voodoo47 on 1/7/2025 at 12:17
oversight/exploit would be correct.
D'Arcy on 1/7/2025 at 12:32
I wouldn't call it an exploit. That's one of the most expensive psi powers you can get and you usually get it late in the game. Using it on the brain was a decent reward for it, especially considering that if you're playing as pure OSA, it's a bit more complicated to hit the stars than it is with a gun - you have to use projected cryo or pyro.
Ryu Connor on 1/7/2025 at 14:23
It was a clever use of the game system. A hallmark of an immersive sim like SS2. Its loss just makes the game more like a boomer shooter.
heywood on 1/7/2025 at 15:49
I don't think it was an exploit either. The original game manual said it works on anything organic. In the original game, it worked on anything organic except swarms. Not working on swarms seems to be a bug/oversight. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work on the brain if it works on other annelid forms and hybrids.
It's a tier-5 psi power, so it's an expensive late game investment and should have a good payoff. The tradeoff of building an OSA character is that you're going to suffer early but later on you'll get powers that make BotM easy. This is one.
D'Arcy on 1/7/2025 at 16:16
I was never a big user of exotic weapons in the original game, but I already gave them a try in the new version and they also appear to have been changed a bit. The Viral Proliferator now causes damage over time. Did this also happen in the original? Because I can't remember it.
Ryu Connor on 1/7/2025 at 22:53
It's a change from SCP.
Quote:
Viral Proliferator
○ Degrade rate decreased from 3 to 1.5.
○ Explosion base damage decreased from 15 to 10.
○ Viral infection effect added that damages target by 1 every half-second until death.
○ Fixed having no reload animation.
We'll be gaslighting/questioning ourselves about how the game used to be for the forseeable future.
heywood on 2/7/2025 at 14:05
Yeah, SCP is a mod, not just a patch. It messes with the gameplay and balance, so it should be skipped for a vanilla experience. The New Game screen includes a Mods submenu where you can "remove" SCP from the list of installed mods. However, I don't know whether that effectively disables SCP for existing saved games or just for new games.
Twist on 2/7/2025 at 20:27
Keep in mind, the entire remaster depends on SCP as a base, as does over 90% of all decent mods out there.
In fact, without SCP, there's little to no reason to play the remaster, as the underlying version of Dark they're using is significantly inferior to NewDark. The list of bugs and missing features in AE's version of Dark compared to NewDark is long and growing.
Every improvement in level design and every new environment detail comes from SCP, not any work that NightDive did. They readily admit that.
I'm not trying to defend the changes you don't like; I'm just saying that unless you want to learn how make mods yourself to undo those changes, it would be pretty stupid to play without it.
In fact, there is a Revert SCP Changes mod over at SystemShock.org. It only reverts a handful of things, but you can look at it if you want.
The reason that Revert mod exists is that people paying attention know it would be ridiculous to play SS2 without SCP at this point. Virtually every mod depends on it. So rather than disable the mod, they created a mod to revert the specific changes they didn't like.
You're welcome to do the same.
Edit - To answer the one question directly: You would have to start a whole new game after disabling SCP. This is because SCP makes significant changes to every level. Depending on where you are, you might get lucky when you first load your save game, but you'll eventually run into crazy jank or outright show-stopping bugs. In some cases, your save may not even load because your save data is based on a completely different version of the level.
Ryu Connor on 3/7/2025 at 07:20
Quote Posted by "heywood"
Yeah, SCP is a mod, not just a patch. It messes with the gameplay and balance, so it should be skipped for a vanilla experience. The New Game screen includes a Mods submenu where you can "remove" SCP from the list of installed mods. However, I don't know whether that effectively disables SCP for existing saved games or just for new games.
Disabling SCP and keeping AE active results in weird glitches and game breaking bugs that soft lock the game. I've tried it, I've filed the bug reports, and I've had a brief discussion with the lead Dev about it. AE not being disabled when SCP is disabled is marked as a bug to be fixed. Nightdive fixing AE to be independent of SCP will only happen if there are development dollars left over after they fix all the existing serious bugs... of which there are many.
Quote Posted by "Twist"
In fact, without SCP, there's little to no reason to play the remaster, as the underlying version of Dark they're using is significantly inferior to NewDark. The list of bugs and missing features in AE's version of Dark compared to NewDark is long and growing.
Yes, I've filed at least one graphical flickering bug in classic mode that was confirmed as a self inflicted wound from Kex having a different camera position than the original game. It also feels like the physics, input systems, or both are modified in some way too, but I didn't report it as a bug, because I couldn't objectively prove it. Classic/NewDark just feels different when interacting in the world versus Kex.
