Shadowrun Q&A - Magical Races, Abilities, and Technology
Mitch Gitelman, the studio manager of FASA Studios, discusses Shadowrun's mix of magic and technology.
While Shadowrun is being designed to be an intense multiplayer action game along the lines of Counter-Strike, the developers at FASA Studio have built advanced artificial intelligence for the computer-controlled bots in the game. That's important, because those bots can teach you a thing or two about what's possible in Shadowrun. And you'll do more than simply run around and shoot your enemies. Since the game is set in a world that features both magic and technology, you'll gain abilities that let you see through walls to find where someone is hiding, magically grow trees of life that can heal anyone standing next to them, resurrect the dead, and more. To find out more, we caught up with FASA Studio manager Mitch Gitelman. The game ships for the Xbox 360 and PC later this year.
GameSpot: Tell us a bit more about the single-player portion of Shadowrun. As we understand it, single-player is mainly a series of interactive tutorials, though these are supposed to be more "advanced" than most tutorials?
Mitch Gitelman: There are a lot of new and innovative gameplay features in Shadowrun, and we've put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that players get familiar with them and can experiment before going online. Each training chapter will show you how to use a set of abilities, give you an idea of why the abilities will be useful/cool in combat, and then give you the opportunity to try them in a bot skirmish. You can replay each training chapter and play the skirmishes again and again until you're a master.
GS: How good are the bots? Do they know how to use all the powers and abilities in the game properly? How tough are they?
MG: Our bots kick a**. I don't mean they'll kick your a**, unless you raise their challenge level. I just mean that they really play Shadowrun and are fun to have in a game, either on your team or on the enemy's.
In most first-person shooters, bots can run, jump, fire their weapon, throw a grenade, and run some more. In Shadowrun, our bots use all the tech and magic that you can use. They glide over the battlefield, teleport through walls, play offense and defense, pick up dropped weapons--the works. In fact, playing with our bots is very educational. In Tony Hawk skateboarding games, there are "trick lines" that people discover that allow them to go from trick to trick to trick in an unbroken line. Part of the fun of the game is discovering those lines. Something similar exists in Shadowrun.
For example, on one of our maps, I couldn't understand how one of our designers was always able to catch me unaware and get a clean kill from behind with his katana. So I decided to practice at home using bots. I played on the RNA Global Corp. team with a bunch of bots and watched what they did. One of the bots ran to a corner of a building that I never gave much thought to. He jumped in the air and then hit his glider, continuing his movement up and forward, and at the apogee he teleported through the wall. I had no idea where the heck he was going, but I followed. It turned out that on the other side of that wall, high in the air, there was a catwalk that extended the length of the building. I had seen it a million times but it never registered with me that I could use it. I followed the bot along the catwalk and through a wall to the place where I always got cut from behind.
GS: Do the bots integrate into the multiplayer game at all? So, let's say you're short of players and want the AI to handle the empty slots, or if someone suddenly leaves, will the game substitute a bot to fill the hole?
MG: Yes and yes. It's cool.
GS: We've discussed previously the wild and dynamic nature of the gameplay. So let's talk about team tactics. How important is team play, and how do you facilitate it through the game?
MG: There's no doubt about it: Shadowrun is wild. It's even fun to watch after you've died. I end up screaming and jumping around just as much watching my friends play as when I'm playing myself. It's never exactly the same experience twice, and I've been playing it for three years. Even though a lot of people have played the beta, we still don't know all the combinations and tactics you can do in the game.
You can have the time of your life and "cowboy" solo around the map trying to get a high number of kills, but if you want to win at Shadowrun, you play as a team. Coordinated teams dominate rogue teams. FASA plays together so often that we call out "plays" like, "You three go ladder-side and make some noise. I'll take the artifact up front ramps for the sneaky jump. Jim, cover me from the sniper tower."
We reinforce team play in a number of ways that all have to do with what players care about: the in-game economy. Remember that Shadowrun is a round-based game, and you can buy weapons, magic, and tech between rounds to grow your character. So if you want to reward team play, you do it with money. You earn money for raising your friends from the dead. You earn it from healing them with your tree of life. You earn money by taking the risk to be the artifact runner. And everyone on your team is rewarded when the artifact is delivered successfully or the escape route is defended successfully.
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- GameSpot Score6.9fair
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- Microsoft Game Studios
- FASA Studio
- Fantasy First-Person...
- Release: Jun 1, 2007 »
- PEGI: 16+
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