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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."
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...
Well, an NWN style game is what SR SHOULD have been as a video game, Or at least the easiest one to do.
Admittedly, if you would like to play one, there are some out there (and they are rather good).
Personally I want to see 2 things from the franchise:
1) Standard RPG ala NWN/KotOR/whatever. Let us play what we want, integrate magic and decking and rigging all properly, etc etc. I would prefer if it had multilayer capability (like the NWN ability for one person to run a game for others).
2) A squad based action game. I know, I know, No one actually would ever make this correct, but wouldn't it be awesome?
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
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.
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.
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.
Personal Experience:
God did I want Dystopia to be a game I could enjoy, but it just seems like Tribes2 without the maneuverability, flexibility of gear, or effective counters. Some of the gear is plain useless and the cyberspace looks like it should be it's own game (beautiful, original, fun) since it has very little impact on the game (obvious from the number of ppl in cyberspace at any given time, it's usually a simple jack in->rush in->kill someone->do something affair). Might as well be a psychadelic underground tunnel system.
I played for about 2 days and uninstalled.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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