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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

System Shock had some of the worst controls ever in a game.

It's a real pity because the underlying game was quite modern for the time.

The problem with the controls was very soon resolved with the arrival of Duke Dukem 3d, which used mouse for moving your view/camera around and keys or right mouse button for moving forward.

System Shock might have done better if it had the Duke3D style controls instead of the awful controls that it had.

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Shockolate replaces the original game's movement with WASD controls, and uses F as the mouselook toggle hotkey. This differs from the Enhanced Edition's usage of E as the mouselook hotkey, but allows us to keep Q and E available for leaning.

I am reminded of the review which first experienced twin stick controls in the year 2000. We had to discover these idioms.

> The game's control setup is its most terrifying element. The left analog stick moves you forward, back, and strafes right and left, while the right analog stick turns you and can be used to look up and down.

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/alien-resurrection-review/1...

I remember finding the transition from keyboard only duke3d (with ALT as a strafe toggle) to mouselook pretty painful initially. The flexibility was there but I had to relearn a skill which was kind of grating.

Yes, it came to being in a time where "the obviously right way" to do FPS controls on a PC hadn't been settled on yet. I see similar complaints from people who play Goldeneye for the N64 without having lived through the era.

Good news though: System Shock Enhanced Edition fixed it in 2015 and can be had for $10. Just disable Cyberspace though, it really doesn't hold up well.

Duke3D did have mouselook, yet it wasn't the default. The earliest mainstream FPS I can recall defaulting to mouselook was Future Shock (1995). Funny enough Quake also buried mouselook behind a binding/command you had to assign yourself.

Regardless, I agree SS1 was a classic. Yet even with the fan patches and modern controls it did so many things and was so hard I bounced off. Wish I had tried some of the skill adjustments but my pride got in the way. The reboot looks like a good chance to retry. After Deus Ex this genre has become my favorite.

I think the developers wanted "the mouse to be your hand" and you could aim the gun with the mouse without also moving the viewport. I remember missing this aspect in later FPS games.

This was reasonable thing to try out and this was partly developed before DOOM so how FPS games works wasn't settled yet.

Actually this problem with moving your hand independent from viewport wasnt solved unitil Oculus Rift CV1 with its hand controllers.

It could have so many more quality of life improvements... If I remember correctly there was also no quest log whatsoever, right? (So basically if you missed one bit of text, you don't know what to do.)

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