Simple Things

It's time for another mini-roundup!

When I pledged to Shadowrun Returns, one of my rewards was a PDF of a short story anthology. Honestly, I wasn't expecting a whole lot out of this - game fiction prose tends to be rather poor, and it didn't have any A-list authors attached. I just recently finished reading it, and was pleasantly surprised by how well it turned out. Each story stands on its own, but when taken together they weave together to tell a surprisingly epic story, which in its own way is just as dramatic as (and simultaneously subtler than) Dead Man's Switch.

It does reveal some crucial plot twists from the main game, so I wouldn't recommend starting it until after finishing the game. If you do read it afterwards, though, there are a lot of treats for you. Some of them you might expect, like getting to know more of the backstory of various characters like Cherry Bomb, Jessica Watts, and Dresden. Others are some surprising changes from the initial concept of the story to the version that ultimately shipped in the game. The world depicted in the anthology is much more, uh, adult than the game, particularly where the Seamstresses' Union is concerned. In the game, it's a bar with some attractive bartenders. In the book, it's a brothel. In the game, it's overseen by Mrs. Kubota. In the book, it's run by Madam Sinful.

The best part of it, though, is how the book broadens the scope of the game's story. It takes a long time to piece together the meta-plot, but when you do, it not only makes many of the other stories make more sense, but also shines a new light on some elements in DMS that felt like red herrings at the time. The NTSB, for example, was a great setting in the game but felt a bit superfluous, important only because it was the site of a murder that could have occurred anywhere. In the book, though, you see how the NTSB is involved in a much more subtle and long-running plot, which adds a new color to the scenes you spent there.

Oh, and in addition to the stories, there's also some really fantastic concept art, as well as a huge portrait gallery. The latter is actually pretty directly useful to me, since it's an easier way to locate good NPC pictures than browsing through the filesystem. Anyways, I think you can pick up the anthology as part of the Deluxe package on Steam.

In other Shadowrun news, I got my physical rewards! The Doc Wagon card looks and feels great. It even links to a funny video that is certainly the corniest, cheesiest thing ever created in connection with Shadowrun (and there's a lot of competition for that title!). The T-Shirt looks nice too, with a good quality fabric and great image transfer. I know that some folks aren't fans of the new blue/green Shadowrun skull logo, but now that I'm used to it I strongly prefer it to the original red skull logo.

In less cheering video game news, I picked up the new Ultima tablet game and found it wanting. I wasn't really surprised. I'd initially been ecstatic at the news, back when I thought that it was BioWare remaking Ultima IV. Since then, I'd learned that it was actually another division within EA who was working on it. (There was a brief period of time when it seemed like EA was trying to cannibalize BioWare's good name by transferring it to unrelated studios. That seems to have stopped, though I don't know if it's because BioWare complained, or if EA thought that the brand is less powerful in a post-ME3, post-DA2 environment.)

I still think that a remake of Ultima IV could make an awesome tablet game. Those early RPGs had relatively simple controls and maps, and so could be a perfect match for today's tablet interface and hardware. At the same time, it wouldn't take a ton of effort to streamline the gameplay to conform to modern sensibilities: cut down on the grinding, maybe add some high-res portraits for the NPCs, etc.

In the short time that I played Quest of the Avatar, I didn't really notice any similarities at all with the plot of Ultima IV. There is a plot, to be sure, but it's something about a, uh, psychic sickness or malevolent evil force or something. The Virtues, which were the cornerstone of Ultima IV, are present here, but in a weird form. The game starts with you answering virtue questions like you did in most Ultimas, but since there are only two classes available they don't really make any difference to your gameplay. The questions themselves seemed more jokey than I remembered, though that might just be me turning into a crotchety old man. In-game, you periodically encounter virtue quests that demand you to make a choice (e.g., show Justice and send a dying criminal to prison, or Compassion and let him die in peace), but they didn't really engage me.

The worst aspect of all, though, is the Free-to-Play structure. Once again, I should not have been surprised. I have never enjoyed a F2P game (with the sole, shining exception of the excellent Fallen London), and Quest for the Avatar seems to combine the elements I most dislike about this genre.

• It aggressively tries to tie in to your social network.
• It encourages you to play daily, but discourages you from playing for very long (without paying).
• It consistently pings you to spend money to improve your game.
• It throws you into semi-forced, low-quality play with other humans.

 The main mechanic they use is "keys". You are awarded some keys within the game, but the system is set up to encourage you to spend money to buy higher-quality keys. Having keys and more valuable keys results in more-powerful items, which allow you to progress more through the game. Worse, items actually degrade as they're damaged, and you need to spend (you guessed it!) keys to repair them.

I went through the tutorial dungeon, met Lady British (which was a fine change on its own, but really underscored how this plot has nothing to do with the original Quest of the Avatar), went into a dungeon, got invited to join a party, and swiftly quit and uninstalled. Sigh.

On the plus side, I have since learned that the Commodore 64 version of the original Ultima IV has just arrived on iOS, so it looks like I will get to check that out soon! I'll probably never get the remake I wanted, but I suspect that the unaltered original will tickle my fancy more than its complete transformation into a F2P game.

Heh, my gaming landscape has changed drastically between when I started this post and starting this paragraph. To wit: GTA V has arrived! I've had almost no time to play it, thanks to an unusually aggressive confluence of time commitments, but am eagerly anticipating diving into it. I think this is the first game I've pre-ordered since Dragon Age: Origins.  My expectations are simultaneously high and measured. San Andreas is my favorite installment of the franchise, and GTA IV was the most impressive technically, so a combination of the two has the potential to become one of my favorite games ever. It looks like they're shifting slightly back towards San Andreas's RPG-ish elements, including tons of customizations and upgradeable skills (though no more fat, alas, alas). And the setting itself looks gorgeous. That was probably what I missed most in GTA IV: I adored the open countryside in San Andreas, being able to blast down an open freeway along the coast with Radio Los Santos blasting through an open convertible, or riding a dirtbike down Mount Chiliad, or flying through the desert on a dune buggy, or... well, yeah. As much as I appreciated GTA IV's taxi innovations and the ability to get from Point A to Point B quicker than ever before, I also really like having interesting land to travel between those points.

The aspect of GTA V that interested me the least in the press build-up was probably the multiple-characters angle. Of the three, only Franklin really stood out as someone I would want to play as. In the brief time that I've tried V, I've come to appreciate Michael much more, and can see some interesting possibilities in his character. He's kind of in a position where other GTA characters would be 15 years after their own games ended: he's married, with two kids, living in a huge fancy house, and absolutely bored out of his mind. So far, the thing I like most is seeing the very different ways that Franklin and Michael express their rage. When Franklin crashes into someone, he'll yell at them. When Michael crashes, he's quiet for a second, as he calmly collects himself... and then proceeds to very deliberately express his hatred in measured, violent tones. It's a great example of maturity affecting attitude in an unexpected way.

So, yes. GTA V will be my big gaming project for the next while. I'm sure I'll have more opinions on it. I'm kind of dreading meeting Trevor; based on his appearances in the previews, he looks like an entertaining character to meet, but I don't know if I'll be comfortable playing as him.

Hm, what else.... oh! Kickstarter! The Sunless Sea has been funded, and can use your help to reach its first stretch goal!


This comes from the fine folks who created Fallen London, and shares some of the lore, but is a totally new game. It's a 2D top-down exploration, trading, and strategy game. It's semi-procedurally-generated, has a system of officers that will allow for party-building, and will include embedded stories within the action (in the tradition of something like Castles). They call out some fantastic influences like Sid Meier's Pirates!, FTL, and roguelikes.

I was one of the people who voted for this concept when Failbetter ran a survey a few months ago, and am really looking forward to its becoming a reality. There's already so many great concepts to (literally) explore, like Hunter's Keep, the Elder Continent, Corpscage Islands, the Tomb-Colonies, and tons more. The game mechanics seem clean and fun, a set of manageable systems that will allow for tinkering and experimentation without requiring micromanagement. And, of course, knowing that Failbetter writers are producing the content makes me very optimistic about the quality of story. (They're one of the few companies out there with a good track record for producing asynchronous, semi-randomized stories, and they do it well.)

There's just over a week left to go, and they still have many slots available in the upper tiers if you want to go nuts. I know that I personally was kicking myself after Shadowrun Returns came out for not pledging at one of those top levels to be immortalized in a game. Here's a chance to do that if the concept appeals to you.

Ibid.

I don't know what's more embarrassing: that I've gone more than a month between updates, or that my new update is basically a repeat of the old one. Sorry about that.

When I wrapped work on Antumbra, my mod for Shadowrun Returns, I wasn't really planning on making any more. Like I said at great length in my last post, making mods is hard, and there's lots of other stuff I'd enjoy doing in my increasingly limited free time. I didn't want to leave people hanging, so I deliberately made Antumbra a fairly self-contained story with a beginning, middle, climax and conclusion. I did leave behind a couple of little hooks, just in case I ever did decide to pick it up again, but wasn't really planning to continue that thread.

