Shock To The System
Ben Biggs
Feature
System Shock was the Half-Life 2 of its time in many ways, advancing and introducing technologies wh
Published on Feb 8, 2010
Picking a single game from a huge back catalogue of titles that stretches so far that it could probably be seen from space isn’t easy. System Shock 2 is one of dozens of high-profile retail PC games from the last 30 years that challenged gaming conventions and came away smelling of roses. For every one that tried and managed that trick successfully, there are another 50 that, at best, faded into obscurity and, at worst, were hauled across the critical coals and lambasted for their crimes against the average gamer’s expectations. Not that we want to detract from the importance of this sequel to PC gaming, but timing and a large degree of luck had a hand in System Shock 2 becoming the game we fondly reminisce about today, whenever we play one of the many new titles that have used the technologies, concepts or the talented staff who worked on the Eidos classic, as a springboard.The game that spawned this pivotal sequel, System Shock, was developed by Looking Glass Studios and published by Origin Systems in 1994, headed by Ultima progenitor Richard Garriot. It was released at the tail end of a financial year overshadowed by Wings Of Glory and Ultima VIII: Pagan, so Origin was hardly pinning the hopes for its fiscal future on this new IP. Besides that, the relatively inexperienced Looking Glass Studios’ previous title, Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth Of Worlds, was a long way from the sci-fi vision of System Shock in more than genre alone. But the team had a few aces up its sleeve.
System Shock was the Half-Life 2 of its time in many ways, advancing and introducing technologies where others were happy to rest on their laurels. It used an enhanced version of the Underworld Engine, allowing the player freedom to move in a true three-dimensional environment, with high-resolution textures and the ability to mouse-look in any direction; this was revolutionary, when the first-person games of its time coupled a limited 2D plane of movement with a rudimentary camera bob, a barrier to immersion by comparison.
Programmer Seamus Blackley developed the advanced physics for the engine that gave many interactive objects mass and velocity, lending tangibility to physical impact and wall climbing. He also implemented the ubiquitous FPS lean, which he used again for shooting around corners in Jurassic Park: Trespasser.
More significantly, System Shock had been endowed with a free-moving cursor mode that gave the player HUD interaction and an inventory similar in concept to point-and-click adventure games. A talented visionary indeed – at least Microsoft thought so, and the company was proved right when it poached him to work on DirectX, and Seamus went on to co-write the initial proposal for the Xbox.
The FPS/RPG hybrid went down well with the critics: PC Gamer, Games Domain and Next Generation Magazine all awarded it upwards of 90%. But, unfortunately, the new IP wasn’t just unfamiliar ground to PC gamers, System Shock was competing with Romero’s killer app and managed sales of around 170,000 – which in no way reflected its quality. Gamespy recently concluded its 2007 Hall Of Fame retrospective by saying, “The best computer game of 1994 came and went while everyone was busy killing each other in Doom II.” A fair observation, but then being upstaged by one of the best shooters in history is surely nothing to be ashamed of?
We’re loath to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the product when questionable marketing also had a hand in System Shock’s relatively low sales. In the rush to make the end of the 1993/1994 financial year deadline, the standard 3.5-inch floppy disk version was released on the 26 March launch day with a second, CD-ROM Enhanced version only appearing a few months later. With a little extra time, Looking Glass Studios made good use of the comparatively enormous capacity of CD-ROM technology and brought unparalleled immersion in the form of an eye-bleeding 640x480 SVGA mode and full spoken speech, transforming a tame end-level SHODAN-boss into an omnipresent, dysfunctional, megalomaniac uber-computer with a terrifying electronic voice modulation that set your hair on end whenever it spoke. Unfortunately the inferior (albeit, still excellent) 3.5 floppy version by then had several months of exposure and was naturally the one to make the indelible impression on consumers.
