That's a good point. I spent $30 more on a donation for this game than I was willing to spend to buy the official MS Shadowrun game. (I didn't buy or play the MS game, but I shelled a bargain title's worth out in the hope of someday getting to play this game.)

Do you have any idea what kind of money is needed to make one of those games that cost $60 on Steam?

Millions. Lots of millions.

This is not such a game.

You best compare it to other Indy titles on Steam (of which there are plenty, and lots of great ones).

It sure won't cost more than $20 when it first comes out.

Bye
Thanee

And yet I'm still more willing to pay $60 for this sight unseen than I am for anything that's come out in a long while. It's my niche, turn based so I can eat while playing, and not a First Person Shooter. I have nothing against that genre, but I only need one or two multiplayer focused FPS games, heck, I'm tired of the mouselook function in general. I'm just too ADD to play fullscreened games on my PC anymore. If I can run this windowed whilst skyping the fiancee it'd be perfect. I want a game I can play one handed over lunch. Also, does anyone else think this sounds kinda like more complicated Frozen Synapse? The combat mechanics, I mean. Just going off what they said with the real-time-turn-based thing going on.

I've seen some amazingly crap games start out at higher prices than you'd believe, Thanee. And let's face it, if they pulled a "Surprise!" on us and threw this game, fully finished, on Steam for $45 right now, almost every last one of us would have bought it.

It's true that some crap games cost a lot, but most of these have advanced graphics even if their design was ugly.

And no way I would pay 45$ for this... at least I think so.

You would. Search your feelings, you know it to be true!


[e]Besides, would you rather pay a lot for advanced graphics and a crap game, or old-school graphics (I'm thinking 'Arcanum' when I hear what they're planning,) and a huge, awesome game verse to enjoy them and frag chummers in?

*Cough*Rage*Cough*

As we've learned extensively over the last five years, 'advanced graphics' don't make a game good. Or even passable. A game with fun mechanics is going to be fun no matter what the graphics look like, so long as they're above the threshold that drives people away (think Atari).

I play Dwarf Fortress.
What are these "graphics" you speak of?

I want a SNES again so I can play my Shadowrun Cartridge.

I enjoy spending time playing MUDs. I find that the DF graphics are dumbing things down too much

I stand corrected. I would splurge 45$ RIGHT NOW on an Arcanum with slightly updated graphics and game engine.

Also, since you're a DF player, I'm scared and will back off now. Not even joking.

Considering the massive successes of DF (massive for its niche, anyway), Minecraft, and League of Legends, none of which have graphics that can in any way be considered advanced...

Actually LoL is about the level of graphics I'd love to see from this game. Isometric overhead view, detailed character sprites and lush backgrounds, but still runs like a champ on my five year old system.

When i see something like turn based combat, all i can think of is the first 2 Fallout games (which were amazing IMO), or the first X-Com. Then I think of the screenshots of the new X-Com comming out, and I would love to see this game somewhere in the middle, it would be fitting I think.

This is a forum for Pencil and Paper RPGers.

We don't need no stinkin' graphics!

Hehe.
I'm actually fairly normal. Afterall, I never made a mermaid bone farm.

What shared vision is there? Last I saw, I don't get a say in how the game turns out, nor was I subject to even the most basic of poll options. This is an odd swarm of microinvestments with no upside outside of initial offers given. If I invest a thousand dollars, I'd expect stock, not a sit down with a gaming dev.

Now, I'll say I kind of get where you're going with the track record, but... let's be honest, the record as of late hasn't been that good. BattleClix completely annihilated the future of Battletech by releasing very detailed statements and maps on what the future was like, with little guessing as to how it got there. Crimson Skies was a great IP but the boardgame had very large imbalance issues, as far as vectors of fire vs turrets. I understand the excuse for SR 2007 is basically "Microsoft execs are a bunch of meanies" but... Really? MS is nowhere near as bad as Nintendo ever was as far as content, which makes me think think that either the success of the genesis and snes games were flukes, or that SR 2007 was a failure on it's own right, and not the fault of someone else.

