Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has shared some helpful advice for those still struggling with the RPG's card-based minigame Caravan.
09.11.2023 - 15:21 / pcgamer.com / Warren Spector
PC Gamer's 30th anniversary issue is on-sale today, and includes a slew of major interviews with some of the creatives that have shaped our industry and some of its most important games in history. One of those is System Shock, and Warren Spector told PCG's editor Robert Jones his major contribution was to stop «it many times from getting killed.» The same roundtable also included Larry Kuperman and Stephen Kick of Nightdive Studios, which developed the recent (excellent) remake, who had an interesting observation to make about that game's reception.
Part of its nature as an immersive game was that System Shock didn't hold players' hands: it gave them objectives, sure, but then it's up to you to work out where you need to go and what to do. It avoids things like the breadcrumb trails so pervasive in almost every major title now, something that Nightdive found resonated with the contemporary audience in its remake.
«One of the big surprises that we found after releasing the game was that because we stuck so closely to the original mechanics, and just the formula, we found a lot of people praising us for not holding their hands; for not including waypoints and a mission point and objective markers and stuff like that,» says Stephen Kick.
«The surprise was: we originally thought that we were going to get grilled on that pretty hard, because it’s become such a standard and staple in games these days. The most surprising thing for us was that people described it as an atrophied part of their brain starting to wake up again as a result of playing System Shock, because it actually trusted them, and it respected them. And it made them think again, while playing the game. As much as I would like to take credit for that–you know, it’s a direct translation of what’s in the original.»
«To Stephen’s point, one reason we didn’t have waypoints in System Shock is because, often, you didn’t have a clear path,» says Paul Neurath, who worked on the original. «There were different ways you could go through. Creating a waypoint would artificially tell a player, „No, no, no. We want you to take this particular path,“ where that wasn’t the best path or the path that would matter to a player, depending on their play style.
»So I think that’s an interesting example where we did something that wasn’t particularly standard, and today it certainly is pretty non-standard. It’s not the way a lot of games continue today to do it. And I don’t know if you look at that as a good thing or a bad thing. But I’m proud that the team took that approach, even if that’s not the standard way to do it these days."
The full interview contains much more chat about System Shock and its remake, but that's far from the only classic this issue of PCG
Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer has shared some helpful advice for those still struggling with the RPG's card-based minigame Caravan.
The developer of the Silent Hill 2 remake, Bloober Team, is seemingly just as confused as the rest of us as to why we haven't had any news on the game since its initial announcement.
Some of the best Easter eggs in The Witcher 3 and/or Cyberpunk 2077 apparently haven't been found yet, according to CDPR narrative lead Marcin Blacha.
Just when everyone thought that the OpenAI saga was done and dusted, a report brought shocking information to the surface. As per Reuters, right before Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board, a team of researchers in the company had sent the directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence (AI) discovery, that they said could even threaten humanity. This key breakthrough is being considered as artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is otherwise known as superintelligence.
The Nintendo Switch OLED hasn't been quite as stubborn as the standard edition was when it comes to discounts. However, it took this week's Black Friday Nintendo Switch deals to fully knock the value of the console down to unprecedented levels. Yes, we've seen the odd $10 discount in the US or £289 sale price in the UK, but 2023's holiday offers are taking things to a whole other level right now - and I'm not talking about the Super Smash Bros. bundle.
Protagonist Alan is maybe not as good a writer as he once thought, and it's fascinating to watch Remedy work through those same feelings.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is juggling an impossible number of balls. In one fell swoop it’s aiming to remake the original’s shattering second act, continue where its 2020 predecessor ended, and set up an inevitable third game. But to make the burden bearable, the game’s development team is turning to a classic Star Wars sequel for some inspiration: The Empire Strikes Back.
A story has been doing the rounds that Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of GTA publisher Take-Two, thinks games should be priced by the hour.
The Final Fantasy 14 Twitter (now X) account bit off more than it could chew when it shared a prompt with the community which, although was undoubtedly written by a social media manager with only the purest of intentions, is open to all sorts of indecent interpretation.
You might have heard of the "horseshoe theory" in political science, which holds that far-left and far-right groups are actually closer to one another in terms of values and objectives than the political centre, coming together like the prongs of a horseshoe. I would like to propose an analogous theory for horror games and cute games whereby past a certain point of cuteness, the videogame in question teeters over dramatically into dread and nausea.
Modern Warfare 3 hasn't had the smoothest of entries. This latest entry has caught some major flak for being a 'glorified expansion' in the eyes of some fans, thanks to some confused initial messaging, carrying your guns over, and its speedy—some suggest rushed—development cycle. Now that it's out, the campaign's been panned for both its short length and an overreliance on «open combat» missions.
The folks at Valve are big fans of Nintendo's Switch OLED handheld console.