SS2 No Keypad Cheese - No more metagaming passcodes

[663715851ce31sarge945]

If you have technical feedback, or gameplay ideas, or other feedback to offer, I really appreciate it. But I don't see the purpose of your post other than to point out that you can't hack keypads. Umm... Yes. You couldn't hack keypads in vanilla either (except for a few, which are all still hackable with this mod). The only thing you CAN'T do is memorise the passwords, which has absolutely nothing to do with hacking and everything to do with metagaming, reduction of which is entirely the purpose of this mod.

If by "hacking" you actually mean "guessing" well...Lets see here. The majority of codes in the game are 5 digits. That gives you a 1/10000 chance of guessing with 1 attempt. This is realistically a non-factor when it comes to the "gameplay feel" of System Shock 2. In order to guess a code, a player would have to be astronomically lucky. Even with 3 attempts per code, you are very likely to complete the entire game without ever guessing a correct passcode. The only possible exception is the 00000 code, but that's already been discussed to death in this thread and I stand by my original theory - it's supposed to be hacked, given that the hacking information kiosk is right next to it and it's the first hackable panel most players will find in the game, so the 00000 code seems more like an oversight than a deliberate code choice. But even if codes were supposed to be guessed, having the player stand around for minutes at a time punching random numbers into a keypad, to me at least, sounds like really awful gameplay design and I respect the developers of System Shock 2 enough to think that they aren't stupid enough to actually design their game around that sort of gameplay. Deus Ex contains many codes which are realistically supposed to be guessed, and in all cases hints are present in the maps. You can guess Maggie Chow's code by her note about Tai-Fung being an invalid passcode. You can guess the key to the Dragon's Tooth Sword based on her birthday, which you find in a datacube. System Shock 2, on the other hand, offers absolutely nothing. There are no code clues whatsoever in the entire game. There is no puzzle to solve. Instead we have people suggesting guessing is a "real" mechanic because it's present in other immersive sims where the developers have actually put in the effort to realise it as a real mechanic. System Shock 2 is NOT comparable to other games in this regard.

In short, I understand you're trying to give your perspective on this kind of mod, but your criticism doesn't seem particularly relevant to the actual mod itself. Your issue seems more like an issue with the vanilla game. If you don't have a technical issue and aren't actually requesting changes on gameplay grounds, then there's probably nothing I can do to really address it inside of the mod.

[663715851cffesarge945]

@voodoo47 I have finally fixed this for SCP5, including the new transmitter code notes.

Can you please transfer the downloads and nuke the old files?

EDIT: actually, maybe keep 1.2 for the few people still using SCP b4. This now reads every qval for deck 5 from 10 to 25, so if they were used for anything else then this is incompatible with scp4. Everything else should be fine with either version of SCP

[663715851d197voodoo47]

it would probably be better to remove v1.2, as we don't really support outdated mod combos. so whoever has b4 with the corresponding mods is recommended to finish the current game in progress, and then just update everything to the latest build (b5/v1.3 in this case).

[663715851d499sarge945]

it would probably be better to remove v1.2, as we don't really support outdated mod combos. so whoever has b4 with the corresponding mods is recommended to finish the current game in progress, and then just update everything to the latest build (b5/v1.3 in this case).

I agree, but certain mod authors STILL haven't updated their mods to work with the latest SCP version, giving a compelling reason to still use SCP 4 for some people. Hell, I only updated this yesterday and SCP 5 has been out for months.