I'd committed to maintaining Antumbra, and so spent a fairly easy week releasing updates, mostly cleaning up some minor graphical glitches and trying to smooth out the combat. While most comments on Antumbra were very positive, almost everyone who disliked it was upset because they got killed at the very first fight. I now realize that I would have been better off making it easier, or at a minimum adding some easier fights in. In the original design, there were only five mandatory (and two optional) fights in the game, and each of them were very different and had their own unique mechanics and strategy. That appeals to me from a design perspective, but in terms of player reward, it's better to include some more boring and easy combat in there so they feel a sense of power and progression, rather than making every encounter a challenge. (At least, that's the take-away I got from my users' comments. My personal tastes still lean more towards FFT than FFVII.)

After doing that for about a week, though, I was feeling giddy enough with the reaction Antumbra was receiving to start thinking about a sequel. People left really, really nice comments, and upvoted it, and altogether Antumbra racked up something like 3,000 subscriptions. More than the raw numbers, I was pleased by the specific notes people would send, like "I'm not playing the sequel unless Dalmin is in it j/k!" and "Can't wait to record my demo!" All along, my goal had been to make a fun little story and not just a set of fights, and that kind of reaction made me feel like I was succeeding.

I followed much the same process for Antumbra 2 as I did on the original. I started out in an open-ended brainstorming period, jotting semi-random ideas down in Google Docs and scraps of paper as they came to me. I'd set Antumbra near the Seattle Sprawl, partly because it's a region most players are already familiar with and that has a lot of documentation. Now that I had some story elements of my own, though, I felt like I had a little more leeway to travel farther afield. I'd come across some lore about CalFree (the autonomous California Free State of the 2050's), and loved the idea of setting a campaign in San Francisco, so I started researching that setting and combining it with some real-world elements that I really love. The "California Free State" sourcebook from FASA proved invaluable, detailing the tense metaracial situation in the Bay Area, as well as the complicated web of authority that included an impotent government in Sacramento, de-facto military rule by the Japanese Imperial Marines, and the even-more-de-facto supremacy of the megacorps. I also trawled the Web for references to the 2060's and beyond, which alerted me to some upcoming events like General Saito's coup that I could start to foreshadow in this time period.

Shadowrun Returns is a great little engine, but since it's a tile-based isometric game, it does not do hills, which meant I'd be missing out on many of the iconic SF settings like Coit Tower, Nob Hill or Pacific Heights. Fortunately, I've been here long enough to know what flat areas would work well in the game. The Embarcadero really helps establish SF's peninsularness, and I knew that it would be fairly easy to recreate using the existing map tools. I also went ahead and built out The Mission as a map. I know, I know, it's very cliche and hip and trendy, but hey, it's flat, and worked well from both a story perspective and a design perspective.

Along with locations, I was starting to pull together some plot ideas. Hm, maybe I should classify these as:

MINI SPOILERS

I started with characters, then began thinking about ways to combine them. The original Antumbra could end in multiple ways, and some important characters (most notably "Mr. Johnson," Carver Wells) could die. However, Kali would always survive, albeit in a state of triumph or disgrace. I figured that she would be my link from Seattle to the Bay. If you sided with her, then Antumbra does so well that she starts expanding her business empire and opening new locations outside of UCAS. If you opposed her, then she's hounded from Seattle by her creditors, then pops up in San Francisco to try and rebuild from scratch. That way, I could keep a single setting for both plot forks, and just change the dialogue around it.

For companions, Dalmin had seemed to be the most popular from Antumbra, so I decided to bring him forward. He's really fun to write for, so I was happy to work on him again. I thought it would be boring to have all of the companions show up again, though, plus it would strain credulity for everyone to randomly show up in SF at the same time, so I decided to omit Turm as a companion this time around. On the other hand, though, I wanted to give her a cameo so people who picked her in Antumbra would be able to see her again. I ended up designing what I think was a fun, somewhat complex encounter: if she died in Antumbra, she would stay dead in Eclipse; otherwise, she would show up as a mercenary on the other side; if you traveled with her before (or had the right skills), you could convince her to switch sides and fight along with you again.

With Turm gone, I would need another samurai. I didn't want to repeat myself with a troll, so I decided to get an ork this time around, and a male to contrast with Turm's female-ness. What should I name him? It was at this point that I realized that, entirely accidentally, I had already kicked off a trend where my hireable runners' names were alliterative with their races: Dalmin the Dwarf and Turm the Troll. So, ____ the Ork. After playing around with a few different names, I settled on Orion. Street Samurai are typically big, dumb brutes, so I decided to mess with that stereotype and make Orion a thoughtful and loquacious scholar. He's kind of a marxist of metahumanity: he's convinced that metaraces will inevitably replace humanity. However, his certainty leads him to a zen-like calm: he doesn't get too worried about any particular fight or alliance, because he knows that in the long run history will lead to the same conclusion. Orion was also really fun to write for, since he's very thoughtful and rational even when making arguments I personally completely disagree with.

Lastly, I knew that I wanted to add the Matrix in this time around, so I would need a decker. I already had two dudes, so I wanted a female for this role. Available races were elf or human. I decided on human, since that would give more insight into what it felt like on the other side of SF's metaracial divide. Continuing my dumb-but-fun naming convention, I dubbed her Hailey the Human. I made her a native San Franciscan, a famously rare breed even in our own time. Where Dalmin is a funny and jaded runner, and Orion a serious and earnest man on a mission, Hailey is bubbly and ambitious, a little naive but a quick learner. I eventually decided to dual-archetype her as a Decker/Rigger, a class combo that my brother Andrew alerted me to that can be very powerful in this game.

For NPCs, I had a flash of inspiration fairly early on: why not include one of my all-time favorite people, Emperor Norton? People might associate him with Discordianism or Neil Gaiman, but he's a real (and fascinating) historic person rooted in San Francisco, and so intrinsically interesting that it wouldn't take much effort to make him a (hopefully) compelling character. I played around with a couple of ideas before settling on a futuristic representation of the man. Much like the historic Norton, my Norton ("Emperor Norton IX, Emperor of CalFree and Protector of UCAS") would be insane, but benignly so; he would be humored by those around him; and he would have a clarity of insight into the world around him. Scenes like the historical Norton's pacific defense of ethnic Chinese from a pogrom would point the direction for how a new Norton might behave in an atmosphere of anti-metahuman persecution fostered by Saito's supremacist ideology.

On a mechanical level, I decided that Norton would best be represented as a Shaman; that seemed to fit his skewed, not-quite-of-this-world position. I've gotten more comfortable commissioning portraits from artists on DeviantArt, and I decided to splurge and have a drawing done of Norton. By far the best unofficial portraits I've seen so far have come from KARGAIN, who has done a fantastic job at matching the proportions and style of the official portraits in Dead Man's Switch. I sent him some old photos of the historic Norton and a brief description of my concept, he asked a few really good clarifying questions (the nature of Norton's insanity, his role in the story), and came up with a fantastic portrait.

I really love this. It's recognizably Norton without being a copy of the source material, and perfectly captures the essence of the character. I especially appreciate details like the very subtle smirk he has.

By now, some rough outlines of a plot were falling into place. In this time period, Colonel Saito would be one of the most influential individuals in SF, although he would not be taking direct control for several more years. Much of the source material on the Bay Area describes the increasing segregation across communities, with humans (particularly those of Japanese descent) clustered in San Francisco, orks and trolls in Orkland, dwarfs in Halferville, and metahumans of all types scattered throughout the East Bay. I didn't want to directly include Saito himself - he's a huge figure in the history of Shadowrun, and I was worried that I'd mess up his portrayal - but I started playing around with the idea of a conflict between Saito and the metahumans driving much of the plot.

I'd still need a way to link this all back to Antumbra, though. You ended the first game in one of two ways: either as a loyal pawn of Aztechnology, or an opportunistic ally of Mitsuhama. From my reading, I knew that Aztechnology was in a fairly rough position in CalFree. Ever since Aztlan invaded from the south, Aztechnology had officially been banned from California. In practice, they continued operating through a set of shell companies, such as Pyramid Operations in SF; but still, they had to contend against the powerful Japanese megacorps that had made headquarters in SF, and so, while globally Aztechnology is one of the most powerful entities, in this local area it was believable that they would feel threatened by their rivals.

So, I started sketching together an overall plot arc. You would be lured down to SF from Seattle in pursuit of work. Using your contacts from the first game, you would participate in an invasion of the Aztechnology Pyramid (which I like to think is the Transamerica Building, though it's probably actually an arcology). Depending on your loyalties, you were either leading a plausibly-deniable rival raid, or defending against such a raid from Mitsuhama. From here, you would be swept up into the conflict between Saito and metahumans; as in the first game, you would need to make choices about what faction to support. Demonstrating loyalty to one side early in the game would give you access to reinforcements later on to help you complete the job.

I'd initially thought of having different villains in the endgame depending on your loyalties (in one extreme case, either attempting to assassinate or save Saito himself), but eventually realized that this would take a ton of work and add more time that I'd rather spend on enhancing a core storyline. Instead, I settled on a single villain, a troll mage rebel named Shavarus. Your relation to him would change depending on your choices, but you would always end fighting him.

