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Shadowrun MMO ? Get fragged chummers !
Omasu
Member Posts: 51
I'm sure many of you remember the gaming system known as Shadowrun. A pen-and-paper role-playing game that puts you in the middle of the United States in 2072 after "the awakening" when magic returned to the world. This cyberpunk genre game has magic, guns, fantasy races, mercenaries for hire, and lots and lots of "cyberware" (technological implants that allow you to do everything from jumping buildings with a pneumatic leg .... or linking your gun through a port in your hand for a heads up display in your brain ... or, well, anything really. Wanna be the next million dollar man ? Check your cred-stick chummer.
The game also brought to life the Matrix. No, not the movie. The Matrix was a neural interface technology that allowed computer hackers or "deckers" to jack-in to computers and actually run around inside. Get your ass kicked in there, and you feel it in your body.
If you are anywhere near my age you also remember one of the best SEGA games, a mediocre Super Nintendo Game, and a huge letdown of a PC / Xbox 360 (first person shooter) flop.
Since then, a lot has changed for Shadowrun. They had a fairly successful trading card game. Their rights have switched ownership hands from Fasa, to WizKids, to Catalyst .... to .... who knows what now. However, the licencing rights were sold two years ago to a company called Smith & Tinker (a company owned by Jordan Weisman, one of the original Shadowrun creators).
This is relevant because last month they recieved 29 million dollars in venture capital funding. For those of you who don't dabble in business startup lingo, this means they recently got a large injection of cash from investors - and these investors hope that they get a large return on their investment.
According to Wikipedia, "details on their website hint at the creation of an MMO."
I would like to open up this thread for discussion - hopefully get some search engine traffic for fans seeking a shadowrun mmo - as well as speaking out on behalf of the Shadowrun fan community to emplore Smith & Tinker to create this game .... and do it right this time.
Comments
Well we will see in like what 4- 5 years?
Honestly, a MMO could be based on the IP of a Nora Roberts novel if it is good and has nice features I would play it.
Pre-existing IPs hardly excite me. Much like video games made about movies.
I have been saying that for years that someone should do a MMO with Shadowrun IP. It has everything for everyone, it magic meets the machine.
Get a life you freaking Gamer.....no no, you don't understand, I'm a Gamer, I have many lives!!
Yeah, it isn't like anyone else has ever done a magic-meets-machine type thing. It would be great for sure!
Oh wait... Tabula Rasa.
Why does it hurt when I pee?
Yeah, it isn't like anyone else has ever done a magic-meets-machine type thing. It would be great for sure!
Oh wait... Tabula Rasa.
Oh yeah, Tabula Rasa was exactly like that, they had paranormal creature, dragon, mage, magic, cybernetic enhancement, many races........Tabula Rasa had guns with mystic power called Logo, but yeah your right, it was the same.
Get a life you freaking Gamer.....no no, you don't understand, I'm a Gamer, I have many lives!!
I played that little Shadowrun cartridge for the Genesis out like a champ. I loved that game. *A-B-B-A-C-A-B*. I played the Table-Top version aswell. Of the few TT-RPG Books I have left, the large majority of them are Shadowrun. I would love to see the IP turned into another well done game. Especially if it were MMO. The genre is great. The combination of cyberpunk and fantasy is my favorite mix. The Shadowrun lore/canon makes for a wonderful storyteller's setting. Large oppressive forces with little else except player characters to stand between them and global domination, whether that be politically, economically or even spiritually. My greatest desire for going to college was to become a game programmer in the hopes of working on a Shadowrun IP or very similar project.
Maligar Kelison
Threat Removal
I played Shadowrun for many years in my youth. I also played TR from start to finish and while basic similarities do exist, Shadowrun is in a very different world. A better one if you ask me because it has resonance with the present more than TR did (the events in TR happened in 2012) I would really love to see Shadowrun as an MMO.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy.
______________________________
"This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
It would be pretty cool to see them turn 4 completely different games into something playable in an MMO format (guns, vehicles/drones, magic and hacking are completely different rule-sets). I don't envy the challenge, since it is a small community (compared to other pen and paper games) and they are all stubbornly playing retro editions (at least in my area, Seattle).
I thought Microsoft owned the rights to Shadowrun to make that half-arsed FPS that came out?
I played the SNES game so much.
