Whomever wrote that should get a medal.


In other news... FASA dropped the ball. They didn't just drop the ball, they dropped the ball that set off the rube goldberg machine of fury and rage. Hopefully, it's going to fly around and kick them in the ass.

What has this game got going for it, ignoring all I.P., and treating it as a straight-up first person shooter? Things that few if any FPS's have ever done?

It has:

Multiple races. (Arguably. While other FPSs may or may not have races, they tend to have weight classes.)
Magic (Which is non-offensive, and relegates players to the support role. We all know how open-play guys LOVE to be the support role, right?)

What it has flying against it:

Windows Vista. The computer gaming crowd is not going to want to upgrade their O.S. just to play this game, especially as XP has several years worth of life left in it yet.

No singleplayer support.

It's a game that will be moving in direct competition with Counter-Strike: Source, which costs a whole lot less, whichever Unreal Tournament is currently "in", and America's Army, which is FREE.


The guys who coulden't care about Shadowrun and only want an FPS will wind up being unimpressed by it and go back to playing Counter-Strike: Source.

Worse, the few that DO like it and find out there's a PnP RPG (if they ever do, because M$ is certainly not going to mention it, as it dosen't get them any money) are going to buy SR4, and be all "omfg wtf is thiz hax? This isen't Shadowrun!" And then the Shadowrun guys they talk to will say "Sorry to say this mate, but that is Shadowrun. That shit Microsoft put out? They only got to use the Shadowrun name because of some legal name-pirating. Go ahead and try SR4 though, you'll find it's a lot better than the game. If you have any patience, that is."

"Patience? WTF is that shit? NM I GB2CS".


Worse is that making this a Shadowrun game would NOT HAVE BEEN ALL THAT HARD. Not at all.

You wanna know how? Here's how.

The game started development before SR4. So you set it in 2060, before the YotC and all the SotAs. This is to limit the PnP material you have to browse through.

You go through the guns and equipment and cyber lists and magic lists of the SR3 core book, pull out the useful stuff. You might have to drop riggers because of the "OMFG that drone just eradicated the whole team" factor - then again, you might not have to. Depends on your implementation - if you only use the small and light drones that can be destroyed with firearms, then you can keep riggers. Alternatively, do like BF2, and make anti-vehicle weapons common, and you can keep tank-truck/heavy drone riggers.

Come up with a good reason for this to be a CTF game. How about, I dunno, a scaled-up version of Urban Brawl? Urban Brawl Championship will be the In-Character reason for it, with anyone and everyone who wants to try to participate allowed to do so.

Bam. Story, not even all that implausable.

How to implement magic? Simple - a Stun and a Health bar. Each one imposes penalties, of course, making your aim more wobbly and slowing you down until you recover. This also gives people a reason to carry nonlethal weaponry - if someone is fast with healing spells on the enemy team, you can use the stun to put people out of action since they can't heal stun. Then when everybody's out of action, you can geek them. Or leave 'em to rot/kill themselves (thus losing points) to respawn.

Implementing decking? Easiest thing in the world. Just create an extra "zone" to the map that's outside the "physical world" zone. When someone jacks in, their meat body stays in the physical world, vunerable and undefended unless someone is defending it, and they can fly around in the extra world. What does it do? Make it so using the Matrix right is either VITAL to success, or Very Helpful - things like hacking the enemy base's turrets would be good. A short hack would simply put them offline until someone reset them in the Matrix, a long hack would change them to target the team they were supposed to protect. Or simply require the door to the flag room to be hacked open. You can simply forget all the IC and stuff, and make the only form of Matrix defense to be an opposing player in the Matrix - not inappropriate for a closed-system Urban Brawl match.

The Astral plane? Same deal, except you don't need a jack-in point to project. Projecting into the astral plane is simple - you occupy a new characture of yourself and fly around in what is essentially noclip mode. Some things (the ground, the boundaries of the arena, the skybox) are impassable, ICly you can say these places (as well as some other places, like the enemy spawns) have been warded against astral movement. Give the astral player moving a lot of speed, give him a speed toggle so he can either move super-fast as is Astral-norm, or move carefully. Let him see ordinary objects blurrily and indistinctly, thus making landmarks a little hard to follow, and make people out there in the meat world visible. Make Watcher Spirits on the astral out so that they show the mage a picture-in-picture view of what they're seeing from the astral in the top of his screen - not really canon, but it's a good fascimile. Other sorts of spirits, of course, you can order around with a simple but option-rich (not an oxymoron) map-view command system. "Go Astral. Go here. Manifest. Kill everything. Go Astral. Go here. Manifest. Kill everything. Go Astral. Go here. Manifest. Kill everything. Go back to step 1." for example. Bam, you just set up a three-point patrol. And this of course, introduces the reason for having the astral - spirits are difficult to combat in the world without AV weapons, but in astral combat a mage percieving is about equal to them, and a mage projecting has a really good chance of punking them down.


Bam. Shadowrun, the FPS. Instead, they chose to do some wierd shit.

Not even arguably. The first, but not the only, example of this to come to mind is UT2k4, though it's an optional setting.

Maldavria (Q3 mod) and Clive Barker's Undying (commercial game) both have magic.

~J

Just to clear up the delusions, we'll see SR5 before we see a strict canon RPG. Fan made or otherwise.

