I've been thinking more about how the game is designed, and why QBRs feel so...awkward to so many people.

I guess when it comes down to the actual gameplay of both QBRs and Medbeds, they are *mostly* fine in their initial design. The issue is how spammable/abusable they are and how the save system effectively renders them meaningless.

Having an actual resource cost to dying is pretty based, same with having a resource cost associated with healing.

The main issues I see are:
1. There's sort of no point paying the nanite cost to use a QBR, since you can freely save anywhere you want and can just load the game on death. 15 nanites is far too cheap for a resurrection (a single med hypo can cost 20 something nanites after hacking a replicator), but increasing it to, say, 100 nanites (a far more fair and less spammable/abusable cost) then makes it worthless because saves are free. The game is contradicting it's own design. In their current design QBRs are basically just a punishment for forgetting to save recently, which is horrible.
2. Medbeds are so insanely cheap and plentiful, and can be spammed near infinitely. The player can run around to a medbed quicker than the enemies can respawn, which can make for a very repetitive (and in my opinion, extremely boring) style of play where the aim is to save hypos by constantly running back to the medbed. Again, free saving sort of invalidates all this anyway because why bother spending 10 nanites for a heal when you can just keep reloading until you get the kill perfectly.

In fact, many mechanics are broken by free saves. Failed a security computer hack? Just reload. Spending too many nanites on a modification and you run out? Just reload.

Unfortunately, short of changing how the save system works itself, or artificially enforcing certain rules on yourself when playing, many aspects of the game are impacted negatively. QBRs feeling cheap and overpowered plays directly into this.

I once had an idea to keep QBRs and Medbeds without making them abusable (and giving some backtracking mitigation), which was to have them break (and need to be repaired) every 3 uses (or every 1 use for a QBR), with the repair level requirement and difficulty going up by 1 every time they break, until eventually they can't be repaired anymore. While I feel like this would help to mitigate some of the "just go down the elevator and heal" shenanigans, it still doesn't fix the fundamental, underlying problem - the time machine in your pocket that lets you delete your mistakes for free.

Not that there's anything that can be done about this. As has been mentioned, saving is a core fundamental engine feature.

But if I had a recommendation for people wanting to get the absolute most out of the game, you should enforce these rules upon yourself:

1. Save the first time you reach every bulkhead. Unbind your quicksave key and do not save anymore unless you're needing to quit for whatever reason. If you save and quit, delete your save as soon as you resume.
2. Use the QBR Breaker mod as QBRs are far too cheap.
3. Either don't use medbeds at all, or use SS2-RSD so that they all require activation keys.
4. (Possibly) increase (double?) the respawn rate, which will make backtracking to safe healing sources less rewarding. This does nothing to stop the giant item hoarding commonly seen in medsci though, where every item in the game is stored there (why did they bother giving us an inventory?)

By playing this way, you will suddenly find that:
- Nanite costs for things like security terminals, hacking difficulty etc actually matter. You will no longer end the game with a huge overabundance of nanites
- Red nodes are still generally not worth taking, but if you're running low on nanites, they might be a risk worth taking. With free saving they are literally a worthless choice as they either succeed, or they fail and you reload.
- You might actually run out of med hypos (and, god forbid, have to actually buy some!), as your particularly bad fights will stick with you and will have to be healed off, rather than being simply deleted when you go "that was terrible" and reload.

I'd suggest everyone try it. It's a completely different (and in my opinion, far better) gameplay experience. I might try an ironman run one of these days too, although I can see how it could be frustrating going RIGHT BACK TO THE START because a psi reaver kills you in body of the many. I feel like my approach above is forgiving enough to not be frustrating, but still punishes you for your mistakes. With this playstyles, QBRs aren't that bad (although the nanite cost is still WAY too forgiving)

as mentioned, we are very sure saves are handled by the engine, so no, ain't gonna happen. self-restraint, best restraint.

I think Dark Souls has the most balanced QBRMs I've seen so far in any game - you get fully refreshed, but the entire area also gets fully respawned.

