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systemshock 2 on gog.com!

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  • McGreed
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    McGreed polycounter lvl 15
    Yeah, I read about that, anyone who doesn't have it already, GET IT! It's an great game, and if you are bothered about the aged graphic, there is some help for some of it with mods. But I can really REALLY recommend that game, one of my favourite all times games.

    "Now buy, In..iiinseeeect!"
  • Andreas
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    Andreas polycounter lvl 11
    Can anyone confirm this versions is compatible with overhaul mods? Is this also coming to steam? Promotional website seems to suggest it is?
  • eld
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    eld polycounter lvl 18
    Andreas wrote: »
    Can anyone confirm this versions is compatible with overhaul mods? Is this also coming to steam? Promotional website seems to suggest it is?

    Without checking I'd have to say yes, the overhaul mods are all data and the game should not have changed at all.
  • Farfarer
    It works with Rebirth0.2 and SHTUP0.6, at least.

    Not tried any others.
  • roosterMAP
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    roosterMAP polycounter lvl 14
    cant wait to see it on steam. I already have a box copy tho. lol
  • Gmanx
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    Gmanx polycounter lvl 19
    roosterMAP wrote: »
    cant wait to see it on steam. I already have a box copy tho. lol

    Me too - this and Shock 1.

    For any noobs to the franchise, this is a legendary RPG and a must-play. Needs the mods installed for modern eyes tho.
  • ebagg
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    ebagg polycounter lvl 17
    About. Damn. Time!

    Maybe it's just me and my nostalgia, but regardless of its age I think SS2 is way better than Bioshock. Better setting, better atmosphere, which are both arguable but SS2's main antagonists are some of the best of any game ever. Shodan and The Many were AMAZING psychological adversaries!
  • Richard Kain
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    Richard Kain polycounter lvl 18
    I've never been able to find an original boxed copy for my collection. I've been keeping my eyes open for years, but it never shows up in my area.

    Congratulations, Good Old Games. Your hard work in securing this title has guaranteed that I will finally sign up for an account on your site. And now that I've looked at some of the titles they have available, I just know I'm going to be dropping some money on them. Time to break out the printer and cook up some custom keep-case covers.
  • MrHobo
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    MrHobo polycounter lvl 13
    ebagg wrote: »
    About. Damn. Time!

    Maybe it's just me and my nostalgia, but regardless of its age I think SS2 is way better than Bioshock. Better setting, better atmosphere, which are both arguable but SS2's main antagonists are some of the best of any game ever. Shodan and The Many were AMAZING psychological adversaries!

    You're not alone friend. SS2>BS forever. Ive played SS2 4 or 5 times over the years. I just LOVE the atmosphere and the constant feeling of overwhelming dread and horror.
  • moof
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    moof polycounter lvl 7
    My favorite game ever. Awesome to see all the love for this classic :D
  • [HP]
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    [HP] polycounter lvl 17
    For those who don't know, this is the grandfather of the original DeusEx.
  • vik
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    vik polycounter lvl 13
    Best.Game.Ever.
  • Lugbzurg
    roosterMAP wrote: »
    cant wait to see it on steam. I already have a box copy tho. lol
    From what I've been hearing, the only way it could get distributed online was with exclusivity to GoG. In other words, if what I've heard is true, it will be on Good old Games and only Good old Games. No Steam release. Ever.
  • Andreas
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    Andreas polycounter lvl 11
    Lugbzurg wrote: »
    From what I've been hearing, the only way it could get distributed online was with exclusivity to GoG. In other words, if what I've heard is true, it will be on Good old Games and only Good old Games. No Steam release. Ever.

    I read that one of their promo pages for the game mentioned a Steam release.
  • roosterMAP
  • rolfness
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    rolfness polycounter lvl 18
    the name Shodan still gives me the shivers..
  • McGreed
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    McGreed polycounter lvl 15
    The sound of a monkeys scream makes me run in panic.
  • cptSwing
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    cptSwing polycounter lvl 11
    Man, I never knew it had a coop mode!
  • Steve Schulze
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    Steve Schulze polycounter lvl 18
    McGreed wrote: »
    The sound of a monkeys scream makes me run in panic.
    The audio across the board is pretty masterful exercise in being utterly terrifying. Even those maintenance bots who talk like C3P0 manage to be incredibly menacing at times.

    It really is about time someone had a better go at those higher res character models. That Midwife is a bit of a travesty. Wonder what kind of specs you'd have to deal with.
  • eld
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    eld polycounter lvl 18
    Jackablade wrote: »
    The audio across the board is pretty masterful exercise in being utterly terrifying. Even those maintenance bots who talk like C3P0 manage to be incredibly menacing at times.

    It really is about time someone had a better go at those higher res character models. That Midwife is a bit of a travesty. Wonder what kind of specs you'd have to deal with.

    Did this one ages ago, the specs I used were above ss2 ones but below the rebirth mod ones, 256 for the texture if I remember right, the original was 128x256, the specs are around the same you'd see from quake3 era stuff, and there's PLENTY of artistic room to move around in, I'd say some talented polycounters could use the same specs as the original but pretty it up quite a bunch.