If there was a Shadowrun MMO I would quit playing every other MMO game I have! It's a perfect world for MMO creation and so original in comparison to all the fantasy IP's that are around right now.
Shadowrun would be amazing. Full stop.
http://www.recycleyourgames.co.uk - Recycle Your Games and Consoles. Help the Environment and Charity!
The best thing they could do is immediately hire me for narrative design/systems design. Why? See block of text to follow with all the things I've come up with over the years...
VoIP hacking, voice distortion (leading to an element of integrity by using your natural voice), recording VoIP discussions and selling them to rivals (all in-game), ambushing people on a mission after obtaining said info, acting of as a broker of aforementioned information (PC and NPC brokers), starting gangs or mingling with corporations in a pseudo NPC organization, receiving texts/emails when people trigger security in your corner of cyberspace (or setup loggers to see the comings/goings for possible password cracking), PvP with in-game and player enforced stipulations e.g. you hit a gang on a run for a major corp and you just made a powerful enemy, a direct translation of the damage/body/hit locations system making combat brutal and dangerous, preferably a level of character class anonymity such as being skill-based with templates (for people who would like to follow one) so you're not running around as a lvl50 Street Samurai LFG, etc. etc.
What this does is facilitate role-playing, but also offer a good healthy mix between player created intrigue and mega-corp (NPC oriented) politics. You can just cruise cyberspace looking for information, cruise VoIP channels which you can hack, encrypt, or trace the bastard trying to snoop on your line, flex over turf in gang warfare, drive your corp's profits (and your rank within it, if the mix of players/npc chairmen decide you're right for the job), and of course, let's not forget rolling up a shammy, claiming a swamp as your protectorate, and working to keep the corps out (perhaps even establishing a gang and turning eco-terrorist.)
The possibilities are endless, it's unfortunate it won't meet any of my expectations.
While i would love to have a shadowrun MMO, there are very few companies i would trust to do it right. So it will probably never happen or some crappy company will get it and lame it out =(
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
- Lewis Thomas
I would sell my soul for a good Shadowrun MMO!
Played: MCO - EQ/EQ2 - WoW - VG - WAR - AoC - LoTRO - DDO - GW/GW2 - Eve - Rift - FE - TSW - TSO - WS - ESO - AA - BD
Playing: Sims 3 & 4, Diablo3 and PoE
Waiting on: Lost Ark
Who's going to make a Cyberpunk MMO?
Microsoft had the rights to it, if memory serves. They were going to do an MMO, but for whatever reason, changed their minds and put out a sub-par fps that did horribly. I kind of think that they thought about an mmo, started work on it, but changed their minds. And since they had already put out a considerable amount of cash towards the project, they half-assed a fps to try and recoup some of the cash back.
After that, I think the original Shadowrun person bought the rights back. Thus where we basically are today, and now a new $29,000,000 investment, thus chances are, an MMO is in the making, because I don't think that much money would go towards something less than an MMO.
That said, I think what would be amazing about a Shadowrun MMO is that it always felt familiar, yet different. Sure magic and tech has been done. But what I loved about Shadowrun, and granted this is from someone that lives in the NW, it always felt familiar. If a game could be made like that with real life cities, reinvisioned in their type of future with enough familiar landmarks, and if this could be done essentially with major cities, not only the US but worldwide, I think it could be a hit, and would spark a lot of interest.
I can see a trailer like a dragon breathing fire across Washington DC, a troll launching an RPG at it, an elf shooting a bow with a line attaching and using it to swing on top of the dragon as it tries to destroy the city.
Could definitely have gameplay with missions for runners to infiltrate something. If it's a pvp type realm, I could see a group designed to hijack them, or defend a corp. I could see gangs instead of guilds.
If done right, I would most definitely play a game like this for a long time.
Originally posted by Benaiah21
Microsoft had the rights to it, if memory serves. They were going to do an MMO, but for whatever reason, changed their minds and put out a sub-par fps that did horribly. I kind of think that they thought about an mmo, started work on it, but changed their minds. And since they had already put out a considerable amount of cash towards the project, they half-assed a fps to try and recoup some of the cash back.
thats the same story i heard, MS was gonna do an SR MMO, scrapped it and used the art assetts to put out that garbage FPS instead
its also the same thing cheyanne mountain did with the stargate worlds MMO, they cancelled the MMO and put out a garbage FPS with the art assetts they had left over
About Shadowrun, it was the quality source books, fun game mechanics and excellent published adventures which set it above it's rivals (seattle soucebook and Bottled demon etc.)
