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System shock 2 mods cybernetic modules mod11/28/2023 ![]() ![]() It's a glitchy robotic future sci-fi stutter. See, in System Shock 2? SHODAN has a really terrible stutter. (Strictly speaking, you don't have to, but the most natural way of playing the game is to rely on her audio for direction, not to consult your Notes or to manually open up her 'emails' to get the textual version of her audio)īut mostly it's that whoever handled the process of rejiggering her dialogue into its glitchiness utterly failed to understand why SHODAN's dialogue worked in the first game. (Even aside your ability to just recheck her 'emails') System Shock 2 is partly just running into the problem that it made her your radio buddy who defines your objectives, making it so that you're really intended to actually listen to her if you want to know what to do next. Her dialogue is characterful and tells us a lot about her personality and why she's doing what she's doing, but if you struggle to understand her or find her too irritating to pay attention to or can't properly hear her through the sounds of combat, you can still complete the game just fine. Now, to be fair, this is in part a contextual shift: in the original System Shock, SHODAN's dialogue is never critical to understand for completing the game. One of the more intrusive failings is the utter misuse of SHODAN's verbal tics. This isn't the first of the game's blatant screw-ups regarding SHODAN, either. So I'm not spoiling anything the game doesn't, itself, spoil in the opening minutes of real gameplay. ![]() The intro explicitly tells you that SHODAN 'tried to destroy humanity'! even if you know nothing about System Shock 1 except what System Shock 2 explicitly tells you, it's really obvious that you're working for SHODAN. And given SHODAN is the primary focal point of the game's intro. The only possible scenarios are that Polito will turn out to be SHODAN (Quick, pretend to be surprised when you get to Operations and she thinks you didn't already know!) or that for some insane reason the writers decided to make a new character have a history of attempted genocide on the entire human species. XERXES asks you on the first floor why you are working with someone who 'tried to destroy your species once before'. I'm talking about the fact that within the first, oh, 30 minutes of the game you're all but explicitly told you're working for SHODAN, never mind that the game pretends this is a surprising twist when it slightly-more-explicitly reveals it later on. I'm not talking anything meta here: I don't mean 'it's obvious that your radio buddy will turn out to be SHODAN because this is a sequel to System Shock and the intro made a point of focusing on ensuring the player knows about SHODAN' or anything like that. The problem is, one of System Shock 2's more obvious failings is that the twist isn't a twist. Normally, I would caution the reader about spoilers regarding one of System Shock 2's Major Twists. ![]()
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