You get the opportunity to refine and upgrade one of the most influential and beloved games of all time, System Shock 2, and you need to add a system that will get players really excited for it. You can’t really alter too many aspects of the game itself, alienating the fanbases probably won’t go down well, and so instead you add something which has to make this edition of the game enhanced: Full VR support.
That’s right, Nightdive Studios has confirmed that System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition will have proper VR support but beyond that, we still don’t know an awful lot about the 2019 announced game.
Considering Nightdive also released an enhanced version of System Shock 1 which added achievements, 4K support and tweaked controls, one has to imagine it’ll be similar a similar story for System Shock 2. As for the VR, that system is being designed and built by Nightdive’s specifically VR-forward dev team.
Speaking to IGN, Nightdive clarified that VR first came to their minds while they were, “reverse-engineering the missing libraries for System Shock 2, we had an opportunity to play around with the idea of creating a standalone VR version… and so we brought on an [VR] expert to look about the code and give us a brief idea of what kind of things we could do.”
Nightdive has confirmed that both single-player and multiplayer game modes will be playable entirely in VR. It’s still in very early development so you’ll have to expect this particular mode to be added to the game sometime after launch which is… well, we don’t exactly know that yet but one can only hope it’s in the near future.
Last Updated: February 17, 2021
Skyblue
February 18, 2021 at 09:00
The game was frigging terrifying as it was so VR should scare you shitless.
On a side note, as a complete fanboy of the original SS2 and as much as I’d love to try this, I’m not sure I could play it through again unless certain aspects of the game are fixed e.g. respawning enemies with degrading weaponry was just unfair.