Help me a bit with the chronology here: you were to the shooting range before or after your experirnce with airgun?
IIRC it was the former, but I am not entirely sure.
Anyway, long break-action airgun and pistol/revolver on the range so not much commonality between those.
As much as there can go wrong when you add a firearm, untrained person and stressful situation, anything short of sniper rifle is really optimized for being pointed and clicked with as little thought as possible, so no matter how little training you had you'd stand a good chance of not only being able to fire ANY of SS2's STD/NRG weapon you'd find, but to hit your mark from distances enabled by Von Braun's interiors as well. Hell, little malnourished kids they use as soldiers in Africa have no problems firing AR's *without* professional training, implanted cyber-rig or cybermodules.
Anyway, given how much effect the suit has on the PC, it's not outside of the realm of the plausible that a suit malfunction (which did happen in the beginning) could have crippling effect on some of PC's basic abilities, including one to hold the gun. Maybe he got cramps in his fingers each time he tried, who knows.
What suit?
And memory restoration failure was the desired result of Shodan's tampering and she/it is nothing if not precise.
You are just inventing excuses upon excuses for shitty mechanics resulting from badly thought out decision because MUH SYSTEM SHOCK!!!1
Grow the fuck up - sometimes shit is shit is shit, even in things you love.
Meanwhile SS1 had all manners of things you plugged into your jacked-up brain that did actual stuff instead of providing boring bonuses.
Stat bonuses are boring. If your game has a system for transcending mundane reality, being cybernetic augs, magic or enchantments, you should use it to achieve something you couldn't do by just pumping stats.
I guess you forgot about PSI powers.
No, I am just specifically focusing on an element common to both SShocks - cybernetics.
PSI powers were neat overall, although a mixed bag with many boring and shit (Remote Electron Tampering anyone? watching those cybermodules swirl down the toilet would have been better use of them).
An implant that allows the devouring of annelid worms.
It was neat, but apart from the three researchanble implants all were just amulets of +1 to %STAT.
OSupgrades that enable a bunch of new abilities
One for extra melee animation (useful in tight quarters and with bonus damage), one for unlocking an alternative healing item, one actively counterproductive, one allowing extra +1 boring stat amulet to be equipped at a time, the rest were stat tweaks and % modifiers.
Shock 2 is a mix of stat boosts and cybernetic abilities. Meanwhile Shock 1 you get a small selection of tools, and only half of those are actually useful. And it's linear progression.
The fuck are you smoking?
In SS1 you get rather diverse selection of weapons - even accounting for 3 marginally different rayguns (and forgetting about SS2's four marginally different clubs) it's better than SS2 , stuff like jetpack, powered skates, targetting hardware, light amp, sensaround and a bunch of other toys. Even those that were situational or moslty useless (like sensaround) really fit the cyberpunk themes, made protagonists cyber augmentation relevant to gameplay and were fun to play with. You really felt like a scrawny but resourceful hacker dude up to his chin with advanced toys he could plug right into his brain. In SS2 ze goggles literally do nothing.
it wasn't a good RPG, it wasn't all that good FPS and it was a pretty shitty Sci-Fi story as well
Coming from the guy that likes Skyrim.
And has modded it to be a pretty good RPG and pretty great fantasy FPS.
As for the story, it first needs to be self-consistent to have a chance to be good. SS2's very premise is inconsistent with its setting.
Between Shock 1's controls
Painful but bearable, today easily remediated with mouselook mod (making the controls BETTER than contemporary FPS because switching between modes allows using strengths of both control methods).
near inconsequential respawn chambers,
SS2's QBRs.
unfulfilled Cyberspace execution
Well, yeah. It was all 90s and shit, but SS2's crappy hacking minigame was both less painful and allowed you to do more interesting things in the end, like disabling security or hacking turrets.
Doom did mazes better, for an appropriate comparison
Doom was less constrained by engine. Unlike SS1 was true 3D (and used it to its advantage over Doom), but OTOH it only really allowed orthogonal or 45 degree sloped/rotated walls/floors/ceilings resulting in rather abstract looking levels where Doom didn't suffer from this problem.
and being an FPS where ammo and health conservation does not play much a role, I'd say Shock 1 isn't even that great a game. A landmark title, innovative and good, yes, but not among the best (like its sequel).
On the ground of technical innovation and gameplay complexity SS1 makes Doom look like high-school programming project, with rich and polished gameplay elements that mesh well together and with supposed setting.
SS2 is a game that used already obsolete technology, with a bunch of often dissonant, badly balanced and poorly implemented mechanics and discarding most of the impressive things already done by its sequel. If it didn't nail the atmosphere and feelings of scarcity and vulnerability so hard there wouldn't be any contest between those two.
