dont know if this sould be here or general gaming?

I was just wondering if it was even possable at this point to make a shadowrun game, movie or tv show that would make most of the dumpshockers happy with the end product? given how varyed some of the views of shadowrun are ie some people like the play up the punk some dont.

and for that mater would almost any rpg even work?

also it is my understand mircosoft owns the right to all 3 right? the only thing that wiskid(soon to be catalyst hopefly) owns shadowrun rpg right so they could not make they own game and say it take place in the 4th world or the 8th?

Make it look ike the old 80's Cartoons or Batman of the Future and i am sold.
as for CRPG's, there was one MMORPG in developement that most of us would have loved, but got nixed my MicroShit

The Digital Entertainment rights for previously FASA products are now held by Smith & Tinker, which was founded by Tim Weisman, who also was a key person at FASA. I believe I also heard that Mike and Sharon Mulvihill are now working there.

The Film rights are owned by Wizkids... and if Catalyst buys the IP probably by them. I have been working on a Screenplay for the last 2 years that I think is a awesome translation of Shadowrun to the screen. I hope to finish it this coming year and try for a sale.

I've always assumed that all play styles were part of the same world.

The closer you get to downtown and high security neighborhoods the more you get low-key professional intrusion specialists. The closer you get to the barrens the more you get pink mohawks and punks. The various editions didn't change the world, so much as move the focus.

A well done film/show would have characters from both backgrounds forced to work together. A well done computer game would have content for fans of both styles.

The problem with that synopsis is The Halloweeners, who for over 20 years have made Downtown their bitch.

that's one of the main problems of SR4, the wireless observation of the sins of everyone in the streets by scanners built into the lamps and other stuff along the roads . .

The exception that proves the rule

In all seriousness, I was describing trends in demographics, not absolutes. Downtown, like any district, is not homogeneous, with both upscale areas, and downscale areas.

I think you mean Jordan Weisman.

I think a shadowrun game would have to be a fairly open-ended rpg, with a wide range of skills that you can use to achieve your objectives. I suppose a bit like a cross between Deus Ex and Morrowind. I imagine that the thing that would give the game appeal would be a community based modder scene and some easy to use tools with which to create and share your own shadowruns.

Film and television would be more difficult to convert, given that it's just such a wild and eclectic intellectual property and it would be hard for mainstream audiences to swallow. Magic? Cyberware? Elves? Dragons? AI's? A shadowrun movie would be more jam packed than The Blues Brothers. I wonder who would play Maria Mercurial? I'd pick Sonic Youth for Concrete Dreams, though.

What does this have to do with the rest of this thread?

I don't think there could be a shadowrun game/movie/tv show/play/soap opera/... that'd please every Shadowrun players. There's not even any official Shadowrun material that pleases every Shadowrun players. What there could be, though, would be something that wouldn't upset most of them or might even be liked by most.
For example, if the latest Shadowrun video game was globally hated by most of Shadowrun players, the Megadrive/Genesis game was generally enjoyed.

Besides, even if there are a lot of different ways to view the Shadowrun universe, I think that most of us are reasonable enough to accept a movie/game as someone's vision of the world. It might not be exactly the same as ours, but as long as it still respects most of the main aspects of the universe and doesn't betray the general atmosphere, it should be at least accepted.

That's because the Genesis game was both a very good game and very true to Shadowrun as a whole. (It was how I was introduced to Shadowrun. Followed by some of the novels at my local library. I was a weird kid--I read 2XS, Shadowplay, Night's Pawn, Changeling, and House of the Sun when I was nine years old.) The SNES Shadowrun game was not so well-received because it wasn't really Shadowrun, either.

The recent Microsoft game didn't even try to be Shadowrun. There was no way anybody who cared about Shadowrun would like it on those merits.

