Kolya on 18/2/2021 at 14:42
I'm not really interested in your speculation about my future or in convincing you of my opinions, Starker. Didn't you say this kind of discussion bores you?
Starker on 18/2/2021 at 21:54
Quote Posted by Kolya
I'm not really interested in your speculation about my future or in convincing you of my opinions, Starker. Didn't you say this kind of discussion bores you?
I'm not really speculating about your future. I'm doubting your sincerity and questioning your rhetoric of casting Kick as a villain and lambasting the community for selling out.
The way you portray it, it's as if the SS2:EE has little to no worth in and of itself and all Night Dive is doing is slapping mods on the game and calling it SS2:EE.
prengle on 20/2/2021 at 08:06
Quote Posted by Starker
I'm not really speculating about your future. I'm doubting your sincerity and questioning your rhetoric of casting Kick as a villain and lambasting the community for selling out.
The way you portray it, it's as if the SS2:EE has little to no worth in and of itself and all Night Dive is doing is slapping mods on the game and calling it SS2:EE.
to say nightdive is doing absolutely nothing else for ss2ee would be a stretch, afaik they're:
-- porting the game to kex just like everything else they've done
-- releasing a portion of reverse engineered source code (which is nice, but it's not the dark engine source dump to end all source dumps or anything)
-- "fixing" multiplayer
-- adding in half-baked vr support
-- making weird new model replacements because apparently rebirth has
that bad of a reputation
so yeah i guess that's rad, except i'm personally skeptical that they'll actually implement any of this well, and they're still piggybacking off fanmade mods? i would love if they proved me wrong but i'm not counting on it. i'm sure stephen and his team are trying to maintain some form of open dialogue with the community because a. that's just common courtesy and more importantly, b. it's good pr for them. i still don't believe that they necessarily have the community's best interests in mind and that judging by the last decade they're in this business for profit first and foremost. i may or may not change my tune when the ss1 remake actually comes out >:3
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Wait, Kick offered to buy systemshock.org?
Still, that's a completely different thing from giving permission to include a mod. Nobody's who's having their mod included will be losing control of it.
But just theoretically, let's say I, for example, refused permission to include SHTUP. It's not like I could reasonably demand money, because it's been contributed to by many different people. So SS2:EE would just not include SHTUP as an option by default. People could still go download and install it themselves. End result not really much difference.
i'm well aware that arguing with zylon is sisyphean but i'll mention this - the majority of players aren't going to get off their asses and install shtup or any mods themselves, because modding is hard and they have absolutely no interest in learning how to do it. this is why modpacks and automated mod installation have been the subject of several heated debates for.. decades(?) in almost every big modding community i can think of. this is also why mods being included in an official release like ss2ee is such a big deal to begin with, even though the same people will think it's nightdive's work and not fanmade work. you can't win with these people :sweat:
Kolya on 20/2/2021 at 16:01
Quote Posted by Starker
The way you portray it, it's as if the SS2:EE has little to no worth in and of itself and all Night Dive is doing is slapping mods on the game and calling it SS2:EE.
Maybe you'd like to point out where I did that. It would be really odd, because I know of the enhancements they're building into SS2EE and apart from the inevitable engine split it sounds all good to me. I liked the models they presented so far and said so. My opinion of what I've seen of SSR has also been generally positive.
And I think you got me wrong regarding Kick. It could be that he does everything right: ie NightDive might implement a mod manager in SS2EE that allows to update the mods, highlights authorship and maybe even links to their relevant threads, so people can discuss these mods and get involved.
It's just that
no one thought to ask him to do so when they handed over their mods. They just gave him the benefit of doubt. Now I don't know about you, but when someone has fooled me once, I don't tend to do that.
But when I'm pointing this out now, I'm necessarily in the anti-Kick corner. Not because I have such a one-sided opinion of him, but because the people I'm addressing are trusting him blindly to do the right thing.
Starker on 20/2/2021 at 16:54
Quote Posted by Kolya
Maybe you'd like to point out where I did that.
You said that Night Dive wouldn't even be able to call it SS2:EE without the mods, no?
