What’s so great about … Shadowrun?

I know this took a little longer than it should to get back to talking about Shadowrun, but it has given me plenty of time to fall in love it, and then back out of love with it. I want to write about what has drawn me back to Shadowrun time and time again despite all my thoughts brought up in the product analysis. Next time, I’ll write about all the issues I have with Shadowrun – and how I would have done things differently …

Interdependence

While almost every online game has “team” modes – very few (hardly any on consoles) involve players being reliant on each other. In Shadowrun, each team needs multiple people to “sacrifice” a power-up slot for a healing or resurrection ability. Good teams have Rezzers and Healers, bad teams have Elves with Gliders, Smartlink, Smoke and the Sniper Rifle. I love knowing that someone has my back if I die, or that sticking close to a particular player is smart because he drops trees in big fights. I like to rely on people – it’s why I like Online Multiplayer gaming, I like that it teaches gamers “don’t always be a dick”. I like that Shadowrun rewards the healer and the Rezzer – I’m bloody awful at killing people but I can still be pretty high on the “team list” by rezzing my suicidal teammates.

Interesting decisions

The balance of Shadowrun is excellent, even four weeks after launch I find people are still experimenting and developing new strategies based on the situations they might find during a game. I mentioned the “Roshambo” of race, weapon and abilities in my product analysis – and it’s still impresses me how many ways I can plan to “make a difference” in each game. Obviously certain races (Elves) are more popular than others (Trolls) which is a natural indicator of which race is “best” – however that not to say that there are teams of one race that will always win (quite the opposite in my experience). It’s clear that FASA’s approach (one year of prototyping on one map) helped them to really identify the issues with the game and try to counter each problem with multiple solutions.

Decisions can be undone quickly

If a team is fairing poorly, a couple of intelligent players can quickly swap their tech/magic to adjust for the tactics of the opposing team. I’ve seen a number of games where the tide has turned at the mid-point of a match because the other team adapted and started working together to beat their opponents. The only decision that “haunts” you in Shadowrun is which race you choose for a match – something that can be changed after 20 minutes or so. Other decisions simply rely on skill or time to allow you to redo them. I like being able to experiment, and try and different combos (I particularly like Strangle and Gust – Strangle always takes too long to grow, so I like to knock back my opponents in to it – or if timed right, I like to have the Strangle grow around them and trap them). Being able to try silly ideas is at the heart of many successful games – World of Warcraft and the many talent builds, Grand Theft Auto 3 and the different approaches that you can take to complete a mission etc … Shadowrun allows players to truly role play in a way – except that the role play can last for 5 seconds or 15 minutes, the power is in the hands of that player as to whether they stick to their role, or whether they “re-roll” in to something different …

It’s fun

At Shadowrun’s core is a fun FPS experience, one that I hope will be as imitated as Doom’s Deathmatch, Quake’s Capture the Flag, Tribes’ Rabbit, Unreal’s Domination or Battlefield’s Ticket system. I hope that more multiplayer focused developers will find interesting ways to use a team dynamic in a cooperative interdependant way and focus on what a team really is – even for a group of randomly grouped strangers. Shadowrun’s focus on making people work together – rather than in spite of one another, takes this Halo variant in a wonderfully different direction – and frankly, after playing Shadowrun I find the “Team” game types in other games dull and uninspired. In the end I mostly like Shadowrun because it isn’t about an Army of One, it’s about an Army.
I listened to Major Nelson’s podcast this afternoon and he had a interview with FASA’s Mitch Gitelman – who is a douche. Nelson asked all the question I’ve seen the Gaming Community raise – How can you charge $60 for so little content? Why so little content? What can we expect from SR’s Downloadable content? – There were no answers (of course). The guy was a real shithead though – his excuses for why maps takes so long was pathetic (6 weeks to prototype a map – fair enough, 2 MONTHS to do the “art” – your tools needs some work sunshine!), also his reasons for not having customization in the game (Oh the game is so visually demanding we didn’t want to add the the visual “seek time” or some similar bollocks response). While I hope Shadowrun is a commerical success, and that we see both DLC and potentially a sequel, I also don’t want see people like Mitch Gitelmen think that his product was “perfect” – there are many things wrong with Shadowrun … but that’s for my next post.