SS1 is an all around masterpiece, SS2 badly flawed and mostly inferior to its predecessor but did a small handful of things so perfectly that they were completely sufficient to build its legend on.
That SS2 managed to eclipse SS1 is the testament to this small handful of things it did horribly right but doesn't make it less flawed overall.
Telling which one is better is not an easy task, in no small part due to differences in their strengths distribution.
Immersion does not take precedence above all aspects of design. Also survival horror is precisely one reason why Shock 2's weapon skill requirements ARE GOOD. It enables a ton of build choice and all the goodness that provides, while still remaining restrictive as a good survival horror should be.
Bull.
First, in survival horror immersion is the king.
Second, weapon requirements actually hurt scarcity (which is the other king in survival horror in general and SS2 in particular), so without them SS2 could have played its strengths even better.
With hard requirements in place you have to accommodate players with different builds and choices of weapons, meaning that even if its scarce you provide enough of distinct ammo types and weapons that 1-2 weapon types and corresponding kinds of ammo are guaranteed to carry player through the game (even if they are scarce and need to be conserved).
And SS2 doesn't even handle those guarantees right - they easily apply to standard weapons build, but focusing on heavy weapons is much more problematic, while exotics alone won't even allow beating the game making them wasteful from pure build perspective.
OTOH If you didn't have hard requirements, you would not need to provide such guarantees, forcing players to scavenge and switch weapons and manage more numerous but smaller ammo pools each with its own niche utility, putting more weight on weapon modifications and introducing tension because carrying around and maintaining their favourite toys and dropping them for something that actually works and has ammo available, with same inventory space but much larger arsenal competing for it.
You'd also get opportunity to cut off availability of different kinds of ammo at different points in the game and make some types of enemies much stronger against certain weapons.
All of that would improve the survival aspect compared to blowing everything away with almighty AR or even cycling between whole bunch of laser pistols.
You'll have access to all of Shock 2's 16 (or whatever) weapons per playthrough, making you a walking tank with little concern for ammo, just like in Shock 1.
You'd still have limited inventory, limited ability to keep weapons in working order, and max ammo stack sizes could be reduced as well (SS1 ammo didn't need inventory space).
Inventory isn't a concern either as you can swap out as you please and weapons are persistent objects that remain on the ground for later use.
That assumes that level traversal is free. SS2 already has relatively frequent respawns.
You could also easily spread elevators around instead of central shaft or add safety feature to them where they would refuse to start with small, potentially dangerous loose items on the floor, and respawn aggressively when moving between levels. When moving back and forth between weapons you dropped costs you more resources than you could afford or could save by using those weapons you stop continuously backtracking to dropped weapons.
Maybe if weapons were designed to be highly disposable, as in they break a lot and can't be maintained so easily so you can't spam all these 16 weapons with such ease, but that is counter to specialisation.
They already have durability of wet paper, lack of weapon skill exacerbating degradation rates and chance of jamming would make it even more important, so would having to spread cybermodules between different skills to maintain your arsenal of weapons.
Unlike getting weapon-selective dickfingers, cleaning and conserving an AR, laser, fusion cannon and half-biological abomination that eats worms is going to be very different from one another and will require specialist knowledge.
The current method is fine and a game entirely in servitude to realism is no "game" I want to play.
Fucking soldier being able to fire a fucking gun is not a fucking game being entirely in fucking servitude to fucking realism, it's the minimal fucking amount of realism to not make it a complete fucking farce!
Thankfully that's not what Immersive Sims are.
They even have "immersive" in their bloody name.
I suppose you hate Deus Ex's RNG-based accuracy system too.
Why? It worked very well. It didn't give JC dickfingers when trying to hold a gun. It didn't make any weapon stupidly weak or overpowered due to damage modifiers.
It actually allowed you to use weapons effectively with little to no training in controlled situations where you could take your time but made them almost useless in tense, dynamic firefights unless you invested your points in them.
It had all the hallmarks of a good weapon skill system apart from somewhat clunky presentation and badly balanced cost/utility of different skill tiers (advanced was king, but taking anything to master was a waste of points).
Underworld's hit/cast % chances.
Magic seems to be a very involving activity so anything with casting failure chance looks like good implementation by default, similarly melee combat generally involves most attacks not connecting with the target because of being parried, evaded or stopped by armour.
Shock 1's cyberspace because it makes no logical sense and is very gamey?
No. Only because it sucks.
Or they generally prefer RPGs to shooters.
Good FPS or survival horror is better than shit RPG.
The latter is not an upgrade to the former.
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