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."

Comments

What do you mean /more/ Shadowrun games?

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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.

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 /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.

I good Shadowrun game doesn't /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?].

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.