Just for the record, I doubt that’s the entire reason. You don’t spend millions to appeal to tens of thousands (maybe) of fans.
I think they were hoping to refresh a stale brand with some nostalgia value. I don’t think they succeeded though.
That’s awesome. Thanks for the laugh. :)
Or alternately, people on the squad could’ve chosen to be hackers, and then, like current shadowrun rules, they could hack in to the security system in real time, in order to get access to a tunnel, and it would only take a few moments.
They could also do a similar thing for shamans, where when the shaman enters the astral plane, he gets magical shaders a la WoW death effect, and can walk through man-made walls, and view life essences, in order to figure out where people are.
Is the demo only out for the 360?
Yeah, it seems like they’ve already gone for the squad-tactical approach with abilities like tree of life and resurrect. I’m not sure how having a decker (get it right Charles!) with some terminals where, say, he could jack in and take over some environmental guns or raise/lower forcefields to impede/help the progress of other/his own squadmates would hurt anything. You’d then have a tactical choice… do you guard him until he’s in and let him protect himself with his hardware access, or do you guard him in case someone comes along while he’s jacked in? Do you take a decker with you despite the fact that he’s not directly mobile firepower for what he can add, or do you just go with more meat and assume that you’ll shut down their decker (if they have one) the old fashioned way?
Shaman would seem to have similar things that could work for them.
(As for gameplay itself, shaman being able to summon from the astral plane and being able to lightly reinforce/damage from the astral plane gives them an interaction mechanism with the meat. Two shaman on opposite sides both on the astral plane would, of course, get to fight it out more directly. Similar mechanics for deckers would seem to work too. Through up some obstacles/barriers that are visible only to those classes when astral/jacked in and you don’t even have to rebuild geometry, you just modify it a bit and put on some shaders.)
Deckers don’t work that way anymore. They aren’t actually ‘deckers’ anymore, either. That was kind of Charles’ point.
Meh. I like the way deckers worked. (Though I guess it would be a bit of an inconvenience for a PnP game to have to stop and ignore everyone to do the decker bit.) However, I think the way I described would still work fine in the game since it’s forced to be in realtime and the other guys who aren’t the decker have ideas of their own.
I’m not sure having a decker in there simply so that he (and only he) can push button X, Y, or Z to make some obstacle go away would be all that entertaining.
They are actually called Hackers in 4E, though I do have a fondness for the term Decker. But with no Decks, the term Decker doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Already done, except the team is there to protect the hacker:
Man, it really is hard to make fun of kludgy PnP mechanics.
Back when I played it, I mostly remember truly absurd numbers of d6s clattering around, lots of thumb-twiddling from the rest of us at the table in decking and shamaning sequences, and of course the goofy “You got elves in my cyberpunk! You got cyberpunk in my elves!” setting. Good for them on tightening up the mechanics in subsequent editions.
It also brings into focus that a lot of the attention NMA gathers is the realization that the abyss they’ve hurled themselves into is one staring at many others, too. Just with different IPs.
The simplest way to fit deckers/hackers into the game that I can see is to make them NPCs. You could have game modes in which you need to protect your decker from the other team or secure objectives to allow your (not physically present) decker to hack into the local security systems.
Jake Plane, Xaroc and others are missing the point. When SR fans, myself included, are getting upset about the misuse of the setting, the choice of game genre is entirely SECONDARY. If this was a MP-only FPS that was actually faithful to the Shadowrun setting and its mechanics, you’d see the majority of the complaints fade away. I still wouldn’t play it, for example, because I don’t like that particular genre, but I wouldn’t resent the design choices and bitch so vociferously on the official forums or here.
When someone says that labelling it as a Shadowrun game is deceptive and your response is “they never hid the fact that it’s not a RPG”, you’re missing the point again. It’s not the type of game that matters, it’s the fidelity to the existing material on the setting.
I don’t care at all about Shadowrun so that doesn’t bother me. That said, my friend and I had a blast with this demo last night. I am guessing it will get a lot of customers for Microsoft. It would for us, if it were $40 instead of $60. That price is ludicrous.
If there was a PC demo, I’d take a look, but the fact that they nerfed the keyboard/mouse controls for “balance” irks me enough to pass. I couldn’t care less about platform balance; let the mouse users pwn the gamepad users. It’d be a selling point for Shadowrun AND Vista to pwn gamepad users. At least offer a server browser option for keyboard/mouse only players without the fuzzy mouse response time.
Got the demo and what do you know… absolutely no public matches going on.
Got the demo, takes a while to find a match, but when you do its decent. Judging by how I was having a hard time barely aiming at anything, I would imagine PC gamers would highly pwn the Xbox 360 players… that being said I don’t have Vista and wouldn’t pay $60 for a game that nobody will be playing 2 months from now.
It’s true to an extent that they’ve butchered the setting - it’s more like they’ve taken the idea of Shadowrun rather than the actual plot and setting of it, and made it fit. Hell, it’s rather like someone described what Shadowrun was and they built it around that, as opposed to them actually sitting down and studying the setting.
The backlash is a shame, though, because it really does seem quite fun. It’s not brilliant - weapons seem a bit off, and the whole game seems kinda lightweight, but it does have a different feel to pretty much anything I’ve played before. There’s a sheer visceral joy in teleporting through a wall, shotgunning someone in the face, and then gliding away to safety, too.
I’ve not played multiplayer yet, but it’s still enjoyable. The single player is far from good enough to carry it (especially compared to things like Unreal Tournament, which also bear the “made for multiplayer” mantle) though certainly amusing. I’d likely buy this as a bargain bin title, but I’m not paying £40 for something when I can get similar games with a decent single-player for much cheaper. I am, above all, a single-player type of gamer, after all.
It’s not so much that I don’t understand that - it’s that I simply disagree. Having someone apply their own unique approach to a license doesn’t take away from my like of the original.
For example, if famed director David Lynch suddenly turned video game maker and decided that the first game he was going to produce was a remake of X-Com, I’d be worried. That, after all, is my cherished turn-based series of all time, second to Civilization. And let’s say Lynch, being Lynch, decided that instead of a turn-based game he was making “X-Com: Super Mad Fun Trax of Speed” - i.e. an X-Com racing game.
Well sure, I’d mentally groan out of initial cognitive dissonance. But here’s the thing - if I tried “X-Com: Super Mad Fun Trax of Speed” and LIKED it, thinking that it offered more than the usual racer out there, than it wouldn’t matter to me that the license was being “abused.” Ultimately, if a game offers fun gameplay, I’ll play it.
So in sum, I do understand why people are upset about how this really isn’t a Shadowrun game. What I don’t get is how some of the people here won’t even try the demo to see if they’ll like it, despite that.
Didn’t you people ever read Green Eggs and Ham?
If you encourage it, they will think it’s okay. That’s why.
How about we move this discussion away from Shadowrun (a third-rate license at best) and phrase it in its more common form: do all the Mario spinoff games make the real Mario games worse due to brand dilution?
The answer is no, of course they don’t.