BODY MOVING

Before SystemShock2, Looking Glass had already explored three visions for the genre it had invented. Ultima Underworld was an RPG fantasy game. System Shock was about sci-fi shooting. Thief was all about stealth. But it was SystemShock2 that defined the most popular form of the immersive sim, since it was the first to fully incorporate the fluid action of a firstperson shooter. It exchanged SystemShock’s clunky mouse-pointer controls for those of Quake and Half-Life, while adding Thief’s physicality. Intuitive and fast, the controls added new fidelity to the genre. Now, in addition to RPG character development and exploration, you could master aim and movement, an innovation which laid the ground for hits that were to come, from Deus Ex to Dishonored.