[X] My Assistant

[Voran]

[emo samurai]

Dude, I have a great idea for the game. The final boss should be a section of the Blood Mage Gestalt; while you're killing blood mages and sacrifices before they can be knifed, the Gestalt will be bombarding you with bigass spells.

[Unrest]

Personally if they were going to this I would be happy with an updated version of the Genesis game. Anyone ever play that game? It was decent for its time and I still run it every now and then just for fun. If they updated the graphics engine, and added more run types and job classes I would be in line to pick it up.

[emo samurai]

Yeah, me too. And no crap about Harlequin being serious and stuff. There should be something at the end where they stop the Blood Mage Gestalt from doing something bad; there has to be a Big Bad at the end, and you can't get that without having them fight Lofwyr. You could prevent Lofwyr from doing something bad (??), but he wouldn't do anything world-shattering himself; he's not into being a magical threat, only a corporate one. And you can't kill him; he can't die outside of an edition-spanning book like System Failure. The end has to make the player be a hero, so the last boss could be... holy shit, WINTERNIGHT! But they've already been taken care of by the corporations, which was lame. Maybe some other freaky apocalypse cult. And you could have them do a bunch of quests inside the run-down Arc.

You see, that's the problem with heroism in Shadowrun. The big bads are all corporations, but they're evil in a much more nebulous and ambiguous sense than Garthganar Archetypal Dark Sorceror of Darkness. The only equivalent of Garthganar Archetypal Dark Sorceror of Darkness is the Blood Mage Gestalt, and unlike insect and toxic shamans, they're supported by a megacorporation. Which is why they'd be the perfect big bads, because really, they're the only big bads.

[Kanada Ten]

I don't think a Shadowrun game needs a big bad guy. In fact, that sort of defeats the point of SR4.

[emo samurai]

But... but the Sega game did!!! And pretty much every video game does; I'm sure it would be a huge departure if it didn't. Then again, it could sort of be like Morrowind in its openendedness; that would rock so hard. Yay not fighting for the greater good!

[James McMurray]

It should feature an evil corpration as the big bad guy and strings of runs designed to ruin that corporation. along the way you'll probably have to meet some bosses, because that's the way video games these days work.

Perhaps the last "boss" could be the cyberzombie gaurding resource X that you need. But instead of ending it there you have to take resource X to location Y and use it for nefarious plan Z, totally ruining the corporation financially.

[emo samurai]

And if it ends with a run on Aztechnology, that would be the most un-archetypal ending for a Shadowrun adventure ever. It starts in the streets, it ends in the streets.

[James McMurray]

Ah, but it wouldn't be a shadowrun adventure, it would be a string of shadowrun adventures tied into a single campaign.

[emo samurai]

Hmm... but I always thought that the last boss fight should take place in an area that just embodied everything about the setting. You fight the lasts boss in Eternal Darkness at a summoning gate; you fight Ares the God of War in Hades; you fight Ganon in the castle after going through a dungeon made up from themes drawn from previous dungeons. A jungle and a pyramid have nothing to do with the rest of Shadowrun. Unless the Blood Mage Gestalt had a part in the Seattle skyscraper; then that could be done quite well.

[James McMurray]

It doesn't have to be Aztechnology. There are plenty of evil corporations in Shadowrun. Almost all of the biggies can fit that bill one way or another. Aztechnology just happens to be the one that springs to mind first because of their blood magic.

And the runs would never have to go near the home office. You could probably ruin a corporation without ever getting within 10 miles of their president's offices.

Whatever it is, it should mesh with SR canon and be adopted into the setting. Assuming it is something that fits of course.

[Kanada Ten]

[emo samurai]

But they're a huge departure from the "glistening towers of glass, steel, and doom looming over dirty, cramped streets" aesthetic of Shadowrun. The last boss shouldn't be that, and no corporation except Aztechnology would do something unprofitable like bringing about the apocalypse.

[Kanada Ten]

[emo samurai]

I was thinking of that; it would be kind of like the original Diablo, where there'd be one multi-leveled dungeon that you could get out of at various levels. Like, every 10 or so levels, there'd be a place to get airlifted in or something.

[James McMurray]

Please don't put it in the arcology. Give a bunch of non-Sr playing game designers the premise "magic, technology, and trapped by an AI in a big building" and all we'll get is Doom IV.

[Voran]

[Kanada Ten]

I think you're missing the word "end" in there, not "take place". But like System Shock without all the missing people, and linearness.

[emo samurai]

That would suck. Screw the Arc; make the game Morrowind, but with more guarded sites and fewer opportunities for sponsorship.

[James McMurray]

An elder scrolls setup could be nice, open ended runs available with there still being a way to find and participate in a larger campaign type situation.

[emo samurai]

Yeah, and with AR, that would just make everything that much more rich. It would really highlight the awesomeness of the system, and if it captures the whole social fabric of the game world, then that'll make people buy books.

[mintcar]

One thing previous SR video games have done well is to portray the originality of the Shadowrun game world. People who never heard of the pen and paper game remember the atmosphere with fondness. And fan of SR who played the video games could see that this was made by people who knew the material well. FASA did become a video game developer, and so we have no reason to believe that the game will be developed by people clueless about Shadowrun.

But we should remember that it's FASA making this game, not Fanpro. This will no doubt be set in the SR2 setting, not SR4.

[cx2]

A few ideas:

MMO:
try
www.awakenedworlds.net
only a mud, but good class system (no classes per se, you just pick cyber and if you have magic... obviously tradition too, but that's not hard)

Combat equipment:
Airburst link:
Gives you proximity detonation grenades instead of timed
Vision Mag:
Gives zoom, along with any scopes or binoculars obviously
Vision enhancement:
When activated it highlights objects with an outline, higher level would highlight more objects

Platform:
For heaven's sake, I'm sick of companies making console only games. They'd sell more copies of the game if they made it cross platform (I'm going nowhere near a console no matter what)

Implementation:
Would be nice if they made an outdoor model for Seattle, with dynamic run generation to some extent... so you get random runs with a mixture of set ones. A "free" mode would be nice too, where you give up the plot and just work for nuyen (persistent server option maybe?)

Matrix:
Maybe show the matrix as if it were the normal world, but with a toolbar for things like "attack" and other utilities. Allow some to be targetted, and show your icon (a choice would be nice) to move to an appropriate location (preferably in a non-natural way to emphasise the virtual nature) when performing actions but otherwise static in the node.

AR and astral perception:
Overliad on the normal view naturally, maybe tinted to show their non-physical nature. Toolbar again for AR, and spell selection for astral. Astral could projection could be the same as normal movement, but moving faster and with a time limit... obviously disabling non-mana based spells (this would allow for astral recon).

Here's hoping.

[Platinum]

I want to see an RTS something like syndicate, where you run a megacorp, it would be part political, etc. You would have gangs, mafia. you can use wired reflexes, smartlink and various cyberware as upgrades. I think it would make a great mod.

[James McMurray]

Please don't make it an MMO. Shadowruns require groups to pull off, and I generally don't have the schedule that lets me find a regular group of people to play online with. I'd much rather have it work as a party game along the lines of Might and Magic: control one character at a time witht he rest on AI modes until you switch to them.