Marc LeBlanc, programmer: Origin wanted another Underworld, in space, and that is what we were pitching. After all of the pretension and forced whimsy of the Ultima franchise, we just wanted things to be dirty and messy and futuristic for a while, which is what drove the aesthetic. Grossman: Everybody had seen the Ridley Scott films, and I was a huge fan of William Gibson. Spector: My first D&D dungeon master was cyberpunk guru Bruce Sterling, so I was pretty steeped in the whole vibe. That went away at some point, and somebody said, ‘OK, now we’re doing cyberpunk.’ I don’t know whose concept that was, or why that sounded like a super good idea to them. Spector: Really? I have no memory of that at all. The first reference I heard to the System Shock project was somebody saying, ‘Oh yeah, we’re gonna do Sonic The Hedgehog, but it’s in space.’ It was a bunch of people out of MIT, and then a bunch of other extra people like me, who were picked up along the way. Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun The first reference I heard to the System Shock project was somebody saying, ‘Oh yeah, we’re gonna do Sonic The Hedgehog, but it’s in space.’ The work ethic was so strong that everything else just fell to the side. Even in art school they were saying, ‘You gotta cut the hair, you gotta put on a tie.’ And I walked into Looking Glass, and people were walking around with shorts and shirts that were way too tight, with hair popping out of the holes. Robb Waters, artist: Looking Glass was my first professional job. The whole company was full of people who cared about this. Greg Travis, programmer: Every few days we would go to the mall, buy any new game that was there, take it back and stand there and critique it. Working with those folks was one of the high points of my life, let alone my career.Īustin Grossman, designer: I remember someone writing about Looking Glass and calling it ‘the studio too good for regular fun.’ I remember walking into team meetings thinking, ‘I’m the stupidest person in this room,’ and loving the hell out of that. There was a thoughtfulness about what games could and should be that I haven’t encountered much since. Warren Spector, executive producer: That place was like a graduate school for game developers. Eventually it got bigger and had more problems, but in its early stages it was just a really raw creative place to work. Looking Glass was chock-full of talented, brilliant people who would set aside their egos. They were working out what they were going to do with the science fiction version of Ultima Underworld. Rob Fermier, programmer: I joined Looking Glass in 1993, maybe even late ‘92, pretty much at the start of the project. Long before gaining legendary status, Looking Glass was experimenting with early 3D worlds. Here’s the story of how it was made, as told by the people who made it. As one of our interviewees tells us: “We were trying to build the holodeck.” This was not so much a game as an alternate reality. The creative figureheads behind Deus Ex and Dishonored were wrapped up in its creation, and forever changed by contact with Looking Glass and its unique philosophy.Ĭountless studios have used Citadel Station as a star to steer by, measuring their own work against System Shock’s commitment to simulation, dense atmosphere, and method-ish refusal to break character. Without System Shock, there would be no Thief or Gloomwood, no Prey or Dead Space. SHODAN broke free, and the world was never the same. 30 years of immersive sim development started here, as Looking Glass escaped the restraints of the RPG genre and embraced thoughtful first-person action. So, when choosing your build, take into consideration whether you want to be super dominant in a single area or dabble across multiple skills.For a certain sort of PC gaming fan, System Shock is where it all began. Similar to life, while blending the best builds in Outer Worlds creates diversity across your gameplay, they are nowhere near as strong as a dedicated build. For example, your attributes, skills and aptitude all work together to make your character a force to be reckoned with when it comes to a specific task. What you will often find is that the best Outer Worlds builds are those which multiply your stats.
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