Slashdot Mirror
Shadowrun FPS Forums Retired
With FASA studios closed and the Shadowrun IP now under better care, what remains of the disastrous Shadowrun FPS is now being swept under the rug. Team Xbox notes that the official forums for the game are going to be closed. This news comes with hope for a better tomorrow from the ex-FASA folks: "We're going to be closing down the Shadowrun forums in about two weeks. As many of you know, the old FASA crew has mostly moved on to other roles within Microsoft, and that means we don't have enough people to monitor and respond to posts here for the coming year. We'll eventually close down www.shadowrun.com and transition it to the folks working on the next generation of Shadowrun products."
Battletech always seemed a more interesting universe, especially when it comes to video games. That said, it would be kinda fun to a play a NeverWinterNights type game in the shadowrun universe.
The sooner the last vestiges of that abortion are dropped the better. Now, let's focus on what Shadowrun fans really want - a good Shadowrun CRPG. Go Go Smith & Tinker!
As a tabletop RPG - shadowrun was one of the games that I will always have a fondness in my heart for. The rules were cryptic, battles took forever, but that didn't seem to make a difference. The world was described so clearly with so many things that were logically futuristic it didn't seem like were you playing a fantasy sci-fi game - you were just role playing in the future.
Microsoft milked this cow for all it could - finally ending the with a PC game that required Vista or an Xbox 360. Neither I was willing to purchase just to play a game that would probably ruin my memory of the weekends rolling dice.
So long FASA, thanks for the great RPG...
I never played the game (Vista prerequisite? That's cute.) but I listen to the PC Gamer Podcast and those chaps seemed to thoroughly enjoy the game until Team Fortress 2 came out. Was Shadowrun really such a trainwreck?
BTW, for a very hard-hitting and informative look into the late FASA studios I highly recommend listening to this interview with FASA GM Mitch Gitelman. No punches are pulled in the questioning and I have great respect for Mitch for bravely meeting each challenge head-on.
Because the most recent abomination has very, very little to do with Shadowrun, for reasons which simply are not justifiable from a gameplay perspective. If you're going to change an IP as much as this one got changed, don't use the IP's name: "Shadowrun" doesn't have enough cachet to draw massive numbers of non-dedicated fans, and completely altering the game universe is going to do nothing but infuriate the dedicated ones.
/believe/ the backlash this game caused, and for good reason: everyone knows you have to take some liberties when transferring a tabletop RPG to a computer game, but the Shadowrun video game played like someone had made an average multiplayer FPS and then slapped a Shadowrun sticker on it as an afterthought.
/have/ to be an MMORPG or an NWN-style game, but it would certainly help. An FPS - even a multiplayer FPS - could make a decent Shadowrun game, but only if there's some respect for the property will there be support from the fans, and only if it's exceptionally good is there going to be support for the non-fans [and why slap the sticker on in the first place when, like, eight people have heard of Shadowrun?].
I've been playing Shadowrun since a few weeks after the first edition was released, and am heavily involved on various Shadowrun forums, and you wouldn't
I good Shadowrun game doesn't
Ironically, SR has been one of the most influential RPG properties of the last few decades. "The Matrix" was based on a Shadowrun short story [which was the back half of Virtual Realities, for those who played that long ago and still have memory of those days]. And yet these funny FASA fellows never did seem to be able to make a buck - or a decent video game [the FPS not being the first try] - out of it. Finally, they just sold off and closed doors, and the property has suffered - in my opinion - ever since. But I thought it started declining with the death of Findlay and the departure of Dowd, which really just means I'm old.
As an old school fan of Shadow Run, it really wasn't a train wreck. Is it what most people were expecting, absolutely not. I wouldn't call it a Shadow Run game as much as calling it a game with a Shadow Run theme. For a team centered FPS, it was actually a lot of fun. If the company didn't fall apart as it was being released, with a few quality updates it could have been really good in fact. I think a lot of the hating on it was because it wasn't an RPG.
Wasn't really that bad. It was a fun game, a bit half assed with the animation (no animation for going up ladders, just hovering up or down), but had some awesome fun things to do, run backwards at someone teleport behind people and stab them in the back, and the fact that it allowed PC and console gamers to duke it out was fun, I never felt disadvantaged due to the controller.
When I heard it was vista-only, I steered clear.
Microsoft completely sabotaged Shadowrun with their vista turd program.
I don't even know how the game is, though it looked dumb.
