System Shock is becoming.
The remake of the father of all immersive sims, the result of a long financing work through kickstarter and development, will arrive on the market in the course of 2021.
To increase the hype, it was Saturday afternoon Nigthdive to turn on thehyping with a new deep dive trailer that shows the game in all its beauty.
It is difficult to understand how a fan of the game Part 1994 can take a makeover of such an old and so important game, also because it is an operation that digs back almost thirty years in time and re-elaborates seminal atmospheres in a totally renewed graphic layout.
System Shock is a beloved game, a game that gave rise to a trend and a way of looking at the action game which made history and laid the foundations for an entire gender paradigm: l‘immersive sim.
Is System Shock more than the usual remake?
System Shock it is not the first immersive sim in the history of the video game, primacy that belongs to a certain brand of historical role-playing games of the eighties but, without a doubt, it is the one that codified its more precise formal premises.
System Shock's goal from the start was to take the labyrinthine and exploratory setting used by Looking Glass with Last Underworld e Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds placing it in a different frame. In this the narrative would have been dried as much as possible, leaving as much space as possible for a gameplay where exploration and fun had a prominent role.
In System Shock we are called to make our way inside one orbiting station controlled by a menacing artificial intelligence that has escaped human control, surrounded by crew members who are victims of genetic mutations and crazed cyborgs, the classic “Oh my God, I can't get out of this alive” situation.
The inspirations are very clear: Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey and a good part of post-World War II “dark” science fiction.
How to deal with a disturbing subject e “survival” like this?
Simple: putting the player at the center of a series of claustrophobic situations in which the fight is only a fragment of a multifaceted gameplay, in which in reality the player has to undergo tests of various kinds of skills, from finding a way to open a closed door to deciding which tactic to use to overcome an apparently blocked corridor.
In practice, the perspective is that of a action in prima persona, but with an extremely more sophisticated perspective and able to give the player different roads (even if only the use of equipment to interact with the environment) to reach the goal.
It was a seminal, crude game, still unable to exploit certain potentials of an idea of the genre, but which laid the foundations for mechanics that have been reused in a very wide way by the action in recent decades: in addition to the BioShock, spiritual heirs of the creature Looking Glass, bits of System Shock's innovations are also found in games such as Dishonored o Prey di Arkane. Instead, the sublimation of these critically acclaimed concepts came with a series called Thief and perhaps the deus ex machina (literally) of the whole genre: Deus Ex di Ion Storm.
In fact, if we wanted to think in purely gender terms, the immersive sim was a sort of collision point between the playful approach of action and the interpretative approach of a pure role-playing game, leaving the player a lot of different mechanical systems with which to interact to get to the real play experience.
Now, given these theoretical premises, the return to the scene of a game like that looks like the comeback of a superstar, or even better than a forerunner, in times when the immersive sim has suffered epochal setbacks and wonderful returns on stage, between ups and downs.
The point is only one: how much of System Shock will we find in this System Shock?
Nightdive's bet
NightDive Studios is a software house known in the world of fans for being behind the modern revival of several antiquated video games on a technical and non-technical level. His doom 64, his Turok 2, his Forsaken, his Harvester o suo I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream: there is so much stuff for a nostalgic in the story of Nightdive.
There is a small problem in this pattern: the new System Shock is not exactly a normal port but it is much more similar to a finished remake, than those that are similarly seen doing to better known software houses such as Bluepoint Games (of which remember the excellent Demon Souls).
Now the legitimate question arises: How much of the original will remain in this redone and corrected edition for next-generation consoles and computers?
It is a common notion that works of art (or even engineering projects) are human productive creative elements that can take advantage of the presence of limits.
Video games, specifically, through the presence of large computational limits have built their grammar over forty years ago, building entire videogame genres based on a limited re-representation of reality.
Several titles, despite these heavy limitations, have succeeded in the difficult task of becoming virtually immortal. System Shock, as we could see above, it is clearly one of them (albeit less than its absolutely formidable sequel) and in this new version of it.
The original System Shock, with its control system now clearly indigestible, exploited the limited technical capabilities of the computers of the time to paint a labyrinthine and obsessive world, with tunnels that curled up on themselves to form a ball of maps and corridors.
The budget and timing that, at the time, were specific to Looking Glass were almost as creative elements as the decision to create an action / rpg hybrid by the developers. NightDive, instead of stopping to update the updatable (with the excellent Enhanced Edition that we recommend you play) has decided to try to take the longest step and propose the commercially attractive remake.
The latter is really the umpteenth sign of a market that is going in a direction in which publishers and developers will make us buy the same work over and over again in the name of nostalgia in order to meet increasingly important development costs.
In the meantime, the risk that System Shock will ultimately be a good and fun game is there and it is also quite high, but the idea that it is the same original experience will hopefully stop being used in promotional material because it is useless to keep promising ourselves. which they cannot be.
The original experience is there and it is also available for a few bucks on the various stores with the enhanced edition, everything else is a market strategy.
