Aja on 3/7/2025 at 16:30
Quote Posted by Ryu Connor
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.
TFix isn't controversial because you can turn off everything except compatibility and things no one in their right mind wouldn't want, like mouse wheel support.
Twist on 3/7/2025 at 16:56
Quote Posted by heywood
I don't think it's ridiculous to play SS2 without SCP because I don't think it's ridiculous to play vanilla.
Just to be clear, I wasn't saying it would be ridiculous to play SS2 Classic without SCP. I suspect you might be more disappointed than you realize if you did so, but I wasn't suggesting that at all.
I'm saying it would be ridiculous to play AE without SCP. This is because much of NightDive's work is literally built upon SCP, so you're basically disabling all their work aside from low consequence superficial work like interface and cutscenes. Once you do that, you're just left with their version of an unfinished and still-buggy version of Dark.
It's the engine code that's the problem -- not the Kex portion, for the most part, but the Dark portion. I don't think it's their fault. It's pretty apparent they never got access to the NewDark source, so they had to reverse engineer Dark again, probably from the same broken and incomplete leak that Le Corbeau used.
But NewDark has the advantage of over a decade's worth of iterations, refinements and optimizations. This may sound odd to System Shock 2 fans, but the prolific and highly engaged Thief fan mission community gave Le Corbeau a ton of data and feedback for refining NewDark. System Shock 2 greatly benefited from the Thief fan mission community. Go figure.
NightDive had none of that, and once they couldn't get the NewDark source, they probably only had a couple of years to reverse engineer Dark all over again and then pair it with Kex's renderer. (If I was less lazy, I could point to specific posts where Stephen Kick has outright pleaded with the author(s) of NewDark to come to him and how he claimed he'd protect them on any legal matters.)
Ryu: You don't sound unreasonable. I really do appreciate where you're coming from. And there are changes in SCP I don't completely like for one reason or another.
(Quick aside... I honestly don't know what you mean by Classic being a worse experience than Kex. The things people have pointed to liking in this thread are in Classic via SCP... aside from multiplayer. The things people have pointed out not liking are either SCP, not unmodded Classic, or Kex problems, not Classic played via NewDark. Aside from multiplayer and consoles, the most polished version of System Shock 2 right now is modded Classic, not the remaster. I sincerely hope NightDive keeps working on the remaster, but it's just not there yet.)
I do appreciate respecting the legacy of the original authors. But I think we could have a robust and reasonable argument with no clear conclusion about what exactly is the
right or fair way to exercise respect for them or their work. I seriously doubt they thought their work was perfect and complete, or that they feel the best way to respect them or their work would be to leave it untouched on a pedastal.
I do think people underestimate and underappreciate just how much SCP does and how much it does so well.You may find a handful of things you don't agree with, or a few situations where you don't like how it altered original behavior, but compared to that there are literally
thousands of fixes and enhancements big and small that you may not ever notice or realize are SCP and not in the original game.
We have no way of knowing for sure without a very deliberate interview, but I suspect the folks at Irrational and LG would actually
love and appreciate what SCP has done. Remember, they had to make that game in 2 years on a limited budget, and pedastals aside, they were, by their own admission in multiple interviews, young and naive.
SCP has been rigorously refined across multiple
decades, with that insanely persistent work fueled only by pure passion for making their favorite game as polished as possible. That's exactly why NightDive chose to build their remaster upon it.
Again, I don't agree with every single change. I don't think it's possible to make everyone agree on exactly how every little detail should or shouldn't work. I bet if you interviewed multiple former Irrational developers they wouldn't agree with each other on every little detail.
But I've also watched voodoo, ZB and others argue and debate for weeks or even months over the tiniest of changes or additions in SCP.
Whether you agree with the result of each decision or not, almost every single change in SCP has been very carefully considered and thoroughly debated. You just can't try to improve something and simultaneously fulfill every single player's personal idiosyncratic preference. It's just not possible.
I could go on here, but I'm sure most people grew weary of my uniquely tedious verbosity before they read even half my post.
ZylonBane on 5/7/2025 at 18:31
Quote Posted by D'Arcy
Damn it, Soma Transfer no longer works on the brain of the many, saving me the trouble of shooting the stars.
Soma Transfer does, in fact, work on the Brain of the Many. But you have to take out the stars protecting it first, just like with every other weapon. No more cheaty exploit for you.
