Xerxes is essentially the AI version of the consummate solder. None of those three forces can directly harm each other they have variable levels of influence on the world and on various agents, but it's purely through the player that each of them at their core can be affected and harmed. The three-way power struggle between dutiful shipboard computer Xerxes, young but rapidly-evolving alien collective The Many, and sinister artificial intelligence SHODAN is extraordinary. The Power Struggle Shock 2's underlying conflict is more undeniably timeless. There's a nice parallel there: The unabashedly wonky cyberpunk worlds of Shock 2 and Deus Ex could never quite achieve the same resonance in today's more accessible multiplatform world.
#System shock 2 plot Pc
It's possible such a phenomenon could only have existed in that particular time and on that particular platform, when the audience for developers like Looking Glass and Irrational was a concentrated solution of PC gaming devotees, willing to deal with so many control inputs simultaneously because their platform of choice itself was such a cutting-edge but demanding piece of machinery. It is utterly understandable why many of these intricate, sometimes unwieldy, mechanics have fallen out of favor in modern action game design since their late-1990s/early-2000s heydey ( Deus Ex being another important example), and it's arguable if they are necessarily better than the streamlined form they take in successors like BioShock, but there is something truly rewarding about mastering such a complex piece of design.
#System shock 2 plot manuals
Remember when game manuals had "notes" section - and they were actually useful?) (The player must even input access codes manually. There are systems related to stats and skills and inventory management and research and voice logs and more. That System Shock would be released the year after Doom, and System Shock 2 the year after Half-Life, illustrates a level of genre exploration now effectively extinct. Looking back, it's astonishing that an action game would ask so much of its player. Some of Shock 2's elements (like the class system) seem like legacy systems that could be designed around, and some (like weapon degradation) would probably be more easily sold if they were a bit less aggressive in their hindrance, but the overall sensation of having so much control and choice over your player character - and so much responsibility during nearly every moment of play - is fascinating and empowering.
With my most recent revisiting of System Shock 2 some time before the existence of BioShock, it was initially a jolt to recall how much more intricate and numerous its mechanics are than in its successor - and to note how much BioShock directly inherited nonetheless. A warning: The first section is about design, and is spoiler-free the second section deals heavily in story details.
More than a decade after the game's release, it's possible my thoughts are nothing new, but the game made a strong enough impression to demand some organized thoughts.
#System shock 2 plot windows 7
After some fiddling to get the game running on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine, and about 15 hours of play this February, I finished System Shock 2. That was when I was starting to think more seriously and critically about the medium games of the Looking Glass lineage, like Shock 2 and its contemporary Thief, were instrumental in the development of my thinking about games, alongside Valve's Half-Life.Īnd so, as BioShock 2 approached earlier this year, I decided I owed it to myself to finally fill in that partially-empty gap. This remains an unfortunately common occurrence with me, but it was particularly so during that era, before games had become a "primary" hobby. Despite enjoying the game, and playing it to various stages of completeness, I never managed to stick with it until the end. When I first played Irrational Games' 1999 classic System Shock 2, I didn't complete it.
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