Shadowrun deserves better

DarkCrisis said:

Play it! It’s amazing! I’m on like my 6th playthrough atm

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It is. I've finished it like 3 times. and have way more "most of the way" playthroughs than that, and it's the first RPG since the Mass Effect trilogy I think I can say that about.

MGibster said:

You should change your name to Ruination Explorer after you ruined any hope I had of a Shadowrun game. My wife saw me crying and asked who died. Explaing to her it was only my hopes and dreams was awkward.

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Ruin Causer or Ruin Creator was right there man!

I mean, I wouldn't completely rule out SR because I'm like 80% convinced Microsoft are going to blow up their entire games department within the next three-to-five years. I could very easily see them selling off a bunch of stuff, including the SR IP.

I'm not trying to say "We'll never see an SR game again!", I don't think that's true. But we probably won't see any AAA first-person one even get started for a while, if ever. I do think if The Expanse and Exodus and "KotOR3" (can't remember actual name) all do well, we are going to see a re-examination of a lot of SF IPs and licences too, and that's a more likely point SR might be get dragged back into the light (esp. if 2077 2 or 2080 or whatever it ends up being called is also looking good - it's unlikely to be out by then but still).

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

Or, at most, make an RPG of their own IP. There would be a huge audience for a StarCraft RPG, for instance.

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The trouble is the amount of assets you'd need for a StarCraft open-world-ish RPG is dangerously close to the amount you'd need for a StarCraft MMORPG. Sure it's like 50% but... even that is close enough to get wheels turning in the minds of executives, like, why are we going to make only say, $1-2bn ("only") on this game when we could make $500m to $1bn+++ every year? Sure an MMO may well end up with an unsupportable lack of players by the end of year 1, but by then it'll still probably have made a profit, so it's only reputational damage, and execs can just move on.

Ruin Explorer said:

I'm like 80% convinced Microsoft are going to blow up their entire games department within the next three-to-five years.

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What causes you to think that?

Thomas Shey said:

Though I'm not sold that the default SW magic system is actually up for the job.

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Emulating SR's full up levels of magic, I tend to share that concern.
But for simply implementing the "Cyberpunk+D&D Races+Magic" concept set, it's fine.
Just a matter of how much fidelity to SR's implementation you want to go.

chuckdee said:

What causes you to think that?

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They just fired the experienced main people in charge of it and replaced them with people with little game industry expertise and Satya Nadella is an absolutely vapid person with strange ideas who has been making increasingly eccentric decisions/declarations about MS and Xbox. They have no clear plans for the future of Xbox, just a lot of woowoo about AI. They already basically flopped out of this generation. Plus the wild and unpredictable headwinds caused by AI memory chip and processor demand. They also fired a huge number of people across a large number of studios, big and small (in some cases deleting entire studios), which significantly decreases their ability to make games.

When this lack of a plan fails to produce record profits (which is what Nadella has been apparently demanding), I'd be very unsurprised if the continuing short-termism and AI-is-magic obsession among MS execs makes them decide to start selling off studios and IPs for short-term gains.

Ruin Explorer said:

They just fired the experienced main people in charge of it and replaced them with people with little game industry expertise and Satya Nadella is an absolutely vapid person with strange ideas who has been making increasingly eccentric decisions/declarations about MS and Xbox. They have no clear plans for the future of Xbox, just a lot of woowoo about AI. They already basically flopped out of this generation. Plus the wild and unpredictable headwinds caused by AI memory chip and processor demand. They also fired a huge number of people across a large number of studios, big and small (in some cases deleting entire studios), which significantly decreases their ability to make games.

When this lack of a plan fails to produce record profits (which is what Nadella has been apparently demanding), I'd be very unsurprised if the continuing short-termism and AI-is-magic obsession among MS execs makes them decide to start selling off studios and IPs for short-term gains.

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Honestly, it's never made sense to me how XBox fits into Microsoft's strategy...

aramis erak said:

Emulating SR's full up levels of magic, I tend to share that concern.
But for simply implementing the "Cyberpunk+D&D Races+Magic" concept set, it's fine.
Just a matter of how much fidelity to SR's implementation you want to go.

