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Shadowrun Preview September 18, 2006 John JCal Callaham |
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Summary: The wildly original Shadowrun RPG setting is being brought to the PC and Xbox 360 as an equally wild multiplayer shooter experience. JCal comes back from Microsoft with a detailed report of this unique game.
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 3 ) |
For those of you not familiar with Shadowrun, it is a pen-and-paper RPG created back in 1989 by FASA (who also created game worlds like Battletech and Crimson Skies), which has as its main premise a future world where in 2011 the power of magic returns to the Earth, starting with a dragon appearing on top of Japan’s Mt. Fuji. Soon afterward the people of this future Earth begin to turn into their “true selves” like dwarves, trolls, elves and orcs and gain magical abilities, all while the technology of Earth remains in place. In addition, magical leg lines of power begin to appear all over the earth. It’s this mix of magic and technology that made the Shadowrun universe a popular one among the pen-and-paper RPG crowd.
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Microsoft bought FASA in the mid-1990 where they developed games for the Mechwarrior, Mechcommander and Crimson Skies series for the PC and Xbox. At one point, FASA was going to make a PC third person action game based on Shadowrun and even had a release date of 1998 but those plans were eventually cancelled (Previous Shadowrun games for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were released). The Shadowrun pen-and-paper RPG is still being developed by another party, Fantasy Productions (a new fourth edition of the game was released last year) and there have been a ton of novels based on the universe published as well.
So it was a bit of a surprise when Microsoft and FASA revealed back in May at E3 that they were releasing a Shadowrun game for both the PC and Xbox 360. However, the game would not be an RPG but rather a multiplayer based first person shooter. Once more the game would use Microsoft’s planned Live Anywhere system that would allow people to play each other across both game platforms online. At E3 the team showed off what they admitted was an early level that didn’t get a lot of attention from the press and when it did it mostly got confused looks. “Why is this game a shooter? Is it going to be like Counter-Strike?”
| The Gameplay | Page:: ( 2 / 3 ) |
And what about the game? After hearing about their plans and playing the game for ourselves, we can honestly say that this version of Shadowrun is unlike any other multiplayer shooter currently out there. While it definitely has some similarities to games like Unreal Tournament, Tribes and Counter-Strike, Shadowrun is doing a lot of different things. First among them is how they are handling the playable characters. There are no classes in the game per se. There are four different races, however. You have the Jack of all trades human, the highly magical elf, the slow but powerful troll and the hardened dwarf. All four races can be played by both the RNA Global and the Lineage sides and each has advantages and disadvantages. The elf, for example, is magically adept, while the dwarf is about the opposite and can actually leach magic from other players. When shot, the troll actually gets a tougher skin the more and more you shoot at him (there is an upper limit so he’s not invulnerable). All four races have some degree of magical ability (called essence) that they can use in the game to create spells. One of the more interesting aspects of Shadowrun’s spell is that it’s never really used for offensive power; in other words you won’t be throwing magical power balls at your enemy. Rather the spells are used for defensive or for support. Things like generating the Tree of Life (a healing tree for anyone to use) or turning your character into smoke so that weapon blast can’t hurt you, teleportation, pushing off enemies via gusts of wind are the main aspects here.
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The offensive parts of Shadowrun are for the tech weapons. There’s nothing terribly innovative about the selection of weapons; you have everything from pistols, machine guns, and shotguns through grenades to rocket launchers to chose from. However, you also have other tech items that you can use to augment your character (at the expense of losing the amount of magic you can use in the game). The most popular tech items are the glider (flying around in short bursts) and enhanced vision (allowing the player to see through walls). If it sounds like abilities to look through wall or teleporting through them are more akin to cheating than gameplay features, that’s not an accident. The development team wanted to put in features in Shadowrun that would be considered cheats in other games.
The end result of all these features is that you can create a playable character in Shadowrun that will be a lot different than just picking one or two different firearms. In addition to magical and tech abilities Shadowrun will allow you to use those abilities in new and complex ways. You can glide up to a location on a level and then teleport through a wall to reach your final objective. You can fire anti-magic tech at an enemy that will cause him or her to not be able to use their magical abilities. You can resurrect your teammates with your magical powers..but if you die, that means anyone you have resurrected will start “bleeding” until they die. If you are getting the picture that this game is going to be more than just a Counter-Strike clone, you would be correct. It’s safe to say that Shadowrun is not for the beginning multiplayer shooter fan. Indeed, FASA is planning on a series of tutorials that in the game that will walk you through the basics of Shadowrun’s gameplay.
| Levels and gameplay | Page:: ( 3 / 3 ) |
So what about the gameplay itself? In a word, fast. In our brief gameplay sessions against the FASA development team we found ourselves yelling and screaming at our teammates to win each round. The round allows the player to win more money so they can buy access to more magic, more tech and more weapons and as the rounds progressed each team was able to use more and more specialized abilities. The gameplay type we played was with RNA Global defending an artifact while the Lineage attempted to steal it and reach a helipad on top of the level before RNA Global wipes them out first. Attacker can used teleport to quickly move in and steal the artifact but they better beware of magical traps like crystal spines that can sap the attacker’s life. Defenders can use enhanced vision to determine where the enemy is going even through walls. The end result is that the game, while still having a bit of a learning curve, seems to offer a lot more variety and gives players more strategy and tactics than a relatively simple shooter like Counter-Strike.
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As has been revealed before, Shadowrun will be one of the first games to use Microsoft’s Live Anywhere, which will allow PC and Xbox 360 owners of the game to battle each other and we got to do just that in our playtest sessions. When asked if the PC’s keyboard and mouse combo could defeat an Xbox 360’s controller set-up we were told that was not the case and that they would be taking great pains to make the game have an equal playing field for both platforms. And what about cheating on PC versions of the game that might crop up in Xbox 360 matches? The team was a big vague but did say they are aware of the issue and are also taking steps to make sure that the matches will remain free of cheaters in both platforms. If you don’t want to deal with online multiplayer, Shadowrun promises to have support for bot play as well and players will be able to play co-op games against bots or populate matches with mixes of bots and real players.
Visually Shadowrun is still a work in progress (there were a lot of placeholder character and weapons models in our preview build) but overall the look of the game is still promising, especially in the environments with the unique multi-level maps. As the screenshots that accompany this article show, the game definitely has a look that’s somewhat akin to the pulp adventure covers and artwork of the 1930s. Unfortunately, the team wouldn’t comment on whether or not there will be any mod or level editor tools released (we are not hopeful on this point) nor on whether there will be any downloadable new content for the game (although the team seemed to want to add that aspect to the title) There will be some kind of multiplayer beta demo released for both platforms at some point since they want some feedback from a large number of players in order to refine the game.
While the game is still a ways away from release (sometime in 2007) the team at Shadowrun sold us on their vision on a new and different look at the multiplayer shooter during our brief visit this week. Indeed the team refers to it sometimes as a fast paced RPG. Our gameplay sessions were a lot of fun as we learned more and more on how to combine the game’s unique mix of weapons, tech and magic (sometime to the detriment of our character’s lives) and if the team can keep the balance of all of these features just right we think they could have a lot of converts from players from other games. We hope to get more info about Shadowrun and perhaps some more playtime in a more complete version of the game before it’s release sometime next year.