Shadowrun screenshots that "Dwarf" the competition via Team Xbox

Brimstone · Mar 22, 2007

Team Xbox has an article up talking about the Dwarf race in Shadowrun.

http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/1929/The-Races-of-Shadowrun-Dwarves/p1/

rusty · Mar 22, 2007

I can't believe just how far this game has come since its first showing...

It's actually looking pretty good now in my opinion, I like the art style as well (for the most part!).

aselto · Mar 22, 2007

Beta video:
http://www.1pstart.com/10-minutes-of-shadowrun-beta-video/
http://useruploads.mythica.org/view/Shadowrun.wmv

StefanS · Mar 22, 2007

rusty said:
I can't believe just how far this game has come since its first showing...

It's actually looking pretty good now in my opinion, I like the art style as well (for the most part!).

Seconded. It looks much better. Lots of improvements.

Inane_Dork · Mar 22, 2007

How many Xboxen will play as dwarfs so they can make Mini Me jokes?

Anyway, the lighting has really come together and they've added so much detail to the levels in comparison to the first showing. This might be a good CS-like game.

Brimstone · Mar 22, 2007

I found it intresting to compare the Dwarf model from Project Offset to the Shadowrun one.

The Project Offset Dwarf has "sub surface scattering".

TurnDragoZeroV2G · Mar 22, 2007

From now until some point in the future, FASA is going to be sending out 1000 invites every Thursday, according to one of the devs.

It's unfortunate I don't have the proper capture equipment to make a good video. With sound. Heh.

Brimstone · Mar 23, 2007

Screenshot from the beta.

TheChefO · Mar 23, 2007

Brimstone said:
I found it intresting to compare the Dwarf model from Project Offset to the Shadowrun one.

The Dwarf Rocks!

I have to say this game has really come a long way but I'm still not sold. If I do pick it up, I will be rockin the dwarf though.

LunchBox · Mar 23, 2007

LOL
I love the pun you used.
It's looking better and better everytime theres an update fo this game.

scooby_dooby · Mar 23, 2007

I'll buy this game......for $29.99

inefficient · Mar 23, 2007

They have a lot of footage of this game and 3 of them sit around and discuss it on this week's 1UP show which I just saw.
http://zdmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/1UP/1upshow_0508_640x360.zip

I'm afraid this project has some distressing problems. The art direction is kind of all over the place. Graphics and animations reminded me of PDZ for some reason. Feature wise it seems they tried to implement too many disparate features all into the same game. They ended up with this huge array of features, but individually none of them really stand out. The core game play by itself seems really out of date. It's ends up relying on all these additional features to make the game fun. But since none of those features alone are specifically well done, it all comes across a bit janky to me. I guess my curent impression is that it looks like a mod of a vanilla FPS game with a bunch of crazy mutators tacked on to it.

The 1UP editors in the video were not crazy about it either. Luke's thinks it is "stupidly complicated" and that it will alienate the core xbox gamers. Shawn as a PC gamer didn't feel it was too complicated, but he didn't feel the core game play was that satisfying. Kathleen just seemed confused.

DieH@rd · Mar 23, 2007

Brimstone said:

This looks awesome. Too bad its not an RPG.

Brimstone · Mar 23, 2007

inefficient said:
The 1UP editors in the video were not crazy about it either. Luke's thinks it is "stupidly complicated" and that it will alienate the core xbox gamers. Shawn as a PC gamer didn't feel it was too complicated, but he didn't feel the core game play was that satisfying. Kathleen just seemed confused.

Luke said "it (Shadowrun) is a lot of fun" on the 1up podcast at the 23.10 minute mark.

http://zdmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/Podcasts/032307.mp3

The game has a challenging learning curve. Just because people are familar with playing a FPS doesn't mean they're going to hit the ground running. They have to learn how to effectivly cast magic spells and upgrade with cyber technology.

FASA made a game that doesn't insult the intelligence of gamers. This is a positive thing. In paticular for console gamers that tend to get watered down gameplay compared to PC games.

NRP · Mar 23, 2007

Brimstone said:
FASA made a game that doesn't insult the intelligence of gamers. This is a positive thing. In paticular for console gamers that tend to get watered down gameplay compared to PC games.

That's an interesting point. Personally, I have always felt that in general console games were less sophisticated than PC games. I'm not overly enthusiastic about this game's concept, but I will certainly keep an eye on it.

