However, what was truly special about the original System Shock is how it delivered its story. You have to plan your battles carefully while lurking in the shadows, learning which weapons work best against which enemies. As a result, System Shock is a game where you have to exercise caution to survive since you can't rely on twitchy reflexes to save the day. Player movement is a bit clumsy and so is using the cursor to interact with the inventory or objects in the environment. However, the similarities end there, as the game reveals its role-playing tendencies by requiring you to use an inventory system to store items and to loot the bodies of destroyed enemies. There are pixelated corridors where all sorts of nightmares lumber and roll about, such as reprogrammed droids or humans who have mutated into zombies thanks to corrupted cybernetic implants, all of them looking to turn you into red paste. They opted for science fiction, and System Shock, a first-person adventure game that cast players as a hacker going up against an artificial intelligence known as SHODAN hell-bent on destroying Earth, was born.Īt first glance, the original System Shock looks like a Doom clone. Looking Glass Technologies, which housed innovators like Warren Spector (Deux Ex), Doug Church (Thief) and Harvey Smith (Dishonored), was known for the revolutionary role-playing series Ultima and wanted to create an immersive simulation that wasn't fantasy-based. Game demos were passed around on floppy disks. How System Shock Came To Beīack in 1994 gaming was in a very different place. Otherside Entertainment, currently developing the Kickstarted Underworld Ascendant, has revealed that they're developing a new entry in the System Shock series, the last of which was released in the tail end of 1999. This feature was originally published online in December 2015.

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