Shadowrun: Hong Kong Kickstarter Campaign Live

The Kickstarter campaign for Harebrained Schemes’ Shadowrun: Hong Kong has gone live, with a funding goal of $100,000 for the stand-alone campaign based on the Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Director’s Cut engine. The campaign is apparently already in full development and on track for a mid-2015 release (interestingly, only on PC, at least for now), but with the budget obtained with the Kickstarter campaign, the developers hope to add a range of improvements and functionality that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to implement.

A couple of snippets:

Shadowrun: Hong Kong has everything you expect from a Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun game: strong storytelling and sharp writing, lots of morally gray choices, a crew of memorable characters with distinct personalities, challenging tactical turn-based combat, a robust character creation system, and a one of a kind cyberpunk-meets-magic game setting that’s endured for over 25 years.

Our Backers voted for Hong Kong as the next city for us to bring to life and we’re excited to be working on it!

…

We’re totally committed to making Shadowrun: Hong Kong and we’re already several months into development. The project is budgeted, fully staffed, and on-schedule for a mid-2015 release. We also have a story we’re really excited about. At our current budget, it’s going to be 12+ hours long and at the quality level of Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Director’s Cut.

But this is Harebrained Schemes and, as always, we have more ideas than we have budget.

That’s where you come in.

By backing the project, you’ll increase our production budget and get more features, more improvements, and more game. Take a look at the funding goals below to see all the stuff we want to add.

Now, we could always talk to traditional publishing partners, but we’re pretty independent-minded around here and we only want to serve one master – our audience.

We’re gonna ship a great game and it can be even greater with your help. Our last adventure together was a blast and we think the results speak for themselves. So help co-fund our third Shadowrun game, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, and let’s make the best Shadowrun game yet!

As you might expect, the developers have already mapped several stretch goals for the project, including an additional companion and animated scene transitions:

$100,000 – Enhanced Player Controls! In addition to all the new Tech, Magic, Weapons, Consumables, Creatures, and Enemies we’re already planning, if we reach our initial funding goal, we’ll add a bunch of interface upgrades. These include the ability to decide which team member picks up an item in free-move mode, item swapping between party members, a player-initiated turn-mode toggle so you can position your team before you enter combat, and a spread-range indicator for shotguns and sweeping melee attacks.

$150,000 – Animatic Scene Transitions! These are short animated slide shows with voice narration that play at key points in the story – the opening, end of Act 1, end of Act 2, and at the end.

$200,000 – Racter joins your team of runners! Racter is a Russian rigger with a wry smile who relates better to his custom drone than he does to people. We’ll tell you about Racter’s unique gameplay abilities and player-influenced upgrade paths when we get closer to unlocking him.

$250,000 – More Animatic endings! If we hit this goal, we’ll be able to create multiple animatic endings for the story to reflect the choices you make in the game.

$300,000 – Gobbet’s personal side mission! Dive deep into the backstory of your team’s resident Rat shaman. Gobbet’s absurdist philosophy and impulsive nature have led her on a twisting path through life. In her personal mission, you’ll get the chance to walk that path with her and see for yourself where Rat takes you.

Before wrapping up this newspost, it’s also worth mentioning that the rewards for the Kickstarter campaign include only two physical items, as the developers found out in their previous campaign that these rewards tend to be the most expensive and difficult to handle.