System Shock 2: Aligned Priorities

So, okay, you've gotten to the mid-late game. You're not constantly meleeing things to death, or if you are it's because you've elected to be a melee build. Things are diverging, right? These different builds are different, right?


... no, not really.

When it gets down to it, System Shock 2 is loathe to make different builds really have meaningful differences in terms of how they relate to the larger game world. The primary axis on which you define enemy types is the meleeable-to-not-meleeable axis: is it trivial to kill in melee without taking damage? Melee it to death. Is it possible to melee it to death, but maybe less HP-costly to shoot it? (eg shotgun-wielding Hybrids) Probably melee it to death anyway. (HP restoration is cheaper and easier to come by than ammunition of any kind) Is it something that will actively punish attempts to melee it, such as most machine enemies exploding on death or how cameras are generally woefully impractical to melee at all? Okay, fine, burn some resources on shooting it or something.

So, for example, Standard Weapons builds and Heavy Weapons builds will both react to turrets and Maintenance Robots and whatnot in basically the same way: pull out your precious, powerful ammunition. That the Standard Weapons build is pulling out armor-piercing ammo while the Heavy Weapons build is pulling out the Grenade Launcher is a fairly trivial difference -especially since a realistic Heavy Weapons build will still be using the pistol and its armor-piercing ammo for lesser problem threats, such as Protocol Droids. (Which attempt to charge you and explode on you, making them extremely undesirable to melee)

Psi builds mostly don't avert this trend, instead exaggerating it by having most Psi be worthless or badly ineffective against machines, which already tend to be some of the most problematic enemies throughout the game. (Projected Pyrokinesis is inexplicably worthless against machines, and Cryokinesis does halved damage to them, and these are your only attacking Psi options) Realistically, an OSA build really ought to invest in Standard Weapons to unlock the pistol and its armor-piercing ammunition to make early turrets and whatnot less maddening.

And this stuff extends into the late game. The closest thing to a major exception is how Energy Weapons picks up the dual-circuit EMP rifle, which makes machines much easier to deal with but is worthless against organic enemies, and this is burdened by the key flaw that Energy Weapons really isn't viable. This is further harmed by the fact that one of the most machine-dense portions of the entire game (The Engineering level) occurs before you can get access to an EMP rifle. It's also burdened by the flaw that Heavy Weapons makes a joke of the issue: the Grenade Launcher gets EMP grenades, and where the EMP rifle does equal damage to an armor-piercing assault rifle round (Which works out to needing several shots to kill high-end machine enemies), a modestly boosted Grenade Launcher will one-shot even the toughest robot with an EMP grenade.

So hey, there's a meaningful build thing: Heavy Weapons laughs at robots in the long haul, unlike literally every other viable build.

Another reasonably meaningful divergence is how Psi gets early access to Localized Pyrokinesis: the damage field it produces is worthless against machines, but it makes you immune to all incendiary damage, which includes protecting you from machines exploding. In particular, your first run through Engineering has fairly dense Protocol Droid counts, and Localized Pyrokinesis makes their suicide bombing totally irrelevant, taking them from one of the more problematic enemies in the early game (They're not safe to melee, they're too numerous to be worth burning armor-piercing rounds on, but they're tough enough to require multiple shots from non-specialized ammunition to kill) to utterly trivialized by a 2 Psi-point investment. Localized Pyrokinesis also makes it more acceptable to melee turrets to death; this is normally worth considering doing up to a point -it's easy to circle-strafe a turret without being shot- but normally you'd beat them nearly to death and then back off and shoot them to finish them. With Localized Pyrokinesis you can just shrug off the death explosion.

But ultimately, the main build that seriously diverges is a melee build, since it takes a lot of threats you'd normally want to shoot and turns them into 'nah, I'll melee that to death too'.


Your priorities don't tend to vary based on what weapons you're using/your larger build consideration. The worst enemies to fight remain the worst enemies to fight. The easy fights remain the easy fights.

Making variable builds almost completely pointless.


Next time, I talk about how the game 'double-dips' on design goals, and how it's a problem.


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