Ken Levine goes behind the scenes on System Shock 2

There is a retexture project called SHTUP and a few high res weapon replacements that work out really well.

There is the Rebirth project which replaces the monsters, but it changes them so drastically I dislike it.

@wcarnation
At first, I thought your comment was a very mean reply to Jawmuncher in that you were discretely telling him to "SHUTUP". Then I realized you were trying to help him. I still lol'd.

It will probably never happen. As you know, SS and SS2 were PC exclusives and had more complex mechanics.

Ken Levine (with many other PC devs) has gone the console route since then and seeing how simpler in gameplay Bioshock is. If we see a new SS game, it will most likely be a multiplatform game made for consoles and thus not the SS you knew and loved.

I agree with nerdydesi. It'll be like when Deus Ex 2 came out. They developed it for PC and Xbox, simplified the gameplay, and dumbed it down. It wasn't the same as the original.

SS is exactly why I would mourn the loss of PC gaming and if console gaming was the only alternative.

Yeah, I'd rather they didn't make a sequel or a remake if it was as dumbed down as bioshock was. Not that bioshock wasn't an awesome game I enjoyed the hell out of it ..... but it was no system shock.

the fact that bioshock 2 had admittedly iffy multiplayer tacked on at the last second sorta has me questioning the future of the whole series anyhow :(

The amount of shouting that ensued when I saw the ending for fallout 3 after 200+ hours of gameplay.

my god.

System Shock 2 has problems with Windows XP and up, and serious problems with multicore CPU's. It would need serious updating for it to work.

Ugh.

Funny how none of those "top Devs" make any games that really appeal to me.. yet I love CoD, CoD4, MW2.. XD

It is one of the best games I have ever played. I remember when I first started it thinking it was the most fun and interesting game I had touched. It really was a great piece of work and a milestone in gaming.

Of course it isn't as pretty now a days due to age - but if you place it in context of when it was made and just jump into the story and vibe, you're in for a treat.

And to add to that, I can't wait for Ken Levine's next game. Whatever it may be.

System Shock was designed for PCs and Bioshock for consoles. Very different playing styles, what do you expect?

agreed. SS 2 was better than Bioshock. I was so excited for Bioshock, but something just didn't do it for me, and I think that something was that it wasn't System Shock 3.

"While Bioshock had a few scares, it's still not as spooky as SS2"

Was Bioshock supposed to be scary? I always had it pegged as an action shooter, not a horror game. Is Penumbra a better game too because it's scarier than Bioshock? I dunno, it just seems like an odd thing to expect from the game.

Personally, and I know I'm pretty much alone here, I liked Bioshock a whole lot more than SS2. Maybe because I played it right before Bioshocks release instead of when it first came out, but there were way too many flaws in that game for me to really get into it. It certainly was ahead of its time and it's a fantastic game but I think the people bashing Bioshock for not being SS3 are looking at it the wrong way. While Bioshock was touted as a "spiritual successor" to SS2 I think too many people forget that it's still its own game and it was never meant to be SS3 but rather a beast of its own.

What Bioshock was for me was an immersive, surreal world filled with life and fantastic detai. Bioshock was all about Rapture. Fontaine's twist may have been easy to see coming, and the ending wasn't great, but that was never the point for me. It was all about exploring Rapture and the city it had been/become. What was happening in the present wasn't nearly as important.

System Shock 2 was great, but for entirely different reasons. I really think they need to be treated for what they are: Two entirely different games.

Bioshock wasn't a completely different game though. It really was a watered down System Shock in execution. The action was better, but the RPG elements were cut in half. The devs came right out and said that they wanted to do a System Shock like game, but make it more accessible by improving things like the shooting. They also took away the inventory system, dumbed down character development, and made it so anyone could hack anything. Hacking in Bioshock wasn't fun because
of that; the etire reason hacking was awesome in SS2 was because
you had to spend precious resources to upgrade your hack skill to see what's in that box over there. It was a huge trade off; do I up the hack skill to see wht goodies are behind the locked door, or do I spend the points on upgrading my research skill to expose enemy weaknesses?

I agree that it is a different game, which my sound like it contradicts myself, but for people like the original poster and myself, System Shock was something that we can't ignore when playing Bioshock, and because of that, it feels gimped.

Also, and I know I'm in the minority, but I HATED the vita-chambers. They are NOT the same as quicksaving, or any kind o saving for tht matter. They were going for that same basic idea in SS, but if you hadn't reached the respawn chamber yet, you actually died and had to start the level over. Thos is a level of challenge that BS didn't have. Vita-chambers annoyed the hell out of me. If there was a level with a bunch of enemies that was really difficult to get through, you could take one out, "die," take anothe one out, "die," etc., until the whole room was cleared out. That is such an artificial way of instilling a challenge for players, and worse, it made it so that whenever you died, you had to walk back to the point of death. It allowed the developers to ignore poper difficulty balance, because the player would just respawn. It allowed them to avoid great level design in a similar way that regenerative
health confines encounters to arena style battles. It's just not rewarding to finish level, because I felt like it took zero skill to do so.

I really was just very let down by Bioshock in almost every way. It was sort of interesting and had good graphics. Other than that, it was a
cheap let down from what it could have been.

It wasn't "watered down" anything, though that's a great pun. It's funny hearing people saying "Bioshock didn't have " and "Bioshock didn't have ".

It's like everyone put Bioshock on such a pedestal that the game mutated into their own personal fantasy, and when they got it and discovered, no, the game was not designed for them personally, they all yelled.

Those first moments in the game were amazing. It was a freaky experience that sticks with you - and you did a great job getting the image out there for us.