Shadowrun FPS Forums Retired

With FASA studios closed and the Shadowrun IP now under better care, what remains of the disastrous Shadowrun FPS is now being swept under the rug. Team Xbox notes that the official forums for the game are going to be closed. This news comes with hope for a better tomorrow from the ex-FASA folks: "We're going to be closing down the Shadowrun forums in about two weeks. As many of you know, the old FASA crew has mostly moved on to other roles within Microsoft, and that means we don't have enough people to monitor and respond to posts here for the coming year. We'll eventually close down www.shadowrun.com and transition it to the folks working on the next generation of Shadowrun products."

It *was* a good RPG

[binaryspiral]

As a tabletop RPG - shadowrun was one of the games that I will always have a fondness in my heart for. The rules were cryptic, battles took forever, but that didn't seem to make a difference. The world was described so clearly with so many things that were logically futuristic it didn't seem like were you playing a fantasy sci-fi game - you were just role playing in the future.

Microsoft milked this cow for all it could - finally ending the with a PC game that required Vista or an Xbox 360. Neither I was willing to purchase just to play a game that would probably ruin my memory of the weekends rolling dice.

So long FASA, thanks for the great RPG...

disastrous?

[spyrochaete]

I never played the game (Vista prerequisite? That's cute.) but I listen to the PC Gamer Podcast and those chaps seemed to thoroughly enjoy the game until Team Fortress 2 came out. Was Shadowrun really such a trainwreck?

BTW, for a very hard-hitting and informative look into the late FASA studios I highly recommend listening to this interview with FASA GM Mitch Gitelman [pcgamerpodcast.com]. No punches are pulled in the questioning and I have great respect for Mitch for bravely meeting each challenge head-on.

It wasn't a train wreck.

[RiddleofSteel]

As an old school fan of Shadow Run, it really wasn't a train wreck. Is it what most people were expecting, absolutely not. I wouldn't call it a Shadow Run game as much as calling it a game with a Shadow Run theme. For a team centered FPS, it was actually a lot of fun. If the company didn't fall apart as it was being released, with a few quality updates it could have been really good in fact. I think a lot of the hating on it was because it wasn't an RPG.

I'm a huge fan of Shadowrun...

[DragonTHC]

When I heard it was vista-only, I steered clear.

Microsoft completely sabotaged Shadowrun with their vista turd program.

I don't even know how the game is, though it looked dumb.

When will a respected RPG company make another good Shadowrun game?

The last good one I played was for sega genesis. The super-nintendo version wasn't as good.

Re:disastrous?

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who picked up Shadowrun when the price came down a bit, it's a decent team-based (as opposed to squad-based) FPS game. Basically, it's CounterStrike with special abilities. Earn money between rounds, buy weapons and abilities, play until one team gets 6 wins on a map. Said abilities include magic with various effects, such as pushing things with wind, teleporting, or summoning beasts, while the equipment includes things most people cheat to get, like seeing through walls, speeding up, or auto-aim. However, you can only have 3 of these abilities mapped at a moment (Though switchable during rounds), and there are management issues between using both magic and equipment.

In a way, it's sort of like tribes; team-based combat towards a goal, various classes and loadouts that are changable, and a variety of tactics that require changing because of how opponents can adapt (Everyone keeps turning to smoke to avoid bullets? They use gust for massive damage). Teleport is a pretty neat trick, as you can warp behind people, or use it for shortcuts that are intentional.

All and all, it's a pretty good FPS/CounterStrike clone. And therein lies the problem. After playing the Genesis version (Sandbox-style with storyline), ShadowRun could be so much more. Shadowrun has RPG elements: leveing system, quest system, magic system, and cyber-system for the matrix/cyberspace. There is so much content that a game to blow away Grand Theft Auto could have been made. And all we get is a CounterStrike clone.

Just ask those who got stuck with the end results of Legends of Might and Magic. Especially after the original hype about the game. Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned.

Re:disastrous?

[spyrochaete]

When did cute start meaning completely illogical and moronic? The game didn't even need Vista or DX10 to run but they just hacked the install to check for it and force it. There are work-arounds for XP and DX9 but they are not reliable. The game was a complete disaster for this reason alone, let alone all the bugs in the game at release.

According to the interview I linked to in my original post, it wasn't the developers' idea to limit the game to Vista - it was Microsoft's. I'd wager this is true because what developer would purposefully alienate a huge potential customer base? I've seen many patches and full downloads of the game available here and there that enable it to work on XP, which confirms everyone's suspicions that the Vista limitation is synthetic.

Reviewers Killed This Game

[solcott]

As one of the few people who actually tried playing Shadowrun on PC despite the horrible reviews (hooray for piracy groups letting me play Shadowrun on a pair of Win XP machines with 512 of RAM) I have to say the game really _isn't_ as bad as everyone thinks it is.

My wife and I play Shadowrun over our LAN (both Win XP machines) almost every day and have a blast against the bots. The weapons and classes are all very balanced and even though there are some common setups (Trolls with miniguns, Elves with swords) there isn't really any of the usual everyone trying to use the same weapon that there is in the other simple multiplayer shooters (eg. the lightning gun in Quake, guass gun in Half-Life, AWM in Counter-Strike, etc.) The layout and design of the maps are great, the controls are smooth and responsive (even on a machine with 512 of RAM like I said before, HALF of the minimum requirement and a quarter of the recommended), the character models are pretty good looking, and from my experience this game had everything going for it other than the alleged Vista only compatibility and the Shadowrun name.

I think the problem with Shadowruns demise (other than the closing of FASA) was with the reviewers scaring people away from playing it. What the reviewers were trying to review was a game that is LIKE Shadowrun, instead of jsut reviewing the game as it is and ignoring the fact that the game had Shadowrun in it's name. Another great, but mostly overlooked, game dodged a similar fate. Project Snowblind, the REAL Dues Ex 3, had people working on it who knew people wouldn't like it if it carried the Dues Ex name, because a team shooter wasn't what people would _expect_ a Dues Ex game to be like so they changed the name to Project Snowblind and released it to mostly good reviews.

Would they have gotten any of the good reviews if the exact same game was released named Dues Ex 3, instead of Project Snowblind?

Stop letting great games die because of reviewers, and try the games for yourself. And when reading a "user" review of a game stop reading if you get to the line "I haven't played it, but..." because if you read about games like Shadowrun that is how most of the reviews begin.

Re:Dystopia

[Jack9]

Personal Experience:
God did I want Dystopia to be a game I could enjoy, but it just seems like Tribes2 without the maneuverability, flexibility of gear, or effective counters. Some of the gear is plain useless and the cyberspace looks like it should be it's own game (beautiful, original, fun) since it has very little impact on the game (obvious from the number of ppl in cyberspace at any given time, it's usually a simple jack in->rush in->kill someone->do something affair). Might as well be a psychadelic underground tunnel system.

I played for about 2 days and uninstalled.