New gameplay trailer for SS1 remake - medical level

[6647042e0f7fbbim]

Prey, while I did really enjoy it overall, had a lot of its own problems. Most importantly to me, the enemies are nowhere near as compelling as those of SS1 or especially 2 - The mimics had great mechanics but they weren't leveraged enough. Like most other enemies they only seem to spawn based on trigger with no randomisation. So if you already know the areas of the game you're going to encounter them (or where it's foreshadowed) you're free to let your guard down once you've cleared them all out.
Beyond their prophunt gimmick though, the other Typhon forms are quite boring - as someone else said earlier, humanising a game's enemies tends to make them a lot more horrifying in this sort of context. SS2 did that perfectly while in SS1 there's plenty of evidence indicating that most of them were human at one point. Prey however failed to do so - even though you can hear the "thoughts" from some of them, they're practically formless and not sympathetic in any real way.

Mechanically it falls short of both SS for lenient resource management. Because there's no weapon degradation you're only limited by ammo, and the resources to craft it are abundant. I've heard even with DLC (or update? Idk), the re-added weapon degradation is trivial to deal with because the guns don't jam until they're at the lowest condition and it takes a lot of use for them to degrade.

System Shock 3, from the teaser, seems to be going a similar route regarding enemy design unfortunately.

[6647042e0fa20fox]

The Mooncrash-DLC did correct many shortcomings of the main game's mechanics. I think if they'd continue this development and integrate it with a stronger story and better characters, they'd be on the road to greatness.

And, yes, I think you'll need someone who's devoted to empowering player freedom (like Spector and Harvey Smith) AND someone who's crazy about atmosphere, character building and telling stories (like Ken Levine and Sheldon Pacotti) to get it fully right.

[6647042e10850JDoran]

Isn't Prey 2 in development?  Could have sworn there was something about that a while ago. Though that could have been for the Mooncrash DLC.

I hadn't heard anything, though admittedly I don't keep my ear to the ground about new games. I've just googled, and sadly can't find anything more than a few rumours, so if a sequel is in production (I really hope so) then probably they're keeping it quiet.

I do seem to remember that before the DLC was announced (which wasn't too long before it's release) there were strong rumours of an early sequel, so that might be what you mean.

I'm currently replaying Prey for the 1st time (after 1st playing through it on the games release), and completely loving it. It's the most SS2-like game out there. As for Mooncrash, gave that a play this week. It's good, but there's time limits attached when I wasn't a fan of. Beyond, it's quite good as it's a rogue-lite. Played it for a day, then wanted something more substantial so decided to replay the main game.

Prey is really good, and as you imply, it's a very close relation to System Shock 2 made for modern hardware. There is so much to love about it, and it does so much so very well. But it does seem I'm in the majority in thinking that the last third or so of the game feels very rushed, the ending is extremely abrupt and disappointing, and that the unanswered questions that the final cut-scenes throw up result in a feeling of frustration rather than satisfied musing. Plus I really wish that the spawn points of the enemies were more varied, and that the enemies were more free-roaming instead of staying relatively close to where they spawn.

But the immersion, the space-station's layout and areas, the PSI powers, the variety of upgrades for the weapons and Psi Powers, the story-line, and almost everything else are really good. I've paid through the game twice, and will do so several more times, I'm sure.

Prey, while I did really enjoy it overall, had a lot of its own problems. Most importantly to me, the enemies are nowhere near as compelling as those of SS1 or especially 2 - The mimics had great mechanics but they weren't leveraged enough. Like most other enemies they only seem to spawn based on trigger with no randomisation. So if you already know the areas of the game you're going to encounter them (or where it's foreshadowed) you're free to let your guard down once you've cleared them all out.

There is some variation with where the Mimics appear later in the game, but I don't know if it's truly random, or if there's a limited set of spawn points and their use is decided by a simple formulae.

And yes, I hate how when you've cleared an area, you can be 95% sure you're not going to be attacked there. They can surprise you, but it happens much too rarely to keep you on your toes the way System Shock 2 does.

