Or hacking, or cyberware, or paracritters.

It does have the 'run' kinda feeling to it though, as you go around doing missions and such.

Not going to lie, an MMO for SR would be amazing, and the party/team work angle would work nice with how people play them now, but I honestly doubt it would be even close to a success. Look at almost every game that has come out since WoW. Most are toted as the next best game, or as previously put, a WoW killer, and honestly most of them are better. But soon enough, most of the player base jumps ship and leaves to the next big MMO, or goes back to WoW. Happened to EVE, WAR, AoC since I played them. Even the majority of the ones that came out years ago couldn't keep a stable enough player base to have a WoW comparable profit, and most companies wont bankroll a project that wont make them any money.

A single player SR game may be good plan, if done right it could have the graphics and include all the material needed for it to be SR. It would just lack the team aspect, which is a huge problem. It would need to be a plot-tracked game like the Genesis and Nintendo versions, or have the runs tailored to be done several different ways (astrally, magically, force, guile, techno, matrix etc) which would mean having a much smaller game since all the coding would be for customized gameplay. But if done right, who knows, could possibly make enough of a stir or get enough attention to green-light a future MMO down the road.

You might be able to get Bioware interested (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davidgaider

Hehe, and I was just thinking 'You know, NWN would be a good way to do the SR game.' That way you have it totally playable as single player, and go ahead and include the tools and capacities to go online and do a GMed session.

All good thoughts, above.

I was thinking about this for a while now since I lost my password I'd jotted down on a piece of paper and am now just getting back to logging in, HA!

As for the game of Shadowrun itself, someone made the comment that GTA was Shadowrun just without the magic...That is a sad statement, sorry.

As I think back to when both Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2013 were getting off the ground, there were two distict lines, among others, in the rpg/sci-fi world that shunned the aspect of magical natures (those people usually played CP2013) and then those who took a mystical approach to it and bam, we grabbed Shadowrun. I should also mention I am a HUGE fan of CP2013/2020 - fuck v3.0 -.

I got out my SR2 rulebook and compared it to the CP2020 main rule book, both of those books an update on the prior system, SR1 and CP2013 respectively. I started to notice that CP2020 is much more "hip" to violence and the death culture, whereas Shadowrun addresses death and struggle as a part of life, Shadowrun didn't contain things like CP2020's "Body Lottery". Or, for another example, most all of the rules contained in CP2020 are combat-oriented. Everyone from back in the day knows that CP2020 is way more violent and brutal than Shadowrun. And that's fine.

It's easier to make a video game like that.

I think that a base Shadowrun game could be established and from there just use DCL content, with occasional new titles, if needed. With the nature of Shadowrun, DLC packets could contain so many things, it's endless.

Hell, the factors in making an actual Shadowrun game are endless. Just think if it factored in what sort of clothing you wore to a meeting with a Mr. Johnson? What if say you had a better chance of [insert game parameter] because you spent $4.75 on the recent Shadowrun DLC pack, which infact, contained the Mortimer of London 2056 Fallcut Black duster. Ohhh, ahhhh, DLC, $$$.

A base game would do well, something simple. People mention that everyone needs to be done properply, and I agree, but you can also do it one-at-a-time. You don't just BUILD a house. Release the base game with all features but say, the astral isn't the best. Ok, well, it takes another 9 months for the two packets to be released that really energized the astral/Magician aspect of the game.

The smell of garlic 'ghetti sauce from the kitchen is good, I must get going, Haha!

One, another thing...

MMO = The worst idea...ever. Details as to why.

Charging for DLC is a fabulous idea from a business standpoint, but speaking as a player it pisses me right the fuck off, especially if there's no gameplay. If you're going to make an expansion, then make a goddamn expansion. I comprehensively refuse to pay money for virtual clothing.

Shadowrun without magic is not Shadowrun. Astral space, astral perception, and astral projection are integral parts of Shadowrun's magic system. Take that away and you turn a Shadowrun mage into a WoW/WHO/EQ/generic fantasy wizard.

But you also don't sell the skeleton and then say in a year or so you can spend money to add a roof, and if they get around to it, maybe sometime you'll even be able to buy walls.

Actually there was a fan based shadowrun mod that was in the works a while back but went missing called Shadowrunner nights. It was pretty interesting though now all you can find of it (last time I checked) was a modern d20 mod instead. *Shrug*

As far as a SR MMORPG I would love to see and would drop wow in a heart beat for it but im not holding my breath. I am curious to see what the shadowrun awakened team is planning to do with there project but that will be a while from what I have seen.

