System Shock 2 Remastered makes modern triple-A games look bad

When you meet Shodan for the first time in System Shock 2, she gives you this slideshow recalling some of the events from the original game. Since I'm playing Nightdive's new remaster, and since Nightdive also did its own full remake of the first System Shock, I'd be unsurprised if the slideshow was edited so that the images from the 'first' game are replaced now with screenshots of the new, 2023 version. Some developers would seize this opportunity to tacitly establish their edition of the game at the center of the series' canon. New constantly supplants and erases old. The history of videogames is an oxymoron. This kind of thing - Konami using voice clips from The Twin Snakes rather than Metal Gear Solid for the Shadow Moses flashback scenes in MGS 4; Rockstar pulling the original GTA trilogy from sale when the Definitive Edition came out - happens all the time.

But the pictures in Shodan's slideshow are unchanged. Even though Nightdive has its own, new version of the original System Shock, when Shodan's talking about the series' in-world history, what we see is still the 1994 game. It's a useful metaphor for System Shock 2 Remastered as a project, and in a broader sense, the work of Nightdive in general. The studio upscales the visuals, smoothens the performance, removes any compatibility blockades, and takes games that were once confined to the museum of PC esoterica and puts them on all platforms. After that, it gets out the way. Rather than a remaster, a better noun for Nightdive's relaunch of System Shock 2 - and a lot of its other works - may be 'restoration'. It's like taking some old black-and-white film and putting it in 4K.

And you can talk about preservation, and the curation and safeguarding of videogame history; if games often feel unoriginal or unimaginative, and it seems like audiences are easily wowed, it might be because nobody has played anything that's more than ten years old. It's in the interest of game publishers and game developers to stop that from happening - if the original version of Assassin's Creed 3 was still available on Steam, probably fewer people would buy the $40 remaster. It's nefarious corporate behavior, and it also warps the general understanding of what videogames are.

Modern, big-budget videogames are created in such a way that imperfections are hunted down and eliminated. You have teams of hundreds (even thousands) of people. You have a lot of money. You have focus groups, quality assurance, alphas, betas, early access. And then it's patches and updates and seasons, the objective being to create something that is unfailingly functional, in the sense that a good electronic appliance is unfailingly functional - it never breaks, but more than that, it's denuded of any human energy; it's flawless, like people are not flawless. Videogame art and videogame software are conflated, an overarching and embedded paradigm of quality where the better a game works as a technical object, the more it is deemed successful as a creative one.

This will probably get worse. But it also feels like it's reached some kind of apex - or nadir - where the north star of modern, mainstream game design is to make the game seem as if it's produced with zero human input, that it looks and runs and plays and never fails like it's made by an elaborate infallible machine. The bigger problem is how this type of manufacturing process - make it work, make it flawless, make it smooth - has infected the non manufacturing process related parts of videogames.

In the same way that game developers are trying to make stuff that's technologically immaculate, and that players in turn expect games that don't break or have any operational defects, developers keep trying to make games that are also thematically and narratively and experientially immaculate, and players as a result expect games with no intellectual or emotional ruffles; games that don't require any work.

Nobody with real power in the videogame world will ever take seriously the idea that games aren't software, or technology, or consumer electronics. We lost that battle the day Star Raiders was bundled with the Atari 400 to boost sales. But what keeps happening in videogames is the encroachment of the software developer mindset and the software consumer mindset on the realm of art. The villain in System Shock 2 is a machine that's trying to mechanize people - mechanize all of reality. I won't patronize you by explaining why this game stings more now than it did in 1999.

Either because it had glitched out and despawned, or because it was buried in some insufficiently brightened corner of one of the samey, mono-textured environments, which are big and don't have objective markers, even with GameFAQs and videos I couldn't find the fourth canister of anti-mutant toxin that you need in System Shock 2's Hydroponics level, and I had to use console commands to cheat one in.

There are bugs in System Shock 2 Remastered that are also in the original System Shock 2. The game can be uncooperative in the same way as the original. And that's because the game is made by people. And if having technologically uniform games that are effortlessly fluent for the player means also eradicating all traces of imperfection, humanity, and subjectivity from other parts of the game, and it does seem to, then I'd rather play games that have bugs and other evidence that they're made by people wrestling with both their game-making tools and their imaginations.

Part of the reason System Shock 2 Remastered is good is because it keeps the bad parts of the original, and when you can see the struggle that the people making this thing were having - when you can see the drawbacks and the frailty, and everything that went wrong - it makes all the stuff that works and all the stuff that's gone right more impressive and meaningful. I'm a person. I like to feel the presence of other people. It's not controversial.