Shadowrun Q&A - Magical Races, Abilities, and Technology

While Shadowrun is being designed to be an intense multiplayer action game along the lines of Counter-Strike, the developers at FASA Studio have built advanced artificial intelligence for the computer-controlled bots in the game. That's important, because those bots can teach you a thing or two about what's possible in Shadowrun. And you'll do more than simply run around and shoot your enemies. Since the game is set in a world that features both magic and technology, you'll gain abilities that let you see through walls to find where someone is hiding, magically grow trees of life that can heal anyone standing next to them, resurrect the dead, and more. To find out more, we caught up with FASA Studio manager Mitch Gitelman. The game ships for the Xbox 360 and PC later this year.

GameSpot: Tell us a bit more about the single-player portion of Shadowrun. As we understand it, single-player is mainly a series of interactive tutorials, though these are supposed to be more "advanced" than most tutorials?

Mitch Gitelman: There are a lot of new and innovative gameplay features in Shadowrun, and we've put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that players get familiar with them and can experiment before going online. Each training chapter will show you how to use a set of abilities, give you an idea of why the abilities will be useful/cool in combat, and then give you the opportunity to try them in a bot skirmish. You can replay each training chapter and play the skirmishes again and again until you're a master.

GS: How good are the bots? Do they know how to use all the powers and abilities in the game properly? How tough are they?

MG: Our bots kick a**. I don't mean they'll kick your a**, unless you raise their challenge level. I just mean that they really play Shadowrun and are fun to have in a game, either on your team or on the enemy's.

In most first-person shooters, bots can run, jump, fire their weapon, throw a grenade, and run some more. In Shadowrun, our bots use all the tech and magic that you can use. They glide over the battlefield, teleport through walls, play offense and defense, pick up dropped weapons--the works. In fact, playing with our bots is very educational. In Tony Hawk skateboarding games, there are "trick lines" that people discover that allow them to go from trick to trick to trick in an unbroken line. Part of the fun of the game is discovering those lines. Something similar exists in Shadowrun.

For example, on one of our maps, I couldn't understand how one of our designers was always able to catch me unaware and get a clean kill from behind with his katana. So I decided to practice at home using bots. I played on the RNA Global Corp. team with a bunch of bots and watched what they did. One of the bots ran to a corner of a building that I never gave much thought to. He jumped in the air and then hit his glider, continuing his movement up and forward, and at the apogee he teleported through the wall. I had no idea where the heck he was going, but I followed. It turned out that on the other side of that wall, high in the air, there was a catwalk that extended the length of the building. I had seen it a million times but it never registered with me that I could use it. I followed the bot along the catwalk and through a wall to the place where I always got cut from behind.

GS: Do the bots integrate into the multiplayer game at all? So, let's say you're short of players and want the AI to handle the empty slots, or if someone suddenly leaves, will the game substitute a bot to fill the hole?

MG: Yes and yes. It's cool.

GS: We've discussed previously the wild and dynamic nature of the gameplay. So let's talk about team tactics. How important is team play, and how do you facilitate it through the game?

MG: There's no doubt about it: Shadowrun is wild. It's even fun to watch after you've died. I end up screaming and jumping around just as much watching my friends play as when I'm playing myself. It's never exactly the same experience twice, and I've been playing it for three years. Even though a lot of people have played the beta, we still don't know all the combinations and tactics you can do in the game.

You can have the time of your life and "cowboy" solo around the map trying to get a high number of kills, but if you want to win at Shadowrun, you play as a team. Coordinated teams dominate rogue teams. FASA plays together so often that we call out "plays" like, "You three go ladder-side and make some noise. I'll take the artifact up front ramps for the sneaky jump. Jim, cover me from the sniper tower."

We reinforce team play in a number of ways that all have to do with what players care about: the in-game economy. Remember that Shadowrun is a round-based game, and you can buy weapons, magic, and tech between rounds to grow your character. So if you want to reward team play, you do it with money. You earn money for raising your friends from the dead. You earn it from healing them with your tree of life. You earn money by taking the risk to be the artifact runner. And everyone on your team is rewarded when the artifact is delivered successfully or the escape route is defended successfully.

