http://features.teamxbox.com/xbox/1464/Mos...x-360-Games/p1/

I decided to start a new topic with this tiny bit of new info, mainly because we only have one topic about the Xbox game and it's nine pages long.

What do you know? Seems the franchise has some wide pull still. It'll at least have the big videogame sites waiting impatiently as far as I can tell. Not just from this article.

<edit> I might have been lying in the title. It doesn't really say there's been a vote. This here site is just claiming the game is among the most anticipated, and has placed it on the first page of the article. Guess I just had to go the route of sleazy journalism and make a half-truth headline to inhance the significance of my find. But I did it because I want to believe there's a huge interest out there!

Only three pages!

~J

Suppose it depends on your settings.

Yeah, I'm a little excited.

I'm equal parts excited and terrified.

Hey, I just went and tried out Crimson Skies for X Box. I was a big surprised that Crimson Skies was turned out by Microsoft before Shadowrun, because I thought that Shadowrun was a more popular franchise. Perhaps they thought Crimson Skies would have more general appeal.

The Microsoft Crimson Skies game was a pretty decent game. I thought that it was pretty, that it had reasonable dialogue for a video game, and the engine was easy to learn. I'm not really into flight sims as much as I am FPS games, though, so I don't know if I'll play it anymore. But I think that Microsoft did a decent job of making a game version of Crimson Skies, so on that count I feel reassured.

Did Crimson Skies the X Box game have anything to do with the pen and paper RPG? I never played the pen and paper game so I have no idea. However, I'd guess that in any case the video game could be a nice introduction to a pen and paper RPG, since the video game had specific manuvers for dogfights, lots of different planes with different characteristics, and lots of plane upgrades. That all feels like stuff that is probably in the pen and paper version in more detail.

I dunno. All in all if Microsoft does a decent job like it did with Crimson Skies SR would probably be just fine.

They say two things in this article that I never heard before (and that is propably not worth a damn, but still). They say that you can only play as a street samurai, and that the game will be out by the same time as PS3 to trumf Sony. That's by next holliday season. I don't buy it though. The release estimate seems very unrealistic as the game has not yet been announced, and limiting the player to the street sam seems just stupid. If they do, it's propable that they do something like what they did in the SNES game; and make the street sam able to do both hacking and magic too, as the game progresses.

Do you think it'll be a sort of urban System Shock, or Deus Ex? Because Shadowrun, in play, is nothing like Quake with upgrades. And if it's like System Shock, then why can't you play with mages or hackers? And if it's Quake with upgrades, why the hell would they use SR?

It's a mystery for sure

I'm still preaching the NEED for a Shadowrun MMO.....

and since MSFT just ABSORBED Lionhead Studios, I am having wet dreams about Peter Molyneaux (sp?) developing it as his first venture into the MMO Arena.

I play WOW now and then, and I enjoy it. I like being in a living breathing world with other people, killing monsters and having casual conversation with the few people you find with half a brain. But it's not roleplaying, and a lot of people in there are stupid. WOW works because it's not serious in any way. You're not expecting anyone to act like anything other than the pubertal jerks most of them are. I would proplably not be able to resist a Shadowrun mmorpg, but it would without a doubt taint my image of the setting so that I could never again take it seriously.

Good points Mint and Karma.

SR is supposed to be a first person shooter, in which case, I'm completely out. Why can't they make it a multi-player co-op like Baldur's Gate or Champions of Norrath? Those engines work just fine, and allow for magic, melee and ranged combat. FPSs's's's (whew!) are generally pretty weak at the RP aspect of an RPG.

Maybe they'll show the gun in the middle of the screen and you'll line up the sight like real life. How accurate the sight is and how much your gun shakes will be based on your weapons skill. Smartlink will maybe do more than just put a reticle on the screen; maybe it'll adjust your targeting for distance, speed, and possibly even give you some auto-aim, while smartlinked grenades will be remote-triggered by DNI. Which will, of course, require about 80 years of programming to get down.

I'm interested to see how Bethesda handles Fallout 3. Elder scrolls 4 oblivion is running really well for me out the gate, which gives me some hope they can pull off fallout 3. For SR, it's hard to say, Deus Ex was nice, Deus Ex 2 gave me headaches. Dumbed down interface, smaller feeling levels instead of the feel from the original, EXTREME lack of modability. Check the sites of DX 1 versus the mod sites for DX2. DX1 is still a viable game you could make adjustments and mod changes to, DX2 had a higher resolution mod (fan made I believe, cause the default res sucked for PC) and that's about it.

The game mechanics of SR are what I'm afraid wouldn't translate as well into a computer game. How do you stay true to the feel of the rules? While stuff like Kotor and Neverwinter Nights were cool games, they also weren't really true to the game systems they came from. Great fun, but lost something because they had to make adjustments to be a playable crpg.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.