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XBox (Games)

Shadowrun FPS Forums Retired 62

Posted by Zonk from the leaving-with-a-little-dignity dept.
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."
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Shadowrun FPS Forums Retired More

Shadowrun FPS Forums Retired

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  • Battletech always seemed a more interesting universe, especially when it comes to video games. That said, it would be kinda fun to a play a NeverWinterNights type game in the shadowrun universe.
    • I agree about Battletech in light of the new online version of Talisman coming out you would think that Battletech, Starfleet Battles and others in its genres would be the perfect games for MS to bring to Live perferable as true to the original board and miniatures battles as possible.

      On a side note, what ever happened to Gurps? Im surprised that nothing from the Gurps world made it to video games. Car Wars would have been perfect for Live and PSN as well, and seeing Cyberpunk, Ogre or Illuminati would be

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Thansal ( 999464 )
        Well, SJ Games never seemed to really want to go into the video game market. However they did pick up UltraCorps from MS a while back (2006), but nothing much has come of it or of their supposed other projects.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Drey ( 1420 )
          They're constantly starting new free games of UltraCorps as they work out the kinks in it. Site is at http://ultracorps.sjgames.com/ [sjgames.com].
        • In fact, we're quite interested in videogames . . . I personally would love to be involved in the design side. And there's been a lot of negotiation over the years, mostly over GURPS, Car Wars, and Munchkin, but few deals have been made and none have survived to the ship date. If anyone reading this is involved with content acquisition for a competent and honest videogame publisher, feel free to make my day.

          Which means that eventually we might try to enter the field on our own, or by contracting with a deve
      • Fallout was originally going to use GURPS... Interplay and SJ Games had a falling out which cause the dev team (before they were even called Black Isle Studios) had to "quickly" change the ruleset to something else (but somewhat resembles GURPS)... thus the birth of SPECIAL.
      • Car Wars would have been perfect for Live and PSN as well, and seeing Cyberpunk, Ogre or Illuminati would be great as well.

        Man, that list brings back some really great memories. Like the year we rolled for who would be president of the rpg club at school because the vote was a tie. I was really into Car Wars - and spent weeks building a campaign based around gurps with maps of our home town, school and stuff like that. It was a lot of fun.

        It would be really cool to have software to do so

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HTH NE1 ( 675604 )

          I was really into Car Wars - and spent weeks building a campaign based around gurps with maps of our home town, school and stuff like that. It was a lot of fun.

          It would be really cool to have software to do something like that. Import maps, stats, scenarios, etc. Then be able to put it all together.

          Yeah, and around the turn of the century it could have been called Instant Expulsion Toolkit. After 2001, it would be called Terrorist Attack Planner. Damn current events always spoiling opportunities for kids to have good clean fun.

          • You are probably right. But should I find myself independently wealthy and with a lot of time on my hands, I'll be writing it.
      • Car Wars did make it in the 80s as Autoduel. As a big Car Wars freak I enjoyed the heck out of it. I was surprised for many years that the really good table top games did not get digitized. I bet a lot more people would play Car Wars today if you could handle virtual miniatures instead of cardstock pieces.
      • Car Wars was already made. What, everyone's forgotten Autoduel already? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoduel [wikipedia.org]
        • I didnt forget Autoduel...in fact I still have it though I lack a 1541 to read them, if the disks are still good :)

          I want full on Car Wars with a modern RTS full 3D view (the twisted metal series was like poor mans car wars but fell woefully short since carwars is about strategy more than action)...with the real rules with fully upgradable cars and weapons, lots of maps arenas, highways, canyons, etc. Hell they could even bring on the ballons and helicopters. Though I admit, I'd even settle for a remake o
          • Aha. Now that you mention it, it reminds me of ANOTHER C-64 vehicle combat strategy game, but I can't for the life of me remember the title. It was turn based, and you scrounged up various types of vehicles for your fleet, recruited soldiers, etc. The soliders would get promoted by surviving combat, and followed some sort of A-E thing. I remember that D stood for Dragoon, and it was the next to highest rank they could achieve; I think Elite was the final but I'm not sure.

            Anyway, you'd have guys on the t

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Thansal ( 999464 )
      Well, an NWN style game is what SR SHOULD have been as a video game, Or at least the easiest one to do.

