System Shock 2 seems kinda close to Doom for me

[Katamori]

Soooo...on the previous week, I played and finished System Shock 2. A truly great game, despite damn "raw" at some points. Anyway, the game in itself combines the extremely creepy and scary horror feeling with sometimes really fast and dynamical gameplay (you know: agility, SpeedBoost, etc.) and this is what I loved the most in Doom as well!

So after this, although the game is mainly an RPG with entirely different gameplay aspects, the basic experience feels somethin Doom-esque for me. What do you think?

[negke]

If anything, System Shock (1) should feel close to Doom... especially if played with the controls patch. In my view, it has a grittier, more hostile atmosphere than the sequel, though typically doesn't get nearly as much attention/praise than SS2 which is kind of a shame. Of course, SS2 is a great game as well, just a little bit too clean in a 'early 3D hardware' sort of way.

[CorSair]

negke said:

If anything, System Shock (1) should feel close to Doom... especially if played with the controls patch. In my view, it has a grittier, more hostile atmosphere than the sequel, though typically doesn't get nearly as much attention/praise than SS2 which is kind of a shame. Of course, SS2 is a great game as well, just a little bit too clean in a 'early 3D hardware' sort of way.

Yeah, controls are rather funky, to say the least, has too many hitscanner enemies for my liking, but overall, it is solid.

(Needs a SS1 appreciation thread if I'm going to start blathering.)

System Shock 2 is, personally, nothing comparable to Doom. It's an amalgamation of many ideas, and executes it really well. And multiplayer.... Yeah, it has that. It's a (glorious) trainwreck.

[june gloom]

System Shock 1 and 2 lie closer to Ultima Underworld. A more appropriate assessment would be that System Shock seems like what Tom Hall envisioned for Doom.

They're not really similar otherwise, though. Doom is a fast-paced arcade shooter with some atmospheric bits. System Shock is deliberately slower paced with more of a survival horror bent (2 especially) and a focus on story; also it is NOT level based -- you have an entire ship to explore, it's all about figuring out how to get there.

[Doomkid]

I've never played either System Shock game, at least not that I can remember. I'm really curios after hearing this.

[Blastfrog]

If anything, I feel that Doom is like SS1 gone astray. Really, the Doom Bible pretty much described SS1. Tom wanted to make a game where you could freely travel between livable, believable spaces with high levels of interactivity. The rest of team wanted "Wolfy but better" so that's what happened with the scraps of the more ambitious version. It's amazing, really, a rushed game barely following an ambitious design doc, only to be killed and resurrected from the grave in late May to follow the direction the rest of the guys really wanted to go in (also rushed). And yet it turned out to be awesome. Visionaries know their shit, even if they mess up later or go their separate ways.

In the end, it was for the best as it would not have nearly had the same impact if released in '94 or '95 with slower, more "boring" and involved gameplay. Still a shame, as I think a (properly executed) DB would be a deeper, better experience when just talking plain art (as a snapshot of their culture and the imagination the contemporary works brought about, like Aliens was way more suspenseful than Doom ended up but Aliens was still a huge reference) and ignoring the commercial/industrial/cultural side of things. They had limited time to strike and those ideas were better suited for a later time, given the unique window of time that the 93 market presented.

[Doominator2]

Feels more like Ultima Underworld to me.

[doomgargoyle]

Doominator2 said:

Feels more like Ultima Underworld to me.

Well, that's probably because System Shock 1 used an enhanced build of the Ultima Underworld engine, and I do agree with the points mentioned here about SS1 having grittier look, and being better than its sequel. I dont get tired of saying, that Ken Levine is way overrated. I'd say that Doom II's release killed any chances that SS1 had when it came out, slightly after Doom II. Everybody wanted a fast paced shooter instead of a more complex, engaging experience that SS1 offered.

[june gloom]

Technically it came out before Doom 2. If only by a week.

[doomgargoyle]

dethtoll said:

Technically it came out before Doom 2. If only by a week.

Ok, but that doesnt matter. Doom 2 completely choked any chance this game had. That was the time where games were making leaps and bounds in graphical advances and when people wanted fast action, completely skipping a more engrossing, slower experience that SS1 offered. Thats unfair since SS1 is a game that didnt deserve to be largely ignored and forgotten like it is nowadays.

[june gloom]

nah

I feel you, brah

but nah

Doom 2 didn't change anything, it was just more Doom which is what people wanted.

System Shock's problem is it wasn't as fast or fast-paced as Doom. While it had more features than Doom -- sloped surfaces, walkways you can move under (if not true room-over-room -- walkways were pretty much just catwalks) and a very early predecessor to dynamic lighting (mostly noticeable only in the very last level which has a lot of dark hallways and you have energy weapons that fire glowing projectiles) it simply didn't have the fast, smooth feel of Doom. The controls were janky, the textures jittered when the camera moved, movement was slow, the UI was a nightmare, the list goes on. This wouldn't have been a problem if it'd come out a year earlier, before Doom.

[dew]

doomgargoyle said:

Ok, but that doesnt matter. Doom 2 completely choked any chance this game had. That was the time where games were making leaps and bounds in graphical advances and when people wanted fast action, completely skipping a more engrossing, slower experience that SS1 offered. Thats unfair since SS1 is a game that didnt deserve to be largely ignored and forgotten like it is nowadays.

Uh, that's wrong, imo. If anything, Doom created a market for clones and people were hungry for "Doom with a twist", any twist. Any first person shit that pointed a gun at enemies sold like hotcakes. It brought a wave of casuals to PC games and Amiga master race started throwing away their outdated hardware because of Doom. I don't see "any chance" being taken away.

System Shock wasn't aimed at the broadest audience and it had none of the revolutionary concepts like network play and PWAD support, so people didn't stay at work late to frag their colleagues. It was still a hit among "true" gamers at that time, because it came from the gods of LGS (hype, hype) and it carried the RPG genre into the FPS era - moreso than the UUs despite not really being a classic RPG itself, imo. It more or less broke even budget-wise and LGS built on the experience when delivering its most famous games. Doom didn't limit System Shock's impact, everyone loved System Shock, buuuut...

- At the time, it was a nightmare to get it running. The engine was actually ahead of id's tech, but it was a hulking clumsy behemoth that required unrealistic hardware and people had to fuck with extended memory management to load, like, sounds. This issue hamstringed UUs as well and basically limited LGS games to subculture hit status, because you had to be a computor nerd to even start them.

- Those goddamn controls are terrible. Doom is the king of smooth controls, but it is also limited to 2D input, so look at Dark Forces instead. DF didn't support vertical mouselook either, but Lucas Arts made sure the control scheme didn't feel like gliding through a slow oldschool dungeon crawl with fast FPS-era enemies. Dark Forces were so much more enjoyable, because they weren't the FPS equivalent of QWOP to first time players. The entire control scheme of SysShock was a difficulty bump the game didn't need, because it was already pretty hard by itself.

- And it has almost no legacy, because nothing was done to fix these issues. SysShock 2 had its own showstopping difficulties (remember how it would refuse to work on XP systems), but people bent over backwards to fix those while nothing was ever done to make life easier for SysShock players. Well, at least not until a few years ago.

My 2c. Also, SysShock2 is nothing like Doom for me.