they don't have to use the whole IP--just enough to make it recognizable to SR fans. it's not like these guys have never heard of SR before. at least one of the devs still plays it. given that fact, i find it hard to believe they couldn't shell out the five or six man-hours it'd have taken to come up with a background story that at least nominally fits the existing material.

yes. because only alcoholic primates recognize that the game they're creating is not SR.

ah. regardless, i disagree with your list. what you've listed could as easily describe a d20 Modern/Future game. the list of things they changed for no apparent reason outweighs your list by an order of magnitude. the game is not SR. i mean, for pete's sake, SRRPG.com posted a freakin' disclaimer for the game.

except they changed all of it. they screwed up the date of the Awakening. they screwed up the expression of metahumanity. they screwed up the global corps. like i said, you don't build a game off an established IP and then change everything--especially when there's no reason to. five or six hours, tops, and this game could be worked into SR canon. the reason Shadowrun is not interchangeable with d20 Modern/Future is because of those details. SR has them, d20 Modern/Future doesn't, or has different ones.

orks are not slight details. the appearance of dragons is not slight details. the way magic works is not slight details.

moreover, details or not, there was no. reason. to. change. it.

blakkie... have you read their timeline? Have you actually checked the difference?

There are no Orks. Humans are tougher than Dwarfs. Elves and Dwarfs weren't born in 2012 (the year of the awakening...) but adults changed into Elfs, Dwarfs and Troll (but again , no Orks) that same year. Elves regenerate and Dwarfs nullify magic. When Humans install cyber, it costs less essece (why? hell do I know...).

Renraku is alive and kicking 8 years before Aneki created the company... and Fuchi's got a great optical implant that lets you see through walls... remember that this is in 2021... Because we all know that cybereyes and tech that could see through walls are part of SR-canon in 2021.

There is no offensive magic (just gone...), but there is resurrection, teleportation and a "Tree of life"-spell.

The game itself revolves about a megacorporation (RNA) trying to take control of a Ziggarut (one of six) that controls magic in the world.

How is that even close to being Shadowrun?

Edit: Forgot about the dragons... there are no dragons.

Link

and 'roughly in the neighborhood' is not good enough for me--and a lot of othe people--to lay money down for. nor is it good enough that i'm going to stop accusing them of being lazy hacks, because it could have been 'really close' or even 'dead on'. you'd think maybe those 5-6 extra hours would be worth it, considering the number of people planning to boycott the game because they weren't spent.

how about six minutes? here we go: replace their mockery of SR history with a cut-down version of It came to Pass. take out elves and dwarves, put in orks. change RNA Global to Aztechnology and change Lineage to a nascent Amazonia. link the whole thing to the massive regrowth of the Amazon rainforest. QED.

and you, blakkie, are the last person on the planet who can talk about being anal retentive.

If you still want elves and dwarfs, then move it up a couple of years to... dunno... 2030 or something like that.

Edit: Oh, and I would be fine with some of the shit they've done if they' d have given some explanation as to why. For instance, I could take the resurrection and teleportation if the other shit was more canon and the explanation was that within... oh, a mile (or such) of the Ziggarut teleporation and resurrection is actually possible. And there you have another reason for the company wanting that artifact. Who wouldn't want to be able to resurrect people?

Edit2: I'm not exaggerating. I think that this game is a completely different game. To me the game they're selling isn't Shadowrun. And thus we're talking another planet. With my changes in the last edit, then we'd be in the same neighbourhood.

they've got until January to fix the gameplay. those spells can be tossed out along with RNA.

that's their problem. if they'd spent the time when they first started, they wouldn't be in this position.

So, is one of you going to make a high-quality, stable, features-jammed Deus Ex mod set in a Shadowrun setting yet? I mean, since we pretty much figured out that the MS game won't be worth buying, I figured I'd just download and enjoy your hyper cannon of drama mod work instead. That dosen't exist yet. But it should.

(Lets see if I can still do this.) Yeah, but it's cool because a dev has a purple mohawk.

I will readily confess that I am a detail man. I love deep stuff. I like stuff that's got so many layers it gets local geologists excited. And then when it comes time to share that stuff with everybody else, I've got to tone it down about ten notches so they don't look at me like I'm speaking Latin. That part of me can't help but feel awful. That part of me feels like my favorite puppy was just drowned in a lake inside a garbage bag. As much as I like SR4, I still miss the demise of variable TNs.