The story evolved as I proceeded into the writing phase. I came to realize that, if I were playing this, it would be a no-brainer: Saito was so despicable, and the resistance so pure, that I would unhesitatingly side with the metahumans every time. In a bid to make the choices tougher, I made the opposition much less sympathetic. Shavarus wasn't a high-minded individual like Orion battling oppression; he was a violent (albeit charismatic) extremist, not only eager to kill mankind but even willing to sacrifice large numbers of innocent metahumans as collateral damage in order to create an atmosphere of fear that would prompt the humans to leave. This story was turning nasty and brutal... perfect for Shadowrun!

END MINI SPOILERS

I followed the same pipeline process for Eclipse as I had for Antumbra, but the bigger scope meant that it took quite a while longer. On paper, it didn't look so bad: I was just going up from 4 maps to 6 maps, though the scene count was increasing from 6 to 11. In practice, it was a lot more. I'd initially envisioned the office building as a single map containing three separate floors, and actually went far enough to implement it as one (including a cool elevator system), only to realize in playtesting that it was taking too long to beat, and a late death would set you back frustratingly early. So, that got split up into three separate scenes. PLUS, I had decided that I wanted to implement the Matrix this time around, so I had two separate Matrix subnetworks for the office building, plus another one in the final level. All of which was awesome, but took a lot of effort to build, and even more to polish and test.

On the other hand, I'd learned a lot of lessons from Antumbra that made some things easier. One of the biggest things I berated myself over in Antumbra was my Everett map, the one outdoor map. It took me a long time to build, almost as long as the other three interior maps combined; but, even though you visited it twice, you barely did anything in it. There was a single conversation in the first map, and a single conversation at the end, and that was it. Great for atmosphere, but on replays most people will run through it in 30 seconds. The work-to-result ratio for that map was insane, so this time around I was careful to make sure I could get enough out of each map. Of my six maps, three of them were set outdoors, and I set up the story so I could plausibly visit two of them twice each, helping justify the time these maps took to build. Likewise, for each map I made sure that there would be enough conversations, combat, and puzzles to make them worthwhile.

I was also able to avoid a few gotchas that can crop up on you late. I always do my music, lighting, and effects last, which works great from an optimizing perspective, but when building Antumbra it wasn't until I had added my point lights that I realized they made overlapping floor tiles look weird. Up until then, I'd cavalierly been laying them on top of each other haphazardly in order to produce a rugged, asymmetrical look for an underground cavern. It was a annoying to go back and totally redo those floors when I thought I was already done. This time around, I carefully took my time up front to avoid any tile overlaps, and as a result my lighting phase went much more quickly.

Speaking of which: I've learned the hard way that illuminating a particular prop, or making light appear to emanate from an on-screen element, is incredibly hard. Even the folks at Harebrained Schemes basically just say, "Keep trying different things and adjusting them until it looks right," since the editor is really bad at showing where light will illuminate. On the other hand, though, point lights that seem to project from above or below (such as from a lamp or a puddle of ooze) look great, and are infinitely easier to set up properly: just drop your point light in the center, and boom, you're done. So, when designing maps I always preferred props that would cast omnidirectional light (lamps, ambient magic, candles, streetlights), only using a smaller number of props that would require more fine tuning to light (neon signs, alarm panels, vending machines). I think the overall lighting looks at least as good in Eclipse as it did in Antumbra, and light-for-light it probably took less than half as much effort.

There was more complexity in Eclipse than in Antumbra, so I spent a lot more time testing it even before handing it off to my ever-dedicated alpha tester. Antumbra had one major branching story decision, a choice between two companions, and a handful of smaller choices to track. Eclipse has three major branching choices (albeit one of which only comes at the end), three companions who can be selected (and re-selected if they survive) over the course of three separate runs, and many more smaller choices including several optional side-quests, some of which don't come to fruition until later on. Fortunately the editor's debug tools are really good at letting you quickly set and test story variables, so I was able to find and clear up any plot-related problems fairly quickly.

Companions were trickier, and yet another reason why I was glad to have finished the more limited story of Antumbra before moving on to Eclipse. Shadowrun makes it really easy to test the status of another runner as long as you're still on the scene where they joined you; but if you want to carry them forward across scenes (which I definitely do!), then it gets way more complicated. As far as the game engine is concerned, by the next point they are just "PC1", "PC2", and so on; there's no way to link back to the original actor "Dalmin" or "Orion". You can still figure it out, but it requires managing story variables, which makes the logic somewhat fraught: IF I hired Dalmin for this run, AND he is NOT dead, THEN I can start a conversation between PC1 and PC0 using the Dalmin dialogue. (That's the secret reason why both Antumbra and Eclipse only allow you to hire a single companion runner. Managing the logic to test multiple companions, and map them onto their PCx identity at runtime, grows exponentially more complex and would be extremely error-prone.) Again, though, since I knew the limitations, I didn't need to waste a lot of time trying stuff that wouldn't work, and could focus on producing content.

Balance was my bane in Antumbra, and I spent a lot of time worrying about difficulty in this outing. Based on the feedback I've gotten so far, I think I've largely licked it. Part of the problem was that Antumbra started you as a beginning character, with very limited karma and resources, so if you didn't optimize your build you could easily get taken down. It helps that in Eclipse you have more karma and nuyen, so you can be more resilient against lucky critical hits. As noted above, I also redesigned the flow of combat, creating more encounters and making each individual fight easier. (Not to say that the whole thing is easier. In particular, I had a lot of fun designing the boss fights, and a couple of the battles have fun elements like ad-hoc allies or respawning enemies.)

I think I spent too much time worrying about something that wasn't that big of a problem. Each Shadowrun module can let players create a new character, import an existing character, use a pre-made character, or some combination thereof. Antumbra only let you create a new character, so it was relatively straightforward to test and tune for a known karma range. For Eclipse, I wanted to let you import your Antumbra character, but also to create a new character (using a process somewhat like imports in my beloved Bioware games). There was a problem, though: there's no way to tell how much karma a character has. Now, I could pretty easily check to see if the character had completed Antumbra by checking a plot flag that gets set at the end of that game. But, I couldn't really distinguish between a new character created for Eclipse with 59 karma, or a character imported from the end of Dead Man's Switch with 150 karma.

Like I said, in the end it wasn't that big a deal. I whipped up a little fourth-wall-breaking appearance from yours truly at the start of the game in the case where I detect that you're using a character who didn't beat Antumbra, and give a gentle reminder that they might want to check it out. (I didn't want to push this too hard, though, since you can't really beat Antumbra as a rigger or a decker, and both of those archetypes can be pretty decent in Eclipse). My original plan had been to selectively adjust the player's starting nuyen depending on their character origin: imports from Antumbra would get a little, new characters would get more (to compensate for their lack of starting gear), while high-karma imports would get nothing. In the end, though, it wasn't worth the worry I put into it. If someone wants to "cheat", that's fine... it's their game, and if they want to proceed after I warn them that it will be less challenging and fun, hey, they can do what they want. (That said, it sounds like the next update of Shadowrun Returns in October will finally add the ability to read a player's karma variable, which will let me at least remove the nag screen for newly created characters.)

Anyways! It was really fun to make this. I still like how making a mod stretches me both creatively and technically. It also makes me even more in awe of the work that goes into making a video game. I feel increasingly reluctant to criticize video games (though that won't stop my next post): the mere fact that a company could finish something is impressive, and should count as an achievement on its own.

I Made a Mod

You remember how I played a few Shadowrun Returns campaigns, and thought they were interesting but rather rough? I may have thought, "Oh, I bet I could do something like that." And I did! I whipped up a little module called Antumbra, and tossed it onto the Workshop, and... it's been a really gratifying experience. Fun to work on, and rewarding to hear from people who've played it and enjoyed it.

It felt surprisingly great to get back into modding again. As I was working on Antumbra, I realized that it's been a long time since I've built anything for another game. I think the last serious modding I did was for Civilization 2, back in the mid-to-late 90s. Actually, Civilization was also the first franchise I modded. The original Civilization was one of my favorite games. One day, when I was bored and nerdy, I started opening random files in my computer to see what they looked like. (This was one of the nerdier thing I'd done up to that point, but would pale in comparison to the moment in college when I realized that I could pipe arbitrary files to /dev/dsp in order to find out how they sounded.) Most were gibberish, but I was surprised to see that several of the files for Civilization were viewable in plain text. I recognized some of the statements that other leaders would say during negotiations, a few messages that would pop up on the screen, and so on.

I carefully made a copy of the entire game (which was quite a hit to my 40 megabyte hard drive), and then started editing the files and saving them. I was elated to discover that it worked - I could change some text, then play the game, and immediately see my own words coming back to me from within the game! Wow, how cool! I embarked on my major project: to align the game's cosmology with the Biblical creation story. I carefully edited the text for the opening movie, replacing its description of a five-billion-year-old Earth and a long process of evolution with text from Genesis 1, synchronizing each step of the creation story with the pre-existing graphics. I felt inordinately proud of myself for striking a blow against secular humanism, and reframing the context of the game into a more palatable mode.

When people asked me what my favorite computer game was, I used to tell them, "The original Civilization is the greatest game to ever have been created in the entire history of mankind, and Civilization 2 is even better." Along with the numerous other improvements of the sequel, it was also a bonanza for the nascent modding scene. As with its predecessor, many files shipped in a user-editable version. I was really impressed to see that this was even true of the graphics - a single image file contained frames for each of the different units, so if, for example, you wanted a giant space monster in your game, you could copy over one of the existing units with your new picture, and then it would show up in all future games.

