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SR Gamer Pleased With Playtest of Xbox Game
Like many Shadowrun players, Philip Richardson felt frustrated by the announcement that the SR title for the 360 was essentially Counter-Strike with elves. Mr. Richardson, though, happens to be the Program Manager at Microsoft's CRM team. He was invited by the folks at FASA studios to give the game a try, and GameSetWatch reports that he's actually pretty pleased with the situation after all. From the post: "Yes folks: it's share price increasingly good... Artwork: Feels like Shadowrun. Good Job! The SR universe has a lot of different types of artwork (as Tim pointed out yesterday). From the gritty stuff in the early source books to the more cartoonish work in the more recent editions. Gameplay: Feels like Shadowrun."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You left out that FASA, makers of Shadowrun, are also owned by Microsoft.
...
So this is like the head of the Windows Vista team saying, "Wow, Office 2007 is great!"
How does a player not liking a game and a developer going on record saying he likes it actual news? I'm really sick of seeing Zonk post all this crap on /.
My understanding of Shadowrun's backstory is that it is a bastardized welding-together of all the worst parts of William Gibson's books and the basic D&D universe. I have never played Shadowrun in any kind of serious way, but I have heard this from multiple people who have. Their general consensus has been "they're getting rid of that preposterous backstory? thank goodness!"
Am I way off-base here?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Ummm...not quite... Microsoft bought the computer games division of FASA & has all rights to produce computer games off of FASA titles (Battletech, Mechwarior, SR, etc) pre 2002. The RPG/settings are still owned by FASA which was sold to WizKids which was bought by Fan Pro or Fan Pro has exclusive rights to produce/distribute content.
Hmmm... I wouldn't say that working for MS automatically makes you a fan of everything they do, and CRM is vastly removed from the Xbox and FASA teams - they are a huge company. Although maybe I should be more cynical...
However, I reckon that whether he works for MS or not is irrelevant given that Xbox 360 owners will be able to download demos of the game from Live to see if they personally like it before they buy it. Plus at least he's up front enough to blog as an MS employee, rather than it being some convoluted viral marketing campaign. And let's be honest, we've all got a right to voice comments about stuff - even if it's made by companies we work for.
Incidentally, the demo download is one of the best things about Xbox Live, because I can get a demo of pretty much any game instantly. So a tiny slither of kudos to MS for doing this, rather than me having to reply on magazine reviews and glossy box pics.
So a project manager at Microsoft is satisfied with the progress of an XBox 360 game.
Well, I guess if it's good enough for a project manager at Microsoft, it's good enough for us.
Or good enough for Zonk anyway.
Having been around and active in Role Playing when the first edition of SR came out I will say you are way off base. Yes, SR does use concepts of fantasy fiction, which in turn borrowed from folk lore. The SR world has Elves, Trolls and other so called Meta Humans as well as magic, but that is about as close as it comes to D&D. Much of the races are significatly different, such as the trolls don't regenerate naturally and dwarves (which are even real, in a form, today) don't have a natural sense of direction under ground. The Background stroy justifying the SR world is actually one of the better ones I have read, IMHO, and it is enhanced further by the tie in with FASAs fantasy world RPG (who's name is slipping my mind for some reason).
SR is also in the Cyber Punk genre, though more cyber than punk. Being cyber punk, there is then some association with Gibson, whom they do give thanks to in the original hard back edition. Being a fan of Gibson as well as SR I can say there are some significant differences there as well.
In the end shadow run is a combination of two genres, so of that you are not off base, but they happen to have take the best of the two world and melded them very well and create a decent universe around it. The world of shadow run is no Al Amarja but still pretty decent.
Read the guy's original critique after the announcement was made. If that doesn't convince you the guy played the game and honestly thought it was decent, then nothing will.
... the game is a squad shooter set in the shadowrun universe, not a shadowrun rpg. What is the purpose of backstory? Nothing short of a novel will do the "universe" any good.
Re: backstory
They're not being "deleted" you retard, they're being moderated. Set your threshold to -1 and you'll see all three of them. Then go figure out how Slashdot works before you criticize again.
Hmmm... I wouldn't say that working for MS automatically makes you a fan of everything they do,
Let's look at the opposite question. Let's say you're an MS employee. Let's say you tried out a crucially important product from a different MS division and you really, reallllly hate it. Are you going to be found interviewed on gamesetwatch.com talking about this? I'm guessing no.
