Shadowrun Online Kickstarter Project Post-funding Update #39

The most recent updates to Cliffhanger’s Kickstarter campaign page for Shadowrun Online haven’t had much information to glean from them (the last one was simply an advertisement for another game they’re developing), but update #39 does at least contain some information about the cyberpunk MMORPG, so I thought I’d point you over to it. The relevant excerpts:

1) Skills, Combat and Stats

We have played around with our combat and skill system for some time now. We have started out with a relatively close adaptation of the rules, then went to something closer to what SRR did, then came up with the Manoeuvres. But this left us with a couple of issues: Stat Balancing – as we all know there are more and less useful stats. I have yet to see a system that balances them all equally well, but mainly this leads to certain stats being a must have for certain classes and others being relatively useless (Charisma is a favourite for this). We ran a shitload of combat simulations both in.game and on the paper prototype and they pretty much sum up likes this (not surprisingly): Shooting is almost always useful (even for stealthy types, they can just use a stun gun or silencer). Melee is a risky approach, magic and hacking and summoning are situational – meaning they may be very useful or mostly useless. So are the related stats. Add to this the progression over game time, which makes small inequalities increasingly large inequalities. Some games (actually many games) use stats to cap other things, such as skill values. We went with this for a while (SRR did that as well), but it never sat right. We would ask people to buy into say Intuition, which has little use in our game, in order to be able to get the skill they wanted in the first place. Not fun.

So we have come up with a radically new approach. EVERYTHING in the game is a “Skill”. A passive skill in the skill tree for example for “Body” would allow you to increase your hitpoints or your resistance to certain damages. Or it may decrease cooldown for physically draining skills. Or you may get an active skill “Rage”, temporarily adding a few HP to your character for a melee charge. Or get bull rush…and so on. All of a sudden a Body 8 dwarf and another Body 8 dwarf may play very differently. We think this creates interesting choices and leads away from a sheer numbers game to a more versatile character build. We are working with these and testing to see if this is what we want to stick with, but so far this is the most exciting system we have tried.

2) Plot and Missions

We are creating levels, assets and missions for SRO as we type. We have tested how much we can do, how big a level should be and how we can mix that sense of personal story and more open Shadowruns. All this set against our LOCKDOWN setting, which also has a certain X-Com like quality of an external threat rearing its ugly head. We opted for a less linear experience – after all in an MMO a very personal story that everyone experiences is less…ahm…personal. In true Shadowrun fashion some runs will be available from several sources – you can do the run for Aztechnology or NeoNet – but not for both. And while the rewards may be similar, the long-term effects may very well differ for you.

Which brings me to the next thing: The megacorps involved. Without a big spoiler alert, we have selected a cast of corporations we want to be involved in the Lockdown chapter of the game: NeoNet, Evo, Aztechnology and Ares will play the dominant role here alongside some other movers and shakers, of which some have featured prominently in Shadowrun history.