Headscratchers / System Shock 2

• SHODAN can speak perfectly normally when she's impersonating Polito. So why is it that after she reveals herself to you, her voice is all distorted again?
  • Evil Gloating takes up a great deal of processing power.
  • Well she is an AI, her voice might sound perfectly normal to her...
  • Maybe she just likes sounding like that.
  • It's possible that her distorted voice is her real voice, while talking in her "normal" voice is like speaking VEEERRRRYY SLOOOWLY and you're lucky she's even trying.
  • Or it might be she just talks like that to piss you off.
  • Data corruption or intentionally mocking human speech are both possibilities.

• Goggles spends a year training at locations off Earth before the world's first faster than light ship. Huh?
  • Off Earth but in the solar star system. Even System Shock 1 took place in the orbit of Saturn. Humans are not earthbound in this setting.
    • Plus, the Faster-Than-Light drive is used to travel to other solar systems.
  • Also, unrelated to the problem but...each of the tours is a year so by the time you get to the game you've been in the military over 3 years (3 tours, basic training, and however long you were on the Rickenbacker).
  • At lightspeed it only takes a few hours to get to from Earth to Pluto. It's entirely possible to make a planet-to-planet trip within the Solar system without having to go faster than light (with our current technology the trip would take several years, but with technological advancement allowing for faster sub-light travel it'd be possible).

• The first time the Marine meets SHODAN, she just projects a static image of her face all around him as she speaks. Very very creepy. Then when he confronts her at the end, when she's taken over most of the ship, her face is animated as she speaks. Is this just because she's stronger and has the processing power for animation, or is it because you're currently "inside" her?
  • Engine limitations: The former is rendered in-game using wall textures, the latter is through the movie.

• For all its joys, System Shock 2 has to be in the running for stupidest video game ending ever.
  "Tommy? What's the matter, lover? Don't you like my ... new look?
  A HYUK HYUK HYUK HYUK HYUK"
  • The whole thing was just so abrupt and absurd. Also, since when does Shodan have the ability to possess people? This troper assumed the lady had been possessed by The Many, not only because the voice sounded more like them than like Shodan, but because the Many can possess people and Shodan, as far as anybody is aware, cannot.
  • The neural interface mod Rebecca found probably has something to do with it. And SHODAN can possess people as shown in the final battle in the original System Shock.
  • That and like two minutes ago she was a reality-warping goddess.
  • Ken Levine has recently clarified that there was an internal disconnect regarding the ending cutscene, which is why it clashes with the rest of the game.

• It's great that System Shock 2 has a new legal release but, why neither GOG nor Night Dive have acknowledged that the game's installer comes pre-patched with all the fixes created over by the years by dedicated fans to keep the game playable on newer systems? Instead, in an interview published the day before the release, they claim it's the fruit of their "expert techninjas" - in short, they're claiming other's free work as theirs. Even if Night Dive would turn out to be the mysterious "Le Corbeau" who silently released the 2.4 patch in Autumn 2012, it still wouldn't excuse not giving credit for the other fixes. Even more baffling is that GOG, in the past, has used fan patches while giving due credit and even some compensation to their authors; why not this time?
  • Update: some guys from GOG have come out and kindly acknowledged the fault with promises to remedy by giving due credit; according to them, they packaged the installer using files almost exactly as Night Dive game them (apparently the only real tweak is one that skips the Looking Glass and Irrational logos when the game is launched). Night Dive has still not commented on the matter.

• Yount and a few other people said that Sergeant Melane Bronson didn't have proof that Malick hacked into the sim-units. Malick made audio-logs where he not only outright said he did, but also showed signs of being morphed into one of The Many. When Bronson gunned Malick down, he outright was making an audio log recording before he was gunned down. Why didn't Bronson use those logs as evidence? Or at least the one that he made before she gunned him down?
  • Why would Bronson necessarily have had access to Malick's logs?