"I'm usually not one to openly criticise my employer (Microsoft) on my blog. However the travesty which has befallen Shadowrun demands that I speak out. After FASA imploded many years ago Microsoft ended up with all the computer game rights to the FASA properties (Battletech, Shadowrun and even freaking Earthdawn). Now I understand that we must make some comprimise in the nature of a game when we transfer it from pen & paper to a computer. I'm a PM: I understand the business of tough comprimises. What happened here was not a comprimise: it was total freaking re-invention. I'm not talking the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica with human looking cylons: I'm talking about re-making Lord of the Rings in which Frodo drives to Morder in a Lamborghini Murciélago. If you work for FASA and you are reading this then I welcome you to take the shuttle over to my office and punch me the face. Seriously: I won't be offended since your damn game just kicked me the metaphoric balls."
= 20
http://www.philiprichardson.org/blog/post.aspx?id
I mean, it would only seem reasonable that Microsoft would think, 'You know, the biggest criticism of our Xbox console was that it was nothing but FPS', there just wasn't a big enough variety of games. Hey, we have this great RPG licensce that we own the rights to. Let's make an FPS out of it, and trick the people who like RPGs into buying an FPS. Then they'll have to buy all our other FPS', or be ridiculed by all their friends!'. Cause, you know, it's the only logical path to take.
just some guy
There is some sort of Microsoft/Zonk marketing deal.
Something as simple as a free Xbox 360(plus replacements for defective units of course) or outright cash.
What is so strange about the flood of Microsoft/Xbox stories is trying to figure out what exactly are Zonk and them hoping to accomplish?
It's like watching a 1950's advertising agency trying to run an add campaign today - no one is fooled.
you see that thing at teh bottom of the page that says 'n posts below your threshold'?
yeah, where 'n' is the number of morons like you who post crap other people don't want to read.
Got hypocrisy?
An MS shill who is supposedly an avid SR fan like a game when his boss plonks him in front of it?
/. frontpage. Bluesnews, maybe, more likely a smaller gamesite, not /..
Wow...that's too blatent even for slashdot. It's paid-for 'viral' marketing trying to put apositive slant on a squad based CS clone which has no business using the licence it does. Even if it were the best CS clone around, it shouldn't be using the SR license for a straight twitchbased FPS.
Hell, even if it were a good tactical game, in the GTA:SA engine, using voice comms and a planning session like Rainbow six used to have, or a limited 6 player ORPG, an article by an employee of the publisher saying it's a good game should NEVER make the
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
As Shadowrun fan, a game developer, and game player who played the SR demo at E3, I call bullshit on this evaluation.
I walked away from the E3 demo shellshocked at how un-Shadowrun-like this game concept turned out to be. While, I'll grant, perhaps, that something has changed in the meantime, the game at E3 captured zero of the spirit of what defined the Shadowrun RPG (you know, the one that was good enough to make this game worth talking about in the first place).
I really have a hard time understanding who they're making this game for:
FPS fans? The gameplay at E3 was pretty standard stuff. The "innovative" new gimmicks include gliding-mode, which allowed you to float from platform to platform (in other words, FPS platform jumping - oh, how we all love that), teleportation through obstacles (but only in certain areas - I found this very confusing in practice), and the ability to resurrect fallen comrades (the opposing team can prevent this by continuously shooting corpses until they disappear).
RPG fans? The dev who demoed that game with me said that the single-player mode was essentially the same as multiplayer. In other words, there is no real story or quests or, god forbid, actual SHADOWRUNS to go on. Instead, singleplayer gameplay is apparently arena-style combat versus bots.
Shadowrun fans? I, for one, am disgusted that they have thrown away everything that made the setting interesting and special to me. The lead designer all but admitted that they've dumbed it down because they were unable to present the world in marketable way. In the end, all they've really kept is the name. That's too shallow for me and, I imagine, too shallow for others who love the SR universe.
Everyone else? Well, everyone else hasn't heard of Shadowrun anyway, so I don't see how they could be interested in tepid offering in an overcrowded genre, with a premise and setting watered-down for the sake of "ease of understanding".
Microsoft Beancounters? Bingo. This game is developed solely to make money. From the lead designer, to the guy who paints the little LEDs on the gun textures, they are all under the thumb of Microsoft's accountants who want this game because they know that it will cost X money to build, and earn them Y dollars back. I know that, by definition, all commercial games have this same burden, but its still possible for them to rise above it and have some spirit.