      Admittedly, if you would like to play one, there are some out there (and they are rather good).

      Personally I want to see 2 things from the franchise:

      1) Standard RPG ala NWN/KotOR/whatever. Let us play what we want, integrate magic and decking and rigging all properly, etc etc. I would prefer if it had multilayer capability (like the NWN ability for one person to run a game for others).

      2) A squad based act

      • 2) A squad based action game. I know, I know, No one actually would ever make this correct, but wouldn't it be awesome?
        Well, there's been a trailer out for Fallout 3...not the same as Shadowrun, but similar flavor...and *hopefully* out sooner. I imagine it'd be a lot like Fallout, except with bionic implants and magic. Which would rock.
        • There was a rumor when Fallout 1 came out that it was inspired largely by Shadowrun's back story and rules set. It could as easily have been Rifts, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, or any other post-apocalyptic game, if it was indeed directly inspired by any of them. Obviously they went a different direction from Rifts or Shadowrun with it not having the big return of magic and all the cybertech even if there was an initial connection.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by deniable ( 76198 )
      Shadowrun got poor treatment from MS, but a decent RPG (with single player) would be great. I would have liked them to do something with Crimson Skies. The only FASA game they seemed interested in was BattleTech and the only BT game that interests me is Megamek.
    • Wait... are you asking for ShadowRun using d20 rules as their back or a d20 Modern computer game? Cuz if you where askin for the first chummer, I'd have to hurt you... And I roll 6's so I'd do it with style...
    • Shadowrun was responsible for one of the greatest RPG games available on the SNES. Its still fun on an emulator. I hope it makes it to the Wii virtual console someday.

      Since then, it hasn't been associated with anything good. An FPS, are you kidding me? I don't understand why they can't just make a solid computer RPG out of such a great system. The fallout series are pretty good games in that genre.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by donaldm ( 919619 )
        While I did like Shadowrun on the SNES it was fairly simplistic but is was good fun. I thought Shadowrun on the Sega Megadrive was so much better since it had IMHO a better story and a better character build path, of course that made the game so much harder and challenging, this was especially so when you thought you were fairly powerful then got slaughtered when you went into a new area, Well back to running some less dangerous jobs - sigh! Unlike the SNES Shadowrun you really needed to depend on the peopl
  • The sooner the last vestiges of that abortion are dropped the better. Now, let's focus on what Shadowrun fans really want - a good Shadowrun CRPG. Go Go Smith & Tinker!

  • It *was* a good RPG (Score:3, Interesting)

    by binaryspiral ( 784263 ) on Friday January 04, 2008 @11:15AM (#21909344)
    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...

    • The rules were cryptic, battles took forever
      For those very reasons, my players cheered with joy when I wiped their Shadowrun party and we switched back to D&D.

      Still, I loved the game setting. I haven't looked at the Shadowrun 4th Edition rules to see if they're any more consistent or comprehensible, but I don't think I can fool my group into picking it up a second time ;)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Mongoose Disciple ( 722373 )
        I haven't read the 4E SR rules, but I've heard they move a bit faster. Apparently everything now has the same difficulty number and bonuses/penalties add/remove dice instead of moving the difficulty number. I'm not sure if I'm in love with that, but I admit the previous SR system had difficulty number weirdness, i.e. rolling a 6 is twice as hard as rolling a 5, but rolling a 7 is just as easy as rolling a 6, so +1 difficulty could either be immense or meaningless.

        I didn't have a problem with the combat sy
        • Haven't read through the SR 4th rules much myself, but what your describing sounds exactly like what White Wolf's done with the new World of Darkness stuff. Beyond that I know in the new SR version they combined rigging and netrunning for the most part. Which depending on your opinion on man machine interfaces for vehicles and drones makes perfect sense. Also the net became a wireless system. On the other hand the module they produced to make the changeover from 3rd to 4th involved so many impossibilities h
        • I've never played shadowrun 3rd ed. My gaming group just recently started playing shadowrun 4th edition. We haven't been playing it long enough for me to form an overall opinion on the system, but one thing sticks out at me as problematic: the initiative pass sytem.

