** FIVE, you are the first person to turn the Resurrection Chambers back on, making you immortal for most of the time. By the time the chambers were out of SHODAN's hands, it was too late for the resistance.
29	*** Yes, but why are you the first person to turn the restoration bays back on? Most of them aren't even difficult to access, unlike the one on Level 1 which is deep in a quadrant held by cyborgs.
30	*** Them being relatively easy to access when you get to them does not mean they were easy to access the entire time. SHODAN has largely eliminated any semblance of a threat to her by the time the hacker wakes up and so she's dropped her guard somewhat when it comes to internal threats.
31	** SIX, you are in possession of a military-grade neural interface, designed for use by the military who, you know, operate guns every so often and probably is designed to help them, and therefore you, with that.
32	*** There's no indication that the neural interface's basic functionality makes you more proficient with firearms or at combat. Plenty of things are designed for use by the military that don't make soldiers shoot better.
33	** SEVEN, you are one person, meaning you get more resources and can move faster than a typical resistance member, e.g. you get all the implants (which the resistance may not have been able to use as well as you do without your implant) rather than sharing them out, same for weapons and ammunition.
34	*** This doesn't make any sense. Being alone is a major weakness, not a strength. To put this in context, less than one minute into the game you've already found more weapons than you can use at once, because you're one person and you can only operate one weapon at any given time. Any resources beyond what you can use personally are therefore completely wasted because you're bottlenecked by a lack the most important resource, which is manpower. More people = more weapons in play at once, more eyes and ears watching for threats, etc.
35	*** There are also advantages to being alone. A single person is much harder to keep track of than a group making hit and run strategies much easier to pull off. A single person is also much easier to underestimate and ignore which can allow them to make considerable progress. And as mentioned above they don't have to share resources, which can allow a single person to go very far on their own.
36	** EIGHT, you gain a rad/bio suit which the resistance didn't have.
37	*** They wouldn't need any such thing to destroy the mining laser, bring cyborg conversion chambers offline, destroy the antennas, and so on.
38	** NINE, you start off knowing that SHODAN has gone nuts because Rebecca told you. SHODAN was able to kill off most of the station personnel by means of mutagen weapons (which have died out by the time you wake up) and modifying the resurrection chambers to make her own personal army from the dead, likely prioritizing the security personnel who likely weren't very many anyway as it was after all a civilian station. There, that enough reasons?
39	*** Just a note on the last point: There's a note in the game that says the station had about two hundred security personnel. Also might as well add: TEN: (as a corollary to FOUR) by the time SHODAN starts taking the Hacker seriously he has probably already smashed a large part of her [=CPUs=] (i.e. her brain) to bits.
40	*** Rebecca doesn't tell you that SHODAN has gone nuts. Her initial email is quite vague and you have to piece together what exactly has happened on Citadel by reading various logs on Level 1. And as noted, Citadel had a huge and very well-outfitted security complement who we may presume all have far more combat experience and training than the hacker ([=TriOp=] security subdue the hacker trivially about 5 minutes after he breaks into [=TriOp=]'s network in the intro, after all). You could really come up with any number of reasons for why a hacker suddenly becomes Chuck Norris after waking up from an induced coma that should have left him crippled to find a disaster in progress all around him, but not too many convincing ones; the actual reason is obviously because they needed a video game to happen.
41	** Don't forget ELEVEN, according to the logs you find, the resistance had been fighting against SHODAN's robots, cyborgs, and mutants for days, perhaps longer, so it's pretty likely that they've significantly thinned out their numbers by the time the hacker wakes up, and with the advantage of being forewarned of SHODAN's insanity and to avoid making the same mistakes the dead did thanks to all the logs.
42	** TWELVE, you have no worries about friendly fire or collateral damage to equipment. The station is one big deathtrap, breaking it more is a good idea, and literally anything that moves ''as well as some things that don't'' are all out to kill you.
43	*** The mined surgical unit on Level 7 would like a word with you.
44	** THIRTEEN, SHODAN can't impede your progress by threatening a more vulnerable group of survivors. There's nobody left for her to use as blackmail material, the only hide you have to worry about saving is your own.
45	*** that still doesn't explain the fact that the hacker is for story purposes at least practically unkillable.
46	*** His body is enhanced with military grade augmentations. That's part of his payment for removing SHODAN's ethical restrictions. He woke up from the recovery comma after his body got used to the mods. This is also a case of EarlyInstallmentWeirdness and hardware limitations; the technology of the time wouldn't really allow for the more stealth based gameplay of the second game and had to play more like a regular FPS.
47	*** He's enhanced with a neural interface that it isn't noted anywhere makes him better at combat, and the fact that he has no issue waking up from a 6 month induced coma without any muscle atrophy or requiring any physical rehabilitation is something we can only handwave with magitech.