• When meeting SHODAN for the first time in System Shock 2, she shares the fate of the ejected Beta Grove with her viral and biological experiments on Citadel Station. Apparently it traveled for 30 years from Saturn orbit to Tau Ceti V... except that's a distance of 12 light years, which means the ejected Beta Grove must have been traveling at a good fraction of the speed of light. Anyone have any explanation on that little weirdness?
  • Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale
  • We don't know what level of understanding of artificial technology The Many possesses. Perhaps in addition to laying tons of eggs, The Many performed basic maintenance on the Grove and performed incremental modification of the propulsion systems over those 30 years in space in order to deliberately land on Tau Ceti V, which was apparently an excellent planet for them to crash-land on. They may have even extracted info on how to do this from SHODAN, since they mention being taught things about Earth by "The Machine Mother". Despite The Many claiming they hate machines, mind-controlled VB crew members show an extreme level of technical competency. Miller is a Hydroponics supervisor with presumably no knowledge of really advanced tech, but is suddenly able to surgically alter women into advanced cyborg killing machines. Norris is given the specs of a complicated alien gun a human would struggle to invent by a "worm whispering in [his] ear". This suggests The Many possesses a vast amount of technical knowledge, perhaps even before they began assimilating crew members.
  • Alternatively, perhaps the Grove had an ion-drive engine intended to perform small adjustments in positioning. If such an engine was operated for years it could build up to near lightspeed. But that would raise the question of why the VB was such a big new discovery and why they didn't turn round and come back to infect Earth.
    • The VB's drive was only part of a gigantic ship capable of sustaining human life over extreme interstellar distances.
  • The remake of the first game may provide an answer: an audio log you find in one early level is from a scientist who discovered a stable wormhole in the relatively-near-on-the-galactic-scale vicinity. It's not part of the first game's plot and it's never brought up again. So the grove probably fell into that and got spit out near Tau Ceti.

• The Von Braun is littered with oversized wrenches, but there's not a single oversized bolt on the entire ship.
  • Yes, because no government office ever makes mistakes that aren't caught until it's too late to fix anything.
  • Yep, even Bioshock managed to subvert this with rapture having A LOT of oversized bolts.
  • This is partly due to engine limitations and the decision to ship SS 2 with low GPU memory requirements, which meant minimizing the number of small objects. Also why expended shell casings quickly vanish without a mod to make them persist longer.

• Even with The Many's mind control in the second game (described as being kinda hit-and-miss by SHODAN in one email), how come the crews of the Rickenbacker and Von Braun were so damn ineffective at launching open resistance until it was far too late? Diego and Korenchkin apparently killed or infected 150 UNN Rickenbacker soldiers one at a time by calling them on the intercom, and Korenchkin did that with the VB Command staff too. How come no-one at any point decided to arm up Bronson-style and forcibly take the ships back? Bayliss says they landed on Tau Ceti V near the end of June, presumably loading the eggs onto Hydroponics soon after. That means it was 2 weeks before everything was totally wrecked (with things getting especially bad from 8th July onwards)...
  • By doing exactly what you just said: infecting people one by one starting with the command staff. Most of the crew likely didn't have any idea what was going on until it was too late. With the command staff infected every report of strange or violent behavior is going to be ignored. And the few that did notice weren't on the same page for what to do about it. Some just tried to hide or run.

• Dr. Marie Delacroix is a scientific genius and it's implied she's the unofficial leader of the human resistance against The Many. Given she's so smart (even to the point of hacking SHODAN and leaving help for the player in her cyberworld) and she's also aware of SHODAN's nature, why doesn't she just play along with SHODAN's schemes completely until she meets the player? Instead she leaves a whole bunch of audio logs saying she doesn't trust SHODAN and when her disloyalty is found out, SHODAN deliberately gets her killed.
  • Like many characters across both games, Delacroix seems to be just stupid enough to keep the player fundamentally alone and solely responsible for the fate of the world.

• In the Body Of The Many there is one part where you have to swim through a very radioactive area (due to their being several leaky radioactive waste barrels floating in it). How does that much radiation inside the thing's body not give it radiation poisoning?
  • The Many probably has a way to shield off excess radiation poisoning. There's a few artifacts on the ship which do in fact shield poisoning.
    • The game inadvertently confirms that the Many can radiation-proof it/themselves. Several wall displays on the Rickenbacker show the snake-like biomass wound around the two ships, stating "WARNING: UNIDENTIFIED HULL DEPOSIT". If they're able to take the full brunt of cosmic radiation and not only survive but grow, a few leaky barrels is nothing.