If you cant go a mmorpg route on it I would like to see a GTA/Saints Row game made of it but with a LAN/Internet option for it so you and some buddy's can go shadowrunning together.One can dream =)

You are right, you don't do that...but you get formica counters at first, then marble when you can afford it.


If you read anything at all of my previous posts, you'd realize that I am very adamant about including all aspects of the game and not leaving one of them out, especially magic, which made SR different from CP.


If a SR game was to appear, it'd have to have revolutionary concepts in order to bust the mold. You couldn't do the whole adventure and kill shit like in WoW...you'd need different and interesting concepts to catch players attention.

Have you noticed that in the last 10 years, video games have taken on a more "mimic real life" mentality. Second Life in Japan, for instance...The Sims in America....people getting married in WoW...sure, some might be isolated instances derived from a hardcore gamer...but it starts with one, then three, then ten, then thousands. Wildfire affect.

Include new systems like a stock market, having to find a place to live/rent, make it challenging...all of those aspects are and can/will garner attention/interest. Remember Wall Street Kid on NES?


Shadowrun without magic isn't Shadowrun but a Shadowrun game with a constantly developing and growing magic system is Shadowrun.

I didn't see where I said DLC couldn't include gameplay expansions...

What would make a good MMORPG woul be real death. Its an iffy concept but done well it can make a totally different MMORPG. Dieing is permiment would add a permium to items in a diffrent way and would also make combat a different kettle of fish. Teaming up and stashing gaer in safe house would mimimise the probelems and ofcorse there would have to be some for of account wide bank system other wise dieing would mess you game up too much.

What would ruin an MMO will be... other players.

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)





-karma

No, you never said DLC couldn't contain gameplay expansions, but the one specific example you cited is the one that pisses me off the most: the kind of DLC that consists of mainly aesthetic elements, yet has just enough mechanical benefit to make it attractive enough to the hardcore set to blow $5 on it. This is one of the more insidious forms of power creep, IMO. Sure, all else being equal, a player who has this package is only at a slight advantage over a player who doesn't. But you make enough such packages, and after a while you see that the players who have the most disposable income to devote to the game are at a huge advantage over players who can only pay the base subscription rate. This has two effects: first, it breaks the base. Now you have to choose who to develop future content for: the hardcore players who buy every DLC and thereby contribute far more per capita to your profit margin, or the (probably much larger) group of players who buy some or none of the DLC and therefore cannot handle the same power level threats that the hardcore players can. The second effect is that it serves to deter new players from signing up. If there's a laundry list of DLC that are considered "essential" to play the game the "way it was intended," that's an enormous barrier. Even if there are only five such "essential" packages, that's an extra $23.75 surcharge on top of whatever the regular startup cost is.

You wanna do expansions to an MMO, look at CCP, developers of EVE Online. Every few months, a huge expansion, with new gameplay elements, balance tweaks, bug fixes, you name it. What do they cost? Nothing. Bupkis. Nada. Zip. $0.00. The development of these expansions is paid for from the subscription fees. That's how you expand an MMO and build a loyal customer base at the same time. EVE might not get the press that WoW does, but believe me when I say the players over there are super hardcore. I oughta know, I used to be one.


Also, this. Having to deal with the endless asshattery of other people is the primary turnoff of MMOs for me.

I've seen this done and work in MUDs, and it tends mostly to be on games where RP is more important than having 1337 5ki11z. Combat tends to be done only in groups, and only sparingly, and great caution is taken with what you fight and such.

The other thing about combat in that sort of game, is that it takes like 3 minutes to kill something, because they want to make sure you have time to run away, or even get disconnected and jump back on and maybe still have a chance to come back.

The trouble with doing something like this on an MMO is that combat generally needs to be quick, and SR combat is quick, with .75-1.5 seconds being plenty of time for someone to die. Now obviously the time frame of death would have to change for an MMO, but it would still generally be too short to have any chance of coming back and surviving. And of course with SR being largely a team game, you have the serious problem of getting morons in your group that train a bunch of enemies at you, or people who get dropped and suddenly the entire team falls like dominoes.

I think what might be better is to see alot of enemies using non-deadly ammo like SnS or gel rounds instead of bullets, and deadly ammo having the chance to be circumvented by DocWagon (Which you could call before you go critical to improve your odds of survival). In the first case you'd come back outside the prison with all R and F items removed from your person (maybe a good SIN could let you keep X items, or some kind of plaming/con roll) and a big chunk of money missing (for bribes, once again adjusted by negotiation or some such) and likely some kind of penalty for running against a particular company for a while (they now have your prints and DNA sample, so they'll have an easier time figuring out if you break into a facility). Waking up from deadly ammo would have you with your items and such (Or not, depending) and a huge hospital fee with emergency rescue.