          For the uninitiated, each round of combat is broken up into 4 initiative passes. By default, a character has only one initiative pass and acts only once per round. However, you can get your reflexes jacked up through cyber implants (somet
          • Just wanted to comment on a few things:

            These are all great things to have, except when it gets to the point where you have to know the content from 20 or 30 books to make an effective character.

            Yeah, I definitely think that agreeing on a much smaller subset of books to be used for a campaign is the only sensible way to play 3.5. You're always going to end up excluding something that someone wants to use, but if you don't, there's just too much there and the DM has to be too much of an expert on too many di
          • Without having the rules in front of me, or having run SR 3rd in a year I can tell you be glad they max out at 4 passes. The old system could theoretically have someone acting 7+ times each round. The reason it could be so high was because you'd have your reaction stat, which could hit 10 fairly easily, added to a number of d6 rolls based on your cyberware or magics along with other modifiers from more cyberware and magics. Never mind the merits that allow you to reroll six's on initiative Now this may not
            • The last time I looked at the SR 3E rules, I swear the thing that let you reroll sixes on initiative was mutually exclusive with anything that added extra dice -- in other words, a way for the exceedingly rare character with no initiative-boosting magic or cyberware to be a little less pathetic.

              Usually (but not always), the really broken things in any system require a 'creative' reading of the rules.

              As best as I remember, 3 passes in a round was pretty standard for any decently optimized character, but gett

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by erdraug ( 962369 )
                Delta? The party i was playing with actually was so munchkined-out they actually DESIGNED their own stuff.

                I was playing this cyberware-free adept who kept dying, it was hilarious - thank god for that platinum Doc Wagon Contract.

        • I didn't have a problem with the combat system in SR 2E/3E though. Yeah, there are more rolls involved in resolving an attack than in a game like D&D, but equally a single attack is more likely to put someone out of the rest of a fight than an attack in D&D is, past the first few levels. I can't think of a lot of SR fights I ever saw that went more than 1-2 rounds of combat. If anything, I think D&D feeling like its fights go faster has more to do with my having played a lot, lot more D&D.

          I guess I should clarify a bit, then - plain old combat in SR wasn't too bad. The rules were fairly consistent and well-written. We had fits trying to figure out vehicle combat in particular, though. Decking wasn't too bad - you roll dice often enough that you start to figure out the rules fairly quickly - but between decking and astral surveillance, we had a considerable part of each game session that involved individual players doing things on their own. Part of this is probably my fault as the GM, b

      • Personally, I find D&D's rules cryptic and laborious.

      • The good: I remember GMing my very first Shadowrun game. 2nd ed. The players decided, as a 'distraction,' to load up a van with plastique. I wanted to know how much damage this would do (as a sidenote; in-play, we just rule-of-thumbed it to keep things going.)

        The rulebook provided rules to figure this out.

        The bad: Had one of the NPCs at 'ground zero' of the detonation, under this system, managed to roll something like 86 sixes in a row, they would have survived the blast. It wasn't until the Fields

    • 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.

      Yeah, Shadowrun was my favorite PnP roleplaying game only after D&D. Fun times.

      Neither was I willing to purchase just to play a

  • disastrous? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by spyrochaete ( 707033 ) on Friday January 04, 2008 @11:32AM (#21909532) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by 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-a

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mprx ( 82435 )
        Teleporting? In Shadowrun? The best feature of Shadowrun is how the magic system is powerful if used correctly, but not immediately gamebreaking (without heavy houseruling) like in D&D. It manages this because there's at least some attempt at consistency and hard limitations on what it can do. One such limitation is "No Teleporting". Anyone who's seriously considered the implications of teleportation on both combat and society will release why this is necessary. If they're going to ignore importan

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bryansix ( 761547 )
      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by spyrochaete ( 707033 )

        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.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by iainl ( 136759 )
          The Vista limitation is synthetic for a LAN battle between a bunch of guys all set up with the patches.

          What it's not synthetic for is tying into the Windows version of XBox Live, as all the crap to do that doesn't come with XP. Integrated play between 360 and PC owners was one of the big things that Microsoft was pushing with the game, and that meant Vista.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Drakino ( 10965 )
            What it's not synthetic for is tying into the Windows version of XBox Live, as all the crap to do that doesn't come with XP.

