For the sake of curiosity: Shadowrun Returns

I'm creating this thread to discuss the newly released Shadowrun Returns game, another project funded via Kickstarter that was released last week. I bought the game, the first one for me that was financed through such a venue, and think it'd be a good discussion topic as to understand what the goals of the developers were and how they materialized in the final product, and maybe compare to the current development of SotA.

I'm no game developer and have no idea the trials and tribulations of such an industry. Don't know how much it costs and how much time it takes to create a game from the ground up.

That being said, I'm nine hours into Shadowrun Returns and must say I'm sourly disappointed. Maybe I had some unrealistic expectations (and here is where my lack of knowledge in the matter might play a part), but I think the game is lacking in every department, expect, maybe, for the writing and the modding tools it comes with.

Why am I disappointed? First of all, the game doesn't have a manual save feature, only recording your progress through a checkpoint system, that is triggered on map transitions. This does not impact the gameplay much, but I think is a very serious fault and just contrasts with the nature of any good RPG (at least cRPGs).

The game is linear. Very linear, to the point where you can't choose where to go and what to do. You are catapulted from screen to screen without any say on what to do. Your dialogue choices seems to matter very little and have no impact on the story.

The turn-based combat, inventory and character screens are very simplistic and does not seem very suited for mouse use (no right-click commands, no mouse wheel support etc). There is no exploration whatsoever, no loot to be gathered from fallen enemies, no manual progression of your party members...

All in all, it is a very simplistic and, dare I say, derivative game, that seems more suited for tablets than as a desktop product. It seems more like an interactive novel than an RPG.

Maybe all these points could be addressed with the modding tools; this is the biggest point people tend make when supporting the game on the forums. Also, and here is the reason I posted this thread here, they say that that's all they could have done with the Kickstarter budget, whose goal was $400k but managed to garner $1.8mi - very close to what SotA got.

So after playing the game for nine hours I began to wonder: is $1.9mi too little for a truly epic game, or were Shadowrun Returns' shortcomings due to design choices? Should I be more realistic as to what Portalarium can deliver with SotA or can I still expect a truly great game - or, at least, a truly great first chapter - as cRPGs go (not expecting, and I do not want, something in the vein of modern AAA titles like Mass Effect and Elder Scrolls - I know what I signed up for here)?

If anyone has played Shadowrun Returns, please post your feelings and express how you feel the game turned out to be, and what the final product has to say about what SotA can deliver.

 

I found the same shortcomings you did. I hate autosave-only points, and on the PC it seems good games keep coming out with those and it drives me crazy.

I believe that this game has investors beyond the kickstarter fund raising. I might be wrong about that. I expect that we will see minimal features in episode 1 of shroud of the avatar, not what you'd get from a big budget title. However, we can tell that the graphics are vastly superior to what was done with shadowrun returns. I also don't like the UI in shadowrun returns, it's not terrible, but it could have been much better. (Final Fantasy 14 wins the worst UI of any modern game I've played, they did fix it in a realm reborn though)

I really can't say where their budget went or why they made the decisions they made. It looks very much like a small 5 person team type job to me (not being an expert) than a $2 million budget with a 30 man team type of thing. I'm not sure what the average wage for a video game employee is.. maybe $60,000 a year? figure with taxes and benefits you might be looking at the company pays on average 100,000 per employ, that gets you 20 employees for 1 year. That's a short development time. SoTA is also on a short development schedule, at 18 months.

So, I expect there is more money floating around than the $2 million raised.. especially with all of the physical goods we are getting that must come out of that budget. I think we'll see a lot more "bang for our buck" with Portalarium's team and experience they seem to be doing great so far. I think the crowd sourcing is also going to give SoTA a big advantage. With backers submitting areas for implementation they can fill in the world for very low cost.

Personally, I don't like mass effect or elder scrolls series.. so I'm a bit frightened thats the type of games people like now, will this be like those? or will people not like it because it's so different from those?

 

Damn, I backed that game too but just haven't had the time to play it. I backed pretty high too, if I remember correctly, Collector Level or something along those lines (to get into the credits and get a big box copy). I was not active on their forums and did not follow development at all. The screenshots looked great...

Anyway, this is quite disappointing to hear, everything you mentioned in your post hit me like a jagged knife.




As to your question, 1.9 from KS is not all Portalarium has. They made another 400-something thousand on their website and Richard Garriott put in a good chunk of his own money as well as having several investors. This game was being worked on before KS, but KS helped a great deal. Besides, Richard Garriott has more experience making PC games than almost everyone else in the industry. We have a very experienced and dedicated team here.

I am actually concerned now at wtf is/was going on at Harebrained Schemes...

