Microsoft will probably cease and desist the wikipage into non-existence. Just to protect their IP rights.

As they did with the SRO MMORPG.

Call it "If ShadowRun were an MMO...(this is what the players would want to see)"

Now, where to host...

I had considered gangs, but I'd view those most like clans. Since we were going with a wish list, I thought having a higher organization at the corporate level would be cool. The people running that would not be "playing" the same game as those of us wanting to play our characters. I am thinking of the MMO football sim I played for a couple of years. You had a team owner who would pick people to coach (i.e. design plays, scout and gameplan opponents) but the team was also made up of user created players. So, you would want the best players to play, but you also wanted strategic players to scout and gameplan. Two very different kinds of users, playing the same game with vastly different roles.

Maybe the AAA corps would just be plot devices, factions for a single-player or small group storyline where you would play canned missions to enjoy the story and after you put in your 250 hours or so of going through a bunch of different factions, then you could play for some smaller AA user-created corporations.

The AA board could request certain missions to be completed against other corps and then clans or PUGs could queue those up and play them, whether it was an instance or PvP type play, with the end result being having some small positive or negative outcome to the AA corp. If the AA corp wasn't happy with the runner's performance, they could put out a bounty or maybe apply a preset negative street or faction cred to the team.

Obviously, having competition in the shadows prolongs gameplay, as there are going to be teams that want to be the best...

I think the thing to keep in mind is keeping this realistic from a programming point of view. Meaning, you are going to have to set limits in gameplay and character balance.

While it would be cool to have some full hacking environment to play with, I don't think you can really do that and have a playable game. You'd need to limit what hacking can do. Find a balance that there are still cool things you can do with it that you can't do in the physical or astral, but keep it limited so you are not playing a separate sub-game.

The reality of it is, just like at a real table, that no matter how "fast" you say the matrix will be, you will still have real people playing, so do you really want to ostracize, say 4 other non-matrix players, for 15 minutes while the hacker completes his sub-game? You want the hacker to be worthwhile to be on a team, but you don't want him causing everyone else to wait.

As for riggers, I don't see them as being anything other than summoners. Riggers have a fleet of drones while some mages will have their spirits, and those obviously will have to have pros and cons. Hackers could destroy or get control of drones and turn them against the enemy rigger.

While I haven't thought of proper missions yet, just the aspect of having a team that is playing together and having to monitor the astral and matrix, all at the same time and in real-time, is pretty cool.

The problem with player run corporations in ShadowRun is:

No one would play the wage slave.

automate the wageslaves.

You play the HRT, the executives, the mr Johnsons, the spiders, and hackers. You know, the fun parts.

Yeah, I envision the only thing you are doing at the corporate level is scouting other corps, setting up runs against them, trying to double-cross them in deals...that sort of thing. The nice thing is, if that part of the sim really doesn't appeal to you, you never have to mess with it and just go back to grinding your runner.

And if you keep the megas as plot pieces run by the Devs, you don't care as much about the user created AAs corps.

Its for those types that in say like a football sim, liked to build their stadiums, control ticket and concession prices, built expansions and when it came time to play the "game" just auto-simmed the season. I'm not into that type of play, but there are a lot of people that do like the sim side of business.

And I think for a game like this, you want to start with as big a picture as you can to tailor to as many gamer types as possible.

A Half Life 2 Mod called Dystopia has a pretty good hacking element. Not the best but if you try it out you would see whats possible. Basically there are terminals people with the right mods can jack into and effect the environment from while trying to fight off rival hackers. Now the VR mechanics would be easy to make (IE. the Dystopia Mod), AR on the other hand I have no idea how you would show hacking in that.

I don't think an FPS is going to do Shadowrun justice...

For combat it is, anything less would seem like a cop out. I mean honestly when was the last turn based western rpg released? It's a Japanese thing and a niche market at that. SR combat would be an FPS shooter with the ability to take cover. The RPG elements are outside of combat except for stats/skills and when you put those into a fight think the first mass effect where the higher your skill the smaller the reticle was or in the case of melee combat you can attack faster with your blades/fists/ club, do more damage and can do complicated maneuvers like in Oblivion.

I think a real-time 3rd person works really well.

