Damocles wrote:You cant deny, that reimplementing a gameplay 1:1 from 1994 with just updated rendering would work poorly.
Watch me.
I do deny that, and most emphatically.
If you backed the Kickstarter, you could download the Unity version that recreated part of the first level of the original System Shock. There were some things missing... and yet it clearly had plenty of the fun of the original game. It looked fantastic, which is exactly what it needed, but nothing of what made the original game great would have been improved by changing the gameplay.
It's probably worth talking about Fallout here. I played both Fallout 1 & 2, and then Bethesda's Fallout. I didn't hate Fallout 3. It was so different, moving to real-time first-person 3D, that it didn't -- and still doesn't -- make sense to compare it to the first two turn-based tactical isometric games. The new Fallout had to be taken on its own terms, and on its own terms, it's a great gameplay experience.
So back to System Shock: if NightDive were similarly going to make their version radically different, I wouldn't be griping quite as much. I'd still be bummed that they chose not to release a version of the original with modern graphics. But the new game would be so different that there'd be no point in criticizing it for not being a simple graphical update. NightDive isn't doing that, though. Their new version isn't going to be anything like as different as F3 was from F2 -- it's the desired graphical update with some arbitrary tinkering added. This makes it the worst of both worlds: not a fully new game, but not simply a respectful update of just the graphics and audio, either.
I've played SS once nearly every year since it was released. I feel like I know it pretty well, and I can't think of anything on the game design side that was arguably "wrong" and needs modification. But maybe I'm too close to it, and lack perspective. So I'm curious: what specific gameplay features of System Shock do you think are visibly defective -- in other words, not just "I don't enjoy that" but "this visibly impairs the other features of the game"? Or are you making a general objection -- you just can't imagine that
any game released in 1994 could still be fun to play today?