Of course, it doesn't have saving at all, but it's still overall a good system. Save scumming is impossible, but at the same time the death mechanics are sufficiently punishing.

Imo the big problem with SS2 is that the QBRMs contradict with the save system. As you pointed out, if it's not cheap nobody will use it. But if it's cheap, it's overpowered.

I really wish there was a way to limit the game to autosaves, but I guess players can already do that by just not saving.

I usually play "autosaves only, QBRMs disabled" and it's pretty fun. There's a few ironman playthroughs on YouTube and they look pretty fun too, but probably beyond my skill level.

You know missions can't disable saving and loading, right? That's functionality handled at the metagame level, which is completely outside the game engine.

No, I didn't know that. I've never tried to edit or create anything in the SS2 editor so I don't know what might or might not be possible, sorry.

Oh well, if anyone did want to "Iron Man" the game, then (as with most games) they could do it on the honour system.

Bioshock 2...It never gets old or boring, I think.

Most triggering post in the thread award goes to you, but it's for the best as you distracted me from some other triggering shit that I don't want to get involved in (been there, done that). The game was so boring and hardly improved the flaws of the first game (though it fixed some) that I gave up 70% of the way in and never returned. This is not an excuse for you to turn this into a thread about defending Bioshock 2. You bring this upon yourself with your constant Bioshock praise. Please just ignore me

I had ideas/plans to make QBRs more hardcore and more tightly integrated, but I'm not sure if they're feasible in NewDark.

Not to mention, I died only 2 times total in my last playthrough on Hard (with my mods which all make the game more difficult), both times to platforming on maps with no QBR or one I hadn't found yet. So even hardcore QBRs would barely make a difference, unless Impossible difficulty proves much different.

False. QBRs are so cheap and plentiful, they effectively allow you to continually throw yourself at hard enemies and wear them down for an extremely small nanites cost which can easily be replenished by a handful of easy kills.

Far from being babies, one of the reasons people use this mod is because they want the game to not be trivialised by mechanics that aren't balanced well.

Being kicked back to the start of the deck (the last autosave) is often further than the QBR anyway, trivialising things even more.

If there was a proper save scum removal mod it would pair well with this one.

Right, things are either shit or not. Stop confounding us with those multivalent ideas of yours, JDoran!

"Multivalent"? I've just learned a new work, thanks! 

Right, things are either shit or not. Stop confounding us with those multivalent ideas of yours, JDoran!

Bioshock being terrible at everything isn't exactly news.

It isn't even remotely correct, either. Bioshock was a terrible System Shock 2 sequel, since it was stripped of so much that made SS2 so great, but judged on it's own, it's a good, though not great first person shooter. And it did do some things really well; the setting is very atmospheric, Rapture does have a real 'feel' to it. The lore is interesting, the sound is well done and adds to the atmosphere and forboding. The plasmids are interesting, and fun to use, and the first half of the game is a lot of fun to play.

On the minus side, Bioshock is not a game for anyone looking for complicated or thought-requiring game mechanics. The atmosphere and enjoyment level falls of a cliff half-way through the game, the end boss fight isn't just un-enjoyable to fight and bafflingly easy to beat, but it lacks any imagination at all (which is amazing, given the imagination and ideas that went into the rest of the game), and replaying the game when you're overly familiar with it all does tend to feel like you're playing through a procession of scripted events.

On top of which, the game wasn't moddable, unfortunately.  Imagine the mods that talented fans would and could have made for the game. But sadly, it wasn't to be.

Just rebadge them all as Orgasmatrons.

The sim love units are basically that.

don't temp me.

Different things have different degrees of subjective believeablility, even if they are all actually impossible.

A good example is one I read that said most science fiction fans will willingly suspend belief for something that's impossible if it sounds possible, but not for a possible thing that sounds impossible. Imagine a story where there is a bomb on Earth that is powerful enough to destroy the entire Solar system. Probably impossible, but it's a story and the readers will accept it as such.

