Shadowrun Comes To Linux, MMO Planned 51
New submitter junkrig writes "After a highly successful Kickstarter campaign, Jordan Weisman, creator of Shadowrun, has returned to bring the series back to the screen as Shadowrun Returns; an old-school, turn-based tactical RPG. Their successful initial fundraising (over $1.8 million) allowed them to commit to developing a native Linux version of the game. A second team, working closely with Weisman, now hopes to bring a similar, turn-based Shadowrun game to life: Shadowrun Online. To be built with the Unity 4 engine, Shadowrun Online will be massively multiplayer and have native Linux support from the start — assuming, of course, they manage to fund their project. Both games are expected for release in 2013."
FYI about the MMO aspect of Shadowrun Online (Score:2, Informative)
It looks like the combat part of Shadowrun Online will be tactical turn based co-op team multiplayer, though you can play as a single player by hiring NPC's for missions and control them yourself.
There will be social hubs in various cities that will be MMO-like, where you move around in realtime to socialize (or not), do legwork (research/detective work to get intel on future missions), buy stuff for your characters with in-game money only on the Campaign servers or real money microtransactions on the F2P servers. Yes, they have both. You can "buy" the full core game and play on the Campaign servers, or just join the F2P servers and only pay for what interests you. The developer has stated firmly the game will not be pay-to-win, and they'll have mechanics in place to prevent pay-to-win.
People complained having two different economic models and two different servers might split the community, but the Campaign servers were added because there was already an entirely separate community that refused to play F2P games. So now both communities are served. If you have any interest in this, read more about it in the updates tab on their Kickstarter page.