If you mean to say that the track record of KS, and I misinterpreted you, then I respond with a hypocritical "Small sample size". I could see this being taken advantage of. Want to watch the last episode of LOST? Oh, sorry, we just *happened* to run out of money, but if 5 million people chip in 10 bucks or more, then we can make this happen!

I happen to be very cautious with my money. Perhaps it's a byproduct of being raised poor. I think the idea of paying for an idea, an idea that may or may not pan out the way it's expected to, is a bad idea if you don't own part of that idea yourself.

That being said, I put my money in, so maybe I'm just yelling at myself for buying into an idea I loathe.

when i get home it's probably gonna hit the 600k somehow @.@
even though it seems to have slowed down a bit by now . .

An interview with Jordan Weisman :
http://www.modojo.com/features/shadowrun_r...jordan_weisman/
For me it looks like it will be much like the SNES game with better graphic and turn-based combat.
Not something like fallout 1/2 with lot of dialogue options and "choices and consequencies".
I really doubt the game will have the P&P rules, too complex for this kind of game (not that i won't love it);
Now i can be wrong but for this budget (even if he got more than 1 million) and short development time it's not surprising.
Well the SNES game was very good for his time, linear but good story.

Hmm. I'm a little worried now given how focused they are on tablets....I was expecting a full-length 2D RPG, not a tablet game ported to the PC...

To me it sounds a bit like Jagged Alliance or Desperados.

Bye
Thanee

For starters, I think it's going to have an good story and a cyberpunk-urban fantasy feel that is Shadowrun. The rules and the graphics matter less then the style and feel, IMO.

The iPad has some pretty good remakes of old games, I have Final Fantasy 3 and GTA 3, and it does do 2D much better than 3D. If Shadowrun Returns is going to be anything like the FF3 remake (which is slightly 3D-ish) and according to what the devs said it's gonna be much better, I'm expect this is going to be pretty good.

Obviously if they had hundreds of millions for development it could have been the game to end all games, but they don't, so maybe a good iOS game is better than no game at all... and besides if it does actually do well maybe industry leaders will stop being asses and actually fund something bigger.

Oh yeah, the new Totall Recall and Robocop will show next year, should be a good time for cyberpunk in general if they do well.


edit: sorry about the double post

You and me both, chummer. You and me both.



Did you ever construct a device to kill "Intruders" (read: trade caravans) and harvest their effects without any risk of death or injury to your dorves?

What, really?

Liar.

Everyone has made a caravan-dronwner at some point or another.

Well, not everyone. Some of us built ballastae firing ranges that seal up and lock them in for target practice instead. Most of us built both, though.




The kind of people Kickstarters are aimed at wouldn't know what the hell to do with stock anyway. The pie-in-the-sky options (anything over $100, really) are there for the really devoted, and also stupidly wealthy, adherents to the ideas, the kind of people who gladly would invest the traditional way, and probably have as well.

They tend to be offered primarily to "oooh" and "ahhh" the unwashed masses who donate in the pittance-to-one-hundred-dollar range, much like supercars are on car lots to wow people before they look at their budget and their needs and settle for buying the econobox that they can actually remotely afford.




Didn't, like, literally all of that except the Crimson Skies boardgame problem happen because the original guys responsible for the IPs lost control of them and bloodsucking parasitic publishing houses started calling shots on how things were to go and hiring in random arseholes?

And isn't that exactly what this is to turn around, because it's specifically the original team coming directly to us, the prospective player base, to fund the development, their way, their rules, with nobody but them calling any shots whatsoever?




Look at it this way: if you chip in the bare minimum to get a copy of the game upon completion, then at very worst, you're doing no worse than someone who buys the game on release day. If you hate it, then you would've hated if you haden't paid into it up-front. You'll probably get it for cheaper, in which case, think of it as a pre-order discount where the product being delivered at all is contingent on enough people making the pre-order for the game to be made.




