Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.


Maybe I have missed something with SS1 as I only know SS2 but in the
latter case I found the atmosphere severly lacking after it repeated
itself with each new crew member that you didn't found alive. Was SS1
different there, e.g. no stupid hopes raised you might meet someone?

Much of the idea was to get your hopes up, only to get there too late. It
served to increase the feeling of being isolated and helped the immersion
even further. The game was released at a time where this wasn't a cliche,
and there was no precedent and therefore it wasn't predictable like it might
have been with System Shock 2.

That is not exactly true. There is a story behind HL but you have to think
about it ;). It's not written down in logs but evolves with the game. Of
course it is nothing compared to Bloodlines and maybe to SS1, but again I
only know SS2 and I can't remember much of that besides everyone is dead.

We clearly interpret what a story is very differently. In my mind, there was
very little story in witnessing monsters slaughtering scientists over and
over, or any of the countless other action set pieces that were impressive
but pretty hollow in terms of a serious storyline.

You keep bringing up Bloodlines, and I can only assume you somehow connect
System Shock with it. However, I see them as completely different games, and
Bloodlines was a dialogue driven RPG with traditional quest structure. But
we can at least agree that the story was miles ahead of Half Life events.

I bring SS2 into it because I never played SS1 and you said SS2 was the
second best. Which means that we either have a very different taste or SS1
was much much better than SS2.

There is no doubt that we have very different tastes.

This sounds indeed promising. Was it actually talking to you or did you
need to read endless messages like in Marathon?

If you got the CD version, she spoke to you.

It's exactly the same story telling mechanism done in SS2 and Doom 3 so it
must have been better on several acounts because I can't remember people
praising Doom 3 for the logs of the dead people and found it bad in SS2.

The audio logs was the only good part about the gameplay of Doom 3. In fact,
it was the sole reason I bothered to complete an otherwise utterly
derivative shooter. Pretty obvious where they got the idea, though.

Again you might be mistaken. I guess I could sum up the story of HL1 in a
similar way that you could sum up that of SS1 only with HL1 I liked that I
actually could experience parts of the story instead of just reading about
it like in SS2. Seeing people die makes me feel more than log reading...

Just because you didn't see the people die in System Shock doesn't mean you
didn't experience the story.

However, it's blatantly clear that we enjoy different kinds of games, and
there is no point in debating what's best as it's entirely subjective. I was
simply pointing out how System Shock did a lot of the things that Half Life
did years before. Whether that makes it a better game is entirely up to the
individual.


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.
    ... It boils down to taste and since you didn't care for SS2, ... because the game is so old that it ... where they licensed the Source engine and still ... Maybe I have missed something with SS1 as I only know SS2 but in the ...
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  • Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.
    ... As I said, I never played SS1 only SS2 but at that time, I was amazed ... Or play SS1. ... First of all, SS2 was the worse game, compared to the storyline of SS1. ... compare. ...
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    ... come to redo SS1 with a modern engine. ... time and a truly revolutionary game at the time. ... Whereas SS2 was ... player luck to a certain extent, whereas SS1 is down to player skill. ...
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  • Re: System Shock 2 - revisited
    ... >> come to redo SS1 with a modern engine. ... time and a truly revolutionary game at the time. ... There were lots of set pieces - something that seemed to be missing from SS2 ... SS2's version relies on player luck to a certain extent, whereas SS1 is down to player skill. ...
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  • Re: Half-Life 2 three years on.
    ... Maybe I have missed something with SS1 as I only know SS2 but in the latter case I found the atmosphere severly lacking after it repeated itself with each new crew member that you didn't found alive. ... It's exactly the same story telling mechanism done in SS2 and Doom 3 so it must have been better on several acounts because I can't remember people praising Doom 3 for the logs of the dead people and found it bad in SS2. ... I guess I could sum up the story of HL1 in a similar way that you could sum up that of SS1 only with HL1 I liked that I actually could experience parts of the story instead of just reading about it like in SS2. ...
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