That said, I don't know how I'd make an SR computer game if I was placed in the hot seat. As Einstein says, make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. The development team obviously took the knife to canon, but I think they probably cut a little too far. But how much of this perceived loss is real or imaginary is hard to determine. They've gone all the way back to 2012. We can't say with certainty whether future events will be invalidated, but there is a real fear that if they tinkered with such basic stuff as making magic absorbant dwarves... then what else we be lost? Call it estimated trajectory.

I think it is clear that somebody probably started with gameplay mechanics first, and the cut apart SR stuff to fit. Sort of like putting square shaped stickers on a circle. On one hand, sure, mechanically a circle peg is going to fit in the circle hole, and thus increase the odds for good gameplay. But I think that people feel it is an insult to their intelligence when you slap the square sticker on top. Example, allow an option like an edge to be magic resistant, but don't slap it on the dwarf metatype.

So, in the end, I'm just conflicted.

According to the game details, not only are dwarves resistant to magic, they inhibit magic! Automatic counterspelling whether they're a mage or not? Come one people!

meh. mods aren't where my talents lie.

The funniest thing to me about this entire thing is that no matter what game they'd made, hardcore SR fans would bitch. They would still have left out Orks, because Trolls and Orks are too close to one another to bother coding both. They would have had to leave some canon stuff out, meaning cries of "damnit! I wanted my kid stealth legs!" They'd have had to drop some spells ("Waaah! Where's my Turn to Goo???").

It is impossible for any game to fully duplicate a PnP game that's been around for decades. And depending on what your time frame is, you'll probably have to even change some game mechanics around to make the coding simpler. Hell, even Neverwinter Nights and D&D Online have hordes of detracters and they're both really close to the actual rule sets.

True. And Microsoft would be getting the $5,000 worth of profits because of it. But who's to say how much making this version will net them from non-SR fans. I certainly can't, but it might be more than the money they lose by alienating the comparatively small group of people that play FPS games and also play PnP SR.

Edit: The "true" is meant to refer to your second paragraph. I disagree witht eh first, and it doesn't really seem to mesh with my statements anyway, since I was talking about hardcore SR fans bashing a computer game, not SR itself.

your estimate of the number of SR fans appears to be slightly lower than mine. certainly your estimate of the number of fans who won't be buying the "Shadowrun" FPS because of the, ah, changes made to the story line is. as for how much they'll get off non-SR fans, well, that goes back to the M$ thing.

i was being largely tongue-in-cheeck about bashing something being the best part about being a fan of that thing.

I'm not assuming anything. Did you somehow take my use of "I certainly can't" and "might" to mean I had nailed down exactly what effects the changes have on the marketability of the game? I'd say that if that is the level of reading comprehension you have, there's no point in trying to talk about anything.

your phrasing would lead one to believe that you made that assumption. you say "this version might not get SR fans, but it might get non-fans", which certainly implies that there is something about the version which attracts non-fans while repelling fans. or, at least, one can easily draw that implication from it.

my estimate? i don't have an estimate. i have no idea exactly how many SR fans are not going to buy the game due to the lack of respect with which it treats the IP. i do know of around 200+ who have vocally made clear their intentions to not buy it for that reason, but whether or not they'll follow through--and how many haven't spoken, but who will do the same--i don't know.

none of which has anything to do with my point, which remains that the honest thing for the developers to do would be to either create a game that treats the IP with respect, or not make a game at all. the fact that they're doing neither is what prompted the whole M$ thing. i don't care how many sales of this game there are, though it would suit my personal sense of justice if it flopped. but whether or not it will succeed has never been my point.

And oddly enough, they don't care whether or not you care. Ain't it grand when life turns full circle.

http://www.shadowrun-online.com/sronline/index.php

On the upside, it looks like there's a SR MMORPG coming out as well.

no. but i'm willing to bet they'll care if there's a massive fan backlash against their game. and i'm hoping that calling them on their dishonesty on the official forums--along with several hundred other fans--will motivate them to mend their ways.

I hope so too, but doubt it. If it makes money they'll make a sequel. If it doesn't make money they won't.

at this point, i'd rather not see a sequel.

i think of it this way: i was unhappy when Greedo shot first, but at least it was Lucas who decided it.

And of course, whether you or I want a sequel really doesn't matter.