Shadowrun Online Preview

Rich Stanton has written a preview piece based on Shadowrun Online’s Early Access build over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun which doesn’t exactly paint the most favorable of pictures for the partially Kickstarter-funded title, to use a euphemism. Here’s a snippet:

The ‘˜this is Alpha’ excuse is, just under a year after the original deadline, pretty astonishing that is, that the £25 version being sold now is merely a functionality test and that content will come later. The projected launch is by the end of this year. The developers still aren’t sure about absolutely fundamental aspects of the game like team size and the inclusion of overwatch.

When Cliffhanger announced the first delay, they did so by saying that the game could not be built on the existing codebase for Jagged Alliance it ‘˜compromised’ too much. This is all well and good in theory, but in practice it is very hard to see what Shadowrun Online has gained from such a delay. Game development is not this linear process whereby a team can, having perfected a single mechanic, produce an entire semi-MMOG worth of content within six months or even a year. It’s not going to happen.

And here’s the real killer: if Shadowrun Online is about showing off a core gameplay loop, then it doesn’t. It shows off a visually slick but generic isometric strategy game that lacks any kind of tactical options whatsoever. The strategy here comes down to the random number generator. The core gameplay loop isn’t here.

The problem with Shadowrun Online is that there are a tonne of games doing what it does already but better. For solo players, there’s even Shadowrun Returns. But very few games have captured that intoxicating blend that makes Shadowrun such a great universe: biotechnology, magical fantasy and raw danger everywhere. The multitude of approaches for any given situation. Taking up such a mantle requires much more than a logo, and a by-the-numbers isometric strategy game.