Luminary Warren Spector worked on System Shock as producer, and in an interview with Gamespy he admitted that releasing the floppy version early was probably a flawed idea. “The additional audio added so much it might as well have been a different game. The CD version seemed so much more… well, modern. And the perception of Shock was cemented in the press and in people’s minds by the floppy version – the silent movie version! I really think that cost us sales.”
The System Shock IP was far from abandoned, though. Several years passed and in 1997 three key people left Looking Glass Studios, ironically marking the beginning of a transient, yet incredibly productive and successful period for the developer. Ken Levine, Jonathan Chey and Robert Fermier formed what turned out to be a diverse hit machine: Irrational Games. Looking Glass Studios was a year away from releasing another convention-busting title, Thief: The Dark Project, so Irrational’s first task was to pick up where Looking Glass had left off. And having sewn up a tight gameplay concept that brought the inventory system, personal log-driven plot and other elements at the core of the original, System Shock IP-owner Electronic Arts was keen to sign Irrational up and give them the licence to work with. “Shock is definitely one of our favourite games of all time,” SS2’s producer Josh Randall told IGN. “Judging from the response we have been getting on the web, we are not alone… people are always mentioning System Shock as an influence. I think everyone at Looking Glass has wanted to do a sequel to Shock since we did the original.”
Sure enough, Irrational wasn’t braving this ambitious debut alone.
Co-developing SS2 was Irrational’s progenitor Looking Glass Studios, who provided its new Dark Engine technology to drive the game. Looking Glass must have had some faith in Irrational to make SS2 a success, as this was the same game engine behind its new Thief IP, and it was an ambitious technology at that – albeit unfinished. “To make up for the short development cycle and correspondingly small budget, the project was supposed to reuse technology,” Jonathan Chey told Gamasutra in his SS2 postmortem. “Not technology in the sense of a standalone engine from another game, but individual components that were spun off from yet another game, Thief: The Dark Project. The Thief technology was still under development and months away from completion when our team started working with it… The Dark Engine was never delivered to the System Shock team as a finished piece of code.” The unrefined engine and unusual development situation wasn’t without its tribulations, of course, but sharing the code had its pros as well as cons. “We had direct access to the ongoing bug-fixes and engine enhancements flowing from the Thief team. It exposed us to bugs that the Thief team introduced, but it also gave us the ability to fix bugs and add new features to the engine. Because we had this power, we were sometimes expected to fix engine problems ourselves rather than turning them over to Looking Glass programmers… But being able to tamper with the engine allowed us to change it to support System Shock-specific features in ways that a general engine never could.”
Despite the piecemeal tech, the Dark Engine became a crucial factor in SS2’s success partly due to the advanced AI and the engine’s use of sound. Levine and company took a great deal away with them from their experiences with System Shock, and sound was once again to prove vital to immersing the player on board the Von Braun. Irrational veered away from using arbitrary noises for many of its humanoid baddies, so Hybrids, Cyborgs and Cyborg Midwives each had a distinct repertoire to dip into. In reference to the hive mind of their annelid parasites, Hybrids would mumble, “Your song is not ours” and, “Silence the discord,” while malfunctioning Cyborgs and Cyborg Midwives politely greeted you or randomly commented on how “they grow up so fast,” respectively, even as they set their targets on you. Flies, spiders, mechanoids and other nasties were bereft of any vocabulary, but the sounds they made propagated in exactly the same way, so the whine of an activating turret, sliding door or the mantra of an enemy could be softly heard some distance away and through several walls, increasing in volume the closer you were to the source.
“We needed to implement a sound system significantly more sophisticated than many other games,” said Dark Project’s lead programmer Tom Leonard about the Dark Engine, in his Dark Project Gamasutra postmortem. “When constructing a Thief mission, designers built a secondary ‘room database’ that reflected the connectivity of spaces at a higher level than raw geometry. Although this was also used for script triggers and AI optimisations, the primary role of the room database was to provide a representation of the world simple enough to allow realistic real-time propagation of sounds through the spaces. Without this, it is unlikely the sound design could have succeeded, as it allowed the player and the AIs to perceive sounds more as they are in real life and better grasp the location of their opponents in the mission spaces.”
