However, the two senior designers quickly shot down the plans, saying the tight deadline would have made them unfeasible.

System Shock 2 is a classic, but like its spiritual successor, BioShock, its final chapter is weaker than the rest of the game. The final map, “The Body of the Many,” replaces the winding spaceship corridors of earlier levels with a giant gut system where players must fight their way through hordes of enemies. If you’re not extremely careful, you won’t be prepared for the showdown with Shodan. While The Body of the Many is undeniably memorable, audiences generally consider it to be one of the weaker parts of System Shock 2.

According to System Shock 2 designer and BioShock creator Ken Levine, this is entirely his fault. He told Lawrence Sonntag of Nightdive Studios that he had an even wilder idea for the System Shock 2 finale, but it had to be scaled back. The result wasn’t as polished as the rest of the game.

“One night, I was going for a run, and I thought, ‘It’d be great if you went outside the ship in the zero-g environment.’ I was so inexperienced that I had no idea what that would take. Jon Chey and Rob Fermier just rolled their eyes. They were like, ‘Dude, we only have 14 months to make this game.’ You don’t want to make a level so different from the rest because it requires so much custom work that it would affect the rest of the game. It would have been cool to have that level, though. I understood, but I still made a level that looked and played entirely differently. I don’t think it’s one of the strongest levels in the game. That’s completely on me because I hadn’t learned yet that when you try to radically shift the focus of the game on the systems side, it just doesn’t get the love that the rest of the game gets,” said Levine.

Setting aside the mistakes that Levine made when setting up the climax of System Shock 2, it’s interesting to learn that he envisioned a map set outside Von Braun. This idea appears in several of the game’s sequels. Dead Space, originally intended as System Shock 3 before Visceral Games was influenced by Resident Evil 4, features several sequences outside the Ishimura, an idea further expanded upon in Dead Space 2. In Prey, from Arkane, we can also exit Talos 1.

The best part is that Levine learned from his mistakes.

Source: PCGamer