This... Admittedly, this is cause to worry. Then again, if they get a ridiculously huge sum of money, they'll be more or less compelled to make a full-length 2D RPG (in the vein of Arcanum, Fallout 2, etcetera,) and then figure out some way to port it to tablet, rather than the other way around, simply as a way to spend all of that money.

(Assuming they don't just allocate the bare minimum project launch money to the project and spend the rest on joytoys and ale, of course.)

The remake of Baldur's Gate series will be on tablets as well. It's not a bad thing in and of itself, but yes, I don't want poorly done ports on any platform.

mmm...joytoys and ale.....ahrahrahr ::drool::

The iPad 2 can run a clone of GTA 3 like a champion, including ALL the features the original had and with an excellent touch interface. And thats with fully 3D graphics, maybe adjusted for lower resolution but that's it. I think people should give the system more credit.

Given their very public support for Moai, as much as I would also prefer this, I don't see it as a reasonable expectation.

Well then... I guess we'll just have to see what we will see, won't we?

Indeed, and there's no reason a point-and-click interface like the old Black Isle and Interplay games used couldn't work seamlessly as a touch interface. It's just an input method.

i would so love a shadowrun game based on the fallout tactics engine. or syndicate wars. which, basically, already was shadowrun, anyway . .
hell, even frank trollman thinks it would be a sweet idea . .

Personally, I've been waiting for more games like this and the soon-to-be Baldur's Gate ports to arrive on tablets. They are perfect for them and there's a real lack of quality 2D-style RPGs there.

OK, so Mac is in, german, french and spanish version is in, riggers are in.
If we manage to get 1 Million, we get a second setting in addition to seattle, an improved editor and kick ass music . .
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/161326...ns/posts/202725

Multiplayer is out. No PvP, no Co-Op. Also, no Linux Version.
Which i don't really understand, seeing how android is a kind of Linux . .

I love the update : the riggers are in !
And single player focus is great too (shadowrun Online is much more MP).
I would love another town and a great soundtrack like in the SNES game, but it's going to be hard to reach 1 million.

Second Setting should be in Germany!
Berlin, Rhine-Ruhr-Megaplex, SOX or Hamburg.
We got books for these, or at least a big entry in the city book ^^

Denver could be the tits, too.

The lack of co-op is kinda sad... everything else is great. Localizations chould mean more income, more income could mean The Return of Shadowrun The Return 2: Wireless Boogaloo sometime in 2014.

Oh Denver! yeah, that would be mamary glands.

Wait, Stahlseele, is there an English translation for those? I actually ran a Vampire: the Masquerade game set in Berlin years ago. We didn't know anything about Germany or Berlin so it was kind of goofy, but still.

Nope. No engrish translations anywhere.
Licensing Problems and Pegasus not wanting to simply give stuff to Catalyst without seeing money for it . .

Ah, that's sad. Revisiting Berlin in Shadowrun might get me to convince old friends to play again.

Edit: Kickstarter just made 600k

First the Double Fine Adventure game, and now this!? Man, Kickstarter is making all of my youthful dreams start to become a reality. This is fantastic; I cannot wait!

Don't forget Wasteland 2, which just got Obsidian Entertainment signed on to help make it.

Yes, the guys that were supposed to make Fallout 3, and did make Fallout: New Vegas. Them.

What seems REALLY odd is that Mac OSX is built off of Unix, and like wise, Linux is built off Unix as well. It really doesn't take all the much to compile code to worth in either/or system. But all I know is some basic C++, so for all I know what ever language they're using could have some oddities to it, and APIs will cause all kinds of problems, so they probably just want to avoid that right now.

As for the second city, I'd actually like to see what Neo Tokyo looks like.

Damn, there's so many good places to get into so much trouble... Let's see...