Edit: It seems their team is pretty bad at coding, which resulted if a very clunky and backwards way of scene transition, which influenced the save style and lack of open world gameplay. Also this is apparently just the first episode (Seattle) and more are coming which are supposedly more open world.

 

A B B A C A B

 

hmm?

 

I found the same faults. I was really hoping (and still am) that it gets better and that they make some much needed updates.

The save feature is inexcusable in my opinion. The fact is that sometimes I need to walk away from the computer to get something done. I cannot save the game though and come back to it at another point if I don't enter a new area by forcing myself through wherever I am quickly. I would have loved the same system that Shadowrun on SNES had where you had to go to a call box to save, but most games these days will also let you save in the middle of a quest to pick up where you left off. Their excuse from what I heard through the grapevine is that it would have cost too much to put a save feature in. I'm calling rubbish on that one because that just seems too out there to be true.

The linear issue is another problem I have. This is an adventure game, not an RPG like it was intended to be. You are forced to go to certain places and the entire game lacks any sense of decision making or figuring things out. It's as someone else pointed out, simply following a story line. Very disappointing.

I don't mind the combat so much. It is simplistic, but I think I like it better than the real time combat the SNES used. This is much more strategic and built more like old RPGs in the 90s. I do think if strategy was the way they wanted to do it, they should have built it more like Dragon Age: Origins had. They had an amazingly fantastic strategic battle system.

Movement is also something that has been getting under my skin. It would have been 100x better to have WASD movement out of combat. Sometimes the character walks, sometimes he runs. It's really annoying.

I get that a lot of the funds they got are going towards DLC content as well, but they should have focused on the game itself before worrying about DLC.

 

I believe the Dev designed the game to play on tablets and that left a PC game that feels out of place. Honestly it reminds me of the SNES game it is based after, so it is what I expected. However, its best part is the combat which I have not run into much.

I am hoping the community does more with it. It has a nice editor and hopefully the main game will be expanded on. As is though I think it is definitely a $20 dollar game at best.

 

I sincerely am not trying to bash the game just to vent out my disappointment with it. I was never a backer for it but I paid the $20 it cost on Steam and, since I had fond memories of the SNES and Genesis versions, and love the whole Shadowrun and cyberpunk setting, I was expecting something in those veins. You know, a throwback to the older RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, or even the Geneforge series that has much cruder and simpler graphics yet has a great, open-world setting and character skills. If the best thing people can say about Shadowrun Returns is how it compares to a twenty-year-old console game, well, that is not good at all.

As for SotA, I'm very impressed with the development team and how they're addressing the community. They have updates almost every day; I always see some video from the Ultima Dragons, Pen of the Avatar and many other feedback from the community. Also, the three-month video they posted got me even more excited: they seem to have nailed everything I love about RPGs, from the character sheet, inventory, world map to the combat and exploration. Loved the overhead map!

As for newer games like Mass Effect and Elder Scrolls, like we were discussing, I do like them. I try to be open minded and try to look for the good points or ulterior intentions in the designs. At the same time, I have Planescape: Torment installed in my desktop as well as the original Baldur's Gate (I got the discs for both but bought them again through GOG so I didn't have to carry the discs around or fidget with patches), and the complete Ultima series (also from GOG), side by side with Borderlands 2, Metro 2033, Chivalry... Not saying you need to have an open mind to enjoy these games, just saying that I can play older and newer stuff alike, and don't think Shadowrun Returns, in its current state, does a good job as a game whether it's a budget title, an AAA, indie game or a tablet one.

Thanks for the posts; I feel much more confident that Portalarium is up to the task of delivering a good game, and with the information on budget you guys posted, I think they have the means to amaze us all. I'm a really happy Explorer pledge, and can't wait for future updates.

 

I thought about getting it. But I'd recently bought into Clang, and that was amazingly poor. In fact, I never even received it, I just watched videos of other people that had and figured I'd save myself the trouble of asking where my copy was.

I've been leery of investing into other projects. This one caught my eye and I've bought into it. But there's a lot of work to do, and unfortunately using this model of "give us the money and we'll give you a great game" is very risky to the fans who put their hard earned money into the pot with nothing more than blind faith.

 

The autosave feature bothered me when I heard about it, but when playing I amost never thought about it at all. I liked the game a lot and the only fault I could find with it was that it was so short.

Goblin King: Clang is not finished as such, the version that you can get as backer is bare bones only as far as I know, just the mechanics, no story or progression at all yet.

 

Yeah, but what was released was really REALLY bad. It doesn't matter if they put a story around it. The story would be something like this: "We can't move right, ouch! I'm dead. The guy fighting me just randomly hacked off my arm. Ouch, I thought I was dead. Why is he still randomly hitting me? The end."

