u/Catgutt

This recent discussion of Morrowind as an 'overlooked gem' got me thinking about the earlier Bethesda titles that, unlike Morrowind, actually do tend to get overlooked in retrospectives on the company. I recently replayed The Terminator: Future Shock, and given that it was Todd Howard's first gig as producer it's not surprising that it shares a lot of DNA with Bethesda's later releases. Additionally, despite its obscurity it showcases a number of features that would subsequently become FPS staples.

Overview

Future Shock is a DOS first-person shooter set in the post-apocalyptic Californian wasteland of the Terminator franchise's 'future war'. While the game has easter eggs connecting it to the films, it is content to just occupy the setting rather than lean on fanservice.

The game follows the typical FPS structure of discrete missions with weapons and ammunition carried over from previous ones. The weapons follow the classic FPS pattern, with a pistol (well, machine pistol), rifle, machine gun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, and a couple of exotic energy weapons. There's an added wrinkle in that many of these share ammo- for instance, the machine pistol, rifle, and machine gun all use 'bullets'- but the bigger weapons consume exponentially more ammo in return for only modest increases in damage and fire rate. So there's a bit of an ammo economy to the weapons, but in practice it doesn't make a tremendous impact to the gameplay.

The enemies are a wide variety of robots, mostly invented for this title. The titular Terminator doesn't show up until several missions in, and most of the fighting is instead against floating kamikaze drones, bipedal armless 'raptors' with lasers, and flying hunter-killers. There are a bunch of other killer robots including a tank robot, a wheeled rocket robot, a giant spider robot, a flying robot with swords for arms. The enemy visuals and their weapons are varied, and there are several dozen different enemy types, but there's nothing too exciting or innovative in behavior. Enemies make a beeline for the player on sight (with mediocre pathing if line of sight is broken) while continuously shooting or attempting to engage in melee.

Credit where it's due, this game does make the Terminators feel like a serious threat- they're tough and hard to hit thanks to their narrow profile, and can do a lot of damage in a hurry if you're not ready for them. Skynet's forces in general are tougher than most FPS enemies, don't have flinch/pain states, and explode into shrapnel on destruction, so it's necessary to engage cautiously and maintain distance.

Mission objectives largely consist of getting to an exit, or pressing a button and then getting to an exit. There's some mid-mission player character dialog, but for the most part the narrative is conveyed through text-based pre-mission briefings delivered by animated character portraits.

So far this is a pretty standard 90s FPS, but Future Shock has some notable elements that stand out.

Innovations

First, for a 1995 title it's impressive that almost the entire game is 3D. It uses sprites for weapon/health/ammo pickups and minor environmental details, but every enemy is a 3D model using its own volume for hit detection, and the level design makes heavy use of its fully 3D design. There's a lot of verticality in level design, with hills and canyons, craters, multi-story buildings, and jumping across rooftops. All of it is texture-mapped, and the engine supports dynamic lighting, with rocket contrails and explosions lighting up the environment.

While System Shock had achieved an explorable 3D environment a year prior, Future Shock blends indoor and outdoor environments into a semi-open-world design. Most levels are large and non-linear, and every intact building can be entered (after a short loading screen). The game doesn't often position ammo and health directly along the path to the objective, so it's necessary to explore for supplies both in the overworld and in buildings. Interiors are all unique, not procedurally generated. A garage has cars on stands, a corporate building has offices and a central atrium, a Skynet facility has computer banks and machinery. None of it is particularly interactive outside of a few setpieces and there are some wonky layouts, but effort was put into making this feel like a real environment. Outdoors, it's sufficiently well-done that when the briefings reference landmarks to navigate by, it's actually practical information.

Unlike System Shock, the game natively supports mouselook and it only takes a few minutes to set up a modern WASD control scheme. It even has throwing grenades as a separate function rather than treating them as a discrete weapon, a paradigm that wouldn't become popular until Halo six years later.

Although most of the missions are on foot the game also has drivable vehicles. There's a Resistance jeep, which handles about as well as you would expect a jeep in a 1995 FPS to handle, and a captured Hunter-Killer for a couple of flying missions. Neither of these are particularly remarkable in their own right but they do add some fun diversions from the core gameplay.

Overall, while the moment-to-moment shooting is just okay, Future Shock shores it up with great presentation and atmosphere. It shines in moments like following a ruined highway in the jeep at full throttle while being pursued by hunter-killers, using a makeshift bridge on a roof to reach a building whose ground floor is inaccessibly irradiated, or suddenly hearing the telltale hydraulic noises of an active Terminator while exploring and scrambling to figure out where it's coming from. When the game hits its stride it's a remarkably immersive experience, a recognizable prototype for the fully open worlds that Bethesda would subsequently build.

Problems

And then there are the fucking sewers. And the robot dungeons, and other areas where the game's semi-open-world and verisimilitude give way to enclosed and functionally linear but frustratingly confusing mazes that pit you against exploding bullet sponge enemies in close quarters.

