They’d be one in the same in every lexicon on the planet if it were humanly possible. The making of System Shock 2’s best level More From Kotaku Australia These snippets honestly don’t do Lane’s piece justice, so if you find yourself intrigued, hit up the full article below.
Do you choose to go down that hall or that hall first or second? … But at the end of the day you still gotta get the passcode to get out of the level.” “That’s where that hub and spoke comes in line. We don’t want you to get too far ahead of yourself, but we don’t want you to feel like you’re on a linear rail either,” he says. “You have a framework for how to gate aspects of the story, or the narrative, or the levelling. His approach to this problem was what is known as hub and spoke design. …Vogel didn’t want the options to be so broad that the feeling of isolation and claustrophobia were lost. System Shock 2 allowed you to build your character as a solider, psionicist or engineer, so the level had to be satisfying to all three, without compromising on theme and atmosphere: Of course, a factor that had to be catered for at every step was the player. Vogel wanted to imbue Med/Sci with a “dark and functional” feel and these naval vessels, both real and imagined, provided that cold and logical pragmatism Vogel sought.
“I would spend hours with Star Trek blueprints and I would just think about how a game level might be constructed, and I would look at where they put the toilets and I would look at where they put the research and I would look at how they built the decks relative to each other.” Submarines and battleships were also useful references.
For example, Vogel’s inspiration was a fusion of Star Trek, hospitals and submarines: Lane’s put together a great retrospective, where Vogel goes into a lot of detail about MedSci’s creation.