I think it came down to the arrogance of the designers, believe that they could "improve" the license in their game translation, while keeping the name to draw in the established fan-base. Either that, or non-creativity on the designers part where they just said, "Hey we have this Shadowrun license (square peg)... and multi-player FPS' sell really well (round hole)... let's combine them *wham wham*"

should/could have become MicroSucks first MMORPG aside from Windumb . .
they could have aquired SRO or paid them to do the work for them . .

Any medium is going to be slightly different, because it is a different medium. The RPG is a collabertive storytelling medium. Your used to seeing SR through your eyes. Since your not the one makeing the TV show, movie, game, it isn't going to match up. Having said that I don't advocate George Lucas theory on fim making "there not going to like it anyways so why care what they want".

Any film version of the game has to have the core elements in it. Not just the Magice/cyberware/cars etc... but the dark future, the corparate control etc. It should stick to the very basics of Shadowrun, not try to stuff so much in it that people are overwhelmed. For instance, no AI's or Dragon's, or maybe just a glimpse or a mention of them. Certainly not let them be ventral characters. After you have the audience hooked then you can get the fantastical in.

Honestly, the SRO folks can't say they weren't warned.

People had been telling them for YEARS, since they first started shopping the idea around, that they'd probably get squashed by MS or whoever owned the license at the time.

You don't just grab someone else's intellectual property and start developing a product based around it without first getting the owner's permission.

That's simply foolish and ill advised.

And to expect that MS would feel anything but threatened and angry about it when the SRO folks approached them saying, "Hey, we've been developing this stuff for several years now based on your product, can we get your permission NOW?" was just wishful thinking.

The SRO devs might have had enthusiasm and a nice product, but they had no business sense at all.



-karma

I've heard rumors that the MMO is back on.

A Shadowrun movie would be awesome but it would have to be EPIC to be worth it.

Microsoft's butchering of the game with their stupid fragfest Vista-only pile of rejected data was unpleasant because they cut out EVERYTHING that made the Shadowrun story any GOOD. They cut out all the story!

where did you hear that?

I've seen it kicked around in various forum circles.

Note I said that I had heard rumors, never said they were credible

the official 6wg board is pretty much dead . . wonder where those rumors are originating . . .

Probably some irate dev who thinks if he puts out a rumor some how the product will come back, stranget things have happened. They could have just gotten some money together and approached MS and said hey we want to option the rights to the mmo, heres 30 grand if we don't have a product in X amount of time the rights revert to you.

Of course they would have to HAVE said 30grand.

Christ, I hope they aren't stupid enough to make a MMO. That's asking for even more epic fail.

A good Shadowrun (or just Cyberpunk) MMO would likely steal my soul.

"Good" and "MMOs" don't belong in the same sentence without "don't exist".

Grind treadmills like MMOs aren't games, they're cunningly disguised psych experiments to see how long it takes you to realize that you'll never get the cheese while you run in that hamster wheel. I hope you weren't looking for roleplay in that "roleplaying game".

OMG GANKED BY RUTHENIUM COS W/ DIKOTE MONOSWORD!!1 OMG TWINK!! TWINKY TWINK!! HAAXXXORRRRR...

Please, god. No.

I have theorised on a way to make a SR MMO that would (imho) be awesome. We even went so far as to make a forum but most of my ideas were shot down, so I dropped. All of my ideas could be summed up pretty clearly,

"Take everything about MMO's as they are, and throw them in the fragging garbage, and start over."

No levels, no classes, no grinding, no XP etc... make a game that is FUN to PLAY. Not FUN to LEVEL.

Yes, you might even add some Permanent death in there... Could be fun, but the problem is that nobody's going to invest in that kind of new idea. And there's still the problem of OOC guides revealing everything to the players.

And the problem with a Shadowrun movie would be that the IP is not prestigious enough to get the good treatment. Just look at how the more prestigious D&D IP was handled...

