Shadowrun on Xbox 360 and PC! Options

[blakkie]

[James McMurray]

If they count how long people have been wanting a Shadowrun game that could bump it up to "most anticipated" pretty easily. How many other games out there can say people have been asking for it for a decade?

[blakkie]

Ten years times dick all is still startlingly close to dick all. In the face of 100's of thousands of Halo fanbois it seems even less.

[James McMurray]

True, but you're saying that from the perspective of somebody not in FASA Studio's marketing staff. :)

[blakkie]

The perspective of some hack spinning total, utter PR bullshit? Yes, I suppose I am not.

[mfb]

re: anticipation of an SR video game, i present the following link.

[blakkie]

Ah, it's one of the six unannounced that are "all at the top of everyone’s “most wanted” list for the Xbox 360". Ya, everyone is special...which would mean noone is. :|

[mfb]

you're making even less sense than usual.

[blakkie]

Translation: Without sarcasm intended, i thank you for that link as that clears up a lot.

I come away from that article with the impression that the results of a survey, with a massive sample set consisting of "everyone", show that in a catagory consisting of somewhere around 6 games Shadowrun is definately right up there in the top 6 when ranked by “most wanted”. 8)

[mfb]

could be. it's certainly possible they picked 6 games they knew were in production and said "which of these six do you anticipate most?". but... eh. rigged poll or not, i can see SR being a hot property. FASA Interactive did a great job with Crimson Skies 2, after all, and the Mechwarrior series, while not a top seller, hasn't been a disappointment.

[blakkie]

I suspect if they have considered making an RPG they probably just followed your criteria of "do it well or don't do it at all" and decided they couldn't make money on a well done SR RPG. I get the impression reading the "Screw All This SR Baggage" manifesto that they even considered it not feasible to "do it well" putting together a canon compliant FPS, so they didn't do that either.

Then they decided to do the next best thing (in their eyes) and take a shot at doing a SR [themed] FPS well. Just is their idea of doing it well focused almost entirely on enjoyment of the FPS game and any vaguely inconvinent SR canon details got tossed under the software development bus.

[mfb]

what i really love is their reasoning for not using the established history. they didn't know who to please--the PnP fans, the novel fans, or the game fans. as if those are all seperate, squabbling fanbases.

[blakkie]

Ya, it's just one single squabbling fanbase. :rotfl: Not picking any of them at that point, to me, just gave it the reek of empty rationalization for taking a "just screw it" approach.

[hobgoblin]

given that the novels are close to the p&p in story (if not in "physics") and the console games are so old, i would have expected them to go with the P&P and forget about the rest.

strange thing is that you see all sorts of action and proper rpgs based on d&d and the diffrent worlds (mostly forgotten realms but now there is eberron with the d&d online), but you never see them feeling the need to call it forgotten realms while puting it into a whole diffrent world.

still i guess the reason for that is that they licence rather then own the IP rights for those worlds. fasa interactive dont have to care about followin a licence as they own the IP rights for a computer interpetation of the old fasa rpgs and other games.

[mfb]

indeed. i believe it's laziness and/or selfishness. crafting a story that meshes with the existing world would take work and research. they want to tell stories involving magic and cyberpunk elements--their own stories--while retaining the SR brand recognition.

[blakkie]

Comparing D&D to SR you have to keep a few things in mind.

The FR D&D stuff tends to just use FR names, and they don't bother put FR on the cover (the setting is quite popular, i'd hazard a guess their most popular setting line long running). FR is also set up as the kind of world where you can find a spot to wedge in pretty much -anything-, it's a pretty flexible setting that way. I don't know anything about the D&D MMO, i have had zero interest in that.

D&D itself tends to be a lot less constrained in some ways than SR in that a lot of what is thought of as "norm" for things like magic are heavily influenced by D&D itself, and the rules are built as general rules with multiple interpretations open. SR, with it's very tight rules/setting binding, does not have that to nearly the same degree.

Also keep in mind that that outside of the gold box AD&D games they had some pretty horrendous AD&D computer games before Balder's Gate. WotC seems to have been pretty good about selecting who they select for licenses, and they also have made a very conscience effort to make their rules computer friendly (i.e. 2 times out of 3 they know a revenue source when they see it). So it's something that goes both ways, and without the effort coming from the P&P it has a hell of a lot less chance of flying.

P.S. The line between fiscal prudence and "laziness" and/or "selfishness" is pretty blurry at times.

[mfb]

i can't imagine how fiscal prudence might lead to completely rewriting a setting. that's the worst part--it's an FPS, the story is just fluff. slap in Aztechnology as the corporation and Amazonia as the hippies, and voila.

[Dranem]

Another thing to remember about D&D is that WotC purchased ALL rights to everything D&D... meaning they have a say in how games are developped.

Fasa Studios does NOT need permission from FanPro or WizKids to produce a Shadowrun game. This difference is the primary reason that the upcoming game will suck, because there's no control between the computer game developpers and the RPG developpers.

[blakkie]

It seems they changed the time to avoid some other issues like tech levels, or just trying to avoid the details of SR history altogether by picking what seems to be sort of a blank spot. So Amazonia doesn't exist. Not sure about Aztech. Though having one of the big 10 names would be a nice nod to P&P players, RNA as the big bad corp at this point on the timeline is no big thing (it's pre-crash, so pretty much anything could have happened to it including a name change or merger to become Aztech). There are other things though that were changed around like dropping orks, elfs/dwarfs goblinizing, and adding teleports and rezes...which the people making the decisions might have only been vaguely aware of as issues.

So there you are designing a game. You look to the left, you look to the right. There is nobody helping or even particularly caring deeply about the P&P canon, or even helping you to understand what conflict between the novels and the P&P (and those previous console games) there might be. Just a lot a people caring about making a fun computer game with likely some requirements from the mothership about a game on both Windows and Xbox 360 that is going to compell people to play crossplatform and so on. This is a serious pressure cooker situation, and the design docs are flowing red with cuts to try get the scope down to something that can be implemented within the total alloted budge and still have a playable, marketable game.

To make it worse those damn artsy graphic freaks have already eaten up 5% just twiddling around with concept art and early 3d models, and another 5% was spent on something labeled as a "focus group marketing retreat" which you suspect was actually the original management team sending themselves off on a weekend bender junket to Tijuana. 8)

Without a champion to aid, remind, and occationally brow-beat guess how far down the list does canon slip? What we see is the natural outcome of a lack of representation. :(

[mfb]

[blakkie]

It's not a matter of being unable to handle the job pressure. It's the reality of making things work. Going into that job with a "everything or nothing" attitude that you are exponsing would ensure disaster. At some point you have to say "good enough" because there is always more scope that could added. Buckling into that creates feature creep which is deadly to a software project.

People that handle the pressure make the tough choices best the can with the info at hand and cut what has to be cut to make it work. People that don't handle the pressure buckle and doom their product to an innevitable shipdate slip or out and out canceling.

So it is lack of a resource supporting the license's canon. Normally that is the job of the person/company with the non-computer product. It isn't really the design guy's or even FASA Interactive's or Microsoft's job to be that voice AND listen to the voice.

[mfb]

"good enough" doesn't mean there aren't standards that can be set. choosing to place canon on the list of thing that you can skip is dirty and cheap.

[blakkie]

[mfb]

no, it's not. the whole point of using someone else's IP, from a creative standpoint, is to tell your stories in their world. it's not so you can rewrite everything from the ground up. if you want to do that, then don't slap the IP on the title of your project--you're not using the IP, just the brand recognition.

[blakkie]