Worse, some of these involve jumping puzzles, which highlight that the physics are not as sophisticated as the visuals. There's a 'floaty' feel to the jumping, and a tendency to just slide down the side of a platform if reaching it from the side rather than straight down. It doesn't help that the game runs poorly indoors, and Dosbox slowdowns are common mid-jump. If the player gets stuck in the geometry- which can happen even on seemingly innocuous surfaces like ramps- the game's solution is instant death.

In some of the indoor levels, triggers that open doors can also break entirely, forcing a reload to an earlier save, or restarting the mission if no save before the missed trigger exists. There's no apparent rhyme or reason to this and from what I can gather it was a problem with the original DOS release too, so isn't just an emulation issue. Some of the actions needed to progress can be unintuitive as well, so without looking up a walkthrough it can be tough to figure out if the game has broken or if you haven't figured out the solution. The map is completely worthless, and there are no mid-mission objective reminders.

The game also has a major gameplay issue relating to the time travel concept of the film. As the game progresses, Skynet starts sending robots back in time to intercept the player. Interesting concept, but in practice, this means enemies increasingly appear literally out of thin air, often right in front of the player. Since as mentioned before enemies are fairly tough and don't have any sort of flinch state, it means guaranteed lost health every time it happens, and ruins the cautious pacing of the exploration and combat.

Conclusion

So overall this is an ambitious semi-open-world FPS with okay gameplay carried by good style and immersion, let down by bugs and some baffling design choices. Yup, it's a Bethesda title alright.

It seems that reviews on release were highly polarized, with some praising all the good elements I mentioned above, others focusing more on the bugs and high hardware requirements or criticizing the control layout as unintuitive. Both perspectives are legitimate, but unfortunately so much of what it did well by 1995 standards is no longer novel or unique. Unlike Doom or even System Shock, where you can still find a lot to appreciate despite their age, in Future Shock the problems loom large over what the game does get right.

The game would receive a sequel- though it's really more of a standalone expansion pack- in the form of Skynet (1996). This added a new campaign with some fun setpieces, CGI cutscenes, adorably cheesy FMV briefings, networked multiplayer, and no obnoxious late-game time-travel whack-a-mole. It's an improvement, but fundamentally it's the same game with the same bugs and sewers, not substantially iterating or offering anything really new.

So is Future Shock worth playing? I'd say only if you fall into one of two categories: If you enjoy exploring old games just to appreciate how they fit into gaming's evolution, or if you really want a Terminator-future-war game and didn't feel 2019's (also janky) Terminator: Resistance scratched the itch. Either way, bail out if/when it starts feeling frustrating and you'll have seen everything that's worth seeing.

A quick look at Modify's new Tyrant 2011. It's already out at this point so not much of a 'preview', but since this was a pre-release sample we're still going with that terminology.

Hi folks. This is a follow-up to ‘Neighbor had no idea where the property lines are, and cut down my healthy 89-year-old oak because he didn't like trees being near his shed’, which unexpectedly blew up on this sub. The tl;dr is that in July 2024, a careless neighbor trespassed into my property to cut down a nearly hundred year old healthy oak. He did this because he felt it threatened his shed (it didn’t) and he had no idea where the property lines were and didn’t bother to check, then demanded we split the $2,000 he paid to have it cut down. A lot of people requested follow-up, but I wanted to wait until the situation was fully resolved, which ended up taking a lot longer than anticipated.

My wife and I were both pretty upset about the situation and hit the ground running from day 1. We retained a lawyer specializing in tree law, who advised we solicit a property survey to confirm the location of the tree. This ended up taking nearly two months due to a local shortage of surveyors, and unsurprisingly conclusively demonstrated that the tree was well within the bounds of our property by about fifty feet.

While waiting on that, we hired a TPAQ-certified arborist to examine the stump and photos we provided of the tree pre-cutting. His appraisal was that the tree was healthy at the time of cutting, and assessed a replacement value based on Trunk Formula Technique at $11.8K.

However, in my state the replacement value is not considered the basis for damages. Instead, damages for commercially grown trees are three times the value of the lumber, while for residential trees the recognized damages are the reduction in property value as a result of the trespass. Our lawyer provided a recommendation for a home appraiser to determine this value.

I explored a few other possibilities based on my research and suggestions on this sub. In no particular order:

• We filed a police report, but since it was not a malicious act, they simply dismissed it as a civil matter.
• Our homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover trees on the property, so filing a claim with them was off the table.
• Our mortgage lender was unconcerned with the reduction in value of the property.
• Our neighbor’s homeowner’s insurance wouldn’t cover him, since it was a deliberate (if negligent) act.
• Legal precedent would not support going after the tree service for damages either, since it was our neighbor who engaged their services.
• The fees involved in the survey, arborist appraisal, home appraisal, and lawyer’s fees would not be recoverable. The only damages we could seek would be that loss in property value.