I can see only one way there could be a Shadowrun movie, and it's not pretty:
* Someone releases a great cyberpunk movie that gets a lot of money
* Producers start to look for other cyberpunk movies they could produce.
* Neuromancer is turned into a movie with a famous director and a famous cast (but a reworked story with a heroïc Case and a damsel in distress Molly who'll live happily ever after), the rest of the Sprawl Trilogy will follow.
* Hardwired, Snow Crash and other big cyberpunk novel are turned into movies.
* Lesser producers start looking for cheap cyberpunk IP they can abuse and find Shadowrun.
* Shadowrun is turned into a movie.
* Dumpshock has a new thing to hate.
And you don't want to know what a Hollywoodian Shadowrun screenplay would be...

I'd rather see a Bethesda-created Elder Scrolls/Fallout 3 style console-game than an MMORPG. MMORPGs sacrifice story and everything else that makes a game interesting and engaging in order to create what is essentially an online social venue. Second Life and World of Warcraft aren't as different as one might think.

I don't see this happening but the smart money would be a direct-to-DVD CG-rendered adaptation (a la Macross Zero) of one of the better (subjective, I know) Shadowrun novels that encapsulates what makes the entire fictional setting of the Sixth World unique rather than a completely new screen play. Like Never Deal With a Dragon or 2XS. It would never be a major Hollywood release but could make a tidy profit amongst fans of sci-fi, animation and gaming. The Ultimate Avengers animated movies did pretty well, faithfully adapted Millar and Hitch's Ultimates, and played to a very select niche. The Dragonlance DVD adaptation with Keifer Sutherland was shit as it was poorly executed but the idea was sound.

The big screen is beginning to show signs of rigor mortis anyway and creators should be thinking home entertainment rather than theater release.

Thing is, not everybody has the same experience with Shadowrun, or enjoys it for the same reasons.

Some people like role-playing, which is real hard to model in any computer game, because a full range of expressions is so difficult via keyboard and mouse.

Some like the challenge of how to succeed on a run without getting caught - this is difficult because developers will not be able to anticipate every move that the players will come up with, and instead players will end up feeling railroaded.

Some just like shooting and blowing crap up. This could be done easily in many different game setups. Morrowind/Fallout3 style RPGs and MMOs could both handle this.

Some people would object to the idea of massive numbers of runners dashing around the city, with the idea that runners are supposed to be subtle and rare, while other people would love the interaction of an MMO.

I think that no matter what approach we took it would disappoint most dumpshockers. I think that it might sell best as an MMO, but be most true to the actual game as a Fallout3 clone.

I remain very skeptical that you can get the depth of Shadowrun in a console game. Ref. Baldur's Gate II versus Mass Effect. That said, if Obsidian Entertainment or somebody else could be convinced to pull out a BG2-style Big God Damn PC RPG, I'd be all over it like white on rice.

I'm sorry, did you just call this "better"?

If Nigel Findley was alive to write it, I'd agree with you here.

If they ever make a Anime Shadowrun movie I am pilling all my books (every one, SR1-4) on a log raft, cover it in gasoline and lighting it on fire. Give it a good Norse send off.

as i said, i would prefer it being done the way the good old 80's Cartoons were done . .
maybe the older robocop series for example . . or Galaxy Rangers or Silverhwaks . . .

it would just fit ^^

Console RPGs have come a long way. The only advantage a PC RPG has is the MMORPG factor. It's a classic but Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls have more plot and story depth than Baldur's Gate.

Like I said: "subjective." Honestly, I read the book twenty years ago so I'm sure my opinion has changed. But the first few Shadowrun novels really encapsulated the universe, even if the writing was sub-par.

A good novelist isn't necessarily a good screen-writer. A third party could capture the plot and character of the novel fairly easily. It wasn't exactly Neuromancer or even Snowcrash in it's depth.

For some. I'm not going to argue preferences are right or wrong but retro-style animation probably wouldn't appeal to an audience that grew up post-1980s.

so?
the animation should fit the style of the era in which shadowrun was born i say . .
ok, Batman the animated series or Batman of te future i could live with . . but if the troll has eyes larger than his hands i draw the line . .

Um...

Er...