TurnDragoZeroV2G · Mar 23, 2007

Brimstone said:
FASA made a game that doesn't insult the intelligence of gamers. This is a positive thing. In paticular for console gamers that tend to get watered down gameplay compared to PC games.

This is NOT a positive thing. I think the steep learning curve (and it is steep) really is going to scare a ton of gamers away from this title.

From the standpoint of game complexity, it's great, and it'll really reward those who put time into the game. But the guy who picked the game up because he heard it was good will have to have the patience to sit through and suffer for hours until he gets a real good grasp on the game.

And the tutorials at this point are nothing but glorified instruction manual descriptions, IMHO. Those are desperately asking for some fleshing out. When a rocket launcher costs $5000 with two rockets and ammo is $1000 after that, and you can lose the weapon by dying, it gets hard to practice real use of it. Just for example.

And that's only going to be worse when it ships with 9 maps and no single player of any kind, for 59.99. If all three of those things are true when this title ships, combined with the amount of time you have to invest just to start making the game fun and exciting (i.e., where you don't suck so completely)... and at the time this title will ship... I'm not so sure I see this game selling very well. I have to question whether it could possibly even break even, for that matter. Limited options even for custom games, no splitscreen for release (if ever), and so on... the gameplay has some incredible depth to it, and it's tons of fun, but it completely bypasses the "easy to pick up, hard to master" mantra and goes straight for hard to play effectively in the first place.

Really, thinking about how long the game has been in development (3 years give or take), relative to the actual amount of content that's been produced... it's hard to believe, really. You'd think they would pop this sucker out with a single player campaign going by how few MP maps they're releasing. But we'll see what happens....

AlNom · Mar 23, 2007

Indeed....

Is this a Vista-only title too? That would certainly make it even worse for sales.

Brimstone · Mar 25, 2007

TurnDragoZeroV2G said:
Really, thinking about how long the game has been in development (3 years give or take), relative to the actual amount of content that's been produced... it's hard to believe, really. You'd think they would pop this sucker out with a single player campaign going by how few MP maps they're releasing. But we'll see what happens....

Shadowrun is a "sandbox" style FPS shooter. The creativity and freshness is going to come from the wild combo's people come up with as they equip with magic and cyber-technology. The little details are often overlooked how the game innovates upon Counter-Strike. Besides a much improved money scoring system, you can loan teammates money. And of course the magical ability to bring a person back to life with "Ressurect". Even the scoring with "Ressurect" is cool, the person that revived the dead teammate gets a cut of all the money reward that re-animated player earns when he comes back.

The individual maps should be way deeper in replayability because of all the degree's of movement possible with "Teleport" & "Glider Wings" and how you can alter the enviroment with spells like "Strangle Vines".

People won't have to suffer online for two main reasons. You can play offline with bots and practice. Just set the A.I. to the lowest setting and increase it as you get better. Then when you play online the skill matchmaking system will kick in. A noob should end up getting matched up with the least skilled players online.

In the long term, I'm sure they're going to add more content to the game. The most obvious are some new maps. The really refreshing stuff will be a new race such as the Ork, additional technology and spells that will all of a sudden make those intial 9 maps brand spanking new again.

scooby_dooby · Mar 25, 2007

Brimstone said:
In the long term, I'm sure they're going to add more content to the game. The most obvious are some new maps. The really refreshing stuff will be a new race such as the Ork, additional technology and spells that will all of a sudden make those intial 9 maps brand spanking new again.

Ya Im sure they'll try and rape us for some extra content down the road....I dunno, this game has the potential to be one of the worst examples of MS's skewed pricing schemes.

Maybe I should give them some more benefit of the doubt, but I'm seeing a scenario here where people will have to pay $60 for half a game, and then another $50/year to play the game as it's meant to be played, and then another $10-20 buying maps and 'extras' that should've been included in the first place.

Maybe they'll surprise me, release this for $30-40, include a free 3-6month gold trial, and offer some free content. Maybe...

Falkster · Mar 25, 2007

I can only hope that the dwarves (dwarfs?) don't have the same Oddjob effect as in goldeneye. I hated that little guy! Similarly, going back to inefficient's post, the huge array of feature will surely be a bitch to balance, I hope they can pull it off. Anyway, the game now has my interest, those videos looked fun as hell!

Shadowrun screenshots that "Dwarf" the competition via Team Xbox

Brimstone

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rusty

aselto

StefanS

meandering Velosoph

Inane_Dork

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Brimstone

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Brimstone

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TheChefO

LunchBox

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DieH@rd

Brimstone

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