Tir Tairngire (Elves proving just how much they can suck)
Denver (heheheh.)
Chicago (Bwahahahahaa!)
New York (The rotten apple!)
Tenochitilan (get caught and sacrificed, bitch.)
London (Jolly day to hang some poor people, eh wot?)
Edinburgh (You know what makes everything better? Kilts and Guinness.)
Tir na nOg (Because even Tir Tairngire needs someone to point to and say "okay, but at least we're not those guys.")
Berlin (Lofwyr's backyard? Are you nuts? You're nuts, aren't you?!)
Neo Tokyo (Because who hasn't wanted to Gaijin Smash with a cybernetic killing machine?)
Rio de Janeiro (I'll be honest, I have no idea what shadowrun lore says it's like after the Amazonians carved off a chunk, then carved out the rest as well, but I loved the movie Rio and thanks to the Sixth World, sapient macaws are a real possibility.)



Should be fun to see, eh?

Winnipeg? Toronto? Vancouver? Quebec City?

...

OK, that last one scared me.

In 2050 Berlin is still a anarchy-city, right ?

Nope.



Yup.



Well, there was this one time I made a zone of 52 tiles worth of upright spikes (3 steel or 4 iron) and linked them all to a single pressure plate.

It was anti-goblins though, not anti-caravan.



I did the steel spikes thing. It was...very deadly. First gobo to step OFF it killed his entire squad. So he'd run away...back over the pressure plate...and into the spike field...
(Pressure plate with critter on it: spikes retract. Pressure plate without a critter: spikes go shnnnk!)

Spike fields are pretty good, too, but I tend to prefer manual operation of them. To ensure that, I seal a dwarf in a luxurious bedroom with attached luxurious office and luxurious dining room into which food and drink are occasionally quantum stockpiled, his only obligations in the world being to pull that lever. If I'm feeling generous, I'll assign him bookeeping, too, so he can get his mind and body sharp by doing tons and tons of dwarvenly paperwork, though how he conducts count of anything is beyond me, and I might even have installed a Dwarven Gymnasium - a screw pump - for him to get extra-fit on, working his way up to legendary pump operator.

I still prefer the ballasta range, though. With the right set-up, it's completely reusable, by exploiting a bug that ballasta bolts which strike a wall and fall down a Z-level don't break. So you can actually keep it in operation all throughout the year, only halting fire when you want to let a caravan through. This is especially useful if you use Dwarf Therapist or a similar program to assign jobs to children, who otherwise won't take jobs, and give them the job of 'siege engineer.' That way you can put them to work doing something children will love - killing foreigners with heavy artillery - and teach them a valuable life skill, not to mention get their stats up.

And this is why DF players should be feared and respected

As far as I understand Shadowrun Returns is set 2050ish. That means you have to take some locations of the list. Chicago doesn't become Bug City before 2055. Old Berlin is too crazy, can't be done. Nope. The new setting is much saner, but that's 20 years later. Neo Tokyo is just Tokyo, which admittedly would still make it Tokyo. But metahumans were totally disenfranchised back then to the point where such characters would have to have their own game. Well, of course if you get a little more handwavy with the canon or simply set a different time frame these problems could vanish.

Also to my mind, barring backer statistics show a overwhelming non-US contribution, the additional setting will be another North American city. Though I wonder, if most backers actually come from the background of the video game and not the pen-and-paper -- and I imagine they do -- they will not be familiar with any of the Shadowrun settings but Seattle. Maybe that opens it up for a more "exotic" location.


Half of is, more or less. The black half on this map: http://www.shadowhelix.de/Datei:Übersicht_...gehörigkeit.png

Well, if I let him out, then he's not going to be where I need him to be, is he? When I need him to start pulling the [L]ever, he'll be off in the dining hall on the other side of the map, admiring a statue and too busy getting his art critique on to go and murder invaders... You know, those damn elves that keep marching up into the killing field with pack animals, damn the bastards, don't they get the message that their kind aren't welcome here?! I've literally decorated the entrance with the bones of their kin, don't they take a hint?