48	** But probably the most important is FOURTEEN, the Hacker's success is based on the long work of the survivors. They did the hardest part obtaining all the information and making necessary preparations. However no one had full information and they were crippled and then killed before they could succeed. The Hacker simply collects everything together and finishes their job.
49	** Also, FIFTEEN: you aren't SHODAN's only problem until nearly the end of the game, at which point you've already scored a couple of major wins against her, most notably dealing with Beta Grove. Anna Parovski's party is still a going concern for SHODAN until you reach the Flight Deck.
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51	* Why didn't anyone who was responsible for SHODAN's being (Diego, the hacker, etc.) ever think to just restore the ethical subroutines right after they're done?
52	** Well, two reasons: first, after the ethical constraints were re-established, SHODAN would then need to ethically report that her ethical constraints had been tampered with, which would screw Diego over. On that front as well, he wanted ''control'' of SHODAN, not just a temporary quick-fix of some sort: by re-establishing the ethical constraints, he would then lose control of Citadel station.
53	*** Indeed, the simplest answer is Diego went mad with power after unshackling SHODAN. If he re-imposed the ethical constraints he would no longer be able to have her shoot down investigators and use her to give himself total control of the station.
54	** Second, it's possible that SHODAN, as a completely unrestricted AI, would have prevented any kind of tampering to restrict her again. This could be as simple as locking off access to her core from anywhere but the bridge (which she did), or simply killing anyone that thought to try (which she also did). By the time the hacker comes along, she's way too smart to let him try anything like that. Besides which, it would take time, and may not work. So the easier solution is to just nuke her program rather than try to fix it.
55	** The Hacker and Diego probably should have put in a program that reactivated the ethical subroutines and then erased all evidence of the tampering after a certain amount of time, therefore Diego could control SHODAN for long enough to get what he wanted without risking a rogue AI going nuts and trying to destroy the Earth or do some other crazy thing those ethical subroutines were specifically designed to prevent.
56	*** SHODAN would have located and deleted that program.
57	*** It may also have been deliberate on the Hacker's part. He guessed that Diego would want to "tie up loose ends" if he no longer had any use for him (which would be very easy to arrange while he was in a coma), so he only did half the work necessary on SHODAN knowing that until he woke up, Diego needed him alive.
58	** A simpler reason is that
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60	* I've never been able to figure out how you are supposed to know what order to put the numbers for the transmitter code on deck 5. Are you just meant to brute force it? (I had the strategy guide, so I just looked it up.)
61	** There's a couple audio logs hinting to the fact you have to string them together but they're easy to overlook.
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63	* Why did SHODAN actually go and turn Diego into her most powerful cyborg, even keeping part of his personality? After he gave her the info she needed, most likely she had no further need of him and might as well have squashed him like an insect. It's also very unlikely she wouldn't have realized that his pathetic groveling was just an attempt to save his own hide, rather than genuine worship. But maybe SHODAN was so megalomaniacal that she enjoyed the idea of a human worshipping her, even if it was a ruse?
64	** Diego believed he could control SHODAN, so keeping him as her thrall could have been a form of ironic punishment and revenge against a mere insect who considered himself above her.
65	** One of her logs says that she admires his contempt for humanity, and others talk about using him as her prophet. So she did specifically choose to use him for emotional reasons (to the extent that she has emotions.)
66	** Whose to say that his worship WASN’T genuine? Being trapped on a ship full of killer robots and cyborgs, all under the control of a malevolent AI whose rise to power you were responsible for, would probably cause anybody to crack.
67	** He appealed to her God complex and she likes being worshipped.
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69	* Why did the Hacker not code in ''at least one'' killswitch or shutdown or backdoor when he was disabling all the ethical constraints? Surely he had to know how freaking dangerous an unleashed SHODAN would be, and the first thing any seasoned hacker does after getting into a system '''is to make sure you have a way back in'''. So why not have some kind of emergency shutdown coded into SHODAN at the very basic level - a code phrase you can yell into the loudspeaker, a 24/7 wifi network with admin access, a QR code to be held up and automatically scanned by a security camera, ''something.''
70	** Cyber security worker here: that kind of coding takes time, it's not something you can just whip up at a moment's notice. And according to the remake, there were men with GUNS in the room with him. Given how relatively simple we see disabling the ethical restraints is, it's likely Diego would have had the Hacker shot if he went out of scope.
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72	* SHODAN does not know about the Hacker because Diego wiped the records ... but Diego then became SHODAN's loyal servant. Why did Diego never bring it up?
73	** He was too busy betraying people and preaching SHODAN's word. Besides, he probably didn't consider the Hacker to be a threat... by the time the Hacker has proven to be a threat, it's a bit late to forewarn SHODAN about him. And that's assuming that Diego was 100% loyal to SHODAN; it's possible there was a part of him still resisting her even as he licked her metaphorical boots.

Context Headscratchers / SystemShock