Civ 2 also introduced the idea of a "scenario": a special game mode that used the existing engine, but played out differently than the usual epic 4000-BC-to-2000-AD experience. Each scenario had a unique map (usually on a flat map representing a particular geographic region), large pre-existing civilizations with their own cities and armies, and unique victory conditions. The original Civ 2 shipped with two scenarios: The Rise of Rome, a classical-era game with a fledgling Roman Republic arising in the post-partition Greek world; and World War II, an awesome simulation of the European theater that starts at the moment of the invasion of France.

I think MicroProse figured out that there were a lot of people like me that enjoyed tinkering with their game, because soon after came an expansion titled "Civilization 2: Scenarios". This didn't make any major changes to the core game; instead, it added a slew of new interesting scenarios. There were some more historic ones, like the American Civil War (a focused battle) and the Age of Discovery (a more open-ended experience); some alternate-history ones, like a World War III set in 1979; and my personal favorites, two dystopic sci-fi scenarios, one set in a frighteningly difficult alien invasion of Earth, and the other set in a post-apocalyptic Road Warrior-esque future.

The real prize for me, though, was that this expansion shipped with its very own scenario creator. You could build your own unique map and create custom civilizations and units, bundle them into a new scenario (instead of needing to overwrite your core files), and use a simple scripting language to turn it into a real game. You could create special events, enforce victory conditions, programatically spawn units, enforce diplomatic states... the possibilities seemed limitless!

I spent a lot of time building an enormous and elaborately detailed map of Middle-earth (using the expanded Iron Crown Enterprises map that included the lands east and south of Mordor). Once that was done, I started creating a Bereliand map for a scenario set in the First Age. I got excited when I figured out how to achieve certain fictional effects by using my available tools in unexpected ways, such as creating the Girdle of Melian by making a bunch of invisible units, setting their type to Bomber (so land-based units couldn't attack them), and then setting their movement rate to 0. Now Doriath could wait secure until the time had come to marshal their forces and march into battle.

I then set myself to a more ambitious project, creating a more open-ended scenario that was set in Midkemia after the Ringwar Saga. I'd enjoyed Raymond Feist's early books, but disliked the Serpentwar Saga, so I decided to try and create my own version. I set up the scene as it was right before the latter Saga, with Arutha ruling Krondor and an enormous armada invading from the west. Several other independent nations were in the mix, and it was really fun and interesting to see all the different ways that the conflict could play out. Once again, I got just as much pleasure from figuring out how to accomplish certain effects, such as creating winter storms that would arise in the Bitter Sea, traveling randomly and damaging ships they encountered, only to vanish after the seasons turned.

So, yeah. I had a ton of fun. Modding seemed very different in those days: I didn't have an Internet connection to speak of, and no access to the nascent modding communities, so it was purely something I would do for fun; in the best case, if I really liked something I'd made, I would share it with a few real-life friends who also enjoyed Civilization, but that was about it.

Around the time I went to college I started getting more Internet access, and was stunned at the originality and creativity of other modders. And not just for Civilization, either: games that I would have thought were un-moddable, like Half/Life, had entire conversions available to them like Counter Strike, adding entire new 3D models and completely changing the style of the game.

This was a wonderful trend for me as a gamer, but a disturbing one for me as a wannabe-modder. As modern games got more complex, the skill requirements for making a good mod grew steeper. There's a huge difference between editing a cartoony 32x32 pixel block in a GIF file, and building an entire new wireframe mesh from scratch. Over time I became very accustomed to grabbing the best mods for any new game I got (which is a large part of the reason why I continue to play RPGs exclusively on my PC), but I gave up any hope of modding myself; the most I would ever do was make some edits to an existing mod made by someone else.

In retrospect, I missed a very obvious solution: work with other people. I know, what a crazy concept! There are lots of talented artists out there, and there could have been some fruitful partnerships with someone else producing the art, and me doing some combination of map creation, scripting, and dialogue writing. I'm not sure why that never occurred to me. Maybe because I'd always thought of my modding as a solitary activity, or because I was afraid of letting other people down if my part of a project wasn't up to snuff.

Anyways. Honestly, I haven't thought about making mods for many years now, but that was all rekindled recently with the Shadowrun Returns kickstarter. Pretty early on, the guys at Harebrained Schemes decided that they wanted to put their effort into making a really good editor: the game wouldn't just be about one story they're telling, but them creating the world and giving us the tools to create our own stories. Now, that sounds cool! It seemed perfect for someone like me: I'd be getting a package with a ton of unique character portraits, customizable 3D character models, and a wide array of elements for constructing maps. It seemed like my weakest spots were covered, and I could focus on the stuff that excited me the most.

Certain high-level donors got early access to the editor and a head start on making mods. I didn't have that access, but did pay a bit of attention to the information released about the editor. I started idly thinking about a certain scenario, and jotted down a rough synopsis and several scenes of dialogue.

When the game was actually released, I... totally ignored the editor and just immersed myself in Dead Man's Switch for several days. I'm glad that I did. The final game was different in several small-but-important ways from what I was expecting: it was more linear and less sandbox-y than the SNES or Genesis games. I discovered, though, that I loved the streamlined feel. As I've grown older, I'm increasingly appreciative of games that focus on your character constantly doing cool, interesting stuff, and removing the padding that surrounds major encounters.

Partly based on that, I revisited my original script. I kept the original story intact, but restructured it to have a more DMS-ish sense of constant forward progress, instead of my original plan that involved more backtracking and exploration. I'm really glad that I played the game first. Not only did the resulting mission come out tighter than it would have otherwise, but it was also way easier to make than the way I'd originally planned. (Folks have figured out how to build sandbox Shadowrun missions, but it's a bit hacky and fragile.)

My original inspiration was one of the most vivid memories of my life as a gamer. As a young teen, my family didn't own an SNES, but a junior-high friend of mine did, and I would sometimes go over to his house to play. One of my favorite games of his was Shadowrun. It was my first-ever exposure to cyberpunk, my first exposure to futuristic fantasy, and one of the only dystopic sci-fi settings I'd encountered yet. My little nerd brain was totally blown.

By far the memory that stuck with me most strongly is your entry into The Cage. For much of the game, The Cage taunts you: it's a cool-looking club, and you can hear some neat 16-bit music playing when you enter, but an enormous Troll bouncer blocks your way. In typical adventure game fashion, he demands a Ticket for entry, so you'll need to find that item to proceed. This takes a long time, and so I was left wondering what lay beyond him.

At last, I found the Ticket, returned to the club, and handed it to the troll. He grunted and stepped aside. I ran forward. The music grew louder. I saw other people in the room, dancing wildly. And, then, I saw her. Maria Mercurial herself. Posed triumphantly at the front of the stage, belting out her song into the microphone, while strobe lights flashed all around her and her band rocked out behind her.

I was floored. I'd never seen (or heard!) anything remotely like it in a video game before.

So, yeah. When I thought about creating my own shadowrun, that experience instantly leaped into my mind. I wanted to pay homage to it, and also use it as a jumping-off point for a story of my own. So: I would need a nightclub, obviously. Shadowrun has a very rich and detailed lore, including a whole spectrum of clubs from the very seedy to the very trendy. I was a bit hesitant to borrow one of the existing locations like Penumbra or Dante's Inferno: it's hard to do justice to the versions people have created in their own minds. So, I decided, I would create a new club. And that became the kernel for the plot: yes, this would be a new club. So, it would be an implicit competitor to the existing clubs, and they might be hostile towards it. Land in downtown Seattle is hotly contested, so a new club might need to open closer to the fringes of the Sprawl. I did some research and decided that Everett was a good candidate: it was fairly far away from downtown, and was a poor-but-improving region that fits the profile of a gentrifying neighborhood that could attract a new place like this.

And... well, anyways, it went on from there. You can check out the mission if you want to experience the whole story. (Which, I should warn you, is not terribly long. I know from painful experience that my ambitious projects never get finished, so I deliberately wrote a small, manageable script and then focused entirely on realizing it.)

This post isn't nearly long enough yet! I feel like pompously meditating on the act of creativity.

It's no secret that I became a programmer because I wanted to make games. My very first experiences with BASIC at the keyboard of an 8088 IBM PC were spent recreating the text adventures that I loved playing. I've known for a long time that I wouldn't want to work in today's gaming industry, but the temptation of making my own games kept me motivated through the long process of learning how to program.

I am FAR from unique in this; most of the male programmers I know have similar stories. And it isn't just programmers, either. Practically any gamer you talk with has a few ideas for their own games. Maybe a side-story set in a franchise that they like, or a wholly original concept. Some use their imaginary game as a playground for telling elaborate stories, and others want to wow people with drastic gameplay innovations.

So, if there are approximately 10 billion game ideas out there, how come only a tiny fraction of those ever get made? Well, because making a game is hard. Coming up with an idea feels special, because it's the idea that we remember most when we think about the great games. (Final Fantasy VII: "Futuristic fantasy, Jenova, Sephiroth, fake Cloud." GTA San Andreas: "CJ transcends revenge and builds an empire." Civilization: "Build a civilization that will stand the test of time.") However, the idea (at least in my experience) is by far the easiest part. You can get inspiration in a matter of seconds. You can flesh out that idea into a rough story outline in a few minutes. But then, if you want to actually turn that story into a game? Well, that's where it gets hard.