Beyond their prophunt gimmick though, the other Typhon forms are quite boring - as someone else said earlier, humanising a game's enemies tends to make them a lot more horrifying in this sort of context. SS2 did that perfectly while in SS1 there's plenty of evidence indicating that most of them were human at one point. Prey however failed to do so - even though you can hear the "thoughts" from some of them, they're practically formless and not sympathetic in any real way.

It doesn't help that your encounters/fights with them are so unmemorable. Once you've got the shotgun upgraded to almost full capacity then you can take down any non-immortal enemy using just the shotgun, the slow-down time ability, and the well known first person shooter technique of circle-strafing. Other than the Mimics (who can change their shape), most of the enemy aliens look and behave pretty much the same.

And as other people have said, even the genuine, still-alive and un-possessed humans on board the space-station are so unconvincing in their portayal that they inspire no feelings in the player. Plus even though the space-station, later on in the game, is so over-run with deadly aliens, a few of the humans seem able to move from place to place at will without being harmed in any way, even though at least two of them are unharmed and presumably untrained in any form of combat. So much so that you might think "Hang on, is there a twist coming? Is [person's name] really an alien in disguise or something, because they surely couldn't roam around in complete safety if he/she was the non-violent, unarmed human that he/she seems to be". But no. Unless that was a plot line that was abandoned at one time.

Mechanically it falls short of both SS for lenient resource management. Because there's no weapon degradation you're only limited by ammo, and the resources to craft it are abundant. I've heard even with DLC (or update? Idk), the re-added weapon degradation is trivial to deal with because the guns don't jam until they're at the lowest condition and it takes a lot of use for them to degrade.

The new additions, giving you a 'Survivor mode' are nice, but don't go nearly far enough (and they are optional, you can play the game without the new features, if you like, it's an option when you start a new game). The weapon degradation is too weak; for a gun that's at one hundred percent working, you need to fire literally hundreds of bullets to reduce the gun to non-working:

Quote (from Rosso's detailed write up at https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=6587.msg120502#msg120502)

A 100% condition Shotgun can fire 200 rounds before breaking
A 100% condition Pistol can fire 500 rounds before breaking
A 100% condition GLOO gun can fire 500 rounds before breaking (each clip is 42 rounds, for reference, this is actually damn quick if you use the GLOO a lot to freeze enemies)

I think there should have been a loss in impact/effectiveness or a chance of misfiring, when the weapon's condition was deteriorating, so that a 20% weapon was more inaccurate and/or fired weaker shots than an 80% weapon. On the plus side though, when you're wielding a weapon, it can be damaged by external forces, it happened a couple of times to me that I was hit by an enemy projectile, and my shotgun was so damaged that it no longer worked. But sadly the game is so easy that you're never short of weapon repair kits, and they are magic not realistic (i.e. it doesn't take time or user effort to repair a weapon, just go into the menu > inventory, and apply a weapon repair kit or two, and when you exist back into the game, your previously dead weapon is now working as well as it ever did).

You now have an oxygen indicator for when you're outside the space-station, or otherwise in an airless area. As long as your suit is better than 50% intact, then you seem to have literally infinite oxygen, whereas when you go down from 50% suit integrity then you only have enough oxygen for x number of minutes, depending on the suit's condition. And if you repair the suit (again, via the magic of a suit repair kit) then your suit defies the laws of physics by providing you with infinite oxygen again. Really convincing, that.

And now, instead of food and health kits healing all of your injuries, you now have specific trauma kits for otherwise incurable injuries. Such as burns, blindess, broken bones etc. But yet again, thanks to the magic trauma kits, you can heal anything via the easily available, portable trauma kits.

Yes, whether it's a weapon repair kit, a suit repair kit, or any of the specialised trauma kits, you can easily find (or make, when you find the plan for the recycling machines) them, and you can always carry a few of each in your suit, since they stack and take up little inventory space. And applying them takes no game-time and only very minimal player effort.

