Dana Hanna of Microsoft Game Studio gave a postmortem lecture at the ION Game Conference called “You Can’t Do That! Crossing Platforms and Genres with Shadowrun.” My opinion on Shadowrun is well-known by readers here, so it should come as no great shock that I’m intrigued by the argument Hanna made during the lecture.
The Shadowrun universe, which had previous incarnations on both the SNES and Genesis as action RPGs, originated from a tabletop role playing game. With dice. The universe was expansive, and much of the gameplay centered around stealth and trickery. The negative response from Shadowrun fans to a pure FPS game wasn’t entirely unexpected by the team:
“We knew there would be some negative reaction from fans of the RPG because we were making it into an FPS, and we knew we had some issues with some of the assets on the way to E3. But we were really quite excited.”
“So we showed it. And the reaction was… shall we say, less than stellar,” she continued. Followers of the Shadowrun property, originally a pen-and-paper cyberpunk role-playing game, were upset with FASA’s decision to make the game a first-person shooter and set it in Brazil.
“Some passionate fans intersected with the gaming press, and it was an ‘epic fail.’ These were opinion-leaders, and we didn’t make a good impression.”
While it is great that the developers were excited about the game–it’s something gamers want to see for every game they might play–the core problem with Shadowrun for the Xbox 360 was that it appeared to be a game idea with a license nailed on as an afterthought. To fans of the universe, it seemed as though someone thought, “Let’s combine Hexen and Quake and update the graphics! That would sell like gangbusters. But we don’t want to invent any new universe. That would be way too difficult. I know! Let’s just pillage an existing universe.” It is not that a FPS shooter wouldn’t work in the Shadowrun universe. That FPS would have to be more Deus Ex than Quake 3.
After the negative backlash, the developers tried to curry favor with fans of the series:
In order to do that, the studio did its best to get people’s hands on Shadowrun, hosting on-site play days and releasing a public Xbox 360 beta to regain credibility and show players the actual game.
The developer also listened to feedback from fans of the RPG, incorporating some of their ideas into the story to make Shadowrun fit better into the canon.
Discussing what the team should’ve done differently, Hanna said the team should have engaged the community earlier, devoted more resources to story and incorporating it into the game, and included more community-building features, specifically measures players could take to deter or deal with troublemakers.
What baffles me is that Shadowrun was ever conceived of as a multiplayer-only title. And now the title has been consigned to the bargain bins of GameStops everywhere. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to playing my copies of Shadowrun for SNES and Genesis.
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