A friend of mine read an article from some gamerzine that said MS bought Shadowrun or something. I can reach him so I thought I would reach out to my running brethren. Anyone know anything? (P.S. Im not new to DS, I just lost all my account info so I made a new one)

MS has owned the game producing rights to shadowrun for a long while now.

No, MS owns the right to an SR video game. They have since FASA sold the rights for the tabletop game to WizKids (who then licensed it to FanPro).

All of FASA's licenses for computer games are owned by Microsoft, which is why you can play Mech Assault on your X-Box. Crimson Skies was also made into a rather entertaining game. Shadowrun has not been made into a computer game, although a couple of console adaptations were made for the Genesis and SNES.

Well, Mircosoft owns the right to make a computer game based on SR. It's probably what your friend read.

EDIT : Man, you have to be fast on the draw around here.

So FanPro can still/ is still doing things with Shadowrun (the books and dice) while MS can make Shadowrun (the video/computer game)?

if SR was made into a computer game surley it would have to be a network game or it would just be another shoot em up??

bring it out on the PS and give it a light gun too ............ on the net ooooh drool!!


torz x

this thread has come up before...what was probably noticed is that M$ recently set up the legal paperwork to use the SR logo - this is being taken as a sign that they are now ready to resume production on a computer game...

for some history, google up MS, Bungie, and Shadowrun...

A close-to-it style SR computer game I've found is The Matrix Online MMORPG. I think that if a Shadowrun online RPG were to be developed, it would have to be VERY similar to this.

rumor i've heard is that the plan is for SR to be one of the premiere releases for the XBox 2....

Oh goodie, now I may actually have to buy that thing ...

i dunno. the latests patches for the beta apparently improve the gameplay quite a bit. and it uses a classless-but-nichey character building system, like SR.

Well I have a buddy who works at Gamestop... who heard from an Micro-rep that Shadowrun has something coming in the future... probably for X-box 2 and that we might find out stuff at E3 depending on how many details are released about the Xbox2.

Of course... I may have failed my Friend of a Friend Ettiquette(Videogames) test here so don't trust my contact information until we see at E3. I am hoping I'm write.

I am also hoping for a persistant world game.

i'm not, myself. then, i already play in a persistent-world SR game; it's understandable that you poor saps feel like you're missing out!

Shadowrun-in-name-only. Just what we need to spread the word.

My vote is still something similar in feel and taking hints from the engines of Dues Ex and Splinter Cell (non-multiplayer).

I could see it being *seriously* kickass as a MMORPG

As long as they do the character generation right (mighty hard) and make it so there are actual people setting up runs.

It would have to be very, very robust in nature. A standard MMO just wouldn't do.

I doubt that ms will ever get an SR game right =(

poor MS, the are a sad, sad company....

Indeed. What they did to the Halo games was a crime against nature.

Maybe if we're lucky MS will fall on hard times and sell off the Shadowrun rights. Mechwarrior is too popular a franchise to hope that all of FASA Interactive will end up somewhere saner.

~J

I'd say that it is soundly not a matter of opinion that if you take a game and spend five months working on that game as opposed to, say, porting that game to an entirely new architecture, operating system, and control scheme, the former game is going to be unqualifiedly better.

But that's neither here nor there.

~J

ACtually, you COULD make it so that you only start out with like, 50 points (using the point system of course) and then everyone would still have to get better.

What I would like to see in an on-line focused game that is flexible enough to allow people to refine only the details of their game dungeon to create an international network of fixers where characters can be ported from fixer to fixer.

I feel that any video game that puts more work into graphics than system mechanics is going to be sucky for SR. Then again, I'm old enough to have been overwhelmed by the awesome ability to play with other people, internationally, through a text-based MUD using a telnet session. I just feel that unless the game would work almost without graphics then it doesn't matter whether the elf has nice tits and Real™ jiggling buttocks or troll's dermal armour looks plausible. Any game that attempts to paper over the cracks in the mechanics would surely piss us off. We seem to be a community where, if shown a wall with paper-overed holes, we'd instantly poke our fingers through the paper to make a point, even if it was safe and looked nice.

My brother and I actually discussed how to do an MMORPG with SR. It COULD be done, but it would be a hell of a lot of work.

i could possibly see myself playing as a fixer or johnson type person in a mmorpg, especially if, as a johnson, there was SOME way to make a mission "on the fly" as a PC.

Like say someone approachs me for a work, "Yea, i got something, lets see here..."


and through a quick series of menus/pictures, i choose something maybe like, an unwilling extraction, and X location, of Y person (in my case, almost always a busty female) paying for the job, plus bonuses for not killing or whatever...


yea, that'd be cool. feasible right now? i doubt it, though i havent really loooked at the current generation of mmorpgs, but i think the biggest problem would be getting that kind of power into a players hand, without breaking something.


for instance, where do the rewards come from? does the johnson somehow have to do some sort of work to get automated work, or does he have to pay out of his own pocket? if it's all "fake" then how is he limited from giving millions of to someone for going to pick him up some eggs and milk?

In such a game everyone *wouldnt* have to be runners, a mage, samurai, rigger, etc, doesnt "have" to be a criminal.

Players could for example be police officers, dealers, fixers, work as a corp wage-mage, etc etc etc.

Non-combat characters or alternate roles have been popular in many MMOs.

Besides, if someone really wanted, theres a billion and one ways to make a SR video game without MS's permission.
Just have to "borrow" some of for example EA's legal team that handles thier LOTR stuff.

I'm willing to bet it'd be possible to simply "base a game" on the SR "source books" as referances, or at worst be forced to release a novella that incorporates plot elements of the game your looking to create and then use the rights to it as a foundation.

Different companies owning seperate rights =legal fun.

Regardless its just a pipe-dream anyways for now.

A Shadowrun MMO would be tough. Possible, maybe, with some creative tweaking. It wouldn't be the same as your tabletop Shadowrun game, that's for sure.

That said, I don't think we'll see one. Not anytime soon. A Shadowrun license would likely be used on some other type of game than an MMO. However, I was at Turbine once (the guys who make Asheron's Call, and the upcoming Middle Earth and Dungeons and Dragons MMOs) and Ken Troop, their live team producer and I talked about a Shadowrun MMO for awhile. He's played SR before and thought it would be awesome, but we both agreed on the difficulties of it.

Of course, Turbine also has close partnerships with Microsoft.

'Course, a game that focuses equally on the alternative roles isn't really a Shadowrun game. Not in the way that SR really is about, at its core, shadowrunners.

And that's where some of the most fundamental difficulties come in. Are you making an MMO that's a derivative of the SR setting, or an MMO which stays true to the game's focus? Neither is particularly easy.

Honestly, for the closest approximation, you need to look at Matrix Online. I know it's not the same property, but they face some of the same problems an SR MMO would face. And having been in the MxO beta, I'd say that the handling is still clumsy and troublesome in a lot of respects.