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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Shadowrun (2009)
FASA Studios
Impression published on Sunday, 2011-03-27 | Videogame | 1 stars
This is a tough one to write up.
It is not tough to write because there is a great deal to be said for or about the release itself. Indeed, most people who pick it up would be hard pressed to describe Shadowrun for Xbox360 as a "game" at all; this title is more like a tech demo, and talking about it as if it were a game is sort of impossible on technical grounds.
Furthermore, since there is no narrative and very little scene setting (of any real consequence) in this release, to call it a "Shadowrun game" makes even less sense: to discuss Shadowrun for the Xbox360 as if it were a Shadowrun game is sort of like discussing a four minute theatrical trailer for Captain America as if it were a full-length motion picture about Alexander the Great.
Additionally, it is tough to write an impression of Shadowrun because of all of the background and related, non-game information upon which my impressions of this product are based. Not only are there decades of pen-and-paper precedent to consider, but also begging to be taken into account (and journalistically explored) are the famously controversial development cycle of this release, it's abrupt (and utter) commercial failure and the release's role in the decades long game of "hot potato" that half-a-dozen corporate owners have been playing with the Shadowrun IP rights.
And since this is neither the time nor the place to explore the tumultuous history of the Shadowrun IP, allow me to ignore all of that, cut straight to the chase and excerpt three quotes from then head of FASA Studio, Mitch Gitelman1 that should encapsulate what I am trying to say about how this release is not actually a Shadowrun game and was never intended to be understood as such.
The first comes from the now vanished2 http://forums.shadowrun.com and was published after the game was demoed at E3, but prior to its release; in May of 2006, Gitelman had this to say on behalf of the work-in-progress that he was presenting:
I remember sitting in the Phantom Menace thinking, “there goes my inner 12-year-old” and now here I am, working on Shadowrun, revising the timeline, and preparing for the onslaught of fan feedback we’re bound to receive.In the project management biz, we call this "expectation setting" and we start doing it when we get the first inkling that the customer/client is expecting something from us that we never had any plan of delivering. It's a strategy for hedging against and hopefully mitigating future disappointment.
Here’s the deal—when we decided to do Shadowrun we realized there was a ton of baggage that came with it. We had been through it with our BattleTech games (MechWarrior, MechCommander, MechAssault) for years and had the battle scars of trying to please hardcore fans and new players at the same time. It’s a rough road to travel and it usually ends in tears. Fans got pissed because we weren’t “following the rules” or “keeping to canon”. New players felt like outsiders because so much had gone on before it was like starting to watch LOST in season three.
After the game's release, Gitelman found himself making exasperated remarks in defense of his product. In late 2009, he had the following to say to Official Xbox Magazine:
And a lot of [the critics] also say, "there's no single player." Like, no shit there's no single player! What did I go around telling people that there was totally single player and then bait and switch them? Since the very beginning every interview we do, every article that's written about the game, it's a multi-player only first-person shooter. Yeah, there's single player bots and stuff like that, but we didn't misrepresent anything.Which, in fairness to Gitelman, is 100% true. On the now-defunct forums, he had this to say in 2007, two years prior to his product's retail release:
The most important thing is the value of what you're getting, I think there is value there at the $60 price point. If you play just about any first person, next-generation shooter that's come out recently, you're looking at the single player game being about 10 hours. I've been playing Shadowrun for three years... You can see this game truly has legs. So, ten hours of gameplay for sixty bucks, plus some probably lame multiplayer they tacked on, versus Shadowrun that you can play, lets [sic] say, for yearsHe rambles a bit, but the main points are these:
- Gitelman warned that he was going to becutting the baby in half: newcomers and fans of the franchise were both going to be equally alienated by his product's treatment of the Shadowrun IP.
- Gitelman also warned well in advance of its release that there would be no single-player or "story" mode to this product.
- When the title was released, the journalists looking for a single-player mode gave it the thumbs down and the forum-kids looking for fidelity and continuity gave it the middle-finger.
So, if I'm not here to whale on Gitelman, then what's my angle? My angle on and impression of Shadowrun is this: while it fails utterly as a game in general and as a Shadowrun game in particular, Shadowrun was nevertheless a success for everyone who worked on it.
Crawl out on a limb with me for a second.
Put yourself back in late 2005/early 2006: the Xbox360 was officially unveiled during the summer, just went to market and, Red Ring of Death and all, is selling like hot cakes. MS is inundating every developer and publisher on the triple A map with obscene amounts of cash, trying to drum up support and "killer app" style system exclusives. Redmond is pushing LIVE hard and everyone is standing around checking his watch, waiting for the flagship Xbox360 FPS that allows for massive team combat across platforms and leaves the competition in the dust.
The R&D on that project is not just expensive, it's time-consuming. Bottom line: third parties don't want to commit to it (especially Bungie, who bought themselves back from Microsoft in late 2007, and therefore, it stands to reason, were probably contemplating the move in early 2006).
You're the Microsoft executive tasked with making this killer app happen. What do you do?
Exactly: you shoot the hostage. You take an first-party team, an IP you already own and commit a development budget to a R&D effort. The final deliverable--the min-spec--is a multiplayer FPS that can handle eight-on-eight gameplay across networks and platforms. Since the IP is already owned and doesn't have to be whipped up from scratch, you save time and money on that; additionally, at the end of the day (i.e. three years later), when the feasibility study and proof-of-concept are complete, you can put your R&D on the shelf and maybe move a few units of product to recoup some of the loss.
And that is why I say that Shadowrun was a success for everyone who worked on it. The platform works. The gameplay, while unpolished and deeply unsatisfying, proves the eight-on-eight cross-platform concept. Additionally, there is enough game design balance to demonstrate how the concept could be embellished upon by other third-parties.
At the end of the day, even if my wild speculations are entirely off base, we know from Gitelman's interviews and blog posts that this game's developers never intended to make a Shadowrun game: indeed, they never intended to make a game, in the traditional sense, at all. FASA Studios set out to prove a concept and lay the groundwork for the second and third generation of multiplayer, multi-platform FPS titles on Xbox360 and that is exactly what they did.
- FASA Studios, originally founded in the 90's as FASA Interactive Technologies (FIT), but renamed in the early naughts when Microsoft acquired the company that owned FIT and renamed the entity in order to publish its output through Microsoft Games Studios (MGS). Gitelman's role, therefore, is something like
- The domain is, near as I can tell, the responsibility of Smith & Tinker, who acquired the rights to develop interactive content for the IP belonging to FASA Studios. To what I can only imagine must be the great chagrin of Jason Hardy and the rest of the true-believers at Catalyst, S&T are doing nothing with it, however, and MS appears to be simply squatting on the domain for them:
Domain Name.......... shadowrun.com
Creation Date........ 1999-04-02
Registration Date.... 2010-05-26
Expiry Date.......... 2012-04-03
Organisation Name.... Microsoft Corporation
Organisation Address. One Microsoft Way
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. Redmond
Organisation Address. 98052
Organisation Address. WA
Organisation Address. UNITED STATES
