System Shock 2 is a PC gaming classic, but much like its spiritual successor Bioshock, its final act isn’t as strong as the rest of the game. Its final level—The Body of the Many—swaps out the twisting spaceship corridors of the game’s earlier levels for what is basically a giant intestine, with you fighting through a resource-draining gauntlet of enemies. Unless you’re extremely careful, this can leave you ill-prepared for your showdown against Shodan.
While undeniably memorable, The Body of the Many is generally considered one of the weaker parts of System Shock 2. And according to System Shock 2 designer and Bioshock creator Ken Levine, this is entirely the fault of…Ken Levine.
Speaking to Nightdive Studios’ Lawrence Sonntag in a video deep dive Levine says this all started with an even wilder idea for System Shock 2’s finale. “I was at home one night, going for a run or something, [and] thought ‘Oh my god, it’d be great if you went outside the ship [in] the zero g environment’, he explains. “I was so inexperienced I had no idea what that would take.”
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Undeterred, Levine says he took this idea to Jon Chey and Rob Fermier. “They just kind of rolled their eyes at me. They’re like, ‘Dude we have like 14 months to make this game.'” Levine explains that building a level like that would have meant significantly expanding the scope of the project, to the detriment of the overall experience. “You don’t really want to make a level that’s so different from the rest of the game because it requires so much one-off custom work that that would make the rest of the game suffer in comparison.”
Levine reckons “it would have been really cool to have that,” but he accepted the wisdom of Chey and Fermier, sort of. “I got it, but then I still went and made a level that looked entirely different and played entirely different,” he says. “I don’t think it’s one of the strongest levels in the game, and that one’s completely on me because I hadn’t learned the lesson yet of, when you try to radically shift the focus of the game on a system side, it just doesn’t get the love that the rest of the game gets.”
Putting aside the mistakes Levine made building System Shock 2’s climax, it’s fascinating to hear that Levine conceived of a level set outside the Von Braun, not least because this idea is explored in several of the game’s successors. Dead Space, which was originally intended to be System Shock 3 before Visceral Games had their heads turned by Resident Evil 4, features several sequences on the exterior of the Ishimura that are further expanded upon in Dead Space 2. Likewise, Arkane’s brilliant immersive sim Prey lets players venture outside its Talos 1 space station.
System Shock 2 recently received a long-anticipated makeover courtesy of Nightdive, which Ted Litchfield thoroughly approved of in his System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster review. Levine, meanwhile, is still beavering away on his next game Judas, which resembles a blend of Bioshock and System Shock, with some ambitious plans for a modular narrative.