I believe the word I am looking for here is "no." Saying what I've quoted you as saying suggests that you never finished Baldur's Gate II, for the simple reason of how insanely wrong it is. Calling either Fallout 3 or Morrowind/Oblivion's stories "deeper" is astonishing given the incredible superficiality of both (seriously, be honest, have you beaten BG2?), and you don't get "more plot" by throwing the same five voice actors out there and yammering about meaningless crap as Bethesda's games invariably do. Sorry, no. Nothing doing. With all due respect, I'm pretty sure you're confusing "pretty" with "deep".

(Furthermore, there's no ability to expand a console RPG. What's the point of an RPG you can't extend to make better? Give the console players their JRPGs-on-rails and put the actual RPGs where they belong.)

Really? Why? If one were to create a cyberpunk/fantasy mash-up, I'd think utilizing the latest technology to create it would be the logical step. Otherwise, Peter Jackson would have been using midgets in LotR rather than CG. And that would have been both weird and awkward.

I find the Betty Boop eyes and the other visual stylization of "traditional" anime irritating as well. However, anime that breaks from those tropes like the works of Mamoru Oshii play just as well to Western audiences as they do their Japanese home audience. A better example would be the French movie Renaissance. It utilizes the same hyper-detailed settings as Japanese anime but does so with a motion-captured and distinctively Western look.

Different strokes for different folks. I wasn't blown out of my socks by BG.

Au contraire, mon frere. Mission Pack technology. Oh and "hello X-Box Live!"

If you're going to make the argument that RPGs belong on a PC, I'd argue they only belong on a table-top around which people are seated as it's impossible to actually role-play on a screen. But I digress, home electronic gaming has reached the point where depth of play, however one defines that, and action in a video game are determined by the programmers and writers, not by the medium upon which its played.

Interesting. I guess that's news to all the folks who play in the Welcome to the Shadows forum.

Careful; that's why I'm referring specifically to BG2. The improvements in the engine allowed for a vastly deeper game.

Really? Anybody at all can make expansion content for a console game? Or is it...just the original publisher?

Because that's one of the biggest draws of games like BG2.

(Aside: those aren't even "Mission Packs"; they're entire copies of the game that simply required the original CD to play. There are cracked versions of London 1969 that omit this check entirely.)

Or a MUD or MUSH...

ok, i could live with Ghost in the Shell style Animation too i guess . .

If you want a Shadowrun movie ask Uwe Boll to be the director.

-Chrysalis

i will ask him specifically NOT to do that . . of course, with him getting most anything wrong, he will probably think he should do it then . .

Thats why he should be asked to do the Movie ( Reverse Psychology)

with a reverse Dance
Medicineman

As we know every RPG movie that has ever come out has been an instant classic. Like D&D2

wait what?
there was a second part?
wasn't the first one bad enough?

Apparently not.

I won't spoil their fun. Shhhhhhhhh! *taps nose*

Uh huh!

Back on topic, I think the latest season of Prison Break is very Shadowrun-like in a lot of aspects.

While we may argue for what would be the best medium to bring Shadowrun to the masses, there really is no denying the convertability of an IP into an anime series.

While some would really love to play through an epic arc in a game similar to Fallout 3 or Elder Scrolls, you only really just get one arc, and lets face it, there really isn't anything to the gameplay in those games. The fighting and attack gameplay in Oblivion drove me insane! Come on, let me learn different ways to attack and different ways to dodge, some special techniques or abilities. The real fun comes from the exploration and interaction with the common folk and the realm. I could see it now. I'd be playing it on whatever platform I chose and I'm screaming, "If I get attacked by one more devil rat as I run through this new random sewer/utility tunnel I am going to turn it off!" There'd be tons of random battles of beasties running around that shouldn't be, and the common folk would be stupid barrens slime or arcology wageslaves with nothing to really contribute other than that they were completely a waste of the time you just spent talking to them. Like I said, it would be awesome to walk around and experience someone's artistic representation of Seattle 207X, but we already know the realm, we need something with story.