Up until this point sound had been used effectively to create atmosphere in first-person games, but nothing applied as much imagination to the medium as SS2. A small revolution in sound technology was developing in the industry with the stereo sound card as a PC standard rapidly being replaced by quadraphonic, then 5.1 channel audio. Manufacturers like Creative Labs were leading the race with its enduring Sound Blaster Live! series, the original EAX-enhanced board and naturally, environmental audio was made available as a tick-box menu option in both SS2 and Thief. These games were way ahead of the competition and still hold their own today in that respect, but EAX was just the veneer on the groundwork that Looking Glass and Irrational had put in.
SS2 also implemented sound in a more intelligent manner with the Dark Engine giving enemy AI three distinct states. The first was a vague awareness of the presence of the player either by a fleeting glimpse or a noise you had made. The second would be some kind of affirmation: a definite sighting or a noise that would prompt a full alert and cause the enemy to seek you out, moving in your general direction. Finally, a point-blank sighting would result in a direct attack. What this translated into in SS2 was fixed mechanical AI-like turrets and security cameras hitting an alert status when you came within close proximity and opening fire. In the case of the cameras, you’d have a few seconds to hide before a security alarm was sounded and baddies spawned in attack mode at regular intervals until the alarm timed out. Humanoids in both SS2 and Thief (guards and monsters in the case of Thief, cyborgs and hybrids for SS2) featured the full spectrum of AI alerts and had as much dialogue written for their intermediate alert statuses as for their attack mode. SS2 cyborgs could be heard to say “Where are you sir?” while Thief guards would mutter to themselves, “He must be here somewhere”, and would even downgrade back through the alert strata if you ran away and lost them for long enough. “Sound plays a more central role in Thief than in any other game I can name,” said Tom. “It was the primary medium through which the AIs communicated both their location and their internal state to the player… In Thief, the AIs rarely ‘cheat’ when it comes to knowledge of their environment. Considerable work went into constructing sensory components sufficient to permit the AIs to make decisions purely based on the world as they perceive it. This allowed us to use player sounds as an integral part of gameplay, both as a way that players can reveal themselves inadvertently to the AIs and as a tool for players to distract or divert an AI.”
This AI perception and distraction mechanic in particular became an integral part of the experience in the following two Thief games, and has become a standard feature for first-person games with even a small element of stealth since, with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow Of Chernobyl and BioShock being notable recent examples. Sound was now a more prominent actor on the stage and two Dark Engine games were proving the difference that good technology and sexy audio hardware can make to a gaming experience. Looking Glass followed SS2 and Thief: The Dark Project up in 2000 with another Dark Engine sequel, Thief II: The Metal Age, taking on board the criticisms made of the first in the series by putting more emphasis on stealth. Otherwise, it was recognisably a Dark Engine game using similar adopted features, and this was the final official use of the engine before it was put to bed.
Both Thief II and Ion Storm’s Thief III: Deadly Shadows (which used a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine 2) used a tiered AI alert system, but featured it as the driving mechanic of the game. Deadly Shadows in particular gave birth to the idea that there really was no place too sacred or safe from the increasingly cunning and dexterous Garrett, who could scale walls and climb through windows to rooms behind impossibly locked or guarded doors. Thief had introduced the concept of the light gem to gamers and the third game in the series pushed it to new levels of immersion. If you stepped into the full illumination of a torch or moonlight, then the gem would glow brightly, indicating the potential of any nearby guard spotting you and leaping into full alert. Conversely, in the deep black of the shadows, the gem would wink out and you could slip by unnoticed. Push the difficulty setting up and the guards became noticeably jumpy, and while they were unlikely to spot you even when several feet from your position if you were flattened against a dark wall, make a move – especially if you ran, rather than walked – and the gem would glow regardless of low light and how little noise you were making. In this situation and on the hardest difficulty setting, any nearby guard in search mode would be virtually guaranteed to spot you, and as most could sap an entire health bar with a couple of swats from their blades, it made hugging the shadows and stealth mandatory. Stealth kills were the only realistic means of engaging a solitary guard at this level, creating an especially tense game when being hunted by groups of tenacious and unpredictable soldiers.
