It had better damn well be released on PC (Even a moderate port would suffice.), or Redmond will have more Red than mond.

We now discover the reason the Barrens began…

~J

And I always thought it was a nuke plant going up.

I know nuclear reactions of all varieties went wonky leading up to the Awakening, but this one may not have gone by itself, ken?

~J

But then wouldn't they be green or glowing instead of red?

Um, no, Mortax, I don't think you are quite catching on. As others have astutely pointed out, making sweeping and incisive assumptions about game design based on the fact that it is presented in the fucking first person is unconscionably, I don't know, retarded.

I'm going to go hate something I know nothing about! Goddamn!

Haven't posted in a few months, but this startled me somewhat.

FPS.

Wow. I have been so over FPS for years. The only FPS I really played recently was Max Payne, and Vampire, both of which I played in technically TPS mode.

All this talk about it being good if it is like Deus Ex, I found Deus Ex to be a real pain to play, wasn't enjoyable.

I've been watching people play World of Warcraft the last few days, and frankly, I don't want to touch that with a 10 foot pole, mostly because I hate the idea of Warcraft as an RPG, and didn't like Warcraft 3 much.

But you show me a Shadowrun MMO, half as good as that, and I'll blow my whole paycheck on it. Coming from someone who doesn't often buy games anymore, that says a lot.

There's a whole pile of money to be made in MMOs, both for Fanpro, and the game studio. People play an addictive MMO, get interested about the base game, and join our stellar ranks. While yes, it does mean you need server maintainance, look at the numbers of people who blow the monthly fee on WoW.

Sigh. They need an emicron for sarcasm so people know when I am and when I'm not. I prolly should have put a larger space in there.

Anyway, as far as the computer rpg subject, I'm aware how little similarity there is. But as anyone who has played fallout:tactics can attest, it's engine could be adapted to shadowrun quite easily. The othe fallouts are close, but I think tactics works best.

I really think that the best way for this to be done would be in the style of the greatest PC RPG series ever produced by human hands - Fallout. I know that that's not what's going to happen, and the best that we can hope for is Deus Ex with elves - I'm just making conversation here.

Think about it - the bulk of Fallout (and Planescape and Arcanum and all those great isometric RPGs) was running around a town getting assigned random jobs by strangers. A mechanic like that makes *perfect* sense for a shadowrunner - much more so than it does for, say, a wanderer in a postapocalyptic wasteland, or a lumbering killer without a memory. This really seems to me like the only way that a ShadowRun game should be done.

That's my two cents, anyway.

Has no one else seen V:tM Bloodlines?

I played it. It's crap as an FPS. The guns are weak, useless, and especially the shotgun.

Right. Because -- and here's my point -- it's not really a FPS. It's an RPG that just happens to be using a FPS game engine. If you max out your firearms skill (and related attributes), it can play like a half-assed FPS (because the shots will kind of go, y'know, where you aim them)...but the core of the game is getting sent on jobs by other Licks, doing what the Prince says (or not), working for different factions (or not), and even doing pretty okay as a melee combat engine (though I preferred third person to first person, for that).

It was a shitty FPS, because it wasn't meant to be an FPS. It was an RPG.

Like Shadowrun might be.

What pissed me off most about Vampire: Bloodlines, was that the hit detection was fucked, and there was no such thing as a headshot. You could spend all that time lining up your crappy .38, that apparently won't even drop a totally unarmored human in six shots, to nail him in the head... And he still dosen't die.

Just treat it as if there was no called shot. It should play exactly like that, it doesn't matter how good the player's skill at lining up the shot is, all it matters is the PC's skill. So even if there was a called shot mechanic, it doesn't mean that you will hit the target even if you spend an hour lining up that shot, if your PC's skill sucked (or got unlucky) you will not hit the target.

Yeah, but I think that kind of lames it up. Part of it should well be the player's skill.

I don't want to be shooting people's faces and only doing 1L damage.

The way I think it would be best to play, would be to have your PC's skill with firearms aid you in aiming your weapon (You shot a milimeter to the left? Well, you must've been looking wrong, it's a hit.)

But more than that, it's still going to be important for staging up. Even if you can pull off headshots, which should, IMO, automatically act as a called shot and stage up one, if you have NO Firearms skill, then he just stages it right down again.

The way it worked in V:tM was just that your weapon skill affected whether or not the bullet went where you oh-so-carefully aimed it. I might carefully line up the targeter pip with the ghoul's noggin, but then my Dex 1/Firearms 0 character goes "guh!" and I see the round fly high and wide by about half the width of my monitor.

Same for the SR one would work just fine with me -- if you've got the right skill for the weapon you're aiming, the rounds go where they're supposed to. If not, they're not as likely to.

You could even integrate the smartlink and laser sight technology very very easily, I think. As a Call of Duty player, you can sometimes turn off your crosshairs (as a for instance), so that they aren't "cheating" and showing you right where your weapon is aimed. Likewise, with the click of a button you aim (which zooms in the camera a little with some weapons, making it easier to line up long shots -- but which mostly just changes your first-person view so you're literally looking right down the line up iron sights of your WWII weaponry)... when you aim, you know right where that round's gonna go.