            Nope. When you install Shadowrun on Vista, it installs a "Games for Windows Live" re distributable. The 360 - PC integration was all done at that level or inside the game and had nothing to do with Vista. Want proof? Grab a Shadowrun PC disc, run the GFW Redist off of it on XP, and watch as it installs fine.

            The only thing Vista about Shadowrun was the installer, and one not even re

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by iainl ( 136759 )
              Really? In which case I apologise; I'd swallowed MS's FUD that GFW has Vista hooks for security reasons.
  • Because the most recent abomination has very, very little to do with Shadowrun, for reasons which simply are not justifiable from a gameplay perspective. If you're going to change an IP as much as this one got changed, don't use the IP's name: "Shadowrun" doesn't have enough cachet to draw massive numbers of non-dedicated fans, and completely altering the game universe is going to do nothing but infuriate the dedicated ones.

    I've been playing Shadowrun since a few weeks after the first edition was released,
  • 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 don't need to pay $60 (assuming I have Vista or an Xbox 360 already) to play a wide variety of games with a Shadowrun theme. Between the free MUSH games, Half-Life mods, Neverwinter Nights mod and even (gasp) the pen-and-paper RPG itself (which can be played online) there are plenty of games that are cheaper and "more Shadowrun" than the official FPS.
  • Wasn't really that bad. It was a fun game, a bit half assed with the animation (no animation for going up ladders, just hovering up or down), but had some awesome fun things to do, run backwards at someone teleport behind people and stab them in the back, and the fact that it allowed PC and console gamers to duke it out was fun, I never felt disadvantaged due to the controller.

  • I'm a huge fan of Shadowrun... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DragonTHC ( 208439 ) <Dragon AT gamerslastwill DOT com> on Friday January 04, 2008 @12:11PM (#21910034) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • 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 swor

    • Stop letting great games die because of reviewers, and try the games for yourself.

      It's easier for people to "try the games for themselves" if the games aren't shackled to a completely illogical and unncessary requirement that you be running a version of your OS that's so new practically nobody has it. Nobody's going to upgrade their operating system just to play a game, unless your game is a truly historic achievement, and those only come along every ten years or so.

  • For everyone interested in a Shadowrun-esque FPS, you should try out the Dystopia [dystopia-game.com] Half-life2 Source Mod. It's free if you have the Source SDK, and it's extremely polished and a blast to play. In my opinion, it's pretty much everything the Shadowrun FPS wanted to be, but better. To quote the overview page:

    Dystopia places the player into tense combat situations in a high tech world spanned by computer networks. As either Punk Mercenaries or Corporate Security Forces the player will fight through the physical world to gain access, via jack-in terminals, to cyberspace.

    Cyberspace is a three dimensional representation of the world's network. Inside cyberspace, players will launch programs to hack into systems linked to the physical world while fighting off enemy hackers and defending critical systems. Gameplay progresses through inter-linked physical and cyberspace objectives, some are completed in either the physical world or cyberspace, others only by a well timed combination of the two.

    Whether the player is a heavily augmented combat mercenary armed to the teeth with the latest in firepower, or a twitch reflex cyberdecker racing to infiltrate a cyberspace node; they'll be immersed in an action packed battle. Only through skillful use of the high tech arsenal we're making available and intelligent team play will players truly jack-in and kick ass.

    Check out the trailer here [youtube.com]

    In case you're wondering, I'm just an enthusiastic fan who is interested in having more people to play with. If you like Shadowrun, download [dystopia-game.com] and come play!

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jack9 ( 11421 )
      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 psych
      • When did you play? Perhaps some of the earlier demo's were less balanced.

        The way it is now is the complete opposite of your experience; there is a huge flexibility of gear, and each requires different counters. There are at least 12 different "implants" which you use to customize your character, and you constantly change them as you move through a level. Cyberspace is one of my favorite parts of the game; its fun, and very important. Its absolutely crucial to capture most cyberspace objectives because witho
  • Not a bad game, definitely last gen animation/graphics. Had a good time playing it during the beta, very interesting concepts that you don't see in the normal FPS genre. I was looking forward to it until I found out that retail launch it would be $60, no single player, and a very limited amount of maps. That killed it for me and a lot of people on the 360. It should have been $40 and released with more maps it might have gained a following then.

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