 

I was unaware of the Clang project but just managed to look up its Kickstarter page and watched a couple of videos of it. The idea seems very interesting and I'd love a more complex sword fighting game like Chivalry, available on Steam.

The thing with Shadowrun Returns, and which prompted me to create the thread, was that it made me a bit skeptical of what to expect from other Kickstarter projects.

 

In its current state, the autosave is not a game breaker, I think, but not because of how it "forces" you to play, but as how the game was put together. The fact it doesn't take you more than 15-25 minutes to move to another level, therefore triggering a checkpoint, seems to limit what the future campaigns will be like. Will there be only small, one-layered maps that you can traverse in 20 mins? I still think there is no excuse not to provide a manual save.

I did enjoy the story and the dialogue, which I think is well written and very distinctive of the Shadowrun setting. The turn-based combat is nice, but seems overly simplified. For example, taking cover behind a box gives you a defensive bonus, but that bonus is still applied if your attacker is on the other side of the box and has a clear line of sight to you. This is just way too limited for a game released in 2013. Hopefully these issues can be addressed in the future but, as of right now, I don't think this is a good game that deserves $20.

 

ABBACAB was the genesis code...

 

I am a bit of a shadowrun fan myself and I also have mixed feelings about the game. It does feel very linear (I was hoping for some sort of "hub" and you have some control over the order you do scenes in) and the lack of a proper save feature is annoying. It's not entirely what I expected but I don't think it's terrible.

I did have a play around with the editor and it seems quite capable. In that way I think that I've gotten a pretty powerful set of tools with the games and perhaps that was partly the intention. I imagine there will be some pretty impressive stuff that comes out of the community and I have considered making something myself.

 

I do like that there are a few people working on remaking the SNES game using Returns. I think that could end up being very interesting.

 

It appears the game is built to more resemble a P&P RPG than a video game. It came with an absolutely amazing building kit for prospective DMs which gives players and creators an absurd amount of freedom to craft their adventure.

I will try to install and play it this weekend.




A few words regarding KS campaigns:

You are never guaranteed anything for backing a project. It is more of a donation or an investment than it is a purchase. Prospective creators and inventors come to the public with an idea. If you feel the person and the idea are worth investing in, you do so. If it works you get perks, if not, well, then you don't. There is no guarantee the final product will be as envisioned, or even if there will be a final product at all.

As for video game KSs, it is even trickier since game development itself has a plethora of problems associated with it. Big companies with enormous budgets have cranked out pure trash (Daikatana, Star Wars: Old Republic) and sometimes their games don't even make it to completion (Starcraft: Ghost, NBA Live 2013). With KS, you combine that with a limited budget and no publisher or boss/investor to hold the dev studio accountable, and, well, the writing isn't that hard to see. Shadowrun Returns is a huge let down (from what I can tell) and Double Fine's Broken Age already ran out of money and is no where near completion.

I think we need to approach these video game kickstarter campaigns the same way we approach any game announcement in general: hopeful but weary. Maybe even more scrupulous since it is our money on the line this time, not some massive publisher's.

just my $0.02

 

This thread makes me sad. Too bad you guys aren't enjoying it, I'm having a blast.

I find the writing to be top-notch, the graphics very smooth, the gameplay far better than any of the other Shadowrun games and streamlined enough to not be clunky. If you honestly think the SNES or Genesis versions are superior in any fashion then you probably haven't played them since they were released.

The save anywhere thing isn't as bad as you seem to want to make it out to be. The game creates a new save slot every 'scene', which is still more lenient than a lot of games you've probably played. The campaign may be linear, but "linearity" is an argument all on its own. They could have made it completely nonlinear, allowing you to pick and choose which order you played which chunks of the plot in, but then people would have complained about that, too. And the storytelling would have suffered as a result.

Last but not least, there's a friggin campaign creator. Many hours will be wasted, especially when top tier fan made adventures come out.

 

I play the SNES version every so often. It's one of my favourite RPGs.

I'm still hopeful that the game will get better. I finished it last night and honestly at this point give it a 6.5/10 because of all the reasons I mentioned.

 

The autosave at each new scene is only not an issue if you have blocks of time available to you, usually 20 minutes to an hour, and you have no idea how long till the next save point is. So I have to be careful when I start playing it if I plan on doing something in 20 minutes I can't just walk away. So it is a big issue for me being someone who frequently can't dedicate large chunks of time to a game. (especially when I'm on call).

I think we were all expecting a vastly superior game than SNES with many of the modern innovations. What we got felt much like what we had in the old game. It's $20 though so I don't feel ripped off.. I just think it's Barely worth it. I wouldn't say it's a bad game at all, I'm enjoying it well enough. I was just expecting better.