When will a respected RPG company make another good Shadowrun game?
The last good one I played was for sega genesis. The super-nintendo version wasn't as good.
They're using their grammar skills there.
As one of the few people who actually tried playing Shadowrun on PC despite the horrible reviews (hooray for piracy groups letting me play Shadowrun on a pair of Win XP machines with 512 of RAM) I have to say the game really _isn't_ as bad as everyone thinks it is.
My wife and I play Shadowrun over our LAN (both Win XP machines) almost every day and have a blast against the bots. The weapons and classes are all very balanced and even though there are some common setups (Trolls with miniguns, Elves with swords) there isn't really any of the usual everyone trying to use the same weapon that there is in the other simple multiplayer shooters (eg. the lightning gun in Quake, guass gun in Half-Life, AWM in Counter-Strike, etc.) The layout and design of the maps are great, the controls are smooth and responsive (even on a machine with 512 of RAM like I said before, HALF of the minimum requirement and a quarter of the recommended), the character models are pretty good looking, and from my experience this game had everything going for it other than the alleged Vista only compatibility and the Shadowrun name.
I think the problem with Shadowruns demise (other than the closing of FASA) was with the reviewers scaring people away from playing it. What the reviewers were trying to review was a game that is LIKE Shadowrun, instead of jsut reviewing the game as it is and ignoring the fact that the game had Shadowrun in it's name. Another great, but mostly overlooked, game dodged a similar fate. Project Snowblind, the REAL Dues Ex 3, had people working on it who knew people wouldn't like it if it carried the Dues Ex name, because a team shooter wasn't what people would _expect_ a Dues Ex game to be like so they changed the name to Project Snowblind and released it to mostly good reviews.
Would they have gotten any of the good reviews if the exact same game was released named Dues Ex 3, instead of Project Snowblind?
Stop letting great games die because of reviewers, and try the games for yourself. And when reading a "user" review of a game stop reading if you get to the line "I haven't played it, but..." because if you read about games like Shadowrun that is how most of the reviews begin.
Cyberspace is a three dimensional representation of the world's network. Inside cyberspace, players will launch programs to hack into systems linked to the physical world while fighting off enemy hackers and defending critical systems. Gameplay progresses through inter-linked physical and cyberspace objectives, some are completed in either the physical world or cyberspace, others only by a well timed combination of the two.
Whether the player is a heavily augmented combat mercenary armed to the teeth with the latest in firepower, or a twitch reflex cyberdecker racing to infiltrate a cyberspace node; they'll be immersed in an action packed battle. Only through skillful use of the high tech arsenal we're making available and intelligent team play will players truly jack-in and kick ass. Check out the trailer here
In case you're wondering, I'm just an enthusiastic fan who is interested in having more people to play with. If you like Shadowrun, download and come play!
In fact, we're quite interested in videogames . . . I personally would love to be involved in the design side. And there's been a lot of negotiation over the years, mostly over GURPS, Car Wars, and Munchkin, but few deals have been made and none have survived to the ship date. If anyone reading this is involved with content acquisition for a competent and honest videogame publisher, feel free to make my day.
Which means that eventually we might try to enter the field on our own, or by contracting with a developer. UltraCorps is a learning project, aimed in that direction. We acquired it from the original developer, Jaleco (nee VR-1), not from Microsoft. We have indeed done quite a bit with it, starting with a complete code reimplementation in perl so it would run under Unix rather than the Microsoft OS that the Zone used. Granted, we thought we'd be DONE with it by now, and we're not. But it is in open beta at www.ultracorps.com, runs much more smoothly than it used to, and has a lot of new features. Feel free to drop in; you can now set up solo learning games and initiate private games for up to six players, and we start a massive game every month or so. (But if you hated UC before, you'll still hate it, because it's still a browser-based 4X that's all about strategy, resource management, and negotiation, and nothing about fancy graphics.)
It would have gone faster if our coder (note the singular) had had nothing else to do . . . In fact, I would be happy to hear from competent perl coders interested in part-time contracting to help us finish it. I'm best reached at sj@sjgames.com.
Yep, the games guy. www.io.com/sj Fnord.
Not a bad game, definitely last gen animation/graphics. Had a good time playing it during the beta, very interesting concepts that you don't see in the normal FPS genre. I was looking forward to it until I found out that retail launch it would be $60, no single player, and a very limited amount of maps. That killed it for me and a lot of people on the 360. It should have been $40 and released with more maps it might have gained a following then.