GB: So how was System Shock conceived?
DC: Many moons ago, after Ultima Underworld II, we decided first, that we
had done too many dungeon games, and second, we wanted to concentrate on
making a really immersive 3-D world that you can interact with.
System Shock is the result. In the game, you wake up from a rejuvenation
sleep to find that the space station's been taken over by the central AI,
SHODAN, who is scheming while mutants and armed robots patrol the station,
and you have to find out what's gone wrong and fix things. And along the
way you have combat, puzzles, exploration...
It's a first-person, smooth-motion 3-D game, similar in that respect to
Underworld. But System Shock has a true 6-D viewing engine, meaning that
you can look absolutely anywhere, fully up and down and sideways and all,
unlike UW where that capability was very limited; and we have an amazing
new physics system with all kinds of effects; and we've created tons of
cool objects and structures to play with... the emphasis is on giving you
a feeling of being there, in this rich, exciting, active environment you
can work with.
GB: So this is not a straight shoot-em-up like Id's Doom?
DC: Hey, we made it to question two before mentioning Doom! System Shock
is different in many ways, in fact almost all.
It's really more an
outgrowth of Ultima Underworld than anything else, without as much of the
"Joe sends you to Bob" conversation-based quests, and instead pushed more
towards action. But the real focus is on creating a world in which to
immerse the player.
Of course, there is plenty of action in System Shock. For a while all the
code that was running was basic running around and shooting and getting to
the next station level, and everybody was having lots of fun just doing
that, so you can play it that way. But System Shock isn't about continuous
combat so much as continuous tension, where we try to keep you wired and
wondering what's around the corner... we want to suprise the players while
we scare them, and give them plenty of things to play with too.
By contrast, Doom is a very focused action game: run around, get the
powerups, win the combat, solve the level. When writing a game like Doom
you want an outrageously playable combat system and powerup system, and in
Doom's case those two elements work all but perfectly; the folks at Id did
a great job, as usual.