Don't get me wrong, they game is better for having these features. But they are far too trivial in their effect on gameplay , being very minor inconveniences in your fight to survive Talos 1. They should provide very real dangers to you, but it's well know that the game was apparently more complex and more difficult until the developers nerfed the game (by removing problems like the various traumas, and recycle machines only being able to make a limited number of items per item plans, etc), and so presumably that's why even with this new survivor mode, they kept it simple to not scare off any potential customers.

System Shock 3, from the teaser, seems to be going a similar route regarding enemy design unfortunately.

But the more complex the game, the less people will understand or buy it. The games buying public get dumbed down, unoriginal games because that's what we buy. It's unfortunate, but it's our own fault...







One question for you and anyone else who's played through Prey; What did you use the shape-shifting ability for? I can't remember what the ability is called in game, but it's the ability shown off in the game's trailers (so there's no spoilers in my asking this question!) where you change into a coffee cup. I only used it to change into something very small (such as a cup) so I could get through a small hole or entrance, such as under the bullet-proof windows on an the security booths. I've heard that you can use it for camouflage (which makes sense), but by the time you get the ability, you are (if you've invested in combat/weapon skills and upgrades) very capable of taking on any enemies anyway, so I never saw the need to avoid combat. I know that, when upgraded, you can shape shift into things like the turret guns, but if you do that (I never upgraded my shape-shifting ability), but if you do become a turret gun, do you have manual control over the shooting, or is it automatic shooting, or can you, in the form of a turret gun, not shoot at all?

[6647042e1098afox]

One question for you and anyone else who's played through Prey; What did you use the shape-shifting ability for?

I chose not to use the alien powers.

[6647042e10c0eJDoran]

I chose not to use the alien powers.

Fair enough. Some of them are really good though. And even though I had quite a few, the turrets didn't attack me, instead they all said (words to the effect of) "Insufficient Typhon material for analysis", and so they never attacked me.

[6647042e10da9icemann]

I only used that ability to get into a couple of the locked rooms where there was no other way (that I could see) to get in there. I'd pile up some boxes, place a cup on top then shape shift into a cup, then jump through the gap.

In Mooncrash I used the psi abilties much more often on the 2nd character you unlock since most of his skills are in psi + one of chipsets I unlocked granted psi point regen over time.

[6647042e11478RocketMan]

Graphics and gameplay are not mutually exclusive. We develop both aspects but neither is being sacrificed for the sake of the other.

Agreed but it doesn't always come down to man-hours or resourcing.  It could be that precedent, investor expectations or industry standards (among others) unconsciously and automatically drive a certain level of care and detail (care and detail are of course good things) in a given area.  However if that means adding the same detailed skeleton to all AIs so that they shatter properly or adding the same number of layers to textures so they react appropriately to lighting or whatever it is, you have pot-committed to something across the board in the interest of consistency, which consumes time, money, talent and while not mutually exclusive, all these things don't come from an infinite reservoir.  They do eventually tax the efficiency of something else.  So then it's a matter of what ratio or balance the team is settled on and what the relative importance of different activities are.  I was simply saying that there are some aspects of a game that could benefit from huge improvements due to leaps and bounds in the technology but which don't necessarily yield a better player experience by themselves.  I'm not a gamer who's "in the know" because I don't watch the news or the podcasts or whatever is out there but when I see these tech shows, they have a certain body language which says to me, "we're using this piece of proprietary tech so now we have to give them a plug and show you how their latest features are being put to good use in our game".  And my knee-jerk reaction (however irrational) is that that stuff belongs in tech demos and not in a game preview, unless it just happened to be needed to achieve a certain design objective.  But it seems more likely, based on the impression I get, that there is a conscious effort to use tech for the sake of... being competitive with other games, promoting the makers of the tech, appeasing investors, impressing the more impressionable segment of the target audience, etc.  For example, could you imagine making the entire game without volumetric lighting?  I mean you could make a better game without that, than some bad games that do have it, so volumetric lighting alone won't save a game - I think we can all agree on that.  But it's kind of expected now so fuck it - let's make sure everything has it, and bloom and a dozen texture passes and ragdoll physics and destructible environments, and this and that...  Is it all necessary, all the time to make the game better than its predecessor?  How was Bioshock better than SS2, what with its fancy water physics?  The game was visually stunning but failed to impress as advertised so...

