Looks Terrible

[funwithphobias]

This "remaster" looks like a bad mod that totally misunderstands the original art direction. The fact they're going to charge for this is laughable. Money-grubbing afflicting even a 20+ year old game

[Stoibs]

Ehhh... not the best bait.
No clowns for you.

[steedless]

Originally posted by Stoibs:

Ehhh... not the best bait.
No clowns for you.

He's right though.

[Stoibs]

Originally posted by steedless:

He's right though.

Subjective opinion noted.

Looks great to me, better than all those mods that we had to screw around with for the original version. Coupled with the QoL features, achievements, new animations etc. I can't wait to check it out.

No comment on the 'Charging people money' complaint since I dare say a lot of us here are set it get this one for free for backing the KS already.

But uh yeah.,.. if you don't know what Nightdive Studios does by now after they have a few dozen remasters under their belt then it just seems silly to make a thread and complaint like this when it is their M.O, and people love them for it.

[Trevor Reznik]

Took more effort to make this thread instead of modding the game yourself and playing it.

Some people sure love misery 🤷‍♂️

[Helios]

It does have a more stylized almost cartoonish look which I am not sure is what was originally intended by Looking Glass, but I don't know what you could realistically do to the low poly assets from back then without straight up remaking (instead of remastering) the whole thing.

[roygbiv]

TBH I'm kinda with you! The new lighting gives everything a more smooth and plastic-like look. I think I should be able to get used to it though.

[ULTRA]

I'm not 100% confident Ken-Levine-Looking-Glass had any kind of coherent artistic vision for what everything was supposed to look like, but whatever it was, their original game at least slightly more resembled the concept art than this Pöljö-ized Mojang version of it. At the time the game came out I kinda thought it seemed like they were doing a Marathon where they had a guy making Craig Mullins art and then just ended up making a kinda cartoony space base game rather than the grungy oil painting look.

It's actually kind of funny how OPPOSITE the philosophy here is regarding the art compared to the System Shock remake, where everything had to be rad as possible, and they had to quadruple down on the grainy textures, to the point where they started hallucinating things like that the humanoid mutants were supposed to be grown in vats rather than just infected crew members. Then, here, the "upgrades" are so conservative that the most interesting things we can really say about it are, "uhh the colors are a little off," like they took the stance that the models were just on the primitive side compared to level geometry and a real proper remaster would just consist of beveling some edges in Blender rather than putting gigantic robot arms on the assassins.

[randir14]

The new character models are too high poly, contrasting with the rest of the environments which they didn't bother to upgrade beyond higher res textures. I wonder how much of the upgrades were even made by Nightdive, since a couple years ago they said they were just going to ask mod creators to use their stuff... in which case there's no point in buying this remaster when you can already remaster it yourself for free.
SS2 is one of the best PC games of all time, so I don't know why Nightdive didn't give it the same love as they did with Quake and Quake 2.

[ULTRA]

Originally posted by randir14:

The new character models are too high poly, contrasting with the rest of the environments which they didn't bother to upgrade beyond higher res textures. I wonder how much of the upgrades were even made by Nightdive, since a couple years ago they said they were just going to ask mod creators to use their stuff... in which case there's no point in buying this remaster when you can already remaster it yourself for free.
SS2 is one of the best PC games of all time, so I don't know why Nightdive didn't give it the same love as they did with Quake and Quake 2.

Maybe by desaturating the textures they were trying to achieve some kind of blending effect on the models so it didn't clash AS hard with the surroundings - like I alluded to previously, one of the main artists here was a Minecraft guy who had ample experience in how gauche extremely detailed textures can look on basic backgrounds. I like to think even NDS listened to someone's reasoned opinion of how to ♥♥♥♥♥♥ their notion of pumping out another barely-upgraded game through KEX.

I think the extent of what NDS did was replace some subset of the models and textures and run the game through KEX with a few more modern rendering methods.

Quake and Quake 2 were godawful btw and at any rate it looks like pretty much the same process - eldrone up the models, hit it with some new lighting, mutter something about multiplayer improvements and ignore that stuff is mildly broken until after release.

Unless you mean releasing those ports for free, which is approximately what they were worth, that is.

[Blackout4711]

Hot take:

You don't have to play it

[CyborgParrot (on 3 week vacation]

Originally posted by funwithphobias:

This "remaster" looks like a bad mod that totally misunderstands the original art direction.

https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=8.0

Yeah sure, because some of the people with modding skills in the community totally understand the games original art direction.

Troll harder.

[ULTRA]

Originally posted by CyborgParrot:

Originally posted by funwithphobias:

This "remaster" looks like a bad mod that totally misunderstands the original art direction.

https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=8.0

Yeah sure, because some of the people with modding skills in the community totally understand the games original art direction.

Troll harder.

Literally quite litrully the art director for this release (Jonatan Pöljö/eldrone/eldron) was from the System Shock 2 and Thief modding community.

[troj]

Looks great, will be buying it.

[Rastrelly]

Dunno, looks faithful enough to me. The original always had the "early photoshop sci-fi + photos of meat" look, screens confirm it is still there. As I said in a different thread, more interesting is a question of value - will the remaster present enough to justify the purchase, or modded original will be enough. Also I kinda missed whether there will be an option to setup for original look. What I do love in remasters/remakes is the "swap graphics" button. Guilty as charged, yes.

[Utophiλn]

I disagree, it's looking great!