In a recent interview on Nightdive Studios’ Deep Dive podcast, former Looking Glass Studios programmer Marc LeBlanc talked about how he sees the System Shock Remake’s success as proof that there is an audience for games that challenge their players’ critical thinking and ingenuity, and that he hopes to see more developers respond to that in the future.
“One of the things that we’re seeing with the [System Shock] remake is a new generation of folks discovering the game that demands more from them,” said LeBlanc. “This is a game without a real quest log.”
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LeBlanc then pointed out how, when the original game released, quest logs and organized in-game journals weren’t a given in RPGs: System Shock and its predecessors were games that encouraged you to take notes, and connect the dots yourself.
While he noted that games being more approachable is generally a positive development, he’s glad that a new generation of players is able to experience the “tradition” of more demanding PC games, and that players haven’t necessarily realized “what they’ve lost” with the ubiquity of waypoints and quest logs. “I think there’s something there about a game that demands you put the pieces together in your head,” LeBlanc said.
He then pointed to one of the more memorable figure-it-out puzzles of System Shock, a great example of point and click adventure logic paired with immersive sim open endedness. “[Looking Glass designer Tim Stellmach] and I were driving home at four in the morning, and we had the epiphany that there should be a retinal scanner that you need to use a severed head on,” LeBlanc recalled.
“The idea that there’s a retinal scanner, there’s a bunch of severed heads, there’s a bunch of logs that talk about like, ‘This person has access to this thing,’ and it’s a retinal scanner, what are you gonna do?
“And nowhere do we put on a quest log, ‘Find the severed head of so-and-so.’ You can read logs to figure where he hangs out, maybe. Actually, you can vaporize all the severed heads, because all the game-critical severed heads would not vaporize. You could just nuke them all with your sparqbeam and the one that survived was the one you needed.”
Nightdive’s Locke Vincent pointed out that FromSoftware’s success is another example of how much of an appetite there might be for this sort of design, and LeBlanc concurred, also noting that games with tons of secrets and hidden side content, like Stardew Valley, also show a similar spirit. “But a game where you have to engage with that kind of stuff in order to meet the end goal is pretty rare,” LeBlanc concluded.
When I was a kid, I seriously struggled to get into The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind when I came to it from Oblivion’s omnipresent quest markers and infinite free fast travel. These days, though, I crave the sort of friction LeBlanc is talking about, being treated like an adult.
I think PCG editor-in-chief Phil Savage summed it up well in our 2023 GOTY coverage of the System Shock Remake: It didn’t need to be “dumbed down” to appeal to modern audiences, it needed an intuitive UI, satisfying gunplay, and Nightdive’s incredible translation of the OG System Shock’s classic, neon cyberpunk aesthetic.