This perspective may not be worth much however because I don't get particularly involved or become particularly informed in the details.  Others might have a different point of view.

[6647042e11d45JDoran]

Agreed but it doesn't always come down to man-hours or resourcing.  It could be that precedent, investor expectations or industry standards (among others) unconsciously and automatically drive a certain level of care and detail (care and detail are of course good things) in a given area.  However if that means adding the same detailed skeleton to all AIs so that they shatter properly or adding the same number of layers to textures so they react appropriately to lighting or whatever it is, you have pot-committed to something across the board in the interest of consistency, which consumes time, money, talent and while not mutually exclusive, all these things don't come from an infinite reservoir. 

They do eventually tax the efficiency of something else.  So then it's a matter of what ratio or balance the team is settled on and what the relative importance of different activities are.  I was simply saying that there are some aspects of a game that could benefit from huge improvements due to leaps and bounds in the technology but which don't necessarily yield a better player experience by themselves.  I'm not a gamer who's "in the know" because I don't watch the news or the podcasts or whatever is out there but when I see these tech shows, they have a certain body language which says to me, "we're using this piece of proprietary tech so now we have to give them a plug and show you how their latest features are being put to good use in our game".  And my knee-jerk reaction (however irrational) is that that stuff belongs in tech demos and not in a game preview, unless it just happened to be needed to achieve a certain design objective.  But it seems more likely, based on the impression I get, that there is a conscious effort to use tech for the sake of... being competitive with other games, promoting the makers of the tech, appeasing investors, impressing the more impressionable segment of the target audience, etc. 

For example, could you imagine making the entire game without volumetric lighting?  I mean you could make a better game without that, than some bad games that do have it, so volumetric lighting alone won't save a game - I think we can all agree on that.  But it's kind of expected now so fuck it - let's make sure everything has it, and bloom and a dozen texture passes and ragdoll physics and destructible environments, and this and that...  Is it all necessary, all the time to make the game better than its predecessor?  How was Bioshock better than SS2, what with its fancy water physics?  The game was visually stunning but failed to impress as advertised so...

This perspective may not be worth much however because I don't get particularly involved or become particularly informed in the details.  Others might have a different point of view.

No offence, mate, but please divide your posts up into paragraphs, as a wall of text isn't easy to read, for some reason (I know you do, so this one post is no doubt a one-off).

I do agree that new or not too well showcased graphical techniques are sometimes concentrated on too much, not only sometimes when it seems that the developers should have spent more time on something more fundamental, such as enemy A.I., or making the controls tighter and more responsive, but also that sometimes the new-ish graphical effect can make the game worse. As I think we've said before, who actually wants perspective blur? It might look great artistically, and as regards realism, but I really doubt many games players want their (in-game) vision to be artificially hampered in any way.

BTW, regarding Bioshock, have you played it recently? The water effects do look pretty poor now, to modern eyes, because the bar for water effects is frequently raised by game after game. At the time Bioshock's water looked really good, but whilst it doesn't look bad now, you can still see how the illusion is done when compared to newer games like Batman: Arkham Knight. I am referring to the original Bioshock, though, not the remaster, as I can't remember in the water looked better in that.

[6647042e11f52RocketMan]

Sorry, the wall of text was laziness.  I'll try not to do that again.

Re: Bioshock, I was referring to when it was released.  They made quite a big deal about their water engineer and "you've never seen water like this" or something like that being said.  It was meant as a period appropriate example.

Also since you mention Batman, is that not a PhysX game?  Wasn't it a Batman game where they decided to put paper and other rubbish all over the place to showcase the PhysX engine?  I haven't played it so maybe it's a good game but I noted their overuse of that feature so it seems to me this tendency is widespread.

It's not necessarily bad to stay up to date and use the latest features and tools but it's a potential risk, when the vision was not clear in advance.  If the vision is clear, then the tools remain on the shelf until they are needed.