Kolya on 20/2/2021 at 19:24
Yes, I said he couldn't call it an Enhanced Edition without SHTUP or putting in the work, of updating the textures themselves. That doesn't mean NightDive's own work was negligible. And because it's not, they need SHTUP to keep the balance.
Have you seen the game without SHTUP lately? And have you seen the models they are planning to add? There would be a jarring quality difference when of these new protocol droids walked though an originally textured door or past a monitor. You would notice right away that a big part of the game is 20 years old and some are new. That sort of thing is actually worse than everything being slightly blurry.
And yeah, people would rightfully ask how it's an enhanced edition when 70% of the the game is a blurry mess. Especially everyone who played SHTUP before.
Starker on 20/2/2021 at 21:49
Quote Posted by Kolya
And I think you got me wrong regarding Kick. It could be that he does everything right: ie NightDive might implement a mod manager in SS2EE that allows to update the mods, highlights authorship and maybe even links to their relevant threads, so people can discuss these mods and get involved.
It's just that
no one thought to ask him to do so when they handed over their mods. They just gave him the benefit of doubt. Now I don't know about you, but when someone has fooled me once, I don't tend to do that.
But when I'm pointing this out now, I'm necessarily in the anti-Kick corner. Not because I have such a one-sided opinion of him, but because the people I'm addressing are trusting him blindly to do the right thing.
Well, I can't get inside your head, so I can only rely on my observations, and the first one that set the tone for everything to follow was your letter attacking Kick's character and motivations. That's a major reason for me to believe that you're guided more by your personal antagonism towards Kick than merely being reluctantly forced into it by circumstances.
Also, I don't think you are really taking into account how much worse it could have been if Squeenix or any other big corp had nabbed the IP instead of Kick. He actually wants to do something with the game, instead of just sitting on it. And, regardless of his motives, he actually seems to want to have some goodwill in the community where a corporation would just not care. And he's not minding fan projects like the Citadel remake and letting them go on unhindered and doing other things like hiring Robb Waters and even people from the community to work on the games.
I guess what I'm ultimately trying to say is that it's not the case that the community has everything to lose and Night Dive has everything to win. It's a much more reciprocal relationship than that.
Kolya on 22/2/2021 at 03:13
Well you don't have to get into my head. Instead of interpreting everything through this pinhole of an angry forum post I made when I had to take down SSPortable, you could just begin taking into account what happened before and in the 5 years since that post. And you could try to understand that this here is only tangentially about Kick. Because his behavior in this was entirely as expected.
And "It could be worse" has always been a terrible justification for anything.
If someone like Squeenix had the Shock IP, NewDark would exist anyway. And Malba would have released "SS1EE" for free and with it the reverse engineered source code of SS1.
And I highly doubt that a big corp like Squeenix would have acted so unprofessional to release public (and partly anonymous) fan works.
So both System Shock games would exist in their current modern form without NightDive. Without any company earning a shit ton of money from fans. What a terrible thought.
SSPortable would likely still have been taken down. On the other hand we might be playing SS3 right now instead of waiting for another SS2 re-re-release.
Mmh. I might even still have my original hair color.
If NightDive make great strides in SS2EE and if they ever release SSR, that will be the first times they truly will have something to give back in this "win-win", "reciprocal relationship" after 9 years.
Of course we will have to pay for that, unlike they did for everything they took, but me, I'll be cheering for them anyway. As I have done on several of their SSR announcements.
But not before. I hope you can forgive me that.
Starker on 22/2/2021 at 05:59
I'm not justifying anything. I'm saying the situation is far from terrible. Pretty damn good, actually.
Is it really so bad that Malba is getting paid?
You are right, though, that Squeenix would never have released fan works. Or tolerated a fan remake or a SS1EE, for that matter.
And what a terrible thing indeed that people are able to purchase the games legally if they want. Such a "lose" situation. And SSP was allowed to be put back up without the assets and game data, no?
As for SS3, after the Thief reboot, I have more faith in Warren Spector (yes, even with Tencent backing) than Squeenix pulling it off, at least as far as creative vision is concerned. And he might well fail, for nothing is certain in game development.