Using my own personal experiences building Antumbra: like I said, conceiving the overall arc for this (short!) mission took several minutes. Writing the dialogue took about an hour, although I continued to polish it regularly. (As my creative writing teacher once said, "Writing is re-writing.")

With that rough outline in mind, I started translating my concept into editor terms. I would have four maps covering the different geographic regions of the story. I would have five scenes, one for each map and a fifth scene that revisited an earlier one. I looked through the portrait gallery and list of NPC models and outfits to find the correct look for my most plot-critical NPCs.

I'd be very curious to hear how other GMs have approached building their own content (which currently goes by the annoying monicker of UGC for User Generated Content), but my own process went like the following.

1. I'd start building a map, just roughing out the geometry: laying down floors, streets, walls, and buildings. This will help define the route that the player will take (for a linear combat section), or the area that they will be crossing and re-visiting (for a legwork section). If there are any plot-critical items, I'll place them here.
2. I then add my gameplay elements. I add the relevant NPCs, including enemies, allies, and quest-related characters.
3. Next, I wire up the gameplay. There's no scripting language, so instead I use the editor's system of drop-downs to define stuff like different regions, events, and triggers. By this point, the map is somewhat playable, so I'll periodically launch into the game to test stuff out. For example, I might set up a trigger so that when I reach a Lone Star checkpoint, they'll start shooting me unless I have a Lone Star badge in my possession. (Incidentally, that's one of the best things about the editor: how quickly and easily you can jump into the game to try your stuff out. It helps me be way more iterative than I have in the past.)
4. In conjunction with this, I'll add the dialogue. Due to a weird quirk of my brain, I find it really hard to write dialogue while staring at the conversation editor. Instead, I usually compose it in TextEdit or Google Docs while lying on the couch or riding on BART. Knowing in advance how the conversation editor works, I'll add little annotations in my document that breaks the speech into chunks, explains how they are linked together and/or loop back, and which checks and rewards are associated with each choice. So, when I'm back at my main computer, it's mostly a transcription process to translate the pre-written dialogue into my editor window.
5. Once a certain scene is done, I'll move onto the next chronological scene, repeating steps 1-3. I'm not worried yet about combat yet, but this is my last good chance to make major changes to a map's layout or friendly NPC configuration. From this point on, making structural changes grows sharply more time-consuming.
6. After the final scene is complete, I have a playable demo! Huzzah! This is a really, really good feeling. However, it's also very deceptive. At this point, I FEEL like the mission is about 90% complete. However, in reality, I've only spent about 30% of the time I'll invest in making this. As with other creative projects, it's the polishing that will make it good.
7. I play through the mission a bunch. Is it fun? Does it make sense? How is the pacing? This is a crucial step. In the case of Antumbra, my original design document ended with a mission that was basically, "Kill all the enemies in the location." When I got to the point, I realized, "This is… really, really boring. The level before was way more fun, this just seems like a grind." So, I went back and largely redid it: I added in some puzzles to break up the monotony of fighting, and added a boss encounter at the end to give a more climactic feel. That boss wasn't even in my original script, so I had to write it up on the spot; but by this point I'd gotten a decent feel for the flow of the story, and was able to come up with something that seemed vaguely plausible and challenging.
8. At this point, I turned to my incredibly awesome brother for some playtesting. Andrew has actually been a professional tester, doing the QA for Saint's Row. He also dug Shadowrun Returns, and so was a doubly-awesome addition. His feedback was unbelievably helpful. First of all, because he gave detailed reports of his own experiences that helped me anticipate how other players would encounter the game. (One fun-but-challenging aspect of letting people build their own characters is that there's a huge variation in the skill sets that a PC can bring into an encounter.) Secondly, he pointed out some important bugs that I had missed because of the different routes I was taking in my own tests. Finally and most importantly, though, he provided positive feedback and encouragement. This is crucially helpful to me at the early stage of creation: it keeps me motivated to keep grinding away and making it good. Negative criticism during creation can kill enthusiasm and doom a project that might otherwise have turned out very well. (Incidentally, this is why I personally am not a huge fan of the release-early-and-often strategy followed by many modders. It can be very efficient, and helps reveal bugs very quickly, but also means you'll be hearing more complaints at an earlier stage of your project. People with thicker skins than me seem to do fine, though.)
9. While Andrew was conducting his tests, I looped back to the first map and started polishing. My first phase of this focused on filling out the environment with more interesting elements. I added graffiti to walls, installed traffic lights, left out a dumpster, added some vagrants, put in tables, filled them with bottles of booze, put art up on the walls, built a recording studio, laid out offices for junior and senior executives, and so on. This was a different type of process, and actually a lot of fun; I've never played The Sims, but can see now why people would get into it. It's fun to sort of tell a story implicitly through the environment: "This guy is very useful to the business, but Kali doesn't like him personally, so he has a large office on the other side of the building from her." And, for example, I'd work with a "rich" set of props to fill Kali's office, but would only choose the pieces that would match her style and the rest of the decor. (Black lounge chairs and white coffee tables are good; beige armchairs are not.) At the same time, I'm also trying to make sure that everything looks all right. Sometimes you need to fiddle with props and the placement of objects in order for things to look right. This part is more tedious and time-consuming, and sometimes if I couldn't make it look right I'd just get rid of something entirely and replace it with something else.
10. I then repeated this for the remaining maps, focusing on each one until I liked the look of it: richly detailed and unique without seeming overly fussy or overwhelming.
11.  Once all the maps were filled out, I did one final pass over all maps adding atmosphere. This involved choosing the lighting for the level, picking out the music to play, placing point lights strategically, and adding non-interactive NPCs to give more flavor to the scene. Placing point lights was one of the most frustrating aspects of the entire process, and required a lot of trial and error.
12. By this time, I'd received initial feedback from Andrew, so I was able to start fixing bugs that he identified. I also sent him periodic updates as I finished polishing the levels. Once again, his encouragement was really helpful and kept me motivated to finish the time-consuming work of making each map look good.
13. I'd been running my private beta testing on Steam Workshop. It's a little quirky, but you can publish your content, then quickly edit it to change its visibility to Friends Only. That gave me a really easy way to send builds to Andrew, and also keep track of what had changed since his previous version. (I use a public GitHub repo for my source control, so as long as I know when each build was created, I can easily construct change notes from my commit list.) Once Andrew suggested that the time was ripe to open it up to a larger audience, I flipped the switch from Private to Public, then nervously waited for folks to discover it.

And, fortunately, it's been a pretty good reaction so far! I received some nice compliments about various aspects of the mission (with writing and map design seeming to be high points), and also some very useful constructive criticism. I was glad to not get any notes like, "This mission is no fun," but instead suggestions like adding an auto-save point before the final boss, notes on where certain details of my story didn't mesh well with the Shadowrun universe, and a single (!) typo report.

So, anyways... it's probably implicit in all that text above, but I'll come out and say it: making something is hard work. This isn't unique to games, of course, but I think they're a good example of the incredibly long path from an idea to a completed work. For me, personally, it feels like it takes a fair amount of mental energy to continue working on something, and also a sense of optimism that the results will be worthwhile.

I found myself thinking a lot about art and craft while building Antumbra. Many people automatically associate "arts & crafts" with gluing sequins to pieces of yarn in elementary school. As I see it, though, they're two different schools of tradition that together encompass almost every creative endeavor. An "art", historically, is creating something unique that has never existed before. This includes fine arts like painting, but also activities like writing a novel or composing music. A "craft", in contrast, focuses on making an existing thing very well. A blacksmith is a craftsman, but so is an orchestra conductor or a landscaper.

Based on these working definitions, you can see that whether something is an art or a craft is not automatically determined by its medium; rather, it's determined by the process of its creation. I would argue that books like "The Raw Shark Texts" and "Kafka on the Shore" are examples of art: they feel wholly original, and seem to emerge fully formed into the world. On the other hand, books like the Nancy Drew series are examples of craft: while each particular story is different, they're all built using the same tools, and seek to achieve the same ends.

So, with all that said, I think that the majority of games that are created today are mainly the result of craftsmanship, not art. There's a spark of inspiration that strikes at the beginning of any good game, and that originality is absolutely necessary for a game to be good. But, it is far from sufficient. Much as it pains me to admit, a well-crafted game following a derivative story will be far better than a poorly-executed game with an original idea. (In other words, I'm looking forward greatly to Grand Theft Auto V, and some of my greatest ire is reserved for games like Spore that failed to deliver on great potential. Of course, my favorite games combine unique concepts with great execution, like Rez, ICO, or System Shock 2).

I think part of that is due to the multi-disciplinary aspect of modern game-making. In the early days of PC gaming, a single talented individual could conceive of a game and then create the entire thing. Today, particularly for the best-known games, a game requires the successful cooperation of hundreds of skilled craftspeople: 3D modelers, level designers, voiceover actors, programmers, sound effects engineers, and more. Sometimes a single strong visionary is able to place their stamp over the entire project, but in practice it usually ends up being a collaborative vision, which dilutes the originality but strengthens the project, as each discipline can claim ownership over an aspect of the finished work.