Twist: I hear you and I recognize that you're just talking with us and not defending a position. So don't mind me in what follows. I'm gonna complain to clouds.
I am not an inflexible purist about preservation. I use NewDark rather than putting Retail on a retro PC or using dgVoodoo as a fix for the compatibilty problems. What has always impressed me with NewDark patches was how it focused purely on technical issues. Double checking the NewDark patch notes on the wiki and the number of gameplay adjustments it has fit on a single hand. Of those changes some explicitly detail how they prevent crashes, like stopping equipped implants from being recycled.
Anniversary Edition (AE) and SCP does not maintain that balance. SCP has waded deep into level and system design changes that Le Corbeau appears to have made an effort to avoid. Many SCP changes are open to serious debate about if Irrational would have done that. Perhaps more egregiously the changes, right or wrong, directly erase the work of Ken Levine, Scott Blinn, Matt Boynton, Michael Thomas Ryan, Ian Vogel, and Shawn Shaft out of the game.
AE doesn't present a menu option, like a blu-ray film, between classic and AE. Even if a user is knowledgeable enough to understand the difference, the UI has a lot of friction in this regard. Additionally this thread has detailed how classic is a worse experience on Kex. Wanting to see classic effectively means you bought the wrong product.
Changed gameplay, obfuscation of the original, and a broken implementation on top. That's not even a token effort at trying to preserve classic inside AE. The SCP mod dependency has also distilled player choice in SS2 into an all or nothing scenario of classic versus SCP/AE.
What normal person is ever going to be able to parse what was a modder choice versus what is the classic game? What normal person will ever realize that Soma Transference not working on the Brain wasn't an Irrational Games decision, but the decision of the bourgeoisie who made the SCP mod?
New and old players alike will pick up AE because of some old YT video from MandaloreGaming, GManLives, or Lawrence Sonntag are gushing over how SS2 is a classic. Except those gushing reviews aren't from SCP, they're from memories of a now buried game. Yet others will be enticed by the tag line of, "Made by Ken Levine and Irrational Games of Bioshock fame. Packaged in an updated package with enhanced graphics and coop."
Except the original developers of System Shock 2 have less and less to do with the product new players will experience. The changes have become so extensive that fresh faces and their conversations with old-timers will increasingly run the risk of being divergent.
a. Was it this way?
b. I could swear this worked.
c. Gamer A: Try this to get past that situation | Gamer B: What do you mean? The game doesn't work that way? | Gamer A: Wait, what?
d. Gamer B: What's item X like? | Gamer A: You didn't have the item Y to try it out? | Gamer B: There were only so many of those, ran out. | Gamer A: That's odd, I don't recall them being scarce.
Hilarious part is, you can't even accuse this of being hyperbole. It happened right here in this thread.
The original SS2 isn't just being lost, it's being replaced. AE has created a packaged product that has and will dust the original game one mod at a time. At this point I'm fully expecting somebody to start changing the game script and dialogue.
The truly insidious part is that this obfuscation of who did what means that mods like SCP get to ride on the coat tails of giants. Every new accolade or disdain of an SCP change will be put at the feet of Irrational Games. No normal person is gonna give a fuck about a, "Well actually, that was a modder choice." Largely because nobody will ask, they'll live under the assumption, or simply believe in the appeal to authority.
Out of curiosity are Thief and Thief 2 dealing with bullshit like this? Hmm, Google spits out T2Fix and... it appears to be nowhere near as toxic as SCP.
heywood on 3/7/2025 at 13:17
Thanks to you both for answering.
I don't think it's ridiculous to play SS2 without SCP because I don't think it's ridiculous to play vanilla. That's how I started playing the game, how I fell in love with the game, and how I've played it the most. I think first timers should experience the vanilla game, maybe with graphical upgrades only. But I doubt many newcomers will, they'll probably get the remaster and go with SCP by default.
In hindsight, I think the community would have been better off breaking Straylight's Anomalies, Discrepancies and outright Bugs mod into two tracks:
1) Bug fixes, compatibility, hi-res graphics, and minor polish
2) Enhancements to gameplay, level design, and/or balancing
The first would be the modern playable version of the original art. It would be great if you could go back and play old saves with it. The second would be the community's attempt to make it a better game. Then everybody else's mods could be based on #1 and there wouldn't be these efforts to back changes out of SCP.
Easy for me to say though, since I'm not contributing.
