XERXES thus should be in-character and in-universe plausible and fine.īut System Shock 2 is a poorly-written mess of a game that seems to hate making sense, so it establishes an explicit plotpoint that SHODAN-like AIs were made illegal after the events of System Shock 1. It's tonally consistent for such a setting to react to an AI going mad with power by having the corporations of the story frown hard and decide that AIs are too convenient and therefore spending money to replace them with less efficient mechanisms, or spending money on further constraining them to avoid a repeat of Citadel Station, is something they can't stand to do and they'd rather placate the masses with Blatant Lies about how they're working hard to ensure such a situation can never repeat. System Shock 1 is a cyberpunk story, and cyberpunk is heavily centered around weak or nonexistent governments being pushed around/displaced by powerful and highly unethical corporations that do really, really stupid things because they're short-term profitable for the corporations in particular. See, I'd have totally bought it if SHODAN taking over Citadel Station back in System Shock 1 didn't cause the larger world to get concerned about powerful AIs. Unfortunately, the game went out of its way to make XERXES not make sense. not precisely self-effacing, but humble-seeming, certainly.

Where SHODAN was egocentric and maniacal, XERXES is.

that's as far as it goes, and it's inadequate) which is a biologically-rooted force. Where SHODAN is in control of her situation and is the one performing biological experimentation to create biological minions, XERXES is subordinate to the will of The Many (Though, frustratingly, it's never properly explicated how this happened.

The basic concept behind XERXES is fine, and indeed I was actually initially intrigued by a lot of the bits of the game's handling: in many ways, XERXES is handled as a kind of flipped-around counterpart to SHODAN. XERXES is one of the most infuriatingly, shooting-yourself-in-the-foot bits of unnecessary stupidity in System Shock 2's plot.

Shodan xerxes system shock 2