Shadowrun Online Status Update, Delayed Until Next Year

The team at Cliffhanger has penned a status update on their upcoming free-to-play title Shadowrun Online, in which they inform us that the game will be delayed and won’t release until next year. Here’s an excerpt:

The good news is: We have been able to procure an investor for our company. Not a big one, mind you, but it allows us all not to starve to death while developing games. The money will enable us to develop a better Shadowrun Online while remaining independent on content decisions. As you may remember, we have put our own money and of course the Kickstarter budget we received through your generous support into SRO already. We’re also facing the tough job of creating a MMO-like game across platforms, which means a lot of the money has gone and will continue to go into this technology.

We remain dedicated and focused on providing the best possible game with our limited means and we want to put even more of our money into it so we can get it done in the way we envision, based on our ideas and your feedback. We still have to make ends meet and won’t be able to put in every feature we (and our friends in the forum) hoped for; if you compare budgets with similar projects, it is a massive challenge to make SRO the game we want it to be with the resources we have available and we promise that we’ll do our best.

One trick we used to overcome that challenge was developing a technology which can be shared with several of our games so we could spread the cost for this part of development across more than one budget. The fruits of this will first be seen with our upcoming ÆRENA game a hero based, tactical arena combat game set in an Ætherpunk world.

ÆRENA shares a lot of technical backend features with SRO and is developed by our second team at Cliffhanger (we mentioned it earlier when it was still a side project). Don’t worry though, only some of the basic and underlying functions will be transferred from ÆRENA to Shadowrun Online. The gameplay will be quite different and the setting will be typical Shadowrun.

The original plan was to release a beta for SRO about three months after ÆRENA. However, now we have the opportunity to get more realized. We can afford to put in more work, hire some new people and also transfer some people from the ÆRENA team to help with Shadowrun Online which is great! But, as it usually is, there is some bad news alongside the good: It will delay the SRO beta release until end of Q1 next year. We will do our best to get as many features into the game and enable you playing an earlier version sooner than that, but we will definitely not be ready this year.