Indie gaming is an obvious exception to this, with weird little independent creations like The Binding of Isaac arriving as strange and wholly self-contained experiences. In a way, mod projects are a kind of corollary as well. In a sense, much of the heavy lifting of craftsmanship has been lifted off of mod creators by the studio who created the game. The modder can then devote more of their time and energies to acts of artistry: dreaming up original stories. However, even then there's still an enormous amount of craftsmanship that is required to make your mod a reality: the sometimes-boring technical tasks of learning the best practices, applying them to your project, then studying the result and making adjustments until it feels fun.

And that's all I have to say about that!

Stay Frosty, Chummer

All right, it's time for my discursive, rambling thoughts about Shadowrun Returns! What a fun game. It really validated my trust in the Hare-Brained team, and is probably my best experience to date with a Kickstarter investment. The game itself is fun, nicely polished, and wonderfully evocative of the old Shadowrun feel while also creating plenty of surprises. It doesn't just exist within the lore; it enrichens it, answering at least one crucial mystery in the Shadowrun universe, and polishing the setting's style for modern times.

I'd briefly touched on my initial impressions before, and for the most part they still hold, with a couple of corrections.

Loading times. These aren't nearly as bad as I'd said. I think that Steam auto-downloaded an update without me realizing it, so the next time I launched the game, it had to re-go through a "caching assets" phase. After that, though, subsequent launches are almost instantaneous. Also, individual levels can take a while, but most load in 10-20 seconds. (All of these times, of course, are based on my particular Frankensteinian hardware, and may have little or no bearing on your personal experience.)

Reactivity. Not quite as major as I'd initially thought. The game front-loads a few majorly consequential choices, but as you get further along it's increasingly focused on player reaction over player choice. It's still good, just not as strong as it first seemed.

Writing. This gets a little sloppy later on. The first half or two-thirds of the game are very polished, with impeccable form; near the end (though fortunately not in the very end-game), there are some pretty noticeable typos and grammatical failings. It's very forgivable within the context of the entire game, though.

Now, let's expand my old list with a new set of reactions. No spoilers, just yet. Oh, and in case you're curious, "Dead Man's Switch" is the name of the official campaign. For most players, this will be synonymous with Shadowrun Returns, but I've gotten in the habit of using it to describe the official mission's content in contrast with the engine as a whole.

The Awesome

Focused Missions. It's more "Mass Effect 2" than "Mass Effect 1", if that makes sense. I know that some people will treat this as a negative, preferring the more open-world, free-roaming structure of the 90s games. But, personally, I strongly preferred this approach. There's a great sense of progress, and you're pretty much always advancing the main plot.

No Grinding. Strongly connected to the previous point. In the earlier games, you would inevitably need to re-run a bunch of similar missions (Corporate Extraction, Matrix Hacking, etc.) in order to level up the nuyen and karma needed to tackle the next plot point. In Dead Man's Switch, everything is tuned very well: you'll gradually gain XP and nuyen in each story mission, giving you what you need to tackle the next step. You'll only run a single "pure" shadowrun in this game, and it's a very fine-tuned, good-looking one.

The Economy! I can't adequately express how happy I am with the balance of their in-game economy. I've gotten used to playing RPGs with utterly broken economies, where it never makes sense to buy anything, and you end the game with way too much cash. SRR makes a single simple decision that fixes most problems: you can sell back items for about 75% of their purchase price. Based on this alone, there's a strong incentive to buy mid-level upgrades, instead of hoarding for end-game gear. Also, you'll purchase almost all items and equipment, so there's no buyer's remorse over dropping cash on something good only to have an equivalent or better item drop in the next mission. (I expect that this is something user-generated campaigns will do differently, but for the official campaign, their system is fantastic.)

Story. More about this later, but I really enjoyed the plot.

THE GOOD

Team Composition. I had a fantastic time just playing with a limited set of classes, and already found some amazing synergies between seemingly disconnected archetypes. I hadn't initially thought that I'd ever re-play Dead Man's Switch, but I increasingly feel like it would be a lot of fun to experience some of the archetypes that I never tried, like Shamans, Physical Adepts, or Riggers.

Etiquettes. I really liked this system. Many RPGs will lock certain conversation options to require a certain CHA score, or the equivalent for a game's system (Mass Effect uses Paragon/Renegade/Reputation, for example). In SRR, you OCCASIONALLY can unlock something with CHA, but more often, you'll use your CHA to select Etiquettes (1 new Etiquette for every 2 levels), and then unlock dialogue with your etiquette. So, for example, a Troll Samurai with 3 CHA might just have the Gang etiquette, while an Elf Shaman with 8 CHA could have Academic, Society, Shadowrunner, and Corporate. If you're talking with a nitro dealer, the troll might be able to convince him to provide more information via his Gang speak, while the elf wouldn't have that option available. On the other hand, there are lots more situations that the elf will be able to talk his or her way out of. I like the loose coupling between a stat and in-game performance, which gives a lot more options for how you role-play your character. (Nested criticism: in the official campaign, some of the etiquettes seem more useful than others.)

Difficulty. I completed the game on Hard mode, and found it nicely challenging without feeling frustrating. I generally ran a 3-person team, with myself (a Decker/ranged fighter), a support mage, and a street samurai. I played conservatively, cautiously advancing through areas, using Overwatch often, and keeping all my members buffed. Up until the last mission, I think I had to use Doc Wagon once. There is a major difficulty spike on the final mission, though; I got pretty far, but eventually needed to re-load an older game and put together a full 4-person team.

Length. I've seen a lot of reports that DMS is a 12-hour campaign. According to Steam, I spent 20 hours on the game, which feels about right. I'm a very analytical player, so I spent a decent amount of time figuring out my build, reading through all the dialog, doing every side-quest, and so on. As noted above, I also had to re-play much of the final mission, though I probably lost less than an hour to that. I do feel confident, though, that a re-play of the game would take less than 12 hours, since you would know where the enemies are and could blow through the dialogue quickly.

THE BAD

(Lack of) Documentation. The in-game help is pretty good, but glosses over the mechanics that underlie combat. Even after trawling through the wiki and other official and semi-official sources, I'm still very unclear on what seem like some pretty fundamental concepts. Like, what exactly does Armor do? I'm sure it protects you, but does it make you harder to hit, or decrease the damage you take on a hit? Is it effective against spells? Does cover work on a diagonal? How severe can the diagonal be? Does cover give a flat reduction in chance to hit, or a multiplicative reduction? I should point out that my lack-of-knowing doesn't materially hurt my ability to play and enjoy the game - it's clear that armor and cover are both good, even if the nature of their goodness remains a mystery - but the tactician in me would really like to understand how the underlying system works.

Cyberware. Maybe not "bad", but "underwhelming".  It feels very under-powered for how expensive it is. You can easily spend ¥2500 on something that only gives a +1 to Body, for example; in contrast, many Outfits give much better stats and only cost a few hundred nuyen. Add in the lost Essence from cyberware, and the fact that (unlike other items) you can't re-sell it, and I have a hard time justifying the purchase. Even though my PC was a Decker, and I'd been planning on loading him up with cyberware, I eventually decided that I got a lot more utility out of a single investment in Magic and a Heal spell than I would by loading out on Cyberware. Late in the game, I did try it out, buying a cyberleg and Wired Reflexes. Wired Reflexes was my favorite upgrade in both the SNES and Genesis games, but here, its stated benefits aren't that great, and even worse, it's very buggy. (The idea is that you can auto-dodge an attack with them; but it's a mode that needs to be activated, costing 1AP; and when it's active, you'll "dodge" friendly actions like beneficial spells cast on you. Bizarrely, you also "dodge" when you try to reload a gun, though at least you don't lose AP from this.) Anyways. Cyberware is one of the defining looks of Shadowrun, and it's a shame that the in-game offerings aren't more tempting.

Healing. Not a big deal for most runs, but there are some quirks in the system. I generally healed via the "Heal" spell. You might expect this to heal a fixed number of health points, much like a medkit. Instead, it restores ALL the health that was lost via the LAST attack on this character. So, for example, if you get shot for 5 pts of damage, and then again for 18 pts of damage, Heal will restore 18 pts. On the other hand, if you get shot for 18 and then shot again for 5, only 5 will be restored. This can make combat very frustrating when multiple enemies shoot you on the same turn. (I think I get why they set it up this way - without that limitation, you could always re-heal to full health between encounters on the same run, which would probably make it overpowered. Still, I think the mechanics could have been finessed to make it more fun while keeping the tension.) On a graver note, before the final mission (which is by FAR the most difficult in the game), you can buy spells, and drone repair kits, and even install cyberware... but NOT medkits, for some bizarre reason. That final mission is the one place where I would have loved to load up on them. The moral of the story: as soon as you gain the access to buy Level 3 medkits, buy a couple more than you think you need and keep them in your Stash, so you can access them when they matter most.

Next up, I'd like to chat a bit about my gameplay experiences. This mostly focuses on strategy and builds; it doesn't contain any plot spoilers, but if you enjoy figuring these things out yourself, you might want to skip for now.