[6647042e12348Synaesthesia]

>But it seems more likely, based on the impression I get, that there is a conscious effort to use tech for the sake of... being competitive with other games, promoting the makers of the tech, appeasing investors, impressing the more impressionable segment of the target audience, etc.  For example, could you imagine making the entire game without volumetric lighting?  I mean you could make a better game without that, than some bad games that do have it, so volumetric lighting alone won't save a game - I think we can all agree on that.  But it's kind of expected now so fuck it - let's make sure everything has it, and bloom and a dozen texture passes and ragdoll physics and destructible environments, and this and that...  Is it all necessary, all the time to make the game better than its predecessor?  How was Bioshock better than SS2, what with its fancy water physics?  The game was visually stunning but failed to impress as advertised so...

The tech we're using in Unreal is standard Unreal Engine fare. Everything we're using in terms of volumetric lighting ships with the engine as of a version or two ago. It's nothing we had to program in from scratch, and nothing that detracts from our gameplay design decisions. Again, graphics and gameplay are not mutually exclusive. We are focusing on both. Graphics are currently more important than gameplay at this stage of development as we're fleshing out the look and feel of the world. We don't have all of the assets in place or even developed yet, so it's difficult to showcase more gameplay when there isn't anything there to showcase gameplay with yet.

It's also not like our design team consists entirely of artists. We have specific people devoted to specific tasks - designers design, artists create art. The art being showcased is not detracting from work going into core systems engineering or gameplay design any more than taking your bike to the shop to get new tires means that your chain and cassette can't be upgraded as well. Design and art are two different teams.

We demo art as we create it. It's part of being transparent to the backers who helped fund the game. Try to look at it as though it's a team of people who are specialized in different areas and are working at different speeds because their work requires progress from one side or the other before something can fall into place.

[6647042e12d75RoSoDude]

We're pretty heavily derailed at this point, but I figure it's worth chiming in with my knowledge on Prey. The critique of Prey's Survival Mode that I wrote (which @JDoran referenced here) is what ultimately inspired me to create my own balance modification for Prey, as it addresses all of the aforementioned criticisms and more.

Weapon degradation was almost well balanced in Prey. While 200 shotgun shells sounds like a lot, you should consider that you never find weapons at 100% condition -- it's always a random number between 25-55% (that's for the shotgun; it differs between weapons). During my first Survival Mode run where I didn't take any Engineering skills, I found that weapons broke often enough for me to have to trade for weapon copies that I found in the world or occasionally craft new ones (which start at 100% condition), forcing me to reapply any modifications. The real problem with the system was not the degradation rate, but how absolutely trivial it was to keep weapons repaired, since each spare part restored 25/35/50% condition for Repair I/II/III. If you spent a single Neuromod on Repair I, you'd never have to worry about weapon degradation again. I nerfed this to 5/10/20% condition restored per spare part, and gave weapons a high chance to jam below 5% condition (where before they always jam at 0% condition) to make it more impactful for the player.

I was a bit off in my earlier assessment -- oxygen only drains if you're below 66% suit condition (and faster if below 33%, and faster still if at 0%). I thought this was super lame, so I added a baseline drain between 66-100% so players who opt in for the mechanic actually have to contend with it. Suit Repair Kits are also made far less common, so having your oxygen drain quickly is a real concern -- I actually started to run out of them in my test playthrough. I don't have any real problem with the "magic" instant application of restoration items, but I do think the fact that you can do so while paused is a problem. Since a real-time inventory management is sadly out of the question, the only thing I could do here was give the radial selection menu 50% slowdown instead of 100% slowdown. Weapon, suit, or trauma repair will largely occur out of combat anyway, so a drawn-out animation (or god forbid, a minigame since Arkane is so great at making those) would just waste the player's time. Those systems should exist primarily for character building depth and resource tension, with the player asking themselves "Should I spend this crafting material on trauma/suit repair kits, or save it to make more ammo and Neuromods?" With (optional) halved recycler yield, this becomes a reality.

