Shadowrun deserves better

[Ruin Explorer]

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

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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

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).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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

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.

 

[chuckdee]

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

What causes you to think that?

 

[aramis erak]

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

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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

What causes you to think that?

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.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

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.

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

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

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.