That site was just someone trying to lobby Microsoft to build a SR RPG or MMO. Microsoft is currently right out of the MMO business. The cut it some time back, but for some odd reason had picked up Brad McQuaid's gang Vangard...which they just offically dumped distribution of earlier this month.

So there isn't going to be a SR as you know it RPG, and sure as hell no MMO.

P.S. As far as I can tell from the datestamps on the news, when that site openned up FASA was already nearly a year into development of this current game.

to bad the mod nosedived and the commersial game was a pure one player game.

hell, after reading some of the stuff linked from the forum-thread that mfb linked to, its clear that its a cheap CS clone made to attract people to the "live anywhere" service. way to butcher the IP property microsoft.

by the looks of it, they could not handle the richness of the background, so they had to boil it down to gun and magic to get the basic idea thru to the execs. and at that point the execs said: FPS! end of story

Can mages not carry guns?

Of course they can. Magic is in a supporting role at a personal level. It is a tool. Even rezing someone, though obviously a "support role" at the team level, appears to be a really well paying (in ingame currency) sideline for the caster.

Well, not in this case anyway.

(I'm sorry!!! I'm really being mean today, but they're just too easy!!)

I've played open server TF and Tribes/T2. I haven't played BF2. If people aren't playing the classes at all I would say then that it was a poorly designed game in that regard. It wasn't a fun to play option, so of course people aren't going to want to play it. Sounds like it is a class that should have been cut.

On the otherhand in Tribes 2 there were lots of jobs to fit different tasks. Pickup games were still relatively unorganized, but you could work effectively in teams of 2 or 3 people too even if the whole of the team was disorganized.

As for the specifics of rezzing currently the the caster gets a 50% take of what the player he rezzed makes from that point on. Given that cash is what you use to buy more spells and gear i'd say that's a pretty strong incentive to overcome tying up about a 1/3 of your casting reserves.

Rez two people and then go find a hidie-hole to crawl into.

I'm not sure what you are talking about with console-killing themselves? You mean if someone rezzes them they'll just kill themselves and not earn any cash at all vs. earning 1/2 cash?

Rezzing the truely feeble isn't so much a problem as they'll soon free your Essense up again, and a player that is really good might leave you with a long wait and a dangerous situation before you can rez him.

You rez someone and your team is strengthened and you stand to gain some unknown amount of cash out of it. *shrug* The actual percentage cut the caster gets is likely something that tweaking would help on to find the right psychological sweet spot. But all in all a game that has well designed avatar options will have them all used in some reasonable extent.....which gets us back to it being helpful in building a good game to avoid being a slave to the literal rules of a game in an entirely different medium, and being willing to cut "features" that get in the way or doesn't add to the gameplay.

EDIT: One obvious area where a problem could develop is surrounding TKing. But without a stringent background anti-TK script running or an human admin present public servers tend to turn off team damage anyway.

People play average schmoes in Silent Hill all the time. Why would this game be any different (assuming the average schmoe is fun to play)?

~J

You don't have to go outside the team PVP set of games to find people on public servers playing all the various roles. Can't say what the specific issue with BF2 is, but TF and T2 had lots of people with engineering and medics loadouts/character types and a mix of offense/defense. I believe that at one point some TF servers did start putting caps on the number of players that could choose a given type. But that problem had to do more with teams running all snipers i believe, which resulted in the other side pretty much needing to run all snipers. It would then devolve into a sniper vs. sniper war.

The biggest problem in T2 was the learning curve on piloting where some noob would jump into the pilot seat on a transport or bomber and then proceed to run into something and flip it over or fly it at missle-bait altitude (anti-missle flares being a limited load out) getting everyone killed.

Which is another design boo-boo to watch out for to make the game public server friendly. Senarios where a single player can easily cripple a team through poor play to the point where it would better if the team was down a couple people rather than him being on the team. That's why the option is normally included to turn off friendly fire or at least have an anti-FF script running.

I'm still trying to figure out WTF Kagetenshi is talking about with SH (but then i don't play that particular game, so whatever he thinks he's saying is going to need to be a bit more explicit), mfb i'm assuming is going off his extensive FPS team PVP experience, and ShadowDragon8685 appears to be going off the fact that he is sparking up a fat one.

Then let me try to distill the concept down to a core essence that perhaps even your feeble mind will be able to understand:

They are different game types. They play differently, and people play them differently.

Now, can we spot two other games in recent discussion that are of different game types?

~J

But why would that make this invalid?

Basically it comes down to if it is supported in the game and it's fun for people to play with it then people will tend to play with it. If it sucks to play it then they won't.

For some reason apparently BF2 was built in such a way that one or more of the avatar types suck (player has little personal reward to play). It doesn't match up with any siginficant personality group that plays the game and so it doesn't get used. That it is a "support role" avatar is largely incidental.

After cooling down you might want to spend a little thinking time addressing it first. It should save you a post.

You are just a no worries kind of guy, hey? You certainly don't worry about backing up your mouth. Oh ya, only 5 or 6 hours tops to write the backstory in total canon for a great playable computer game. Nothing but Bull and Shit....and Bull just left town. Your solution being just copy and past the P&P game and it'll all play great.

That's what happens to snipers that sit and squat too long. Someone comes along and drops a grenade in their nest. To top it off he tries to pretend he is all mr. hash out and constructive when really all he's showing up to do is what he specializes in. Bitch, whine, and moan.

haha, nah. Will Smith's I Robot had a single-player campaign (c'mon, i can't be the only one who though "boss fight!" during the tunnel scene).