I think going MMO with the idea is a big mistake, I have had far more fun with single player story, community mods, instanced / persistent servers, and Developer/Publisher DLC of NeverWinter Nights (NWN 1 or 2) than the instanced and hub model of Dungeons & Dragons Online. I hope you understand, even though it is a poor example given it is D&D which has its own grind inherit to its style of leveling. The grind has been something I have come to hate, if I can't get good player / character generated stories to share, it is a waste of my spare time to be on that particular tread mill searching for a bit of game play fun. Besides, you compete against World of Warcraft (WoW) and simply, no one does the grind better than them. The only thing that comes close to competing IMHO is the model used by Guild Wars because of its payment model. Beyond that, why wouldn't a SR MMO just fail like Matrix Online, Planetside, or more recent releases?

At least we know a ShadowRun PC game is conceivably possible because Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines while it had flaws in some of its level design did show some fun game play from the point system character creation that varied well enough and even had its shadow world with magic closely mimicking the real world.

If one could find a way to meld NWN community run multi-player with V:TM-B character creation with content created by the community with decent, ease of use GM and map tools, I think a PC developer would have something I would want to buy (hopefully from them directly or through something like Steam, I don't particularly like what Publishers and Retailers are doing to the industry as a whole: especially its paying customers and its content creators the developers). Given time, people naturally add to the shelf life and promote after release sales beyond the initial hype (if there is an effective hype campaign to begin with) with their community content and server support. Who knows how many extra sales there have been for things like Half-Life (1 & 2) or NWN (1 & 2 & DLC) because of that.

If you do insist on going MMO grind and payment model, I don't think the end product would be any more recognizable as SR than the Microsoft FPS travesty of which the only thing I ever saw any good come from was a machinema made by Rooster Teeth (the same people who made the Red vs Blue Halo machinema).

I would see cyberware/bioware/magic that enhances speed/reaction perform a mechanical effect of lessening cool-down refresh times. Say if SR was an MMO, and your toon had wired reflexes... this would increase movement speed, as well as maybe lower the weapon speed of your main hand weapon, ergo increasing DPS.

For combat... stick to real-time combat, with an option for players to switch to a 1st person view for shooting.

For spirits... summoned "pets" with limited duration and 2 choices. Attack or Guard.

For Riggers... this will sound unpopular, but don't let any PC own/use a vehicle if they are NOT a rigger. You want to travel? Pay for a taxi/monorail or get a Rigger PC to commute you to where you wanna go. Also give riggers the ability to "summon" or buy drones "aka pets" that act the same way spirits do for mages. In WoW terms... mages get spirits/pets and riggers are like hunters with animal companions.

For Hackers... they should be sort of treated like WoW Rogues. Wanna get past a door or access a terminal? Use the hacker who will use hacking abilities to crack a code or whatever. There will be some runs where a hacker is needed to get access to certain places or to get/harvest something and the hacker has to be the 1 to grab it.

Instances/quests/runs reward with money, maybe a piece of gear, faction hit, and karma. Karma is used to improve skills/abilities as per normal i would say.

Gear modification... each weapon/piece of gear has limited slots for mods and each mod varies in costs depending on the PC's rating in contact, influence, faction, etc... in order to get good modifications (like the smartlink) the PC must meet certain requirements in level and influence.

How to code for all this, I have no idea... but I am drooling at the thought of a SR MMORPG.

@Saint Hallow
Well, that is begging the question: What is a rigger?

If you push through with it, cyber and bioware will be converted to skills paid with Karma for or chosen when getting a level up.
Money is only to buy gear. To restrict cars to a certain classes really sucks. Cars or motorcycles reduce traveling time. To be unable to use means of transportation really sucks big time.
Guess you would not be able to buy a horse in Oblivion or a mount in Sacred.

Wouldnt the point of a rigger be able to effectivly spawn into the droid (leaving your meat sack somewhere) and carry on with the group. Could be a interesting tactical thing with with atral being a similar situation. Group sometimes have to defend the body while they do a quick scout around.

a mmo would be a very very big challenge and I dont think the current crop of games developers could do it justice

Astral space would be sort easy, you just fly / run around, with the option to quick travel by clicking on a map.

Deep matrix hacking would be easy but dangerous to do on a run. It could be made funner by just sticking to hacking the whole time on the fly and letting your team mates take care of things. The matrix world could be very lame and very easy to do. Fly/run around and attack things in a bland low rez 3d world. Some places could look like tron wile other places look like a real 3d world.

AR I image as widgets on your screen and floating around you. When you see a security camera with the right software on you see some thing floating around it, when you click on that you attempt to hack it. I imagine the AR setup to be highly user customizable. So you might have a hard time seeing the bad guy past all your widgets displaying what team mates see, mini maps, hacking dialog boxes, node maps, virtual pets... Also changing the environment would be fun. Software to virtually tag stuff could be popular if the mechanics made it fun.

