Shadowrun Post-Launch Aftermath and Review Scores
Before you do anything else, head over to the Official XBox Magazine Podcast site and check out Podcast #70, specifically the interview with FASA Studio Head Mitch Gitelman which starts around the 20:00 minute mark.
Commentary on the interview below.
Ratings, Value and Crying in Your Beer
So, in essence Gitelman is crying about how his game got lousy review scores and how unjust it is. Since the OXM reviewer is in on the podcast, he defends his 7.0 score by saying the game’s $60 pricepoint, nine maps and three game modes aren’t compensated for by the innovation in the FPS genre that Shadowrun supposedly represents. Gitelman focuses at first on driving home the point that the game is fun and many reviews acknowledge that, but don’t represent it as such in their overall scores. He seems to think that review text is being overlooked in favor of the score, especially when the score is average.
Initially, I wanted to agree with Gitelman. Obviously I think the weight put on nonsensical numeric scales as applied to the relative merit of a game is foolishness which is why reviews on Tunnels of Doom are nearly binary. Essentially, either a game is good enough to play or it isn’t and the only distinction is whether it is also good enough to own. That’s how I look at it. Trying to drill down and assign decimal-level integer values to something like “fun factor” is an exercise that is at best a little silly.
But then he gets into this weird place where he’s saying that people don’t even read reviews when the final score is in the six to eight range, only finding lure in the text when the game is highly rated (to see why the game is deserving of such praise?) or panned (for the humorous slander?). Since Shadowrun got a lot of reviews that went something like “fun to play but we’re docking it points because it’s expensive and doesn’t feel like they have enough content in the box for the money,” Gitelman gripes that people are missing what he feels is the key phrase there—”fun to play.” He rails against the cost argument by saying that a single-player campaign mode would be perhaps 10 hours worth of play based on other comparable shooters and they preferred to polish the longer-lasting multiplayer element which could give many more times that amount of entertainment thus justifying the full price even more due to its multiplayer-only style. He calls all this just the way the world is, suggesting reviewers (and gamers, I suppose) are operating under some sort of delusion.
Meanwhile the OXM guys complain that the problem really is that 7.0 range scores are misunderstood as being a “bad” score when the definition they include in their magazine reads something like “good game with some kind of glaring flaw that may limit the game’s overall appeal.” Now, I concede that if ever a game fit that description, Shadowrun is it based on the review texts I’ve read. But they do have to recognize that—while we’re talking about the way the world works—7.0 scores generally mean “mediocre” whether a reviewer intends them to be so or not. Put another way, if they used the exact same scale but applied scholastic grade values, Shadowrun would have been given a C- and no one would suggest that’s exactly a ringing endorsement.
All of which amounts to a sort of meta debate about reviews in general (and their ultimate utility) that kind of gets nowhere with Shadowrun.
It’s difficult to go into much detail because I still haven’t played the retail game so my opinions are based almost entirely on the stunted demo version. But let’s talk a bit about Gitelman’s gripes especially since he seems to hammer on the idea that Shadowrun is so innovative that it breathes new life into the team-based shooter style of game.
Basically, Shadowrun offers races with different attributes, tech and magic upgrades that allow players to do relatively unusual things like have limited flight, healing, teleportation and so on and does so in a format that gives each player a single chance to fight per round and must purchase their equipment prior to the match using money earned via performance in game. The races are essentially classes which we’ve seen in plenty of games like Battlefield 1942 and Day of Defeat. The funky powers are kind of intriguing but teleportation has been around since Unreal Tournament and flight is not really any different than low-gravity mods available since early versions of Quake at least. The game’s structure is so much like Counter-Strike that it’s practically impossible to read a review that doesn’t make the comparison, so that’s nothing new.
Hang on, where’s the innovation again?
The one claim to fame Shadowrun does have is the PC/XBox interoperability thing. Which is fine and kind of neat but, I have to ask, was any gamer really asking for this? I know almost everyone who heard about it said right away, “Aren’t the PC folks with their mouselooks going to pwn the XBoxies with their analog sticks?” Even if Shadowrun gets it right (which several people have suggested may be true), that still doesn’t change the fact that playing PC vs. XBox wasn’t really something everyone was clamoring for.