All this game has is elves with machineguns.
Read Pynchon.
And now it will be FPS/RPG genre, though more FPS than RPG.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I know a guy whose dream job is to be able to make music. He loves writing music, growing up he spent countless hours learning about music and acoustics. He's also damn good with math. When he graduated college with a math/comp sci degree, I was startled, but, as he explained, if you go to school to study music, they will teach how NOT to make the music you want to be able to.
Before finishing his degree, Microsoft had already signed him on, and agreed to pay moving expenses from Boston to Seattle, more or less. This man hates MS, comes from a family of devoted Mac users. But he saw the dollar signs and decided that if he made enough money quickly enough, he could spend the rest of his life on music.
Now, John (name changed) is not the easiest guy to get along with, and upon getting to MS and beginning work, he found all manner of coding practices that he disagreed with. And he was vociferous about it, angering almost everyone above him, save those few souls who saw that, indeed, by trimming this out and doing that, it would make a more efficient function. John was promoted because of his ability to see these flaws and fixes. This lead to people writing WORSE code that he was then forced to fix. After a year or so of this, John quit.
Are you going to be found interviewed on gamesetwatch.com talking about this? I'm guessing no.
When John left, he told the people above him at MS exactly why he was leaving: the department was turning out shitty code and no one other than he seemed to care about it; that struggling to work in their environment and under their terms was destroying his ability to pursue the creativity that was a part of his life.
Less than one year after leaving MS, John was, again, living in Boston when he was contacted by the head of the department he had been working for. The worst offenders whom John had cited had been fired and MS was happy to pay his moving expenses, again, and reinstate him in his old position if he would come back. It's not the same case as what you mention, no, but it does demonstrate that *shock* Microsoft does listen to internal feedback, even if it happens to be scathingly negative, and is willing to make changes to improve itself. Maybe not always, but it happens.
The fantasy setting you're thinking of is Earthdawn.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Yeah that's it. I could have just looked at my book shelf had I been home. Of course I probably could have looked it up online too. But hey I knew someone would know what I was talking.
Perhaps you should. Sure, being a worker for MS won't automatically make him a fan. It may however make him unwilling to continue to say negative things about his employer when in the public eye, and said employer is aware of it.
I just can't believe that anyone who knows Shadowrun would say an elf melding through a wall "feels Shadowrun".
I played this extensively at E3. Shadowrun in name only.
And actually, the description they are eager to avoid that is mentioned in the article; "counterstrike with elves", is probably the most accurate .
"Guy Critical Of Microsoft Gets All Expenses Paid Junket, Changes Mind"
"Incidentally, the demo download is one of the best things about Xbox Live, because I can get a demo of pretty much any game instantly."
That's the trouble with the xbox, isn't it - this impresses a console gamer, but a PC gamer thinks "hmm, was it 11 or 12 years ago that I downloaded that demo of Wolfenstein 3D".
Still, it is a nice feature, and maybe the xbox has a nicer UI or something?
Big difference between telling your bosses what you think about your situation, and spouting off publicly about how crappy one of their products is. Really big difference.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Anyone dumb enough to buy this game because of the Shadowrun name deserves to be ridiculed.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
So essentially, everyone's a street sam or street shaman. Great, the two classes I didn't enjoy playing (I was much more into the Decking / Rigging parts of the game).
I'll still pick this game up. Looks like a blast, and it also appears they're producing it for Windows Vista.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
How do you figure that? Seems to me like someone high up (and recall that Billg himself has been touting this game and its Vista/360 LiveAnywhere capabilities) didn't like his comments, and he was told that he should "take a closer look", and then take another shot at making public comments. So he toned down his comments to a much less critical, yet still somewhat credible level.
The thing is, the game is still the same as he first saw, and all his initial comments still hold up. The only difference now is that he thinks it is a fun game. Nobody has been disputing that. Pretty much any SR fan you talk to on the official boards for this game or most other SR-related boards say that the game could be a fun shooter. But that doesn't make it a Shadowrun game. I think most of us would be happy if they'd just drop the SR name, or at least do a major rework of the backstory so that it doesn't mangle SR quite so badly (which, given the type of game and the fact that there is not much backstory to begin with, should take a few hours, a bit more if they actually decide to do a little research this time).