The idea of using new sound technology with AI to heighten atmosphere and increase gameplay was almost as rapidly taken up by developers as PC gamers, who were investing increasingly in sound hardware. Not least of all these developers was Ion Storm, founded in 1996 by John Romero, who incidentally worked at Origin Systems prior to its acquisition by EA in 1992. Two of the key people who worked on System Shock, Warren Spector and Harvey Smith, came along later for the ride with him. Up until that point, Ion Storm’s Dallas studio had proved a massive money pit, with flops like Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 and the notoriously protracted Daikatana, but fortunes were about to change in 2000 with another new IP. Even in the early stages of development, the dynamic AI concept adapted from SS2 for Deus Ex was surprising the team. In an interview with IGN, level designer Steve Powers described a situation where he “jumped three feet in the air” when an enemy NPC found its way into a restaurant he was working on and ambushed him in the cooler – the only indication of its presence was the hanging meat swaying gently from its recent disturbance. “The world just took on a life of its own and even the person who built the location and placed the NPCs and objects couldn’t predict what would happen.”
Deus Ex wouldn’t be recognisable for the game it is today if it wasn’t for System Shock 2, due in part to the MVPs steering its creative direction. It was cyberpunk in genre, an FPS/RPG hybrid and had multiple parallels with the Irrational/Looking Glass game, including a broad inventory system, object manipulation, hacking and an imaginative musical score that changed appropriately depending on the situation: whether you were taking a stroll, engaging in conversation or in combat. It also featured a sophisticated character advancement system, rewarding the player with skill points that they could pour into a pool of abilities, plus nano-augmentation. As far as the gameplay was concerned, this had much the same effect as the rare OS-UP stations found in SS2. Deus Ex built upon all of these features, especially the career system where investment in firearms at the expense of stealth abilities, for example, created a soldier rather than an assassin. A character’s class was far more pronounced in Deus Ex, which was one of the weaker facets of SS2, despite it giving the player an explicit career choice of Marines (heavy and assault weapons), Navy (light weapons and computers) and the OSA (Psi-abilities) at the start of the game.
But plot and character interaction was one legacy Deus Ex took into a league of its own. When he was asked what a computer RPG meant to him by Warren Spector at the concept stage of Deus Ex, co-designer Harvey Smith replied, “I want to be able to fully explore and interact with an environment in as immersive, self-expressive as way possible. If something occurs to me in the game world, I want to be empowered to try it. And I want the results of the action, even if they are not always what I expected, to be interesting and plausible.” Undeniably a result of Harvey Smith’s own experiences on the original System Shock – and a creative vision apparent in Deus Ex. A focal part of the design was interaction with a massive array of NPCs within a dynamic storyline. JC Denton would communicate directly with these characters, which wasn’t exactly revolutionary in itself for an action-orientated game, but for the fact that you would have different dialogue options throughout the cut-scene. At the very least these elicited a radically different reaction from the NPC, most made tangible differences to the gameplay, and one conclusion of a single conversation could have far-reaching effects on the plot that completely changed the course of your game. Moreover, almost every character could be killed by the player or another NPC. For example: kill Johnny, one of JoJo Fine’s heavies, and Sandra the prostitute would provide you with valuable information. Frighten him off or otherwise incapacitating him would have the same effect, but if you bumped into him again in Hell’s Kitchen, he’d run away screaming. This is obviously a minor example of Deus Ex’s underlying RPG design, but there are hundreds of these throughout that colour the game and lend it a more organic feel.