MINI SPOILERS

I played as K1r10n, a male elf. He was primarily a Decker, but I knew that Decking alone wouldn't be of any use in most combat, so I also devoted a fair amount to Quickness and Ranged Combat. I decided to specialize in Assault Rifles, figuring that I'd generally hang back from the front lines and do my damage from a distance. Altogether, I eventually put more Karma into Quickness/Ranged/Rifles than I did into Intelligence/Decking. I also invested a fair amount into Charisma, reasoning (correctly) that my main character would be leading all conversations, and therefore points invested here would help unlock new dialogue options. It's pretty similar to how I tend to invest in skills like Persuade in games that support them.

I love the idea behind the Etiquette system, but for in-game purposes, it doesn't feel very balanced. For example, the "Security" etiquette shows up many times at the start of the game, and seems to give you a way to bypass some early puzzles. In contrast, something like "Academic" might only show up once or twice, late in the game, and only provide a bit of extra flavor text. I don't recall ever seeing "Gang" come up as an option at all.

One of the great design ideas behind DMS is that your PC's skills will help speed solutions to certain problems, but will never lock you out of content. So, for example, if you have a high enough Decking skill you can get a necessary plot item out of Coyote's computer within a matter of seconds. If your skill is lower, you'll instead need to go on a conversation quest, talking with other NPCs and inputting answers into the computer. This involves more running around, but also lets you learn more about Coyote, so it doesn't really feel like punishment.

When applied to Etiquettes, sometimes you get a similar easy-pass option. For example, Security checks are generally used to let you cross checkpoints more quickly; without it, you might spend an extra minute doing a mini-quest. Other times, an Etiquette can be used to expand a reward given from an NPC. Late in the game, if you turn some pay data over to a fence, he might offer you ¥1500 for it. If you have the Society etiquette, though, you might recognize the names on the list, and be able to demand ¥2000. So, there's a direct in-game benefit from having the right Etiquettes, but it doesn't confer an overwhelming advantage.

Incidentally, I think this is an area that might pose a big challenge to campaign creators. Using etiquettes is a great role-playing tool, but it's expensive and time-consuming to create enough situations where each of them will feel useful. It'll be interesting to see if people go to great efforts to incorporate them, or only add a few for flavor (not worrying about balance), or just ignore them altogether.

Back to my build: like I said, I pushed most of my Karma into Quickness, Ranged Combat, Rifles, Intelligence, Decking, and Charisma. I dropped a few points into ESP Control, but didn't find it very useful; my programs tended to die very quickly, and felt very underpowered compared to my avatar. I think that if you invested more points here, they could get very powerful; but at that point you're investing a great deal of Karma into something that will only be useful a handful of times in the game. (This contrasts with raw Decking, which is also used in many terminal actions that don't involve a full-on Matrix run.)

Late in the game, as my main stats started getting very expensive to upgrade, I began investing a couple of points into Body and Dodge. I actually pretty much never died, so Body wasn't essential, but it did give some extra insurance. Much like Baldur's Gate and similar games, if one of your companions dies you have a chance to resurrect them (via a Doc Wagon pack), but if your PC dies the game instantly ends. So, it's worthwhile to err on the side of caution. Likewise, Dodge seems useful, though I still don't totally understand just how effective it is (how it stacks with cover, whether it protects against magic/AOE, etc.). Oh, and as noted above, I even put a couple of points into Magic just so I could cast Heal. I almost never needed it, but it's useful to have on hand.

Combat strategies will vary a lot depending on your team. In my case, once I got to the point where I could hire runners, I pretty much always brought along Alexander Falk, who is a fantastic support mage. I would also take along Coyote if she was available; she shows up for free on some missions, for a really cheap ¥1000 on others, and doesn't appear at all on more, so I'm not totally sure what her deal is. When she was gone, I'd pick up another Street Samurai, preferably one with a shotgun.

Incidentally, I'm not sure of this, but it looks like the game might keep track of what runners you've hired, and give you discounts if you re-hire the same ones later. When I first picked up Falk, I think he cost around ¥1000, about the same as the other Nephilim runners. Later on, his skills had improved, but he was still available for just around ¥1500, while other runners with worse skills were asking for ¥3000. I'm not sure what the mechanics around this are, but I really like the idea that runners are paying attention to how successful your runs are, and giving you a discount if they like/trust you.

Anyways. At the start of combat on a typical run, I'll first have Alexander buff us all. I generally cast Haste on K1r10n, since, as my main runner, he does more damage-per-turn than anyone else. (If I had another runner who was stronger, I'd cast it on them as well). Between the rest of this turn and the second one, Alexander will also be able to cast Armor and Aim on the two main team members. From then on, his main job is to keep up those three buffs. In between, he will either catch up to them, or buff himself, or (rarely) attack enemies with his spell.

I absolutely adore how tactical the game is. You'll generally be advancing further into the fog of war, trying to anticipate where your enemy will come from; however, sometimes you'll be ambushed from the side or behind, so it's important to watch your six as well. Many maps will include chokepoints, typically a door or a narrow corridor, and if you're able to take advantage of it, you can triumph over a much larger group of enemies. One of my favorite tactics was to use Alexander's spell to create 5 squares of fire, which can easily block off a doorway. Enemies can still walk through it, but they'll take 10 damage from each square. Meanwhile, one or both of my shooters can keep Overwatch from the other side of the entryway; if I'm lucky, anyone who crosses through will take initial damage from the fire, then trigger an auto-shot from my defenders, and die before they can even get off their first shot.

It isn't immediately obvious, but boosts in this game seem to be additive, not multiplicative. So, while a 15% boost to hit from the Aim spell might not sound like much, in practice it can take you from a 50% chance to hit up to a 65% chance, which is great. I never took any shots if I was less than 50% chance to hit. I usually tried to conserve my cooldown shots like aimed shots for situations where I needed them.

Within a given turn, I would try to plan ahead and think of where I wanted to be by the end of that turn. Depending on my position and the enemy's, I might fire off a shot and then duck into cover, or move into cover and then fire a shot. It would sometimes make sense to take a single action from one character, then switch to a second character for one action, then back to my first for a final movement. This was particularly true if, for example, I wasn't sure whether I would be able to take down a particular enemy by the end of the round or not.

Weapon-wise, I was very happy with my Rifle. The base attack has very good accuracy and damage at any range. Once my skill got high enough, Full Auto became a very viable attack, particularly at close range but even at mid-distances. All of the special attacks have good use, though... an aimed shot can let you hit something on the other side of the map at 99% accuracy, and the two-shot attack is fantastic to keep in Overwatch if you have the AP to spare at the end of your turn.

Other than that, I most dug my fellow runners' shotguns. It's more accurate at range than I would have expected, does a nice spread (with the right upgrades/special attacks, you can even get spread at close range), and packs a good punch. Pistols and SMGs are fine, but seemed lacking compared to the other two. Which is fine - they're also cheaper weapons, so it makes sense that they would carry a bit less power.

 My absolute favorite encounters were the ones where K1r10n would jack into the matrix, and then the other two runners would need to protect his meat body while he did battle against ICE and enemy Deckers in cyberspace. The first of these may have been the best - you're invading a BTL system, and combatting an enemy decker who you can actually see in meatspace at his own jack terminal. Meanwhile, he's controlling chipheads that are attacking your runners, and... well, it's all really awesome.

If and when I re-play the main campaign, I think I'd like to try a shaman. I didn't have any experience with them in this game (apart from a scripted encounter with a summoned spirit), but they seem to have some interesting mechanics. Of course, I also want to try playing as a rigger, and a physical adept, so... we'll see how it goes!

I'd ordinarily drop into Mega Spoiler territory here to discuss the plot, but I actually put a lot of that stuff on my screenshot album, so I won't repeat myself here. Check it out if you love spoilers!

END SPOILERS

After wrapping up Dead Man's Switch, I tried a couple of other user-generated campaigns (UGCs). The biggest and best-known so far is Life on a Limb, which is the first major release from the ambitious Shadowrun Identity project (a huge set of interlocking stories set in a shared universe). It's pretty impressive, and a great example of what the Shadowrun engine is technically capable of: it has a huge open area, with tons of actors, tons of interactive objects, lots of dialogue, and so on. Personally, I felt a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing. I had really loved DMS's focused drive: there was variation in how you could accomplish your goals, but you always had a clear objective in mind, and a strong sense of propulsion to your plot. In contrast, LoaL drops you in the middle of things (after an initial encounter on a bus), and it's very challenging to figure out exactly what to do next. I do think that this sort of open-world, exploration-based game could be a lot of fun, but it will take more polishing and tuning to become really fun.

The other one I've tried so far is the SNES Reboot. This is still in an early alpha state, and is appropriately flagged with warnings about its bugs. Considering how early it is, though, I was very impressed at what a good job they've done so far. I got serious nostalgia at numerous points throughout my short playtime: waking up in the morgue, scaring the attendants, letting out Dog, spotting a sniper in the grass. One interesting question that they'll need to address at some point, though, is how closely they should faithfully adhere to the original SNES mechanics, and how much they want to update/improve it for modern times. I loved the original, but it required a lot of grinding. Similarly, there's a lot of potential to update aspects in the original that were lacking, like the Matrix. Anyways! This is one of the projects I'm most excited about at the moment.