The sad thing is that this probably spells the end for SR computer games. Either this game will bomb, and no more SR games will be made, or it will do well, and we'll just see more crappy sequels. I'm hoping that it bombs. At least then we won't have some unrecognizable crap out there abusing the Shadowrun license.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
It's 4-minute rounds, you keep your cyber and magic upgrades between rounds, and magic is Non-combat only. There are no offensive spells in the game. There are no RPG elements to the game really. Retaining upgrades between rounds is as close to an RPG-ish feature as you'll find. There is no story worth reading for this game. The one they came up with is just boring, and basically unrelated to Shadowrun in general aside from the fact that it has tech and magic. That's not unique to SR though. There have been several proposed changes to the backstory that would rectify many of the problems and bring the game at least somewhat closer to Shadowrun canon, but it remains to be seen whether they will want to fix the problems or not.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
This is supposed to be the flagship product for showing off LiveAnywhere, Microsoft's term for the ability to have Windows Vista and XBox 360 players playing on the same servers together. That's probably why they wanted to use the SR name in the first place. They wanted something recognizable that people would get excited about. Too bad they butchered it and the people that actually recognize the name are pissed off, and the ones that don't recognize it, well the name doesn't matter to them. What a waste.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
You got modded down. Probably because you didn't even bother to RTFA before posting uninformed criticisms. The guy is the program manager for Microsoft's CRM team, not just "a player". He's not a dev either. There are reasons to criticize the article and the writeup. You didn't hit on any though.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
> So essentially, everyone's a street sam or street shaman. Great, the two classes I didn't enjoy
> playing (I was much more into the Decking / Rigging parts of the game).
I hear ya; I was always either a Decker or a Hermetic Mage.
Chris Mattern
Okay this has been bothering me for awhile. Ever since Penny-Arcade talked about shills, it seems like everyone is calling everyone a shill. Marketers like G&W aren't shills, they're just marketers. :Conspiracy theory alert:
It seems like guys not unlike Gabe and Tycho, who create a huge backing of respectful PA-like fans who talk about how good a certain game is on their blogs or webforums are the ones who most resemble the PA described shills.
now I suppose I'll have to take the karma hit from some rabid PA fans. . .
For the record, I too am a PA fan. I just wish people wouldn't take their word for god ALL THE TIME, Moderation people! moderation!.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Seriously, that headline sounds like something straight from the front page of The Onion. I mean, if that doesn't elbow you in the ribs right away then RTFA'ing won't let you in on the joke.
Counter Strike Neo
It has going for it: a unified source (no mirror-hunting), no Fileplanet-like bullshit queues, and decent speeds. Static hardware also means that demos are probably going to be more stable on the 360 than a PC, though honestly I've not had too many demo stability problems in the last few years.
I admit, it's not as flexible as what's been available on PC for years, but it's a step in the right direction. It's much better than paying $7.99 for a demo disk packaged with old news and generic commentary.
Yeah, but why do you think they put the Shadowrun name on it? Because they think there are a lot of people dumb enough to buy it based on the name.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
thats the point to liveanywhere? didnt sony do that with ffxi? i dont see the big deal...
Ha ha- that is so right. I haven't had to go out and search for a demo for a while now. PC demos are a pain in the ass.
I also haven't had any problems installing a demo on the 360. I couldn't say that was the case on the PC.
No reason to lie.
How do you figure that? Seems to me like someone high up (and recall that Billg himself has been touting this game and its Vista/360 LiveAnywhere capabilities) didn't like his comments, and he was told that he should "take a closer look", and then take another shot at making public comments. So he toned down his comments to a much less critical, yet still somewhat credible level.
...
Riiight. You just flipped the "paranoid tinfoil hat man" bit.
Nobody has been disputing that.
Yes they have. The whole "the guy works for Microsoft he has to be lying" crap directly conflicts with your assertion.
But that doesn't make it a Shadowrun game.
You mean Shadowrun RPG. There are more game genre's than RPGs. If this isn't what a Shadowrun squad based shooter would look, what WOULD it look like?
or at least do a major rework of the backstory so that it doesn't mangle SR quite so badly (which, given the type of game and the fact that there is not much backstory to begin with, should take a few hours, a bit more if they actually decide to do a little research this time).
Gee, that feedback sounds very familiar