Shadowrun Returns - Interviews

Max: You guys haven’t made any bones about the fact that is not going to be the kind of game that holds your hand, even though as you said it is more streamlined. Do you see Shadowrun Returns as something that’s going to bring Shadowrun into the popular gaming circles, or is this more of a love letter to the classic, old-school fans

Weisman: You’ve hit on the issue we’ve been wrestling with the entire development because luckily the property has this very loyal fanbase. They’re the ones who’ve helped bring this project to reality with their funding and Kickstarter and their continued support, so it is a love letter to them. Yet as we’ve acknowledged from the very beginning it’s in their interest as well as ours to make sure that this is a reintroduction of the universe to the larger game audience, to people who have never heard of Shadowrun, because otherwise the 40,000 people who supported us on Kickstarter aren’t enough to make a viable game.

We need to reach hundreds of thousands of people. So we’ve been very conscious of the fact that we’re trying to make a game for a much broader audience than the people who reached out right away on Kickstarter. It’s not a casual game, it’s a gamer’s game, it is deep tactics on the combat and management of the resources and team, so it is a gamer’s game. We think there is a big audience for people who love that kind of game and are looking for something new in the genre.

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Between the original Kickstarter goal and the limited time spent in development, one of the things I was concerned about is the length of the game overall. About how much playtime can people expect, and is there side content?

There are some side runs in Shadowrun Returns. It’s not like Neverwinter Nights where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a side quest, but there’s one main story in the game and side missions that go off of that. Also, say you’re outside running around, there are other things you can do within that scene, but it’s not a huge open world. We didn’t have the time and money for something like that. In terms of playtime, our testers logged somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen hours playing the game. Mileage may vary if you’re more cautious.

Are there plans to expand on the campaign, maybe with DLC or expansions?

So, we announced that we are creating a new campaign environment based in Berlin, same timeframe of 2054. We’ll put out a complete story of that in the Fall of this year. We’re also releasing the mission editor along with the game, and people have already starting making their own stories with it. We released the editor to some of our backers and they’ve had it for at least a month, and they’ve already started releasing all sorts of cool stuff. We’re also shipping all the scenes and the campaign itself so you can edit it, take it apart, change it around, that kind of thing.

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One of the things we realized working on the trailer for the game was that we didn’t have to spend a lot of time legitimizing the mix of high fantasy and cyber punk because in the last 25 years it’s become an accepted trope.

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