Soma Transfer also now works on eggs, brains, membranes, worm piles, and the Many boss stars, so it's been buffed far more than it's been nerfed.
Quote Posted by heywood
Not working on swarms seems to be a bug/oversight.
It's an impossibility. Soma Transfer can't work on swarms because swarms are particle systems. They don't have a physical model for the psi power to target. They can only be affected by AoE stims.
D'Arcy on 6/7/2025 at 01:49
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Soma Transfer does, in fact, work on the Brain of the Many. But you have to take out the stars protecting it first, just like with every other weapon. No more cheaty exploit for you.
It's not cheating nor an exploit. It seems like a more than fair reward after spending 169 cybermodules to get it, especially considering that for a pure OSA character it's more annoying to hit those stars with projected pyro or cryo than it would be for another build using a gun. Removing this ability doesn't make the game harder to finish, it simply removes the main motivation to acquire that power. Or, in other words, it makes the game less fun.
ZylonBane on 6/7/2025 at 03:40
Of course you don't consider it an exploit, because it's an exploit you really really like, and you don't want to think of yourself as the sort of person who uses exploits. But it's totally an exploit.
Let's consider the two possible options:
1. Irrational intentionally made it so players with a certain power could trivially bypass the one unique gameplay mechanic of the BotM boss fight.
2. Irrational forgot to add DrainStim to the Invulnerable metaproperty, thus making any AI with this metaprop vulnerable to Soma Transfer.
I'm gonna go with door number two.
The "fair reward" for buying Soma Transfer is having Soma Transfer, a ridiculously powerful ability. There's no need to justify the expense with a cheesed boss fight.
BTW you seem to have completely missed where I mentioned that it works against the Many stars now. So no, you don't have to use guns, or cryo, or pyro to take them out.
D'Arcy on 6/7/2025 at 12:08
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
BTW you seem to have completely missed where I mentioned that it works against the Many stars now. So no, you don't have to use guns, or cryo, or pyro to take them out.
Fair enough, I'll give that a try.
But I always thought of the stars as some sort of physical shield, protecting the brain from damage coming from physical sources. Which I don't consider Soma Transfer to be one. That's why I don't consider it an exploit, and always thought that it was intentional that it worked the way it did.
[Edit]: After trying it on the stars, it's still totally worth getting it. It simply adds three more uses of it to get rid of the stars, but the fight is still quite easy. I actually think that the brain fight in the remake is easier than in the original, in the sense that even on Impossible there seem to be a lot less enemies - I'm usually only being chased by a single Rumbler and a spider, with low respawn rates once I kill them, whereas in the original there are usually multiple enemies pursuing us and constantly respawning. I do think that making every enemy die once we kill the brain was a very nice detail added.
heywood on 6/7/2025 at 12:32
This boss fight is cheesy regardless. The first time I saw the stars I was like are you kidding me?
Anyway, you can breeze through that fight easily using photonic redirection and a decent gun that's not going to break on you.
D'Arcy on 6/7/2025 at 14:01
Yeah, Photonic Redirection is always a must for that section. And I usually also get Anti-Entropic Field, so that I don't have to worry about weapon degradation. Although you really don't need to shoot that much anyway, not to the point where a gun would break on you.
A question: Has anyone figured out how to get the nanites and bullets hanging over a pool, right before the teeth? For some reason, Psi Pull doesn't work on them. That hasn't changed in the remake. In the original, I would just shoot them down, then grab them in the pool, but that is no longer possible because the pool will pull them down (and you, if you enter it, eventually killing you).
DarkMax on 7/7/2025 at 17:18
Calling that a "fight" is being generous.
ZylonBane on 8/7/2025 at 03:56
Quote Posted by D'Arcy
I actually think that the brain fight in the remake is easier than in the original, in the sense that even on Impossible there seem to be a lot less enemies
You're right, looks like the ecology period for the Rumbler spawner was changed from 1 second to 5 seconds back in 2014. Oddly, this change isn't noted in the issue tracking topic.
Maybe it could be turned back up a bit. 1 second is just ridiculous-- Rumblers respawn so fast there's basically no point even killing them.
Quote Posted by DarkMax
Calling that a "fight" is being generous.
Expert bias is a hell of a drug.
