Since the game originally launched only on PC at a time when controllers weren’t common, Nightdive had to make some significant adjustments.

System Shock 2 begins with character creation, which also doubles as a tutorial. The protagonist, wearing glasses, walks into a recruitment center to sign up as a marine, engineer, or psychic operative. Then we choose assignments for each tour, which alters the character’s stats. An instructor then explains how to use abilities. This became an unexpected challenge for Nightdive when remastering the game in the Kex engine, as lead producer Daniel Grayshon explained in the latest episode of Nightdive Deep Dives. Unlike the early FPS titles the studio remastered, System Shock 2 was fully voiced.

“We had never recorded voice lines for a Kex game. We’d never needed to. Those older titles just displayed text prompts on screen like ‘press X to jump.’ System Shock 2 doesn’t do that. When you enter the training center, you’re told: ‘To jump, press the spacebar.’ Or: ‘To reload, press 2 to equip the gun, then press R to reload. Press this key to change ammo types.’ At that point, we realized this just wasn’t going to work. What do we do?” said Grayshon.

Optimized controller support is one of the major features of the remaster, but you can’t exactly tell gamepad players to “right-click” on a bag of chips to eat it. As a result, the remaster no longer includes instructions like that. The new voiceover, which everyone hears, avoids mentioning controllers altogether. Instead, it simply instructs players to select an item and choose the “Drop” option from the action menu if they want to discard it.

With keyboard and mouse, however, this isn’t possible: items can only be highlighted using a controller. On PC, the right mouse button uses items, the left mouse button drags them, and that’s how players can throw them out of the inventory. This has confused some players. It’s not a perfect solution — wouldn’t it have been better to keep the original voiceover for those not using a controller?

Source: PCGamer