Still, the largest problems you have to get around are people getting disconnected, and protection against idiots. For the first you could maybe get to pick some AI to run your character until you get to a point where you can drop out of the mission or reconnect. The AI could be something similar to the FFX.... was it 13? The one where you could basically set up battle tactics for your characters by doing things like 'heal anyone if at 30% or less health' and such. Basically set up something like that to run if the game ever detects that you've been disconnected.

As for handling idiots, I figure an account based 'referal' system of sorts, where people can write that you did well, or know what you're doing in general, or that your a moron who will train the entire compound onto you. Include of course a -100 to 100 score that others will see to get a quick idea, and maybe even have it affect the person's karma/nuyen gain rate. Some potential for abuse, but it could be handy.

P.S.

I think the other reason you don't see permadeath in MMOs is that if you've worked on a character for ages, and then that character dies, you might be inclined to give up the game, and MMOs want to minimize any incentives you might have to give up the game.

True. I play guild wars with survival in mind thats you die go make an new PC its much harder you play like a sissy and this is a game where death is common. Yes a "perma" death MMO would be dicey ground but if you make "lvling" up not a massive boost and keep most gear low down on the price as it is in SR really. It has potential that other MMOs don't.

Fire-fights in the SR MMO could easily be made more tactical the game would then reward skill in the player not grind time as much. www.mortalonline.com uses similar idea but i've yet to try the game.

There is a way that could combo the two approaches, the limited subset and the 100% experience, do what Torchlight did, make a limited subset as a tech demo of your game engine, then release an mmo down the track. Torchlight just broke 500,000 copies sold to, nice way to generate cash flow when you are in the middle of a dev cycle for an mmo.

And as for astral space, piss easy to code, just do it the same way phasing is done in wow, for things like invisibility for mages and such like.

Like in Shadowrun, if you have a bad rep, you don't get jobs, you lose contacts, and some NPCs will just start shooting you on sight. Sure you can blackball someone for no reason, but then that gets back to you if it proves to be false.

Perma Death for certain character types would be on another slate though . .
AI's, Free Spirits, Cyber-Zombies and Jar-Heads. Everything else could work as usual.

I'm guessing none of those would be included from the start, and have a decent chance of never being included as PC options without some really heavy modifications. Free Spirits for instance are nearly impossible to kill, though being unable to use the character for a couple weeks after death would sting.

Near death was one aspect I really liked about the old sega rpg. I'd imagine Doc Wagon style NPCs could be worked into an MMO or multiplayer game. Could do something like eve online and adjust contracts based on total skills, attributes, and character type. RP wise these rising costs could be tied to expense of saving magically active and high threat areas; imagine having to pay for the death of an npc that came to save you. Base contracts wouldn't even include high threat.

Man, this makes me wish m$oft hadn't messed up their game.

Makes Me wish they had left SRO in peace.
As most of the stuff discussed in here was planned for that one . .

This has already been sorted out, they'd just make it so that each player has the equivalent of a top level DocWagon contract and you get ressed at the hospital with some negatives to your stats for a while, they do this in City of Heroes (ressed in a hospital), in WoW (but they make you run back to your corpse).

If the street cred system in a Shadowrun MMO was actually written well it'd be 10x more useful than the rep system from WoW, which has changed from back in the day where a rep grind to Argent Dawn would actually take 40 runs of scholomance getting the dragon flesh quest item each run.

And then there's this guy: http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/8167/xinhuaninsanity.jpg who'll powergame his way through anything you throw at him.

Here is something by accident:

http://www.sixthworldgames.com/games.html

Its a video game company studio looking for a personal and a publisher, but they essentially just ripped off Shadowrun. No idea how far they will get with their game as the PC gaming industry is more or less dead IMHO - except for MMOs and Starcraft.

I think it's nearly impossible to do a Shadowrun game that would satisfy fans. The features list is so extensive (and you just need to look at the comments about physical world + astral + matrix), the world so complex, that the required game is either a triple A RPG a la Dragon Age / NWN, or a triple A MMO, specially considering doing a good MMO with tons of content is one of the more expensive propositions nowadays.

If we ever want to see another Shadowrun game done, we would have to accept that the game wouldn't be able to have everything, at least in the beginning. Because it will be extremely difficult for any company to get the kind of budget that SR requires.

I think it's nearly impossible to do a single Shadowrun product that would fully satisfy 10 dumpshock posters.