Shadowrun Pre-Demo Rant
As an inclusively-oriented gaming site, it behooves us to stop for just a minute and think about the new Shadowrun game for the XBox 360 and Games for Windows. Because Shadowrun is primarily a pen-and-paper role-playing property, the translation from that into modern video game warrants some consideration.
It has already been said—often!—how woeful it is that this game is a First Person Shooter and not some type of role-playing adventure. Whether you share that knee-jerk assessment or not isn’t what needs to be discussed here, because reasonably you have to grant that it is at least possible that Shadowrun could be translated into a phenomenal shooter. What does need to be questioned is the design decision to make Shadowrun an online/multiplayer-only team-based shooter more along the lines of Counter-Strike than Deus Ex.
I don’t mean to suggest that the Shadowrun world’s precise blend of SF technology and fantasy elements doesn’t have a place in a game like this. As a matter of fact the idea intrigues me. But where I get lost is when trying to figure out why in this particular case they needed to work from Shadowrun at all. Blending magic and cybertech is certainly not unique to Shadowrun, and if the developers merely wanted a reason to have various races of characters and the ability to apply technological as well as mystical upgrades, they could have fairly easily done so without a licensed property.
And here’s where things start to go badly because the wonder of Shadowrun is not its originality, but the boundlessly exact manner in which it sets the stage for these disparate elements to interact and create a fertile soil to plant narrative seeds. Let me put it another way: I assume the developers for the new Shadowrun game simply thought that having tech and magic upgrades in a squad-based shooter would be cool. I’m with them so far. But in this particular environment, with this specific type of game, they don’t require the kind of perfect execution of exposition that sets the stage for story the way Shadowrun does it. They could have set the game on some remote planet, “Gamma 6″ for example, and said, “On Gamma 6 there is a struggle between high technology brought by the Earthlings and mystical energies wielded by the native Ancients.” Done. Magic and cybertech are duly blended sufficiently for a narrative-less shooter.
By using the Shadowrun backdrop to accomplish something that it isn’t needed for, the developers really only succeed in doing one of two things: If you already are familiar with Shadowrun as an RPG product, you enter the game disappointed. There is no narrative here; there is no reason for this game to be called “Shadowrun.” You hoped for at least a campaign mode that could explore the Shadowrun setting in a novel fashion (or, let’s be honest, you hoped for a console role-playing game set in this world) but you didn’t get what you wanted. Alternately, you have no familiarity with Shadowrun and you leave the game wondering what all the fuss is about because there is very little here that could adequately introduce Shadowrun to the uninitiated.
So Shadowrun serves neither the fans of the licensed property nor does it work to create new fans of that property, at least not actively. Let’s assume for a moment that the reason Shadowrun’s property was licensed to this product was due to some assumption that the fanservice product (a modern role-playing game set in that universe) would not be successful. The problem is that betting against the fans ahead of time is the only sure way to “prove yourself” right as the IP owners. Say this new Shadowrun game is successful and sells well: The obvious conclusion would be, “See, we were right. People want a shooter with a setting they like.” But if the game fails the conclusion most easily reached is, “Shadowrun doesn’t sell well enough to be a viable license.”
Those aren’t the only conclusions one could cull from the success or failure of the game, but those are the most likely to come from a company or group of companies who shied away from giving gamers what they wanted in the first place. And the end result either way is that a Shadowrun game we really want is unlikely to ever be made. The only scenario I can imagine paving the way for a legitimate Shadowrun title would be for this game to sell so incredibly well that the publishers think they’ve stumbled on a licensing gold mine along the lines of Pokémon. But with the game releasing right in the middle of the Halo 3 beta and to critical indifference/disappointment, that seems highly unlikely.
Okay, granted all of this is coming from someone who hasn’t had any hands-on time with the game. But I need to express why this game was such a bad idea and how it was so poorly executed that it has, as I see it, essentially ruined any chance of a decent game in one of my favorite RPG settings. I will grab the demo and give it a fair shake on its own terms; I haven’t even ruled it out as a purchase if it’s legitimately good. But for what it represents to a fan of the franchise by its very existence, I can’t help but undertake the exploration with an already somber mood.