![]() ![]() "I just wanted to welcome players and terrify them at the same time." I was like 'Lemme do this' and I rebuilt the level three or four times," he says. He stepped forward and asked for creative control over the level. In Med/Sci, Vogel saw his chance to make his mark. It just felt flat and kinda lifeless." The information kiosks were felt to be a necessary evil, but Vogel wishes they hadn't been included. There weren't any nooks and crannies that were either architecturally true to what a ship could be. "It was basically a flat basement space, and it just didn't feel like a spaceship. "There wasn't a really great plan for Med/Sci at the time because we're all scrabbling to make the entire game at once, right?" says Vogel. ![]() It's from this perspective that Looking Glass and Irrational began development. Indeed, if System Shock 2 did have a sequential structure, then Med/Sci would actually occur smack in the middle of the game. But the environment is built through a more holistic approach, with the player required to traverse back and forth through the ship frequently. The spaceship Von Braun does comprise several decks, each with a different form and function and separated by loading screens. From the player's perspective it isn't constructed from individual levels. System Shock 2 has a very different layout to Thief, and indeed most immersive sims. So I was like, 'I want to make this my own, and I want to leave my imprint on this title.'" "I loved the game design and I loved the theme, and I loved the original System Shock. I got this feeling that these guys wanted to make their mark," Vogel says. ![]() "When I met with Ken and John Chey, the guys at Irrational, I got this scrappy, hungry feeling that I wanted to be part of. When Looking Glass and Irrational Games joined forced to design a sequel to System Shock, Vogel jumped ship from the former to the latter. Although Vogel enjoyed his time on Looking Glass' seminal stealth game, he says it "was not as customisable as I personally liked". System Shock 2 was the second game Vogel worked on. How does a designer juggle all of these different elements when building a level? Vogel boiled it down to a simple objective. ![]() And on top of that you want that feeling of emergence, of autonomy as a player." "We're giving you all the world-building, we're giving you all these new notions of who you are, what's going on with the ship, all these new mechanics, new weapons. "We had to do a lot In System Shock 2 with the first level," says Ian Vogel, a former level designer at Irrational, and the man who authored Med/Sci. The opening scenes of Med/Sci are were heavily inspired by Half-Life. But Med/Sci itself substantially influenced how the remainder of System Shock 2 was developed, as it's in this initial area where the ideas and atmosphere of the game are established, and where the player is grounded in its themes and modes of play. It has directly inspired games like BioShock, Dead Space and this year's Prey, while aspects of its design have found their way into dozens of other titles. Med/Sci is the opening area of System Shock 2, one of the most influential games of its era. If you're lucky, you'll bludgeon him to death. No sooner have you made it through the airlock when you're attacked by a malformed crewmember, begging you to kill him. You rush to the airlock, crawling through a hamster run of corridors and access tunnels as you're given a brief rundown of how to play. There's an explosion, and Polito tells you to get out of cryobay, because soon there'll be another explosion, and then everything in the area will be sucked into space. Nearly everyone on the ship is either dead, or infected with a strange organism that mutates them and turns them hostile. Janice Polito, who summarises the situation. Illegal cybernetics have been implanted into your brain, and your memory has been wiped like a hard-drive. You awake in a cryotube on the medical deck of the spaceship Von Braun. It's one of gaming's most terrifying introductions. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |