Yes, that's obvious.
Why? You think if I'd just stuck with it a little longer it would have won me over?
There wasn't anything quite like System Shock when it was released. It's hard to tell now because of how old it is, but it was miles ahead of most games back then tech-wise, and the level design blew everything else away. It was also one of the first, if not the first, sci-fi horror computer games.
1994 was a great year for PC games.
Doom2, Descent, Warcraft, Master of Magic, UFO, Rise of the Triad, Heretic, Need for Speed, Raptor, etc. There were too many games and not enough time to waste on them.
Obviously its personal preference, but I remember when I first played Descent and I was just blown away by it. System Shock was sort of interesting for a few minutes, but it failed to impress me. I have high standards, I admit, and I hadn't paid anything for it to force me on, but I was clocking D&D RPGs years before SS came out, while also playing all FPS games like Wolf3d, Catacomb Abyss, Blake Stone, Doom and it was, to me, as an FPS veteran, a mediocre FPS game and without a full party it didn't even register to me as an RPG. I was even into adventure games like Secret of Monkey Island and Loom and Beneath a Steel Sky and SS couldn't impress me as an adventure game player, either.
I'll have to take your word about the level design, but being the first doesn't make it the best. System Shock 2 was immediately more immersive and I believe it was a better game.
Cyberspace was the the game's way of hacking into things, and to this day it's still the coolest mini-game within a game I've ever seen.
Well, I hate hacking/lockpicking minigames, in general.
I don't think SS1 would have aged well. When I first played Deus Ex I fucking loved it, but when I tried to replay it recently it just felt awkward and took far too long for your crosshairs to close in and become accurate. If I replay SS1 now, and it wasn't good enough in 1994, then I can't see how it would be enjoyable even if it was ported to a new engine.
But, hey, it's not me saying System Shock sucks! It's the developers doing the reboot. Clearly they realised it was a bad game then when they tried to make it good they realised they couldn't without changing it to a point where it's not even the same game.
I was quite interested in the reboot hoping that I'd finally get to experience the games greatness, but from what I'm hearing you couldn't make it great if someone gave you 1.3 million dollars to do so!