System Shock 2 gets full VR version

The "System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition" will be playable in VR and, as the responsible Night Dive Studios promise, we will be offered a fully-fledged VR implementation that we can definitely look forward to.

To make a really good VR version possible, a separate team is taking care of it. The whole thing is therefore not being developed as a by-product of the normal "System Shock 2". Stephen Kick, CEO of Night Dive Studios, said: "During the process of reverse-engineering the missing libraries for System Shock 2, we had the opportunity to play around with the idea of creating a standalone VR version. And so we brought in a VR expert to look at the dataset and give us a brief idea of what kind of things we could do."

According to Stephen Kick, "System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition" will be fully playable in VR, along with the game's multiplayer mode. This means that co-op in VR can be played across platforms, with one gamer playing in VR and another on a PC without a VR headset. In any case, the creators want to create a "truly remarkable VR experience developed from the ground up".

"When you're in VR, you're the one actually wielding the weapons, you're reloading the weapons yourself, you're not just pressing a button and having the character automatically reload the weapon," says Stephen Kick, for whom "Half-Life: Alyx" is an inspiration. "Half-Life: Alyx has simply become indispensable for conveying the feeling that you're there. Things like being able to pick up items from a distance was really important in Half-Life: Alyx, and that's something you can do in System Shock VR as well." "System Shock 2 VR" is still in the prototype stage, which is why the VR version will not be released together with the normal "System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition".

Source: IGN