Watch On
System Shock 2 opens with playable character creation that also functions as a tutorial. Your trainee goggle-wearing badass walks off the street into a recruitment center and signs up to be a marine, or an engineer, or a psychic black ops agent. Then you choose where you’ll be posted for each tour—decisions that alter your stats—and an instructor teaches you how to use your abilities.
Which created an unexpected problem for Nightdive when it came time to do one of its Kex engine remasters, as lead producer Daniel Grayshon explained in a recent episode of Nightdive’s Deep Dives. Because System Shock 2, unlike some of the early FPSes Nightdive has remastered, was fully voice-acted.
“We’d not really ever done a voice recording session at all for a Kex game,” Grayshon said. “We’d never really needed to. Those older games would usually just have text prompts on the screen saying ‘press X to jump’ and things like that. Shock 2 does not have that. When you go into the training center you get told, ‘To jump simply press the spacebar. And you’ll need to reload this gun, press 2 on the keyboard to equip your gun, and then press the R key to reload the gun. Press this key on the keyboard to change ammo types.’ It’s like, oh my goodness, this is not going to work at all. What do we do?”
“Optimized Controller support” is one of the System Shock 2 remaster’s key features, but you can’t have gamepad players being told to right-click on a bag of chips to eat them. The remaster doesn’t have voiceover telling you to press the right-trigger either. Instead, the new voice acting plays for everyone and avoids mentioning physical controls altogether. “To drop an item,” it says, “highlight the item and choose ‘Drop’ from the actions menu.”
Which, if you’re playing with keyboard and mouse, you cannot do. Items only highlight if you have a controller. Right-clicking uses them and left-clicking lets you drag them around, which is how you can drop items from your inventory with a mouse. This has confused some people on the Steam discussion forum. It doesn’t seem like a perfect solution, and while I respect the effort put into this change, I kind of wish the original voiceover would play if you don’t have a gamepad plugged in.
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