Which just left suing our neighbor for the reduction in property value. By November 2024 we had an appraisal in hand, asserting a loss in value of about $10K. Our lawyer wrote and sent a demand letter, which received no immediate response. After repeated attempts at follow up, and seeing my neighbor walking around his property with a surveyor (now he cares where the property line is), we finally got a response from our neighbor’s lawyer in February 2025.

The response basically asserted that the tree was dead and ‘hollowed out’, that it was on some forgotten corner of the property and therefore worthless, and that it was an innocent mistake by my neighbor so oopsie-daisy not his problem.

This pissed me off.

My lawyer thought this response indicated that my neighbor’s lawyer recognized he had no case, so called him to see if they could hash things out over the phone. Neighbor’s lawyer was apparently dismissive, clearly out of his element with tree law (it seems his specialty is tenant law), and hung up on my lawyer.

This made my lawyer rather upset, and consequently highly motivated to pursue the case further as a matter of defending his professional integrity. As general life advice I would highly recommend not antagonizing lawyers.

So, my lawyer sent a follow-up letter breaking down every point of the defense and why it’s nonsense, and included the arborist appraisal and photos that I took the day-of, which clearly showed that the tree was healthy and that the claim that it was dead and hollow was bullshit.

My neighbor, and his lawyer, didn’t reply. So at this point- nearly a year after the actual incident- we finally filed a lawsuit. And this… still didn’t seem to spur my neighbor into taking it any more seriously.

The court system did its thing, slow as ever, and by fall assigned us a court date for summer 2026. Then there was a whole lot of radio silence until lo and behold, come February, my neighbor must have realized that he was actually going to court for a lawsuit he was unlikely to win. Suddenly he wanted to negotiate, offering a very generous $2K.

Hah hah lol no. We began actual negotiation and the number started to rise. Apparently, my neighbor was yelling at his lawyer by this point. Eventually, we settled on $7K. I was a bit disappointed by this, but my lawyer gently explained that going to court would mean more billable hours, plus having to pay for the time of our expert witnesses (surveyor, arborist, and appraiser), plus any additional fees that would go into actually extracting the money from this moron if/when we won, and those would eat up the difference even assuming the judge fully sided with us.

At this point our total expenses were just under $5K out of pocket, so we would still come out ahead. There was some additional nonsense with our neighbor asking to pay in installments, but in the end our lawyer received all payment and it cleared to our trust account. So in total it took nearly two years, many hours of emails and phone calls, and almost $5K out of pocket to ultimately receive a $7K settlement for an appraised $10K of damages.

And that’s where this ends. It was a lot of time and effort to ultimately walk away with a fraction of the damage done. There’s a hole in the treeline that I don’t care for, a depressing stump where that huge oak used to be, and a neighbor who I can only hope has learned some lesson. Either way I’ve built a rope fence that careless workers can’t ignore as readily as property markers, but doesn’t restrict the movement of animals through the neighborhood. I like seeing deer and foxes and trees around me, thank you very much.

You read about the karmic justice cases where someone gets a six-figure payout, but from my research I gather most cases of tree law go more like this. Most trees just aren’t that valuable outside of exceptional circumstances or treble damages, and it takes a lot of money to actually engage the legal system to force an outcome. My wife and I are very fortunate to be in a position where we could afford to spend so much out of pocket in the hopes of getting repaid at some unspecified point in the future. A lot of people don’t have that luxury, and unfortunately that means little recourse in a situation like this.

I’d like to share a comment I found during my initial research. As I was reading so many comments on my previous post setting one-month reminders and certain that I was about to receive a massive payout, this was one that stayed on my mind.

“I want to manage your expectations. Most of the time tree law isn’t like bylaw. You can’t call someone and they’ll issue a fine for your neighbour to pay you. Instead, you would usually call and pay for a consulting arborist to come and evaluate the loss of the tree and replacement cost, then you would hire a lawyer and pursue your neighbour for the cost to replace the tree. It would likely take months or years. You will need to pay out of pocket for the consulting arborist and the lawyer, as I doubt anyone would take it on contingency. You can attempt to be made whole through the civil court system, but it’s not quick. And it will destroy your quiet enjoyment of your property. 

This sub can be great because you learn about how people receive huge amounts of compensation in treble damages states. The reality, though, is that litigation is very costly and very stressful.”

Spot on. Do I regret the decisions that brought us to this point? Hell no. If our neighbor hadn’t been such a blithering idiot by denying responsibility at every step along the way, we could have resolved his error with more money in both our pockets and his. He instead, after being proud of having 'only' spent $2K to have the tree unnecessarily cut down, chose to end up paying an additional $8-12K between the settlement, survey, and legal fees of his own. Sucks to suck.

In summation: Neighbor cut down our tree. Neighbor demanded we pay him $1K for doing it. Neighbor had a Lawyer Experience instead. Neighbor paid us $7K, we walked away with a bit over $2K after expenses.

If you read this far, thanks for bearing with me. I've got a plane to catch, but if anyone has questions I’ll try to answer them when I can.