Player Freedom

One of the core tenets of System Shock’s design is giving the player as much agency as possible.

This is displayed before the player even enters the 3D game world, as System Shock offers one of the most customizable difficulty menus ever seen:

Your chosen name is your in-game name, though you are rarely referred to by it.

Want a DOOM clone? Well, it certainly won’t be DOOM, but you can turn off all puzzles and mission objectives.

Want a Puzzle game? Setting combat to ‘0’ means enemies don’t attack you until/unless you attack them. Turn puzzles off too for a ‘Walking Simulator’ feel.

Want an excruciatingly stressful experience? Max everything out, including ‘Mission’, which adds a 7 hour time limit to beat the game (the game normally takes around 12 hours to complete).

Beyond that, System Shock offered an incredible amount of control over player movement, especially for a game from 1994: jump, crouch, crawl, walk, sprint, and controlled leaning accompany the ability to look up and down.

You can freely load and unload weapons.

This freedom also extends to combat: unlike near every other FPS from the 90’s, picking up new weapons is a choice — and there are over a dozen weapons in the game, but the Hacker can hold just seven at a time. Among these are normal firearms, energy-based guns, and a couple of melee weapons. Each of the standard firearms offer two ammo types to use, and the energy guns have a slider to adjust power settings. A few weapons even offer the chance to use a nonlethal approach, with tranquilizer darts and rubber slugs.

Furthermore, the game world is not especially linear; each deck is a maze of hallways and rooms, but they are not arranged in a linear fashion. For the most part you can explore the station freely, with limiting factors being the need to acquire access cards, key codes, and character equipment, and completing objectives. And many of those weapons and items are not only available in a single instance, so there is not necessarily a ‘correct’ path to take as you can usually find what you need in more than one specific spot.

Believable World Design

The simulation-tier level of player control was complemented by the game world itself being akin to a simulation.

The level design of Citadel Station’s various decks was intended to convey the feeling of it being a real space. Granted, sometimes the architecture veers into the nonsensical but the world is largely realistic, with offices, storage closets, transport hangers, and maintenance crawlspaces. Walls are often lined with piping or electronics, to maximize space efficiency.

System Shock complemented the mostly believable level design with advanced engine features for a game of its time, including sloped floors, elevators, ladders, variable gravity and a full-blown physics system.

Weapons and other items are not automatically picked up by simply walking over them; the player has to manually pick them up and place them in their inventory. Similarly, throwing grenade-type items is not bound to a hotkey but rather requires manually selecting them in the inventory before throwing. Naturally, the game does not pause while you sort through your inventory or data reader.

Even more notably, in System Shock weapons actually use magazines, rather than feeding endlessly from a pool of ammo. And, again, reloading weapons is not done via a hotkey, but instead through manually reaching down and clicking an icon in the player’s HUD. Many guns also have substantial recoil due to the aforementioned physics engine. All these factors combine to support more methodical, slower-paced fighting that is the complete antithesis to DOOM.

Subdued Storytelling

Less bombastic action is far from the only way System Shock diverged from DOOM’s design, regardless of the ‘DOOM clone’ label it received for releasing after the blockbuster title.

While id famously shunned having a narrative with DOOM, with System Shock Looking Glass wanted to find a happy medium. They knew that the long texts of RPGs of the time were intrusive and conversations with NPCs were clumsy, so they opted to deliver the narrative through more passive techniques instead.

Aside from short beginning and ending cutscenes to book-end the narrative, the story is told entirely in-game, from the First-Person. As you explore you find audio logs left by the station’s late inhabitants, which flesh out the questions of what Edward Diego was up to and how SHODAN seized control. The game also uses environmental clutter to suggest what events may have transpired throughout the station.