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Shadowrun Game to Rewrite the SR Universe
adamp writes "Shadowrun has officially been confirmed as a squad-based FPS for the PC and Xbox 360. From the look of the trailer released at Microsoft's Press event yesterday, it's not the game we know and love. Fasa Interactive has decided to rewrite the universe in an attempt to not make anyone angry. It's currently not working."
If you're just using the Shadowrun name to sell copies of the game, without the intent to stay reasonably compliant with the pre-existing material, you suck.
If you cannot stay reasonably compliant with the material, then make the game you want to make and call it something else.
You have the license so you can still use the terminology and such. Just don't call it Shadowrun.
I was a big fan of the Genesis Shadowrun game and although I didn't enjoy the SNES one quite as much, it still gave a good feel for the game and the setting.
I would have loved a Oblivion-type game with lots of different NPCs and missions, with hireable shadowrunner buddies and stealing random paydata in the matrix. I would have loved a Deus Ex style FPS/Adventure game. I would have even liked a top-down RPG like Neverwinter Nights.
The new game looks like a version of counterstrike with magic. Even if it does have magic, we don't need another multiplayer FPS where two teams shoot at each other and buy better weapons afterwards. I'm not impressed.
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This is more like... well, imagine if that movie Stargate had been called RIFTS. No change to the plot, just call it RIFTS because there's this gate to other worlds.
To be more clear about what's happening here for the non-gamers, let's pretend we were releasing a Star Trek game. Except there was no teleporting, no Vulcans, no warp, no spaceships, no Klingons, no hot green babes... but you could use a phaser.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
FASA's strength was always creating fun, compelling (if derivative) settings. And their weakness was always in creating rules systems to actually enact a game in those settings.
(Battletech and Shadowrun were littered with tables of numbers that never quite lined up into a sane equation, supposed rules that could never really be applied in practice, and huge gaping optimization holes. I couldn't begin to tell you how many different groups of people I met who were playing "Shadowrun", by which they meant playing "a game set in the Shadowrun universe, but we rewrote all of the rules from the ground up because FASA's were so awful". I suspect that Shadowrun has been the most-rewritten game in history.)
So I'd be perfectly happy with a game that kept the setting and feel of Shadowrun, but used completely new game mechanics. But substantially altering the universe means throwing away the one genuinely good thing the game had going for it.