The quality of the published adventures will be hard to translate to MMORPG format, but I would imagine the Contact system and Cyberspace mechanics would work really well in MMORPG. Something like "The Agency" MMOG - action oriented gadget heavy MMOG would be enjoyable in the Shadowrun world, just don't expect it to be better than the P&P original.
I agree. It's so hard to translate PnP games to MMOs, partially because no one's been able to do a credible job recreating the game mechanics, partially because no computer game can really encapsulate what we imagine when playing through the same material at a table, and primarily because no game engine can even come close to approximating what a game master does: ("What do you mean you want to-...ugh. Okay, fine, you shoot your contact with your streetsweeper. You hear the sound of sirens coming from around the corner, but you also notice the phone in your contact's pocket is ringing.")
Of course, no matter how badly a company bungled the thing trying to translate it from an imagination-based experience to an MMO action game, there's something to be said for elves with cybernetic eyes and adrenal boosters dressed in black leather dusters, armed with molecular-edged katanas and machine pistols, who ride armored cafe racers with hard-points through downtown Seattle in an alternate version of the world. It's the kind of run-on sentence that makes me pre-order things, even if they stink.
I hate to dissapoint.
Washington-based start-up Smith & Tinker has won around $29m in VC funding for its new range of games and toys based on its emerging Nanovor franchise.
Every 3 or 4 months I check to see if a Shadowrun MMO is in the works.
Shadowrun is, by FAR, my favorite IP for gaming, above Warhammer 40k by several leagues.
2nd Edition was probably my favorite edition with 4th feeling too much like World of Darkness with D6s. But mechanics aside, its an amazing setting.
If a proper MMORPG can be made from the ashes of that horrible 360 game, one that serves the IP Justice, I can die a happy man.
My favorite character was probably my Dwarven Saboteur from the Tir nations, Chargen, with Wrist blades and Kid Stealth legs which made him look like a frog. His last words before getting picked off by a sniper were "Could you hold these for me?" Many explosions followed.
Dude, Shadowrun didn't do bad at ALL as the game it came out to be. That was hands-down the best tps I have played (aside from Transformers: WFC, which is awesome) in the history of shooters. It generated it's cult following as well as many others.
THE Rooster Nash
The Shadowrun FPS was awesome. It was ruined by GFWL on the PC, which is a shame. They could make an mmofps game and I would be happy.
I know, and they still have that Mechwarrior game (which we have seen a demo video about) on their platter, so Shadowrun won't be coming out any time soon.
Still, Smith&Tinker has the licenses of all Fasa IPs, so we can still dream that someday they try making a Shadowrun game, and Weisman is the guy I'd like to see running the show when it happens.
A thread from somebody wanting a Shadowrun mmo starts up here every few months. They always get lots of posts. I think messege is clear. Dev's....give the people what they want! I think in todays jaded climat this would knock the mmorpg world on it's axis. Shadowrun has something for everybody. (Still would prefer a Rifts mmo but this is not the time or the place
)
i really didn't get why the Shadowrun FPS was so trashed. i don't remember hearing any of the haters mentioning specifics on what was bad about it.
i played the demo for a few hours and the only problems i had with it were modern day fps features that i hate (such as penalizing movement/jumping with spreading crosshairs), but that the present day shooter audience seems to like or at least expect (& never complain about).
and it had several nice & unusual/unique abilities(such as teleporting thru walls, gliding)
for all you people that hate it..... WHAT EXACTLY about it do you hate?
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Corpus Callosum
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Personaly I think that it's becouse it's a very beloved i.p with a huge following. People have been waiting for a decent computer game version for years. When it came out it was just a run of the mill shooter in a world of run of the mill shooters. Thats why I didn't like it anyway.
For me, it's not a matter of hating that game specifically, I just don't like shooters of any kind (especially the first-person variety). They're not my thing. I loved Shadowrun (the PnP game, and, to a lesser degree, the Genesis rpg), but the Xbox shooter may as well not even have existed for me. I was excited when I first heard they were making it, but I lost interest immediately when I found out what type of game it was going to be. Themes are wonderful, but even the most impressive theme in the world can't make a game fun if you don't enjoy the way it plays.
I still play shadowrun RPG, and I would love a shadowrun MMO :-)