Now imagine that the bomb is on a countdown, and in ten seconds it will detonate, and destroy the sun, the Earth, Mars, Pluto, etc. The Hero rushes into the room, goes to the bomb, opens the front compartment, and is faced with a keypad. The only way to stop the bomb from detonating is to key in the defuse code on the keypad. The problem is, the hero doesn't actually know what the defuse code is, only that it's a twelve digit number. So the hero thinks "Well, I have nothing to lose", then he randomly presses a key twelve times, and the bomb stops, with a message "Bomb disarmed". That is possible, though the chances against it are monumental (999,999,999,998 to 1, I think), but no one would regard that as a good end to the story, despite it being possible. It just doesn't seem believable . Whereas if the hero was a cyborg from another dimension, who teleported in and froze the bomb in a time lock, it would somehow seem much more acceptable, storywise.

And I have to agree with Sarge946 here, I always felt that SS2's back-from-the-dead booths felt like the game was expecting a little too much from me, suspension of disbelief-wise. Most of the rest of the game was fine, but not a magical cure for death. If the QBR system could somehow tell when you were almost dead, then would teleport you to the booth, heal you 100%, and then release you, that would still serve the same game purpose, but even though the science required to do this would still be impossible, it would seem to be much less 'impossible', I think. than the mega-impossibility of bringing back to life a dead person.

They could even justify it story-wise, by saying that your character, like everyone who travelled on the star ship, had had an implant that monitored his/her life-signs, and if the implant recognised that the host's body was so damaged that death was imminent then the implant would broadcast a "Retrieve me and heal this human" signal to the nearest QBR booth.

Mind you, even as they are, the SS2 QBR thing does seem more believable in SS2 than in Bioshock. In System Shock 2, the few times you hear people talking (who might or might not be people...) they have other things on their mind so they don't comment on such an amazing thing as a get-out-of-death machine, but in Bioshock, you hear lots of splicers, who are bored, or worried about dying etc, yet none of them seemed concerned about having such a phenomenally useful machine at hand, and trying to get it to work for their own advantage. You'd expect some technically minded citizens of Rapture to try to get their own DNA accepted into the system (since, by the time you get to visit Rapture, the Vita Chambers are keyed to only work with Andrew Ryan's DNA), or at least to hear them talking about this.

I would enjoy a version of this mod where activating the QBRM starts some relaxing muzak playing inside and no enemy can enter. That would make it a happy place to store items and regenerate (mentally).

Yes, because of the game's own explicitly stated reasons for why cyborg midwives exist.

They were created to tend to the eggs, yes. But that doesn't mean that they can't exist anywhere else.

Yes, because of the game's own explicitly stated reasons for why cyborg midwives exist. Completely different from some mushy "I'm okay with this superscience but not this other superscience."

Except the reasoning is flawed.
SCPb4 changelist:

Midwives 1467, 1469 nowhere near any eggs. Midwives should only be in the BotM near eggs.
//fixed, replaced with shotgun hybrids 1616, 1467

Objections:

• Irrational had Body of the Many consist of the hardest enemies that fit the fiction (Cyborg Midwives, Invisible Spiders, Rumblers, Psi Reavers) because it's supposed to be a challenging final area. Shotgun Hybrids are fodder by this point
• It makes substantially less sense for a Shotgun Hybrid to be anywhere in the Body of the Many, since they'd get instantly consumed by the flesh already (the first stage is the parasitic worm taking over, but if they're already in the body they'd just be eaten for biomass as soon as possible)
• I can think of several locations where Cyborg Midwives are nowhere near any eggs elsewhere in the game, such as their introduction in the storage transitway at the bottom of Engineering, or the ones you can meet in Hydroponics hallways that can easily be assumed to be walking between hatcheries, which could similarly be assumed to be the case in BotM

Riiight. So you're fine with strong AIs, psychic powers, tools that can instantly repair any device, med beds that can instantly heal any injury, stasis field guns, anti-gravity generators, teleporters, replicators, interstellar starships, and reality-warping FTL drives. But QBRs? Well that's just silly!

Well, for almost most of those things i am willing to put my suspension of disbelief in there - for the sake of the experience of being marooned on a deep space vessel, one of my favourite sci fi tropes since i watched alien and similar things - except for Qrbs and psi-powers for example (although i intended to do a psi-only run for years, but never pulled through, but thats another story i guess..).