A movie would fall into the same pitfall as a single player game much in the fact that we'd only get one good story arc, and much of that screen time would be an introduction into the realm very much like we see in such novels like "Never Deal" or "Born to Run." It would be a total noob fest (good for drawing audience), but let's face it, has Hollywood ever not fucked up a work? I can't see something as deep and rich as the SR universe not being bent over and forcefully raped by some stupid studio exec for a percentage. We'd get some really bad junior script-writer (I went to school with guys like this, I know how bad they really are) who's never even heard of Shadowrun writing up a screenplay over the weekend so they can enter production with their drama school drop out borderline porno grade acting drug addicted moronic cast and churn out a movie for a couple mil (and that's being generous) and hope that they can capitalize off of whatever sci fi trend is sweeping the box office. The plot will suck ass, not be epic at all, and most likely go against everything the license has created in the past. Then the boards get flooded by a bunch of fan noobs who actually thought it was good asking how it ties into the rest of the metaplot just like I saw on Resident Evil boards post release of that cinema atrocity. Remember how close the Doom movie was to the games? Remember how it tied everything to hell and transportation like it was supposed to? Yeah, no. We'd see some familiar denizens of the sixth world on the silver screen, but nothing would ever fit. Chalk any attempt at a SR movie into the videogame movie cursed lot.

Now, here's where I support my initial claim that an anime series would be an awesome representation of SR. Every anime series in the last 10 years has followed a very distinct pattern for a two season series (26 episodes). We find a character who is likeable and that the audience can relate to in some manner. They then are thrown into whatever team or premise of the show that will carry on for the remainder of the series. The next 4 or 5 episodes deal with this characters ability to adapt to this new and chaotic life and understand and relate to his/her new team members. We don't have to know about the other team member's origins because usually they are covered later in the series during filler episodes that show how the team came together or what the characters backgrounds are. There will be several small story arcs in the beginning of the series that show our main character having trouble and getting over themselves and fitting right in. Then, right about episode 13-16, there'll be a really big super plot centric arc that deals with some characters past or the overall metaplot of the series. Things get really bad, the team might disband for a bit, they might get caught, but whatever have you, there is a lot of downtime now (this usually details the different characters origins). Towards the end of the show, the characters join back up and evenually take on whatever epic plot that has been looming over them and of course succeed. If the show is popular enough, other seasons will continue in an episodic fashion with sub arcs and major arcs wrapping up the end of seasons till the writers get sick enough of the show and start killing off characters. Sometimes you can see it will be the very end when the good guys team up with their rival bad guys to take on whatever superpower or force is manipulating both of them. Some retconning is seen later on during these final stages of a series to explain certain coincidences.

Now, this format and length makes for a perfect display of what is shadowrun. While it isn't as interactive as say something like Elder Scrolls or Fallout 3, there'd be more actual framework and less "common folk" fluff. Even if a hollywood movie succeeded in being true to the license, we'd never get to know characters or story beyond the major plot and possibly one or two important characters. Plus, it would never satisfy all of us fans just because of the variety of different parts to the world of SR couldn't be covered in a 2 hour movie. The stealth crew would be upset if it was an action movie, and all of the gunbunnies would be pissed if it was like any other heist movie.

A series would not only be a good introduction but a decent dive into the realm of SR. It would allow for the orientation set of episodes, followed by different "runs" of all calibers to show different aspects of how jobs are resolved. There'd be lots of room for backstory and breathing room for something epic to form. Plus, if you watch any recent good anime show, the animation and character designs aren't half bad. Watch a bit of Black Lagoon and tell me you wouldn't want to see SR and the sixth world animated by the same team.

I can get behind any anime series that doesn't use a J-Pop singer crooning about love or the stars. Give me Yoko Kanno on music and the English voice dub team and the animation team behind Cowboy Bebop and I would be a happy camper.

Black Lagoon was nice in the first Season.
Second season started off with the whole mindfuckery and psychotical incest twins and got progressively worse . .