    The biggest hassle is getting the stuff into the engine which is even harder for the skinned models.

    old_3_big.jpg

    The one thing I made that did end up as a mod was the psi-amp replacement which some very smart people fixed up into a very mod friendly format for the game: (also very old)

    http://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=82.0

    SS2_eld_psiamp_v2.jpg
  • Steve Schulze
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    Steve Schulze polycounter lvl 18
    Ah, That's much better. Do the models need to be watertight? Being able to segment the mechanical parts would open up some more options.
  • eld
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    eld polycounter lvl 18
    Jackablade wrote: »
    Ah, That's much better. Do the models need to be watertight? Being able to segment the mechanical parts would open up some more options.

    not even skinned meshes if I remember correctly, you can have loose polygons.
  • Gmanx
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    Gmanx polycounter lvl 19
    I just heard a rumour that this GOG release of SS2 uses the revised 'Dark Engine' without giving props to the devs.

    Sad if that's the case. There's an awful lot of hard work gone into making this and ThiefII (they share a code base) work on modern machines.

    Anyhoo - it's great to see it available to a new audience.
  • Farfarer
    I'm not sure anyone knows who the author is? As far as I know it sorta turned up online unannounced.
  • oXYnary
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    oXYnary polycounter lvl 18
    Gmanx wrote: »
    I just heard a rumour that this GOG release of SS2 uses the revised 'Dark Engine' without giving props to the devs.

    Sad if that's the case. There's an awful lot of hard work gone into making this and ThiefII (they share a code base) work on modern machines.

    Anyhoo - it's great to see it available to a new audience.

    http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140849&page=3&p=2166662#post2166662
    Howdy all;

    I'm TheEnigmaticT, A.K.A. the head marketingbot at GOG; we've heard the comments from you guys here and, after investigating, wanted to get back to you with a reply. Apologies it took so long, but what with some of the involved people being in Poland and some being on the West Coast of the US, there's a long time lag in getting answers.

    1. About the patches from this community that are in use in our build of System Shock 2: Whenever we receive a build from a publisher / developer on GOG.com, that's the build that we have to use. Night Dive provided us with a build for us to use when we signed the game with them, and it worked pretty well out of the box. Armed only with the knowledge that it contained some "community fixes" for the game, we made a few changes on our own and then, after testing, found it was as stable as any 13 year old game is likely to be. Absent the knowledge of what those fixes were, we couldn't really request permission / get acknowledgement for the fixes from the community here.

    Many of you guys here know us; we have worked with some of you before on a paid basis to develop patches and fixes for games that we sell,. We're not bad guys and we're sorry about the fact that we've upset you all and caused this uproar. We're open to suggestions from this community on how we can address your concerns about the community-created content in the build in a manner that's fair to all parties. It's worth noting that any changes that we want to make to a build have to go back through the approval process with the publisher (Night Dive) again, however, so anything that we decide to do together will take time to go into effect.

    You guy seem particularly angry about the wording that Guillaume used in the interview he gave with RPS (There are some user-made mods out there which do phenomenal work on the game’s stability, but none of them were quite perfect, so we took the game to our expert techninjas to analyse and swat the remaining bugs). I think this may be a case where you're focusing on the negative excessively here. Guillaume explicitly acknowledges that you guys have "done phenomenal work on the game's stability" (it's a direct quote!); that said, our build engineers did make a few changes that, in our tests, improved things enough where we decided that they were worth committing to our version of the GOG.com installer for System Shock 2.

    Again, I'd like to apologize if you guys interpreted this as a slight. It wasn't intended as such.

    So what can GOG.com and TTLG do together to help make you guys happier about this release? I've got a few suggestions, and I'm willing to hear yours as well.

    1. Giving credit for the community-made mods in the build notes is certainly possible, although problematic for everyone because as I understand it, patch 2.4 was developed by someone whose real name is unknown and who appears to somehow have had access to the source code. For the rest of the content, we're happy to move forward with including some kind of acknowledgement for you guys.

    2. Including a reference to the the community contributions on the gamecard + a stickied thread in the GOG.com community subforum for System Shock 2, giving credit and telling people to come check you guys out and systemshock.org out..

    Also, possibly:

    3. Generate a new build that does not rely on SSTool. This is a little tricky for us, as it will require that we both retest the whole game again once we've made our build and also resubmit the build to Night Dive, since it will not be the one that they gave us. I'll admit that it's probably not our preference--SSTool works quite well, from what the build team has told me--but if you guys would prefer that we don't do that because you feel it's stealing from you, we understand it and we'll try to work with you all on this issue. Do keep in mind that if we decide that this is a path to take, it will take some time to accomplish. Remastering, retesting, and reapproving are, none of them, things that happen overnight or even in a week's time.

    That's all I can think of to help address all the concerns you guys have. What are your thoughts?

    Note: I'll be in a meeting for the next, like, four hours, (and my account at TTLG is in the queue awaiting mod approval :P) but I'll check back in as soon I'm done with it.
  • Andreas
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    Andreas polycounter lvl 11
    Unfortunate but I'm sure the situation will be rectified.

    So; what mods would people recommend, other than Eld's sexalicious orb? I'm mostly looking for visual overhauls but some gameplay tweaks might be ok too.
  • Gmanx
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    Gmanx polycounter lvl 19
    oXYnary wrote: »

    Thanks for the link and quote Oxy, a friend just sent the same link to me.

    That's a great response from the GOG guys.
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