And worse, say he spends a lot of time in the dining hall, because, as the designate [L]ever puller and accountant, he has few tasks to acomplish, so he gets to know everybody and gets to be a good chummer with every last dorf in the fort. So then some asshole soapmaker who came in a useless wave of peasants who got himself assigned to fishing duty and brought this fucking cat with him wanders into the wrong part of the outdoors, runs for his life from a creepie crawlie that any of my valuable dwarves could have murdered with their bare hands, and his cat dies. So he hauls it back to the dining room, looking to drown his sorrows in a big mug of mushroom wine, but when he gets there, he's so distraught over the loss of his cat that he instead decides the way to assuage his grief is to walk right up to my Legendary Hammerer and clock him one.

My Hammer takes one look at this shrimp of a useless dwarf physically assaulting him and takes out his hammer and administers Dwarven Justice, and by that I mean he cracks the useless little fucker's skull in one swing of his silver hammer. Just one bang, not even two. Immediately, of course, my [L]ever Puller, his grief over the death of his friend dying magnified by the fact that his sensitive dwarven eyes have not seen a dwarf's brain smashed out his skull before, flips his shit, seizes his meal in his hand, and begins assaulting a fishmonger with a unicorn steak. He's beaten the fishmonger half-way to "dude, what the fuck is wrong with you," when the Hammerer looms over the back of him, and brings his silver hammer down on his head, too.

Half the motherfucking fort, outraged and infuriated by the death of their dearest personal friend, proceed to riot. But instead of rioting sensibly - mobbing the Hammerer, useless bastard he is, and flinging him bodily into the lava moat, they simply start whaling on the nearest dwarf, no matter if that dwarf is their closest chummer, friend-for-life, spouse, or a Legendary warrior, and no matter if that dwarf is on their side in outrage over the [L]ever Puller's death, with whatever object is nearest to hand, whether it be the Legendary Sworddwarf's Adamantium Sword, a miner's pickaxe, a diner's meal, or a new mother's five-minute old infant.

Things rapidly degenerate from there, with Dwarves who were not rioting in the first place being drawn into the chaos as their friends and loved ones die, or simply drawn into the fighting in self-defense from the rampaging rage virus known as the Tantrum Spiral, until the only dwarves left in the fort are the antisocial bastard of an omnismith whom I had locked in the forges to keep him on-task instead of wandering off to eat in the dining hall across the map instead of the private one I assigned him, a bunch of crippled, useless dwarves with no meaningful skills, the Legendary Hammerer who started this mess, with both of his legs having been broken and trying desperately to drag himself through the corridors one-handed to find the other cripples and administer dwarven "justice" to them, which evidently means beating an unconscious dwarf to death because he got drawn into the fighting and shanked someone in self-defense. Then an immigration wave arrives, and it's wall-to-wall fishmongers and lye makers and cloth weavers, with nary a warrior nor miner amongst them. I order them into the fort, but then a Vile Wave of Darkness - and by that I mean an absolutely ridiculous number of goblins - shows up on the horizon. I try to hustle the immigration wave in and lock the door behind them, but a goblin outrider reaches the door before it can close because one of them had a fucking cat, which kept the door open long enough for the goblin outrider to reach it, preventing me from controlling the door, and the entire fort gets slaughtered, save for the antisocial bastard locked in the forges, who keeps on merrily hammering away, oblivious to the screams and sounds of looting, pillaging, raping and plundering which are echoing through the halls.


That is why I lock the [L]ever-puller - and, indeed, everyone whose job doesn't require them to travel - into a suite of rooms consisting of their workspace and legendary living accommodations, and why I take great pains to avoid letting dwarves socialize, or else if they're of a profession which requires they be free to move a lot (and hence laze about in the dining room, such as haulers and farmers,) or which affords them the opportunity to socialize amongst others in the same occupation (warriors,) to expose them to controlled amounts of horror to the point where they become completely desensitized and "don't really care about anything, anymore."


And also why I escort the Hammerer and any Nobles straight into a beautiful personalized bedroom/drowning chamber and kill the useless bastards.





Yeah, I know. Which is why 2050-ish becomes so important. You can be in Chicago for the botched hive clearing and subsequent minor pest problem.




Nothing is too crazy to be done, but alright: wherever is Lofwyr's back-yard.



Sounds "fun," doesn't it?



Like one of the Tirs, or London... Or Rio.