Ditto with a Shadowrun game using this sort of engine -- no "magic crosshairs" displayed on the middle of the screen, for reality's sake. If you want to try and shoot something (just like in the real freakin' world) you either gotta practice shooting from the hip a whole damned lot, or you gotta take a second to aim... or you gotta get a smartlink/laser sight.

Mmm. There's an easy way to make characters lust after some chrome, already!

What I'm wondering is whether this game will actually get made. Someone said that the paper trail for a new SR video game was out there but this is the first I've heard and I pay attention. Many bigger games have gotten a lot farther along in development and still gotten canned in the end. This animator was working on one.

The only way this game will get made is if SR4 is a huge success IMO. And since I (and many other people on DS) have doubts as to the success of SR4 making SR a household name again, I have my doubts about the game even being made.

Having said that, it would be great though if they could cross Deus Ex with Rainbow Six and add a little Arx Fatalis for the magic. I always loved casting spells in Arx. (If they insist on going the FPS route.)

If not FPS then Jagged Alliance 2 could easily be made to look Shadowrunny. That whole game is a Shadowrun.

Crit: I always personally figured that the way Smartlink worked was exactly that: Provide crosshairs, or something similar.

And yes, I know. I play Call of Duty. I love it. Aiming down the ironsights is the only way to shoot, bay-bay.

jesus and all her saints, would i love to see an SR mod for JA2. that game is a work of art.

Jedi Academy 2? I think I have mis-read your acryonym.

jagged alliance 2, sucka. i pity the foo' who has not played it. jibba-jabba.

Meh.. I don't like no cussing rules. Soldiers are some of the most swearingist people in the world.

But still... I dunno, I don't like CoD multi. I prefer Day of Defeat for my multiplayer WWII action. I dunno why, I just die every ten seconds in CoD multi.

Jagged Alliance is a damn fine game, which is damn replayable.

Count me in for a vote for a JA-esque SR game, or even a JA mod.

You guys heard about this JA3 stuff? Apparently it's no longer vapour.

JA3 is actually in the works? Cool!

Was apparently slated for real-time, but they're knocking back the release date to make it turn based.

Here.

Now, if they'd only release an editor for this game, that would be so sweet and would go so damn well with an SR-based strategy mod ...

JA2's community is moribund. It's damn old, and quite honestly, the game wasn't that great. It was just better than any other game that had tried the turn based squad level strategy thing on the computer.

JA3D is going to be a 3D update of JA2. Who knows if they'll change more (more realism and less retarded humor'd be nice).

JA3 will be a whole new game, which will hopefully take the good stuff in JA2 and jettison the crap.

There is now a beta demo of the Shadowrun mode for Neverwinter Nights. Shadowrunner Nights

I haven´t tried it because I dont have the game installed and Im not curious enough to make the effort. But if anyone else is, it would be great to hear a review.

It has flying cars, for fuck's sake. Goodbye.

A few covers of sourcebooks have 'em.

I apologize in advance if this has already been brought up, walked into the topic late, but did anyone else catch this.

yes, its been brought up, and yes, it could be seen that way, but given he also preface "paper RPG" with old, i'm not sure the guy really knows any such pen and paper RPG's are still being played.

"There is nothing wrong with that." is expressive of your approval of flying cars.

"There are multiple sourcebooks with flying cars in/on them." has just about fuckall to do with whether or not flying cars are actually a good idea. One statement does not procede from the other.

Besides, this looks like a Futurama-Type hovercar, not even one of these jet-engine-powered air cars BitBasher linked to.

Which, by the way, I can't see going very far. Even in the US, where permits for anything are much easier to get than where I live, you do need a pilot's license to fly anything. And besides, who will tolerate cars operating at the sound level of fighter jets now? Would you want your neighbour to ride one?

Air cars as usually presented in 'cyberpunky' settings are bullshit. Small planes, micro-helicopters, ultralights, all that is good and I can live with.

But no aerodynes, hovercars, or back-to-the-future DeLoreans that fold in their wheels and fly.

No, you don't. If what you fly doesn't go above 400 ft, you can fly it license free. You just have to obey local ordinances regarding air traffic and noise.

Actually, licensing is what is mainly what is holding the Moller Air-car off market. the FAA is having a shit fit over the concept, but if he can prove the safety and the software that does most of the flying can also help alleviate air-traffic concerns, this could very-well become a feasible mode of transportation. Though the military applications will come first, we should see it in the next 10 years or so.

I doupt this thing can be armoured enough to operate economically and take what low-flying things have to be able to survive. It will go the way of the Commanche.

And besides, I still am not too convinved about noise generated by these things. Those are turboprop or jet turbines (couldn't tell from the pics), for crying out loud!

They're turboprops with electronic noise cancelling built in (environmental, not just for the pilot). Noisy, of course, but not as noisy as you might expect.