Just like the Shadowrun pen-and-paper game, there is nothing particularly original about the ideas behind Shadowrun the video game. Magic and technology, SF and Fantasy: Not a stretch. The PnP game is/was great because it blended the two so well, but Gitelman doesn’t seem to be saying he did everything exactly right, he’s trying to say this is something you can’t get anywhere else and that may be true for all the pieces combined, but collages aren’t innovative. Interesting, possibly, but not original per se.
Meanwhile he completely sidesteps the main issues: CS and Team Fortress 2 are similar but vastly cheaper alternatives which are both similar in execution and multiplayer-only format. How does that reconcile in a customer’s mind if they (like me) are on the fence? To the point: How is this game worth $60? If you want to talk about the way the world is, let’s talk about the way the game is selling versus how it could be selling if it were priced appropriately. In the real world, perception of value is value, so while some people may find a game with nine maps, three modes and no single-player campaign worth $60, I and many like me don’t even find games with twice that multiplayer content and a full single-player/co-op campaign worth $60 most of the time. Ask me sometime how many of the fifty-some-odd 360 games I’ve played cost me $60. Here’s a hint: Zero. I don’t want to pay that much for a game, sorry. Even Oblivion and Dead Rising, which I’ve gotten countless hours of enjoyment out of and are two of my favorite 360 titles, weren’t worth full retail price to me. I got them both used. Maybe I’m one of the cheaper gamers, but I play a lot of games and if I’m even going to consider dropping $60 the least you can do is give me something to do that’s more entertaining while I’m learning the game’s controls than stupid tutorial missions.
I’m sorry Shadowrun isn’t burning down the house with rave reviews, but I’m sorry to say it was nearly destined to be so because at the end of the day, this isn’t even what people wanted from the license at all. Who here thought at any point, “What the 360 needs is another shooter”? To take a role-playing license and shoehorn it poorly onto a semi-interesting shooter and then cry because no one is taking your game seriously enough strikes me as being unforgivably myopic.
Speaking of…
The Real Slap in the Face
Near the end of the interview, around the 54:00 mark, the OXM guys ask Gitelman about a Shadowrun RPG. Gitelman responds:
People are like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve waited twelve years for a Shadowrun game and you haven’t made an RPG out of it!’ It’s like, hey, you know what? Everybody waited twelve years. And think about it, we’ve owned the rights to Shadowrun for a long time: Microsoft has had it for eight years as a publisher. Nobody has ever approached us saying, ‘Hey do you want to put out an RPG with this?’ It was us going to other people. So all these people [saying], ‘It should have been an RPG,’ if it had to be an RPG that much, someone would have made it by now. I love Shadowrun to death, and I personally want to make an RPG out of it… I never made an RPG before, and I worked in the RPG industry. But I’ve never made one and that’s what made me shy away from it this time. The talent we had in the studio was first person multiplayer action, so that’s what we did.
Okay so score one for the idea that someone over there sees value in making a real Shadowrun game. But that bit at the end makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Granted, I don’t have any insights as to how games get greenlit but it sounds to me like Gitelman is blaming the format of the first Shadowrun video game in eleven years on a nebulous “they” and the fact that he didn’t have the talent on hand to make the game the way it should have been made. For one thing, if no one was approaching them asking for a Shadowrun game, when they approached other people, why not say, “This is a role-playing license so we want to make a role-playing game. Who’s with us?” For another, if you don’t have the staff on hand to make the game correctly then doesn’t that mean you need to get the right staff in there? That would be like Bungie buying the license for Super Mario Bros. and saying, “Well, all we really know are first person SF space shooters, so we decided to make Super Space Mario because our team is more comfortable doing that than a family-friendly platformer.”
At this point, I’m almost afraid that this guy will make a Shadowrun RPG.