It’s here in the opening moments where you learn the basics of shooting, hacking, and using psionic powers to conduct all sorts of space age wizardry. The tutorial system is narratively woven into the introductory sequences. And as complex as the game does get, you won’t need to spend time reading through the manual to come to terms with how it plays differently from something like Shooting Stuff 4: The Shootening. As part-RPG, upgrading skills is handled via trait-specific upgrade stations, with a currency system, and without any pause to the action. In System Shock 2 there are no arbitrary menus, cut-scenes, or screens filled with numbers that serve no purpose other than to be the gamey part where you add numbers to numbers.

Perhaps the greatest strength of System Shock 2, is how it keeps doing just that. For all its merits, the sense of immediacy that came from playing an action-centric shooter just wasn’t there. So even though the original System Shock, which came out in 1994, was a sci-fi based role-playing game (RPG) played from a first-person perspective, it was as complex as Doom was simple. The sort of experience where serious study was a required entry point. On the other hand a typical computer RPG in the ‘90s was seen as a game built on a diverse set of rules and systems. So to be able to do other things, like sneaking around in the shadows, or even just moving objects around, felt fresh. In the ‘90s, an FPS was seen primarily as an action game, one where the immediacy of the interaction heightened the immersion. Avoiding conflict and confrontation, two key things antithetical to early shooters, would prove to be intoxicating to players everywhere. As graphics and game engines embraced fully-3D interactive environments, things like the stealth elements in Thief: The Dark Project (1998) felt truly ground-breaking. By the late ‘90s elements from other genres would make their way into first-person shooters in a big way.

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