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Even with that I'm not sure I consider it to cut it. SR is too magic focused for the, honestly, overly lightweight magic system in SW. Among other things, it just lacks some effects that are sometimes important in the fiction if SR.

Even if you're not trying for literal SR, its just really, really focused on tactical magic, and that constrains the kind of things you can do with it.

aramis erak said:

Emulating SR's full up levels of magic, I tend to share that concern.
But for simply implementing the "Cyberpunk+D&D Races+Magic" concept set, it's fine.
Just a matter of how much fidelity to SR's implementation you want to go.

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I like Savage Worlds, but it isn't designed to emulate other games. If fidelity to the original system is important, then you're better off sticking with Shadowrun. From what I remember about SR, most of the magic as it relates to the players revolve around that which is useful for running. And for that, I think SW would do just fine with hermetics, shamans, and adepts.

Eyes of Nine said:

Honestly, it's never made sense to me how XBox fits into Microsoft's strategy...

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I think MS themselves have been struggling with it since the end of the 360 era, where they'd kind of starting believing their own hype. Up to then, it was relatively clear what MS was doing, and what they were doing basically made a lot of sense to both them and consumers. But this all changed with the Xbox One, which was going up against the PS4. Microsoft made some truly bizarre decisions, which are often forgotten now, but the main four killers were:

1) Initially the Xbox One had a Kinect as a MANDATORY part of the package. That was the IR/video motion tracker/voice sensor thing, which for the 360 was a late optional add-on. This made the Xbox One significantly more expensive than it needed to be, at launch. Particularly because all the people buying the Xbox for Madden or Halo - which was probably most Xbox customers - didn't need or want that.

2) The Xbox One would be always on and always online and the Kinect always listening to you/looking at you. This was an amazing way to piss off an awful lot of people at once, but perhaps if MS had apologised and backed off quickly would have been minor, but instead, they doubled down, saying that people were being ridiculous for caring about any of this, and the no Xbox One games at all would work unless you logged online at least once a day! Not even ones on disc! The many obvious objections were raised, and MS basically just told people to shove it, and get with the times (there was a lot of that in the 2013 media zeitgeist, and the public didn't seem to like it much - especially with the now-mostly-forgotten Snowden revelations).

3) Xbox would charge you to play used games. Possibly full price or close to it Just incredible move from MS here. Every game would have to be registered online, and you would only be able to trade them in at "participating retailers", and you couldn't lend games to people, only if you'd had them on your official Xbox friends list for at least 30 days, you could transfer ownership of a game to them. Once. Ever. That game could never be transferred again. It was absolutely demented, overcomplicated and dystopian-sounding and just totally unnecessary.

4) "The Xbox One is primarily for watching TV" - I mean, I paraphrase, but only slightly. The initial reveal and launch really aggressively focused on the Xbox One not as a games device, but as a device for watching TV via (not just streaming, broadcast too), a sort of home video hub more than a game machine. This was wild and senseless. I don't know how much coke was going around the MS boardroom to think this was a good, viable strategy, but it has to have been absolutely truckloads! Despite the bad ideas of the first three, this is where we most saw "MS doesn't even know what the hell they're doing selling a console" vibes. The other stuff was creepy and grasping, this was just pure "We don't understand our own product".

Bonus: MS openly sneered at backwards compatibility and insulted people who wanted it!

Now, over the next few months, MS backtracked hard on all of this because of the obvious and inevitable massive backlash, and points 2 & 3 were resolved rapidly, and a Kinect-less version followed not long after, but this lead to the Xbox One being absolutely destroyed in sales by the PS4 (which wasn't even a good console, really), because Sony were able to basically say "LOL yeah we're not doing any of that, that's all stupid and evil, here's our games machine to play games on and here are good games for it".

The Xbox Series X/S also got smashed by the PS5, but that was mostly because the install base of the PS4 was insanely larger combining with MS just basically deciding to lose on exclusives for complicated and bad reasons.