Cowboys and Teamwork

GS: What are the best team tactics that the development team has come up with so far? What do you like to do, and what happens if people aren't playing together?

MG: Here's an example of a tactic that two of our designers (Derek and Bill) use to great effect. Bill is a nasty sniper, who prefers to play as a human. He often takes a position on a sniper perch and uses enhanced vision to call out the locations of enemies to Derek. Derek is vicious as an elf and plays as a "distractor" using a combination of glider and teleport. Derek uses hit-and-run tactics to confuse and lure enemies into a position where Bill can turn them off like a switch. When Derek uses a katana, he's deadly in this role as well.

When people aren't playing together, they're picked off and the bodies are "cleared" one by one by players operating as a team. Remember, when you die in Shadowrun, you can still be raised from the dead to continue the round, but if you're body is destroyed, there's no coming back that round. "Cowboys" don't get resurrected as much because they're not supporting the team and no one wants to keep someone alive when they're just going to go off and do whatever they want.

GS: Tell us about the escalating nature of the game and how a match can evolve over time. Are there similarities to popular games like Counter-Strike?

MG: The similarity to Counter-Strike ends with the concept of buying things between rounds. Every round of Counter-Strike seems to play the same, to me.

In Shadowrun, you begin the match with a pistol and enough cash to buy a weapon or ability. As discussed before, there are a lot of ways to earn money, so in each round, people grow their characters in different directions to support their play style and counteract the abilities of the other team.

For example, someone on the Lineage team might have the enhanced-vision tech that allows them to see through walls. It works similar to sonar, and when you're being "pinged," you know it. So in the next round, someone on the RNA team might buy the smoke magical ability. In its active state, smoke lets you turn to smoke so that bullets go right through you. But in its passive state, smoke is like a stealth mode against enhanced vision. No one can see you through a wall.

So in that regard, Shadowrun can resemble an arms race, where each round new action "verbs" or abilities are added to the game that change the way the game is played. Playing with a pistol and the tree of life in round 1 is wildly different than playing with a rocket launcher, teleport spell, and antimagic grenades in round 4.

GS: Tell us how the art team went about designing the game's graphical look and feel. Was it derived in any way from the pen-and-paper role-playing game, or was it entirely from scratch?

MG: Because our game takes place in Santos, Brazil, in 2031 rather than Seattle in 2050, the look of our Xbox 360/Windows Vista game is different than the look of the pen-and-paper role-playing game. We have a thorough idea of where the world is going, but it hasn't gotten there yet.

GS: The PC and Xbox 360 games seem visually indistinguishable from one another. Was this mainly for balancing purposes for cross-platform multiplayer? Are there any differences players should be aware of--control nuances like aiming assistance, content differences like different maps or character models, and so on?

MG: This was a very conscious choice on our part. What we set out to do was to create a game that was "platform agnostic." We wanted Shadowrun to look and play the same regardless of the game machine so that people would focus on the fun rather than the differences in hardware.

So to answer the question directly, there are no differences that players need to be aware of. It's really a matter of preference of which input device you use. I've played first-person shooters for years with a mouse and keyboard, but I learned to play Shadowrun on the Xbox 360 controller. Now I'm reasonably effective (I can hear the team laughing now) with either one but prefer the controller because that's what I learned on.

GS: Finally, what are the system requirements looking like for the PC version of the game? Will it require Windows Vista? How will it take advantage of DirectX 10?

MG: We have not announced any system-requirement specifications at this time. Shadowrun does require Windows Vista, so you must have a machine at least capable of running Vista to play the game. If you bought a new machine with Vista on it, you should be good on the CPU/memory side. From a graphics card point of view, I'd recommend a Radeon X1900 or equivalent video card.

When you allow a combination of 16 players and bots to glide and teleport over a large map or through the floor and ceiling, casting spells and summoning creatures, while looking all "next gen" and doing it at a decent frame rate, you need a little help from your hardware.

In regards to DirectX, we don't have any plans for DirectX 10 right now. I'm very happy with how Shadowrun is looking. The focus now is continuing to polish what we have and perfect the gameplay.

GS: As always, thank you, Mitch.