Metaplanes would be fun. I think you would make an expansion pack to really explore them.

People do heavy online play so much now days because it is harder to pirate. I would consider NWN multiplayer though. Its multiplayer was not very fun though. From what I saw it was all just speed runs though the same boring quests.

I do think user created content would be cool, especially if you could code AR stuff to share. The main thing to share would of course be missions. But game balance mods are would also be nice. Fallout 3 has a very nice mod community. But all those mods is also what stops it from being multi player. Every single sharing the game needs the same mods. If you did AR mods then it would not affect anyone but the user. But I can see how this would be hard to implement.


One thing that could keep this game interesting is to have new missions keep coming out and a big story arc mission coming out each season or two. Sort of like how shadowrun has official missions games.

By "people" I take it you are referring to publishers and the developers dependent on them and inevitably if you start into measures to reduce unauthorized copies aka "pirating", then really you are talking about Digital Rights Management (DRM) going online, since online multiplayer has been around before the methods of DRM software became bit by bit more sophisticated. Its part of the reason for the rise of consoles as a dominant sector of the electronic gaming market because the publishers (and thus developers) have more confidence in those platforms to have more hardware restrictive DRM, despite the development kits, certification and restrictive distribution channels (which came about at least in part because the bottom fell out on the market in the 1980s) for those platforms taking a considerable chunk of their development budget and thus being a barrier to entry (why you find so few legitimate Indy developers in the console market) and making publishers (and their developers) averse to risk due to the higher development costs, which seems to have resulted in ridiculous amounts of variations on popular themes (aka clone games, most notably in FPS games) and a franchise focus of trying to milk rabid fans of a particular brand of it aka sequel-itis.

If all you found from NWN multiplayer was speed runs, you missed out on a awful lot of other modes of play, which ran the gamut of full on hackNslash PvP exclusive to exclusively roleplay where more time is spent chatting and emote animations being run then combat and also the range of fully NPC to DM fully run instances of quests. The full range of multiplayer was/is more than even all the available mods, a DM could distribute custom adventures practically on the fly and even more so with help from community DM mods to boot. But that was more or less during its hay day, not sure what remains of the player base and servers at this point, but just like MUDs and such, I am willing to bet there are a few die hards servers and DM'ed group instances still going on to this day for NWN and NWN 2.

It should be noted here that the distribution of content so all the users are using the same version is something that has been around in PC gaming multiplayer for many years now. I guess you weren't around for things like Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament (or whatever) downloading maps when you would join a server? Well, the possibilities are becoming expanded upon if there is support for it, things like cloud distribution programming (think of it roughly like the different p2p file sharing methods) are opening things up for such content heavy instances since it helps take the load off of community content servers. What if other gamers were seeding your mod content that you play with them? Here, this could be a good watch on the digital market (which is very important to PC gaming - and possibly the next generation of consoles - which what the thread is asking about) -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxhGlNbsRxs

And if you are interested in what is possible for AR, VR, Astral or whatever, you really should run a google for articles on things like WoW's phasing, which would allow players to view different runs of the same enviroment, IIRC. http://www.wowwiki.com/Phasing

Ugh, a double post and no delete option that I am noticing in the edit features. Sorry.

This post has been edited by CanadianWolverine: Aug 31 2010, 04:02 PM

Yeah, it wold suck to restrict vehicles to only certain classes. However, for those of us who recall EverQuest and all those times begging for a SoW... travelling via foot is possible or using game-made transports like WoW's Griffon/Wyvern points... it helps make Riggers more viable other than just a wannabe caster who uses drone pets instead of spirits.

A friend of mine had the best idea for wired reflexes:

Done like how that awful XBox 360 game did it: auto-aim of various sensitivities, along with speed boosts, and reload speed. Smart link gives auto-aim (say 1 px per second), wired reflexes gives the smart link bonus (at the lowest level identical, at Wired 2 you'd get 2 px a second, Wired 3 4 px a second) along with movement bonus and reload speed bonus.

Just roll the hacker and the rigger into a single class, and you're no longer worried about being a pseudo-summoner.

Technically, if smartlink is done right, all it provides is a reticle. Which means you wouldn't normally have one.

As soon as you step into a (PvP) Z-zone, you get shot by 100 sniper rifles mounted on 100 renraku stormclouds...