There’s no two ways about it: System Shock 2 is an ancient, if venerable relic of gaming’s past. Yet, here we are in 2015 and you can download it for $US10 from Steam or GOG right now and play one of the most important (and terrifying) first-person shooters ever made. And it’s still being patched!
While the update is being distributed officially via Steam, the patch itself is a community-created one, specifically from a nice fellow by the name of “Le Corbeau”.
Here is the changelog:
Fixed various smaller issues that could potentially affect stability
Fixed light radius from dynamic lights on other objects so it matches light radius on terrain (instead of infinite)
Fixed (or at least reduced) issue where on rare occasions it could turn AIs invulnerable and non-collidable after loading or level transition (fix may not apply to existing savegames where this already happened)
Fixed bug with archive extraction failure not being detected properly in FMSel, at least for archives with unsupported compression method (like old zips using “Implode”)
Fixed some bugs in FMSel with localization, paths containing umlauts and other special characters, and added OGG to WAV conversion option
fixed DML parsing bug with link IDs
Fixed bug with “d3d_disp_enable_atoc 1” on nVidia where it ended up using SSAA (if available) instead of ATOC
Fixed bug where filtering was applied to even pixel scaled UI in DX9 on most resolutions even when it shouldn’t have
Added subtitle support
Added support for mission DMLs to include so called fingerprints, data that can link a DML to a particular mission (because mission filenames are often the same for different OMs/FMs)
Added support for mission DMLs to be bundled in dbmods subdirectories
Added support for DMLs to request additional OSMs and to reference objects by name
Removed GOG EULA.txt
Is it a thrilling, content-packed update that has all your bits tingling? Not really. But I doubt anyone at Looking Glass, the game’s developer, would have guessed that people would still be playing System Shock 2 in 2015, let alone one tweaked to run on modern hardware.
System Shock 2 [Steam]
Comments
7 responses to “15 Years On, System Shock 2 Is Still Being Patched”
If only Sims 3 were still being patched, then you wouldn’t even need Sims 4, you’d simply patch all the new features into Sims 3.
Well that is a random tangent lol. You are right but I still, random dude.
Sims 3 had 5 years of patch support, that’s more than most games get.
Take note, Ubisoft.
Anyone know if the awesome mods they developed that work with the good ol’ games version and retail are working well with the Steam version yet. I wanna get my SS2 on now that it is in my head again.
I have the unofficial fixes and rebalance mod, the texture upgrade, the character meshes upgrade, the gun meshes upgrade, and one of the sound mods (deepfriedbeer’s one from memory). I did have the UI resized but off the top of my head I don’t remember the mod to untether the UI resolution from the engine resolution.
All working nicely together. It’s stable, looks good, and plays as good as ever.
Cool, that is all that I want really. Just a tidy up of the game for modern sake like the earlier Skyrim mods. Not this turn it into some bastardized mess of different themes like the silly Skyrim mods.
Would sell shitloads if the only thing they did was remake it with CryEngine to modern day next-gen quality.