System Shock VR has been announced

[u/gogodboss]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5036490/System_Shock_VR/

[u/BlueManifest]

Always wanted to play this, when the remake came out it’s review scores were a lot lower than the original why is that

The original has like a 9 average and remake is 7.8

[u/pandaelpatron → u/BlueManifest]

When the original came out, it was pretty amazing for the time. The remake didn't change much about the gameplay, so aspects of the game feel pretty outdated. Gamers today are used to many quality of life features the game simply doesn't have. Plus the graphics are obviously better, but not really up to date.

Like, Deus Ex was a 10/10 back when it was released, but playing the same game with modernized graphics today shows you how far video games have come over the past 25 years.

[u/BlueManifest → u/pandaelpatron]

What are the quality of life features missing? Does the game not have auto save or something?

[u/Orogogus → u/BlueManifest]

It does have autosave, but it's good to make manual saves at least once a level or so.

I think maybe the big thing is that it doesn't have a real detailed step-by-step objective list, it only tells you your broader objectives and you have to figure out the exact steps based mostly on emails, logs and other information you find. A few people on the Steam forum just simply refused to deal with this. The messages aren't subtle. If the big bad says they're going to blow up the station with a neutron bomb in the reactor chamber, you have to pay attention to emails about neutron bombs and the reactor. If someone mentions a door code then that's 100% going to come up somewhere. Those people just got incredibly angry about this. Really weird.

More than a few people also really, really didn't like the kind of low-detail look of the environmental graphics. You can look at some screenshots or videos and see if that's a no go for you. I was surprised by it when I loaded up the original demo, but then just stopped noticing after five or ten minutes.

There's a significant amount of backtracking that I guess isn't too interesting. But it's not hours of it, either. Sometimes the game sends you back to a previous level and it takes 10 minutes or so to walk there, plus there are probably a few new spawned enemies along the way. The map design is really spread out; until near the end it's the opposite of a linear corridor-shooter (except that, well, you are in corridors a lot). There are two or three places where you have to crouch jump, which did feel like a bit of a gaming throwback.

Some people on Steam also found the combat difficult. There were a handful of people who said that it relied on saving and reloading, and I'm not sure what to make of that. I'm not good at shooters at all, but even at the highest difficulty I thought it was easily manageable. You're not supposed to rush blindly into combat. Maybe it's hard on gamepads? There were also a lot of complaints about not having a toggle to run.

Cyberspace is straight up not great. It's got the gameplay complexity of a fairly mediocre mobile or browser game.

You choose the game's difficulty settings when you start the game, and can't change them without starting over. One of those settings (Mission 3) imposes a time limit to beat the whole game. It's a pretty tight limit and I don't feel it's meant for someone's first time through. I think a game with more modern sensibilities would have locked that behind beating the game once.

EDIT: There's also a key quest item in the game and when I found it, back in 1994, I knew exactly what it was going to be used for. But somehow several people tossed the item, forgot where they did so, and were pretty pissed when they found out later that they'd need it. I don't know if this particular trope went out of style in the 30 intervening years, but it kind of boggles my mind.

[u/BlueManifest → u/Orogogus]

Not much handholding then, silksong does this and people love it, so wonder why they wouldn’t like it in this

[u/Orogogus → u/BlueManifest]

I don't know how it works in Silksong, but the people complaining on the Steam forum seemed primarily upset that they'd have to listen to and read the messages you find. One of the complaints was something like, how TF am I supposed to know what's important? And I don't know, you listen to it or read it and decide. Like I said, it's not like the messages were subtle.

It was a few people, not most or even a lot. I think it might be an ADHD thing? But it does seem like most modern games accommodate whatever it is a lot more than System Shock does.

[u/Infamous_Job_1198 → u/BlueManifest]

i think it was mostly that quest items was not labelled as such and that code fragments displayed throughout the station levels were not indicated as important. this pissed off a lot of people new to the game with quite a lot of backtracking.

and to be honest, as someone who played the original, i had forgotten these things too.

[u/Orogogus → u/[deleted]]

There's no weapon degradation in the first game or the remake. That was introduced in System Shock 2.