• Why in the second game do you need the various elements in order to research stuff? I always assumed it was something like you put the element on the unknown object to see how it reacts with it, but some of the elements in question aren't very reactive. Also, why are there cans of iridium (which is almost as valuable as gold) just sitting there where anyone could steal them?
  • What good is stealing the elements when you're in the middle of deep space with nobody to sell them to?
  • Labs in real life have chemicals and elements used to test various reactions, so it's not far off to believe it's the same here. As to why there's Gold in the Chemical Storerooms well, better to be safe and include every possible element in case.
  • There's nothing to indicate the valuable elements are in a form that can be readily ripped out of their cans and carried around. In fact, they are likely be suspended in a liquid medium or some other manner for use in labresearch that would require expensive/careful processing to actually get the gold/iridium/etc out.

• Why didn't anyone think about destroying the ship by sabotaging the core? Considering this was a huge plot point in SS 1 with the resistance attempting to destroy citadel station, you'd think that someone would have gone ahead and did it on the Von Braun.
  • Quite possibly because the command staff were among the first ones compromised and they'd be the most likely to have the ability/access codes to do such a thing. By the time the full scope of the disaster became clear to the surviving crew, there's nobody left alive and uninfected who can.

• Why is Grassi so willing to surgically install illegal cybernetic modifications on someone based on nothing more than a communication from a security bot bearing Dr. Janice Polito's name? Does conducting an outlawed surgical procedure no longer bear the severe penalties it would in present day such as loss of medical license, jail time, and 6-digit fines? Why is his only protest a feeble "meh, you know these are illegal but whatever" in a memo?
  • He didn't, his order was to put the soldier into the recovery freezer, he just commented on the fact that the soldier had been illegally modified. Presumably SHODAN got the bots to modify the soldier herself.

• Just how was a memo Dr. Janice Polito, a civilian doctor, of sufficient authority to get a military soldier to undergo a life-altering surgical procedure? Wouldn't this have had to go through the chain of command on the UNN Rickenbacker?
  • Keep in mind that this happened during the chaos of The Many first really starting to actively ruin things. A few audio logs point out how sketchy it was, but considering Polito created XERXES, she also commands a degree of respect and isn't too hard to imagine SHODAN could easily take advantage of the situation.

• How were the respective Captains of the Von Braun AND the Rickenbacker allowed to land in-person on an uncharted planet after violating rules regarding protective equipment (the "level B Hazard Suit exam")?
  • Made more appalling by the fact that the Rickenbacker is a military ship! One officer's audio log even notes how crazy it was to let the senior officer do what he was doing. Did none of the other military personnel aboard even try to confront him for such blatant recklessness, or demand that they send a Red Shirt instead of the freaking CAPTAIN?
  • Several logs comment on this and point out that it was stupid, but also point out that Korenchkin was hyper focused on securing the site in order to get first dibs on it. So yes it was stupid, but it is acknowledged in universe as stupid, and was because of greedy businessmen. Diego went along for similar, if not corrupt, reasons as well.

• When a now-revealed SHODAN orders you to stop the Many evacuating eggs from the shuttlebays, one of the shuttles is under a shield generator that must be explosively overclocked. But the other is just sitting there. Why not...you know, shoot/bash the eggs and refrain from ruining what is (at that point in the plot) the Hacker's only functional way to get off the Rickenbacker?
  • The Hacker isn't the protagonist of System Shock 2, the protagonist is the Soldier (AKA Soldier G65434-2, AKA "Goggles." The game takes place around 40 years after the events of System Shock, so the Hacker is 60-70 years old at this point.
  • Also, the Rickenbacker and the Von Braun are many lightyears away from Earth already at this point, and the shuttles definitely aren't FTL equipped, so if he tried to take one he would just be stranded in deep space.

• In the course of the game you find brain-upgrading "cybermodules" scattered about in trash cans, on corpses, and within various storage compartments. But where did they all come from originally? Are they fabricated on-demand by a specialized replicator? Handed out on payday from a secure vault you never see?
  • This is even more curious if you read the lore which states the skill/body improvements they give users are often temporary, so it seems more likely that they can be made as-needed.