Dear Members, I would like your help, i need marketing information for my project. To be able to get possible sponsorship and the like. Please take 5 minutes of your time to complete the survey. many thanks.
Survey link: http://awakenedmmo.org/survey.php

Awakened is an Open Source project to create a Shadowrun MMO. Unlike other projects like this, we have license from the ineractive rights owner for Shadowrun (microsoft) to produce the game.
http:\\www.AwakenedMMO.org

Feel free to ask me any questions or make comments. We want to hear from you all. And, as with any Opensource project, we are always seeking talented team members. 3D artists are currently the premium! Coders are always welcome, but we have a crack team of skilled hackers. Artists with Shadowrun experience are a rare breed indeed!

Mein Gott, holy total absence of commit messages Batman! I suggest better habit-building immediately, so that it doesn't become a problem in the future.

~J

That's possible, but it's still strange to read german words in an english forum.

Nah, I was a Latin student in high school. That said, some expressions (like that one) just feel more satisfying to me in German.

~J

I'll give you that. Heh, I've been known to use "Ach, mein auge!" from time to time. But only when the goggles do nothing

Good luck with your project. PLEASE don't just use the name 'Shadowrun' like the FPS did, while making a completely different game.

Sweet! Auch du lieber! Jahwohl!

I don't want to become picky, but "Auch du lieber" makes no sense and "Jahwohl" should be "Jawohl".

Best use of german ever though, was "Ich bin ein berliner". Someone should have told him that a berliner is a type of doughnut.

Looking back this might be true, but when Mr. Kennedy said it to the people of Berlin nobody thought about this connection, I'm sure.

Mmm, your art needs a good going over by the SR fan boys, it's a little to WOW for my taste.

And my question for you is how are you going to handle death?

i REALLY recommend looking at a MMO called EVE on-line. I think their spin on getting killed is VERY good. I would like to see your developers play EVE for a bit and see what they can take away from it.

Looking at the gallery, I found the dwarf somehow "unfitting" - it looks more like a small, tiny human and not like a dwarf (who have shorter legs and a broader torso). And the cyberarm of the ork is strange - it should begin on the shoulder and not in the middle of the upper arm.

In the magic section, I noted that a full magician's tradition will determine or limit the types of spells he/she can cast. I am not pleased, since that is obviously NOT SR.

With the uproar that the MS FPS made I would be very wary. An MMO should really be truer to the IP and canon. The FPS is an unecessary standard FPS in a situtaion where there are so many FPS games we are drowning. Microsofts SR game did a total hatchet job just to create yet another FPS.

Now we have a mass influx of Everquest and World of Warcraftclones with more on their way. Even Lord of the Rings online. I would not think that another game of that kind would go down well unless it was spectacular. And especially iof it broke far too much of the IP and canon. And to be quite honest. WoW and EQ are not the best MMOS in anycase.

Shadowrun with its decades of material over the years offers so much to a fantastic MMORPG that with good development and time taken and innovation could break the mould and become a benchmark in ANY genre but most noteably I think RPGs and MMORPGs. Such a game would be a great hit with MMO players irrespective of how much they know of SR. For one thing SR has alot to offer as a game and the potential is there. The canon works. And for MMO players thats a bonus and for SR fans its even better. For myself Id love it as I cant get to game groups these days and the prospect of turning on my PC and logging in rather than months of legwork for a gaming group would be fantastic. Im sure Im not the only on.

Another serious point I would like to make is that the most important factors in any RPG or MMO is character creation. JUst as it is im PnP RPG games. The reason is obvious. We are playing someone we want to relate to and present a recognisable facade to others. Create concepts and so on. Even if they do end up generic stereotypes they can still end up being unique in some way.

Now to me I have been disapointed in many MMO and RPG vidoe games on character customisation. But I think its even mpre important in an MMO. Not only because you see your character all the time but so do many others all at the same time. WHereas in PnP groups we have an image of a player character between a few other [layers we are dealing with a situation in which we play on servers with numbers far greater than any PnP group. And game devs just fall shprt of this.

I dont beleive many devs actually bother with this and it beats me why. Either they dont truly understand the need to make a player character as individual as a real person or they have low standards. So far the best game for character creation is City of Heroes/Villans but even that can be very basic and limiting. I know some people who play the game just for its options. And yet few games have tried to even equal it let alone exceed it. Too many MMOs out there arwe cookie cutter crap. And often where character abilities are the same we end up with clone toons. WoW and EQ are great examples of this. The upcoming Chronicles of Spellborn looks like one of the few to take it seriousluy and Age of Conan alos is set to be the only game to take it further. All other titles of the genre have simply gone for Cookie cutter (or few options amounting to the same thing) even if they have nice graphics a clone toon is a clone toon.

My advice on this matter is to look at the ioneers of character customisation. Consider that even when player characters may end up being built and developed the same they can at least look diferent. This was at least a comfort in City of Heroes/Villans which for all its nice graphics and rather well customised apperances were clones in powers and abilities.

Body scaling options to allow us to be fat, thin, muscualr or inbeteen along with height and skin colour and age have been used to a lesser extent in the WWE consloe games for years. Age of Conan MMO also uses these very well. Naturally all these options may be too much messing for some people and so an option of taking a generic type and altering slightly or severly would be preferable or leave alone. We can choose this model and maybe change skin tone and select or select each individual part and advanc custom so we can even change lips and eye size, shape and position or whatever.

