System Shockbe an exploration as well, and that’s why it’s all in the logs and the data, so
then it’s very tied into your movement through the spaces and to the world. The floppy
disk version had only text and no voice-over and should never have been released. I
fought against that and lost. The voice version is just so much better because you never
have to take your eyes off the world: “Here I am and moving around and hearing all this
creepy stuff.”
So it doesn’t interrupt your play experience.
Exactly. It just felt much
more integrated. I think in
Shockwe did do a good job
of integrating everything
into one piece a little
better. The tone of the
whole game was a little
more consistent, a little
more scary and alone, and
the systems were much
simpler. There were no
stats any more. InUnder-
world, there was all this
dice rolling going on
off-screen basically, and
I’ve always felt it was kind
of silly. Dice were
invented as a way to simulate swinging your sword to see if you hit or miss. So every-
one builds computer games where you move around in 3D and swing your sword and hit
or miss, and then if you hit you roll some dice to simulate swinging a sword to decide if
you hit or miss. How is anyone supposed to understand unless you print the numbers?
Which is why I think most of the games that really try to be hard-core RPGs actually
print out “You rolled a 17!” InWarhammerwhen you get a five percent increase and the
next time you roll your attack you make it by three percent, you’re all excited because
you know that five percent increase is why you hit. In a computer game you have abso-
lutely no idea. And so we really wanted to get rid of all that super-opaque, “I have no
idea what’s going on” stuff. We wanted to make it so you can watch and play and it’s all
happening. So that was really the driving force forShock. And, as I said, those minutes
of gameplay describing this tense experience, with the computer looking for you with
security systems and cyborgs. Everything’s gone horribly wrong and you’re trying to
figure it out. Those two or three little documents were the things we referred back to.
508 Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church
System Shock