That said, there's huge potential for a large number of even better campaigns to start arriving in the next couple of months. Next to the Kickstarter story, the thing that is collecting the most interest about SRR is the powerful editor it ships with. I've played around with it a little, and am very impressed by it: I'd initially been skeptical that it would be usable without a scripting language, but in practice, their node-based system for manipulating conversations and triggers works perfectly fine, and is certainly far less error-prone than a script would be. The editor also integrates a mapping tool, which is a lot of fun to play around with: it's a bit akin to building something out of Legos, and features a truly staggering array of items to place in your game.

Like Harebrained Schemes said, the editor they've shipped is exactly the same one they used to build DMS, so literally anything that can be done in the main campaign can also be done in our own scenarios. You can hack cameras to gain line-of-sight into the fog of war. You can set up a three-way battle between mutually hostile factions. You can disguise yourself. There's rain, and cut-scenes, and puzzles, and all sorts of nifty things that you might not initially think were possible. Most amazingly of all, SRR essentially ships with the complete source code to DMS, so if you ever wonder "How did they do X in the game?" you can just load up that scene and find out for yourself. With tools like this, I'm very eager to see what a legion of passionate fans can create.

I've lurked a bit on the Shadowrun editor forums and wikis, and have been really impressed at what motivated modders have already figured out. The editor is powerful, but still seems to have some limits: for example, you can add custom portrait packs to your campaign, but there doesn't seem to be a good way to add custom 3D actor models. However, there's lots of other stuff that was thought to be impossible (in some cases because HBS said "that's impossible") that modders have recently achieved. People have figured out how to create random encounters, how to build random maps, how to make respawning enemies, how to create new weapons, how to implement a manual save system, how to import your own props and textures, and so on. I'm frankly pretty stunned.

So, there you have it! If you're at all interested in the Shadowrun setting, turn-based combat, and/or RPGs, I think Shadowrun Returns is totally worth the $20 investment. The main campaign itself is nicely tight and exciting, and for people who want to spend more time with their character, there's a growing body of user-generated modules to continue your adventures. Highly recommended.

UPDATE: Since I started writing this post, Harebrained Schemes has published an update to the game. I haven't had a chance to verify it yet, but it should address the following points of my post:

• Wired Reflexes no longer dodges friendly effects.
• Load times have been reduced after version updates.
• Many typos fixed.
• Possibly more med-kits.

Also, it sounds like guns have been rebalanced: in particular, shotguns are a lot less powerful, and SMGs more useful. I'm happy to hear about the bugfixes, and the balance changes sound reasonable.

Shadowrun Returns: First Impressions

I grabbed Shadowrun Returns as soon as it arrived on Steam, and am now a couple of hours into the official campaign. I'm sure that I'll do one of my standard verbose write-ups after I finish, covering the plot and strategy and such, but there's enough curiosity around the title now that I figured I'd throw in my two cents' worth. There aren't any spoilers in this post.

My Background

I've played the SNES, Genesis, and CCG incarnations of Shadowrun, but never played the pen-and-paper RPG nor read any of the books. I really enjoy the games I've played, particularly for their atmosphere. I was a Kickstarter backer of the game, and have followed its development somewhat closely.

Housekeeping

If you've played other tactical turn-based shooters (like X-COM or Fallout 1-2), or one of the earlier video game adaptations of Shadowrun, you'll probably want to change the game difficulty to "Hard" instead of "Normal." After reading online about the difficulty, I've played as Hard from the start, which has made combat nicely challenging but hasn't caused me to die once yet. Normal might be good if you're new to the genre, though, as it will probably let you get away with more mistakes.

If you haven't played any version of Shadowrun before (or only the SNES game), be warned that magic and technology in the same person do not mix. If you want to be a mage or shaman, don't invest any points in Decking or Rigging, and never get any cyberware. The game lets you mix stuff up, which is cool, but in almost every case you're better off not crossing the streams.

The Good

Writing. This was the single nicest surprise for me. The game has a cohesive and very appealing narrative style, which is mostly a hard-boiled noir tone, mixed in with small elements of punk, cyberpunk, and dark humor. Characters' speech and the in-game exposition are really well-crafted.

Dialogue. Yet another nice surprise. I don't remember reading a whole lot about choice-and-consequence during SRR's development, but they're ahead of the curve in crafting an engaging, reactive plot. This is an old complaint, but most modern RPGs have unfortunately succumbed to losing the "role-playing" aspect of RPGs, and one major aspect of that is that in most games, the point of any conversation is just to visit every node on the dialogue tree. In contrast, SRR harkens back to the more complex, nuanced, and risky dialogue of games like Fallout 1 and Planescape: Torment. Picking certain conversation options will tick off the other person, which might prevent you from learning some crucial information or gaining certain items. I wasn't expecting this level of depth, and am really enjoying it.

Style. It's recognizably Shadowrun - rain, pollution, trenchcoats, sunglasses, cyberware, tattoos - but looks great, much less 1980s than I'm used to.

Art. One of the early decisions Harebrained Schemes made was to combine 3D character models with 2D backgrounds, and I think it paid off extremely well. The backgrounds look fantastic, very lush and real; if I have one complaint there, it's just that they look so real that I wish I could interact with them more. The NPCs also look really good. Similar to old-school RPGs like Baldur's Gate, each speaking character has an in-game model but also a detailed portrait, and the portraits look fantastic. I really wish now that I had sprung for one of the higher Backer levels that would have put me in-game as an NPC, just because I would have loved to have one of those avatars. Anyways. It's much better-looking than is typical for a $20 game.

Music. One of the Kickstarter stretch goals let them bring on both Marshall Parker and Sam Powell, who created the music for the SNES and Genesis games. This was a great move. The music for SRR is all original, but very evocative of the older games' music, which in turn triggers all sorts of great sense memory in my brain. It's perfect for the setting - moody, atmospheric, occasionally sinister.

Combat. I don't play a ton of these style of games - I still haven't tried the new XCOM - but I'm really digging it so far. It's fairly puzzle-like, as you try to figure out where to place your characters, how much you're willing to risk, etc. The element of chance adds a lot of tension to the game. I've already missed one 99% shot, which bummed me out. It's cool, though. The combat is actually very different than in SNES or Genesis, both of which were real-time. The SNES version's combat was miserable, awkwardly using a mouse-style cursor that you had to control with your gamepad. The Genesis version was a bit better, and featured target switching, but I still far prefer the turn-based version here. (It's also nice that you can directly control your Runners now, unlike in previous versions.)

Ruleset. Shadowrun is now coming out with 5th edition rules, but SRR is based on a modified version of 2nd edition, which was the version used by the SNES and Genesis games. So, if you played either of those, it'll be quick and easy to adapt to them here. There are some new elements, though, like Riggers and Physical Adepts, which is really cool. Anyways. A good game design is all about presenting interesting choices, and I'm constantly questioning the best way to spent my limited Karma as I shape my character.

The Matrix! I actually just finished my first mission that included a full-on Matrix portion, and absolutely loved it. The design is really excellent - in previous Shadowrun games, a Matrix run was a stand-alone thing one Decker did while the rest of your team sat around and watched. In SRR, though, it's very well integrated into the rest of the game. In my case, I was playing a Decker who shot down a keyboard jockey, then jacked into the Matrix, then helped bring down [PLOT DATA REDACTED] while my team protected his prone body. Time moves more quickly in the Matrix, but still takes time, so there's a fun sense of pressure to wrap up your objective so you can rejoin the fight. I'm so glad that they fit this in!

The Mediocre

Saving. This seems to be the number-one complaint in user reviews that I've read so far. I can sympathize with it, but I also see some benefit to the way it's currently set up. Honestly, if I could save any time, I'd always save before the start of every conversation, and if I didn't like the way it turned out, I would re-load and try again. Over the long run, I think the current approach is much more immersive, and lets me focus more on having fun and less on min/maxing outcomes.

The Bad

Bugs. And not the fun Chicago kind, either! Actually, maybe I should just say "bug", since so far I've only run into one, but it was annoying. At the end of a fairly complex fight, where I'd made extra effort to achieve the result I wanted (zero civilian casualties!), a plot-required NPC failed to spawn. I ended up wandering around the map for about five minutes before checking out YouTube, realizing the mission was bugged, and then re-starting. Fortunately it ended correctly the second time, so it wasn't a game-breaking problem, but it was still annoying.

Loading times. It can take a surprisingly long time for the game to even bring up the main menu, and each map takes a while as well. It isn't awful - not as bad as the interminable loads on Mass Effect 2 or Civilization V, for example - but it's quite a bit longer than other recent, high-resolution, large-scale games I've played like Mass Effect 3 and Bioshock Infinite. Eh. Maybe it just means it's finally time for me to look into upgrading my PC.

Audio stuttering. Can you tell that I'm digging for things to add to this section? Anyways - the sound and music are usually great, but I've noticed that if I switch between sections in the menu, the audio hiccups or stutters for a bit. Hardly a big problem, but another thing that's a bit annoying.

The Bottom Line

... well, you'll have to wait for that. So far, though, my experiences have been very positive! And I haven't even checked out any of the user-generated content yet, but have already heard good things about some of the existing modules, including a fan-made remake of the SNES campaign, and several works based on existing Shadowrun novels. From what I understand, the main campaign is just about 12 hours long, but it looks like I'll have plenty more Shadowrun goodness to look forward to.