The Making of System Shock 2

The British gaming magazine Edge, which has teamed up with the website Next Generation, offers up a piece looking back at the creation of System Shock 2 . The cult classic storytelling horror-themed FPS has survived as a popular and often-referenced game despite the eight years between now and its release. The piece covers the reasons behind that popularity, as well as the 'horror' of an inexperienced team taking on a dauntingly high-profile task: "The original System Shock was one of the games that made Levine want to move into the videogame industry in the first place. What made it so special? 'The feeling of being in a real place,' he raves. 'The feeling of a mystery, of unraveling it - not in an adventure game way, but in the context of an action game. You arrive and... what happened? That's a really good storytelling mechanism.' Austin Grossman and Doug Church's original idea from Shock was something Irrational expanded in its sequel. 'In Shock 1 you were a specific guy, you had a backstory,' Levine notes. 'With Shock 2, I started you out with the classic 'wake up with amnesia'.'"

Comments

Re:Bioshock and System Shock

[urbanriot]

Well, both games are in my Top 5, but Deus Ex actually rewarded you with stories, points and situations that altered based on your gameplay. Kill someone earlier in the game, and a cutscene won't contain that character. Every level, you had at least two clear options on completing it... stealth or head-on, guns blazing. While System Shock 2 might have seemed more open ended, it most certainly was not; however that's a testament to the developers for making a game that seemed open ended when it was fairly straight forward. I don't know, I can't really contrast the two games since they're both personal favorites.

System Shock 2 was far better than Deus Ex, in my opinion. For one thing, System Shock 2 felt quite nonlinear, while Deus Ex railroaded the player through the game from start to finish.

Deus Ex contained some racist content that had me considering just uninstalling the game for a while. What content offended you? Are you of a particular race they offended?

I'm not a namby pamby liberal who doesn't go out of his way to be offended by comments or content that doesn't directly apply to me, so I might have missed it.