Shadowrun Returns Interview

Mitch Gitelman from Harebrained Schemes offered some new info on Shadowrun Returns in this interview on PlayNation, on subjects such as the game’s design philosophy, the editor, the plot hook of the game, where it stands in the timeline compared to the SNES and Genesis games, and more. Here’s a couple of questions and answers to give you a better idea:

– I’m a bit curious about this editor. Could you explain a bit more about it; what kind of tools do you have available and how do you share it with people?

“So let’s see the Shadowrun editor is the exact same tool that we used to create the campaign. It is widely functional, and we’ve had it in early access to about 600 of our backers hands already, and they are already creating their own content for the game. You can use our art and tile system to make your own environment, you can write your own dialogue, create your own story, create NPCs, you know, the works – everything we can do you can do. It is extremely flexible, it is extremely powerful and we have no idea what’s going to, happen when people really start exercising it.

We are also releasing our campaign in its entirety along with the game in an editable format too – it’s like a read only thing, so you can save your own version of it, and then add to it, expand it, or improve it if you want. You can also use the maps that we have created and just say (look, this is what downtown Seattle looks like”, Or “this is what The Barrens look like and I’m just going to build my encounters on top of what Harebrained Schemes did so I don’t have to recreate that myself).”

…

– How much does the game allow for alternate paths? Will I for example be able to go through the campaign with a combat-weak character?

“Yes. You’ll be able to survive. What you’ll do is, that on several missions you will have in NPCs come with you and most of our in NPCs are pretty combat oriented. You’ll also be able to hire runners to go with you to supplement your own abilities, but it’s a tactical combat RPG so I wouldn’t go to weak on that just now at least in *this* campaign. It’s a dangerous campaign.

You know what I’m hoping, and Jordan feels the same way, with the editor we would love people to create stories where it doesn’t even need combat, you know. There’s all sorts of things you can do with it. You can create sort of a choose your own adventure game with our editor, you can do all sorts of things. I’m excited to see what happens. To see people use more of the character skills that we allow, than we did ourselves in our first campaign.

Here’s the metaphor for us, that we sort of talk to each other about. What we’ve done is that we’ve created our (boxed set) of Shadowrun. So we’ve got the rules, which is the game engine, and we got the world, which is the art and all the characters and all that stuff, and we’re shipping our first (module). And from here it’s your game. So you can take our module and expand it or modify or create your own stories like everybody else. I started in paper and pencil, same way as Jordan, so that’s the way we see it. We want to put out more, just for lack of better word, (modules,) more stories in the future, and we intend to with Berlin. But we’re really hoping that other people create campaigns on their own. And people already are. One guy is already recreating the whole SNES game in our editor right now.”

Thanks, VG247.