We’ve saved SS2’s biggest influence on the games industry to date for last, though, and it comes in the form of a single multiformat title released in August 2007. Singling BioShock out for special treatment is cheating ever so slightly on our part, as it was made by one half of the original SS2 team, Irrational Games, and was intended as the spiritual successor to SS2 anyway. But it received universal praise, with only a minority of System Shock purists blindly criticising it for the parallels that can be drawn between the two games. They weren’t wrong about the sheer number of similarities, though – there are dozens of very explicit examples: Splicers, turrets and other baddies can be compared almost directly to System Shock 2’s menagerie of creatures and even have similar AI as their predecessors. But BioShock also introduced the iconic Big Daddies and Little Sisters, an unlikely pair that at a superficial level alone, turned a player-versus-environment scenario into a decidedly more complicated combat triangle. Then there were System Shock 2’s Nanites, transformed into a substance called Eve, SS2’s reconstitution chambers that translated directly into Vita-chambers, psi abilities made a return (albeit far fewer than the 40 available in SS2) along with plasmids, and the concept of permanent augmentation via cyber-modules became the substance Adam.
Taking the comparisons deeper still, Ken Levine and the team made the same effort to humanise the baddies for BioShock as System Shock 2: it was hard to forget that Hybrids were once your colleagues aboard the Von Braun, when they were so good at giving an occasional glimmer of residual humanity, straining out “I’m… sorry” before launching a violent attack. And using similar methods, Irrational turned the denizens of Rapture from evil freaks into maligned creatures unwittingly driven mad by their own substance abuse and the insane designs on one overseer. Little Sisters were originally going to be insects, but in the words of lead designer Joe McDonagh, “no-cared”, so Irrational threw another moral conundrum into this underwater melting pot of iniquity, by making them into little girls. Even BioShock’s plot moved to a similar beat as System Shock 2: audio logs and the odd ghostly sighting provided a backdrop to Rapture’s downward descent into chaos, SHODAN and the hive mind of The Many were substituted for a more charismatic Frank Fontaine and Andrew Ryan, while a rather enigmatic Atlas replaced the disembodied voice of Dr Polito – to the extent that a very similar twist involving Atlas awaited the player only a few hours into playing the videogame.
One of the more intriguing wheels System Shock 2 helped set in motion is the concept of emergent gameplay; given a diverse combination of around 20 weapons and 40 psi abilities, the player had scope for exploring many different methods of dispatching a single foe. It was one of the early pioneers for giving players the tools to create solutions that were far more than the sum of their parts, but eight years on, BioShock proved far the cleverer game in this respect. With its dynamic combat environments plus combination of plasmid, psi, conventional weapons and security hacking, a resourceful player could come up with a solution to a situation worthy of an SAS handbook. Big Daddies could be swayed to fight for your cause and then dispatched when on the verge of collapse, turrets hacked and forced to rain bullets in one direction to cover your back, and Splicers frozen in place while you used telekinesis to batter them with a safe… this is just a very small selection of the more obvious means of tackling your foes, but BioShock delighted us with its creativity.
While SS2 hasn’t been the single most defining influence on the games industry, its originality and conception have undeniably had a knock-on effect for many games released in its wake. Several titles since have directly benefited from SS2’s hindsight, including and especially BioShock, which may not have existed at all otherwise. Or, at least, come close to achieving the plaudits that have made it one of the most acclaimed games in history. As for Irrational Games (now 2K Boston), it’s almost as if it boomeranged SS2 deliberately, developing some ideas while leaving others in a more rudimentary state, flinging SS2 out there to mature before taking it back to its bosom to create a spiritual successor. A ridiculous notion, of course, but with few developers planning things better than this, that doesn’t take such an enormous stretch of the imagination to conceive. The current legacy of SS2 comprises of some of the top PC and console games of the 21st Century: as well as Deus Ex, BioShock and Thief III, its influence can be seen in games like Knights Of The Old Republic, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. And for the future, titles like BioShock 2, System Shock 3, Deus Ex 3, Thief 4 and beyond will all owe something to that talented Looking Glass/Irrational duo and the prodigious game they created.
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