5/21/2023 0 Comments System shock 2 engineOne was a game of squad-level tactical combat called Terra Nova, another a civilian flight simulator called Flight Unlimited. In the months immediately after Ultima Underworld II was completed, the studio’s head Paul Neurath allowed his charges to start three wildly diverse projects on the back of the proceeds from the Underworld games, projects which were unified only by their heavy reliance on 3D graphics. Looking Glass’s publisher Origin Systems would have been happy to let them continue making games in this vein for as long as their customers kept buying them.īut Looking Glass, evincing the creative restlessness that would define them throughout their existence, was ready to move on to other challenges. And both were very successful, so much so that they almost overshadowed Ultima VII, the latest entry in the mainline series. Both it and its predecessor were first-person fantasy dungeon crawls set in and around Britannia, the venerable world of the Ultima CRPG series to which their games served as spinoffs. Looking Glass arrived at their crossroads moment just as they were completing their second game, Ultima Underworld II. It was in this moment, then, that the differences between id and Looking Glass, the yin and the yang of 1990s 3D-graphics pioneers, became abundantly clear. System Shock would demand far more of its players than DOOM, but would prove in its way an even more rewarding game for those willing to follow it down the moody, disturbing path it unfolded. They made exactly the uncompromising experience they had first discussed, refusing to trade psychological horror in for cheaper thrills. Meanwhile the folks at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based studio Looking Glass Technologies stuck obstinately to their original vision. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” id discovered that they weren’t really interested in making an immersive virtual world they were interested in making an exciting game, one whose “gameyness” they felt no shame in foregrounding. Lead programmer John Carmack summed up id’s attitude: “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. The team that was working on DOOM at id Software down in Dallas, Texas, decided that all of the elaborate plotting and puzzles were just getting in the way of the simpler, purer joys of blowing away demons with a shotgun. Both games were envisioned as unprecedentedly rich interactive experiences, as a visceral new way of living through an interactive story.īut in the months that followed, these two projects that had started out so conceptually similar diverged dramatically. Yet wresting back control of the station would demand more than raw firepower: in the end, you would have to outwit the malevolent intelligence behind it all. As you explored, you would have to kill or be killed by the monsters swarming the complex. You would roam its corridors in real time in an embodied first-person view both studios prided themselves on their cutting-edge 3D graphics technology. Each was to make you the last human survivor on a besieged space station. In late 1992, two separate studios began working on two separate games whose descriptions sound weirdly identical to one another. We hope that our toiling now to make things work when it is still very hard to do effectively will mean that when it is easier to do, we can concentrate on the parts of the game that are less ephemeral than polygons per second, and distinguish ourselves by designing detailed and immersive environments which are about more than just the technology. But we all believed very strongly in Looking Glass’s direction, and were proud that we were taking games to a more cerebral and story-rich place. There was, to my recollection, a vague sense of fatalism about the parallel tracks the two companies were taking, since it was clear early on that id’s approach, which needed much less player education and which ran on adrenaline rather than planning and immersion, was more likely to be commercially successful. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, we still had a lot of respect for the simplicity and focus of games. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We approached games as immersive simulations.
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