There's also frustrating context stuff: one of the potentially legit cool tier 5 powers sets a teleport beacon, where using the power again will take you to that beacon. Some of the best powers -such as Localized Pyrokinesis and Adrenaline Overproduction- are down in the second tier, and in fact most of the tier 5 powers are pretty terrible.
More broadly but less concretely, there isn't really any aspect of the game placing the more useful powers higher up. So instead of Projected Pyrokinesis being a way to upgrade your psychic offense, having invested tons of Cyber Modules to break into the third tier of Psi, it's just a garbage option you should probably skip buying. and then Cryokinesis is consistently more efficient against any target and Projected Pyrokinesis is inexplicably useless against all mechanical targets. As a direct example, Cryokinesis is a tier 1 attacking power, while Projected Pryokinesis is a tier 3 attacking power. Now, I don't object to a tiered concept per se, but the issue is that System Shock 2 doesn't really hold itself to a quality progression to fit to this tier system. The biggest one by far is the conceptual presentation of Psi being divided into five tiered sets, particularly the part where everything in a tier has a fixed cost defined by its tier: every Psi ability in the first tier costs 1 Psi Point, every Psi ability in the second tier costs 2 Psi Points, and so on up to the fifth tier abilities costing 5 Psi Points apiece.
narrative stuff I'll come to later that makes me less sympathetic than I might otherwise be, but unlike a lot of System Shock 2's failings Psi isn't something where it was executed extremely well in the first game and then System Shock 2 made it awful (The original System Shock doesn't have psychic powers to do well), and 'wizard analogue gets an interesting variety of unusual powers' is fairly common to end up screwball in any design, even in games that otherwise have very solid executions.Įven so, there's some frustrating, baffling decisions in the mess. Psi is one of the mechanics whose screwed-up-ness I'm most sympathetic to, as far as strictly mechanical stuff goes.
0 kommentar(er)