There are also alot of clothing lines and armour types in the SR universe that could really be used to greart affect. Especially with a good colour scheme and style of wearing. For example armour jackets are common. But while player 1 has a plain black jacket that fits well, player 2 has a baggy red armour jacket with Orange horizontal stripes and a symbol or decal on the back like a gangster with the zip open. And player 3 wears a armour jacket half zipped of the colour blue that is tight fitting. And Player 4 has same as player 1 but in a camoflague pattern of blues.

Thirdly the actual abilities in SR are so very loose and customisable many player characters end up unique just by the canon rules nature. Its what made Shadowrun abov many other more generic PnP games and I said before this can very much be the problem of manyy MMO gamen to the extreme. Again I use WoW and EQ as examples. This is made worse by game instances where only a certain build will do. While it is very hard to allow for such diversity in MMOs due to technology restraints and other logistics I do beleive with time and effort it is possible.

No one expects a Shadowrun MMORPG that is the same as the PnP something will have to give but things should not be cut and simplified too early on. Shadowrun as I have said has all the potential to break the MMO mould and improve on the whole MMO genre as a whole to become a benchmark. But if a good version of a SHadowrun game that is not part as good as expectaions it would better not be made at all. For a game with great potential receives stronger criticsm than one that is unknown. And Shadowrun is a great IP that has a great following. To try make a quick turnout on this game would be a disater on so may levels.

Anyway I have waffled at you good people enough. Just take things into consdieration.

He's just lucky he didn't say Arsenal was out. *mumble mumble*

Here's the forum for that project if anyone wants to post comments there: http://awakenedmmo.org/forums/

Use the SNES game as inspiration. It wasn't absolutely true to the mechanics and setting, but it was quite close enough to be respectable.

Except of course for the fact that you could be a Fully Cybered Sammy/Decker/Shaman and could only learn spells after finding various regents for them...

Naw, if they want to look at the existing games, then look at the SEGA version for the mechanics and only at the SNES version for the 'feel'.

Because they just "tolerate" it. They aren't affiliated with it. If Awakened turns out to be a totally illegal product, WizKids LLC and Microsoft Corp. won't be responsible of anything.

Just like in here on Dumpshock : Wizkids allow us to talk about Shadowrun, to use Shadowrun's names, logo, artwork and so on on Dumpshock, but nothing that's said here is WizKids' words and nobody can sue Wizkids for something that has been said or done on this forum.

Some recommendations:

1) Make sure your game is interface moddable. I don't really need to change maps, but I like having control over my interface in an MMO.

2) Character models should not be class oriented. I noticed in your charcter art that your rigger looks "rigger-y" and your mage looks "mage-y." Your gear should determine how you look, not your class. I know plenty of players who specifically make their charcter look like another archetype to confuse first response - most notably, a good mage shouldn't really look like a mage unless he wants to get geeked first.

3) How real time will this be? I like human reaction time being an issue, but not so much that your quickness and reflex enhancers mean nothing. In a lot of cases, the people that shoot first win, and that should be based on the speed of the character, not the player, if it is going to actually represent the RPG.

4) Like Lodestar said, Character Creation is a huge deal. Obviously, you couldn't make skills as customizable or open ended as is possible on paper, but be aware that there are more or less an infinite amount of charcters available in Shadowrun, and X number of classes with Y number of possible builds just won't cut it. What if I want to play an awakened rigger? I think NSRCG does a great job of making most everything availble in an easy to use digital format. Check that out if you haven't.

5) How MMO are we talking here? 3000 people on a server? Or like DOTA, where you have maps (runs?) people can take with 1 - 30ish people? Can you play Lonestar? Etc.

Which is made even more entertaining, due to several people here being on the Wiz kids payroll (alabit indirectly) at points in time.

Bribery? Marriage to someone who works for them and not having a job oneself? Theft?

~J

Apparently it can, as Second Life demonstrates, but I'm not sure that's exactly an indicator of success for this project.

~J

The biggest reasons Second Life succeeds is the modability of it, and that you can make a living creating things for it.

That is why I think time should be taken in creating such a venture. Technology may have to catch up and time must be taken to focus. Not rushed. The world doesnt need another WoW or EQ clone unless its a vast improvemnt on it. That is even less likely. And I wouldnt touch another WoW clone even if it bore SR name or concept.

The problem with trying to make an MMORPG, with a focus on the RPG, is that you'll have this:

"My GM makes better adventures."
"I want such-and-such and my GM would let me."
"It's not how I imagined it in my head around a table."
"It's all too limiting!"

Unless you have a way to work things on the fly, and make it look good, having an RPG-focused MMO is going to fail. Period. There will be inconsistencies. There will be mistakes. There will be discrepancies. There will be outright differences of opinion. There will be differences in thoughts on rulings.

It can work, but it'll take far, far more than anything our very limited technology can produce.

Jeez. . .


The inherent problem with MMORPG's not being "RPG" enough is the fact that they're Massively Multiplayer.
Step 1 is removing the persistent world factor. You can't tell the story of 1 character, your character, in a world that has to service the story of thousands and thousands of characters. If the world changes, it has to change for *everybody*, at which point you're telling the story of armies - see ryzom, wow, warhammer, etc. - and your game ceases to be RPG enough.


The kind of game you want will never work for Shadowrun either, because in SR the ENTIRE FREAKING KNOWLEDGE BASE OF MANKIND IS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS and it's really hard to code that believably.

heck I find it hard enough to deal with in a regular PnP setting . . .

HOWEVER. . .

Shadowrun would make a good MMO. . . it's mission based, features mostly well defined archetypes, has an interesting premise, and a wide array of bad guys. But everyone knows this already. I'll stop preaching to the choir.