As for interstellar spacehips: maybe i just pretend i'm on an interplanetary ship instead of one heading to tau ceti; med beds = auto-doc units executing conventional surgery with accordingly long off-screen time, replicators = conventional good-dispensers, etc. etc.

would be all good stuff to be remodded too.. to make for an authentic hard sci-fi experience.. wouldn't it?

: /

i would love a version which removes the QBRs altogether.. they always seemed too unrealistc and immersion-breaking for me.. too much more like science-fantasy...

updated to 1.01, now you'll get one random item after frobbing the pad, accompanied by the spawn effect. also killed off the now redundant Polito mail about her activating the QBRs that would normally be received near the first machine (and makes no sense with this mod active as all the QBRs are permanently busted).

the scripting isn't exactly beautiful, but hey, whatever does the job, right?

also;the beauty of dml mods is that they are largely immune to changes in other mods, and even if something breaks, fixing them up if that happens is trivial. that's why I'm always saying, if it can be done via dml, do it via dml.

Fair enough.

I would love to do some reading on DML. I played through the game a few years back and DMLs didnt even exist, everything was all incompatible gamesys mods. I am really glad it's going the way of more modularity. Is this related to the new scripting possibilities in NewDark?

I think the vanilla respawning is pretty ok - its job is to keep the players on their toes at all times, and it does exactly that, I believe.

one way or another, tweaking the ecologies is probably one of the most, if not THE most annoying and time consuming thing there is as far as I'm concerned (see my ongoing effort to make the RttUNN ecologies not suck, still not done after a couple of YEARS), so there's that.

yeah enemy respawning is pretty okay. My "respawn everything on new map" idea was just to appease the people who turn respawning off completely, to maybe make the game a little better for them because of the large amount of backtracking in SS2. For the Dark Souls reference (respawn/heal everything when you die), I was talking about player respawning, to discourage the current "run at them with your wrench out many times until they eventually die" approach within the game. Would that be related to the complex ecology rules?

I understand modding is hard work though, so feel free to dump it all in the "too hard" bin. It was just a suggestion, and I am more than happy to just not use QBRMs at all rather than "fixing" the respawn mechanic (which I am sure a lot of people don't even see an issue with, which is fine).

I'm very sure making SS2 more like Dark Souls is the exact opposite of what I want to do.

That was just an example. There are plenty of ways to make respawning more fair without having to make it "The Dark Souls of System Shock Games".

This mod is actually really what I was looking for! Thank you so much! The idea of spawning random crap is really awesome! Ideally, it would be possible to make it spawn something once, then the keypad explodes (harmlessly) to stop an endless stream of objects in a way that makes sense within the atmosphere of the game.

Would it be possible to either include this in the official SCP as an optional extra, or maintain this alongside SCP as it gets updated? I would hate for this mod to suddenly stop working after an SCP update. Maybe you guys could consider adding an area to the space station mission (the one where you do your years of training) a command console that allows setting certain options, so that mods like this and repairman can be integrated more easily and be optional without having to install a bunch of different mods.

The big problem with QBRMs in the vanilla game, and the reason why I think there are people who don't like them, is that you can (almost) endlessly throw yourself at the enemies and wear them down, which pretty much makes any sense of difficulty disappear as long as you have even a modest amount of nanites. Would it be possible to make a version which doesn't disable QBRMs, but instead force-respawns every enemy on the map whenever you respawn, so that respawning is somewhat similar to games like Dark Souls. That wouldn't really make sense without disabling manual saving though, so it's probably too much to ask.

Completely, totally unrelated - could someone make a spawning minimod which completely disables respawning, but force-respawns every enemy when you change maps. This means you can reliably clear an area for temporary safety, but as you re-tread your steps (which you do a lot in this game), the areas aren't all totally empty when you move back to them.

I should really learn how to do this stuff and get on board so that I can do it myself.

Oh this was just a proof of concept, not actually intended for any particular purpose.