I was very disappointed with Mimic Matter on my first playthrough of Prey, especially as a signature ability so prominent in the game's promotion. I had assumed it would be a useful tool for stealth, but frequently found that rolling around as a coffee mug would instantly attract the attention of every enemy across the room. I later discovered that you have low visibility as a mimicked object if standing still, but high visibility if moving. This was originally going to be communicated in the ability description based on the game files, but for some reason the final localization file removes the line that says "Movement is possible, but may attract attention." What sort of visibility values are we talking? Well, let's lay out some stats that I found in the game files. Lowest possible is 0.0, highest is 1.0:

Standing - 1.0
Sneaking - 0.4, 0.25 with the Stealth Neuromod
Crawling - 0.3, 0.2 with the Stealth Neuromod
Mimic Matter (still) - 0.2
Mimic Matter (moving) - 1.0

I made the max visibility lower and added improved stealth camouflage to Mimic Matter I/II/III as you upgrade it (0.2/0.1/0.0 still, 0.4/0.3/0.2 moving), because in my experience it wasn't even clear that there was any stealth benefit, and the ability seemed useful only for rolling into small crevices.

I agree with the other criticisms of Prey, especially those that can't be fixed with systemic tweaks. The enemy designs don't really resonate, the story is mostly a snore, the final third of the game feels rushed and tedious, etc. Still, there's enough good in there that the rest was worth refining.

For the record, I actually agree with @bim on the subject of remakes vs reboots, at least in principle. In practice, NDS promised a faithful SS1 remake and failed miserably to deliver a reboot, so there's no question that they should have stuck with a remake in the first place. But this new version can't (and shouldn't) supersede the original, and thus will do well to iterate in some key areas of gameplay. Notably, if the remake shipped with improved graphics and a modern control scheme as its only changes, it would actually be a huge downgrade from the original in my book. The combat design of SS1 is rather mediocre as a shooter, but acceptable in the context of its original control scheme, which requires a lot of manual management from the player. With a slicker control setup and interface, the remake must have completely overhauled enemy behaviors to hold up the experience. As I wrote about the hotkeys available in the new SS:EE source port:

A quick note on gameplay: I think it's a bad idea to use many of the hotkeys they've made available to you, such as reload/healing patch/grenade/quick pickup hotkeys. SS1's combat is already rather straightforward with the mouselook mod, and much of the tension and challenge that was still there came from managing so many things manually in the interface in the midst of danger. Since reloading is instant save for the time it takes to mouse over from your target to the reload button, a reload hotkey renders magazine capacities as essentially pointless. Also notable is that there used to be a functional difference between dry reloads and tactical reloads, since you had to click once to unload a partially unspent magazine and again to load the desired ammunition type -- a reload hotkey merges these functions and removes another element that you had to keep track of. Other hotkeys streamline gameplay in a similar manner, to the detriment of tense moments where you're cornered and have to improvise a way to get out of a sticky situation. I appreciate that you can rebind hotkeys for your implants and whatnot, but I think it might have been best if they had left out many of the new ones.

To clarify, I don't think streamlining the interface from e.g. SS1 to SS2 was a bad thing -- I'd argue that Deus Ex/Thief/SS2/Arx Fatalis perfected the interaction paradigm in this sort of game with minimal loss of depth. Nor am I one of those people who insists you must play Doom with arrowlook, alt-strafe and CTRL to fire; or even SS1 without the mouselook mod for that matter. But the difference is that those convenience/quality of life features don't delegitimize entire chunks of gameplay. Doom still has tough encounter design that requires careful movement, weapon selection, and target prioritization with mouselook, and SS2 importantly compensated for its greater fluidity in gameplay and refined interface with aggressive enemies which did more than slowly shamble at you like turrets with legs. With the need to juggle the interface removed alongside the more straightforward movement and aiming from the mouselook mod, the flaws of SS1's combat design are stretched to a breaking point. It's like replacing Resident Evil 1's tank controls with Hotline Miami's topdown setup and expecting any of the horror or dread to remain in the absence of any other changes to AI, weapon design, and so on.

My point here is, the SS1 remake must iterate on gameplay to even be competitive with the original experience, so the mindset of "nothing must change!!1" is a bit misguided from the outset. The question, of course, is how much change is too much change, and where do we draw the line between "faithful remake" and "total reboot". While I haven't played it or the original, the Resident Evil 2 """Remake""" appears to strike roughly the right balance by overhauling the game's mechanics, systems, and content to suit its style of gameplay, regardless of how well it's executed. I lament that the existence of some form of remake always tends to make people completely discount the original and wish the gaming industry and community at large could come to an understanding that remakes/reboots should be considered on their own merits without a need to erase the original from consideration. But that's even more of a pipe dream than NDS' bloated reboot ambitions.

[6647042e138a7bim]

I [...] gave weapons a high chance to jam below 5% condition (where before they always jam at 0% condition) to make it more impactful for the player.

If it were up to me - be it in Prey, SS2, STALKER, FNV/3 or any other game with a weapon degradation mechanic - Guns should be able to jam at any condition (Minuscule when perfect, almost guaranteed when critically low). Being very complex pieces of engineering, there's a multitude more factors than just the physical, mechanical integrity of a firearm that determines whether it will operate as intended. Heat, environmental conditions (Dust, dirt, extreme temperature), the condition of magazines (where applicable), the consistency, quality and properties of the particular ammunition being used, improper user operation (Limp-wristing pistols for example), and lack of/improper maintenance.
While no normal game is going to go out of their way to simulate all these factors (Jagged Alliance 2/1.13 is the only one that gets even close), they can be emulated as just a simple probability. It also means that simpler, generally weaker weapons have another compelling advantage to them in this regard. It's not easy to cause a stoppage in a breech-loading rifle for example.
Undermining the player's ability to trust their equipment 100% is a great way to feed into tension, and can lead to it being released in interesting ways, especially when like with SS2, remediating the fact you heard a click instead of a bang and the enemy is undamaged requires player intervention. Do you take the time to clear the jam or fix the weapon, or did you have some kind of back-up? Is that back-up as close to ideal for this engagement as your original weapon? Do you force the engagement or decide instead to run away?
It's an especially under-utilised mechanic overall.

[6647042e13a21RocketMan]

Synaesthesia: 

I have actually been speaking about the industry in general and specifically how it applies to SS3 and their demo.  However I chose the wrong thread to talk about it, since this thread is for SS1 (sorry about that).  I actually think ND is more on target now and so my discussion was not a criticism of ND.  In any case, SS3 is a totally new game whereas SS1 already exists so what I've been saying is not really applicable to SS1's remake and I was only expressing concern for SS3, even though it's too early to warrant concern.

[6647042e13b81Synaesthesia]

No worries, I didn't take what you wrote personally. I just thought I'd clear it up as there's a common misconception among gamers that development of graphics and gameplay cannot co-exist and that one must be sacrificed for the other. If you're seeing that happen it's generally because of poor decision making.

[6647042e13c9cicemann]

To put my university teacher hat on for a sec:

The first step in the development of any game is paper prototyping to test out gameplay (from a board game style perspective), and to test quickly what works and what does not. Did Night Dive do any paper prototyping? I'll admit that I'm guilty of often skipping this bit myself very often.

[6647042e13e00ZylonBane]

Uh, they have an entire developed game as their "prototype".

[6647042e13ef5icemann]

My question was not to you Zylon.

[6647042e13ff8Synaesthesia]

He's right, though. SS1 is the prototype from which we're basing our gameplay decisions. If we were building the game from scratch we'd have more of a focus on gameplay right now instead of getting the level graphics up.

[6647042e140e9icemann]

Completely fair. In my remake projects I didn't use paper prototyping either. It's more for completely new games to test the fun factor, and if everything works well.

[6647042e14230Synaesthesia]

I'm helping brainstorm weapons right now. All I'll say is that I think you guys will like the direction we're moving toward. More to come soon.

[6647042e14333icemann]

Awesome