Shadowrun Multiplayer Hands-On

You expect studio heads to be strong proponents of the games they're making, but when FASA Studio's Mitch Gitelman told us that Shadowrun is the most fun game that FASA has ever made, it was a bold statement. After all, the Microsoft studio already has an excellent reputation thanks to MechAssault and Crimson Skies. But with Shadowrun, Gitelman has some of the best and most experienced designers at Microsoft working for him, including the lead designer of a tiny little game called Halo. So we headed up to Microsoft's campus to get our first good glimpse at Shadowrun and see how FASA is trying to change the way multiplayer first-person shooters are played.

If you're familiar with the Shadowrun universe, it may seem a bit odd that FASA is working on a shooter in the first place. After all, Shadowrun began as a pen-and-paper role-playing game back in the late '80s, and it drew a sizable and loyal following that was attracted to the game's unique setting and premise. Shadowrun combines fantasy with a futuristic setting. In the year 2020, magic returns after a 5,000 year absence. Some humans discover that they have magical abilities, while the magic reawakens latent magical DNA in others, transforming them into elves, dwarves, trolls, and more. The characters in Shadowrun get the best of both worlds, as they can draw upon state-of-the-art technology as well as good old-fashioned magical ability.

In the upcoming Shadowrun game, you'll play as one of two factions. There's the RNA Corporation, a megacorporation so large that it has its own standing army, and then there's the Lineage, an organization tasked with defending an ancient ziggurat, or temple, that the RNA Corporation discovered inside a mountain in South America. It turns out that the RNA folks made a lot of enemies with their discovery, since it ended up collapsing the side of a mountain to expose the ziggurat, and the resulting landslide wiped out half the city of Santos. As such, expect the levels to range from the sleek corporate facilities of the RNA to the slums of Santos to the mountainside itself.

This is primarily a multiplayer-focused game, as there will be no single-player campaign or story in Shadowrun. There will be single-player, mainly in the form of an extensive tutorial with replayable practice missions, as well as skirmish and cooperative battles with artificial intelligence bots. The meat of the gameplay, though, is to be found in multiplayer, as there will be a number of modes that support up to 16 players, mainly in team-versus-team combat. And it's here where Shadowrun really begins to differentiate itself from most multiplayer first-person shooters.

Gitelman told us that too many action games rely on the same verbs. In other words, all you do is run, shoot, throw a grenade, and maybe drive a vehicle. In comparison, you'll almost need a small dictionary to describe all the actions in Shadowrun due to the sheer variety of actions that are possible in the game, all of which are built upon the unique characteristics of the Shadowrun universe. So on top of running, shooting, and grenade throwing, you can add in teleporting and gliding, as well as transforming into smoke, growing trees, seeing through walls, and much more. These sound like interesting abilities, but it's when you begin to chain them together and play them in a team environment that you get all sorts of wild and unpredictable tactics and battles.

You can unlock magical abilities and technological items that can give you all sorts of advantages. For instance, if you use enhanced vision to see opponents on the other side of a wall, you can teleport behind the group and slay one with a shotgun or katana to the back, and then teleport away before that person's friends can claim vengeance upon you. Or, if you're caught between two enemies, you can transform into smoke and watch the two enemies hit each other as the bullets pass through you. Other magical abilities let you summon a Tree of Life, which has a healing radius around it. You can also use a strangler vine to clog up a chokepoint with giant crystals that slow or even trap enemies. Tech items such as wired reflexes make you a lot faster, so if you're armed with a sword, you can use it to deflect incoming bullets, while glider wings give you limited amounts of flight. Magic and tech are meant to give you a lot more flexibility in how you play the game, but they're not really weapons in and of themselves. Instead, you'll rely on an arsenal of familiar conventional weapons, such as submachine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, miniguns, and rocket launchers. The idea is that, when taking the conventional and mixing it with the unconventional, you get all sorts of interesting new dynamics.

It also helps that the four different player races in the game are so different. These are essentially class types, with distinct strengths and weaknesses. The human is the general all-around character, who has the bonus of being able to use technological items with less of a penalty on magical abilities. Magic and technology don't meld well in Shadowrun, which means technological items interfere with magic. If you use enhanced-vision goggles to see through walls and glider wings to float around, you'll be able to cast fewer spells before running out of power. But this dynamic gets interesting when it comes to the magical races.

Elves and dwarves and trolls, oh my

In addition to the humans, there are three other races in Shadowrun. The elf is the quickest character in the game and a natural at magic, so elves are capable of casting more spells faster than the others. The price is that the elf isn't quite as durable in combat, though elves do slowly regenerate health automatically. Then there's the dwarf, who drains magic around him to power his spells. This makes the dwarf perfect for nullifying magical defenses. If the enemy has thrown down a mess of strangler vines, send a dwarf at them, and they'll melt at his approach. Dwarves also nullify magical abilities, so opponents can't teleport away from a dwarf or use any of their magical powers. And, finally, there's the troll, the giant bruiser in the game. Trolls are great for defense since they're slow and absorb damage like a sponge. Shoot at a troll, and its skin begins to turn to stone and giant spines start to grow around its body. The way to take a troll down is to either unload lots and lots of ammo into it, or, more intelligently, stop firing, wait for its skin to revert to normal, and then open fire again.

Put it all together in a 16-player game, and all of these races, weapons, and abilities suddenly allow for whole new kinds of team interaction and tactics. We played in raid mode, which is probably going to be the central mode to the game. Raid tasks one team with attacking an enemy base, taking an icon in the middle of it, and then transporting the icon to an exit point, while the other team does everything they can to stop them. On defense, you can have one player equipped with enhanced vision call out where the enemy is, and the rest of the team can react in many different ways. But for every tactic, there's a valid counter, it seems. For example, if someone turns to smoke and is immune to all conventional weaponry, you can use a gust spell to blow that player across the map and dissipate the smoke, causing damage. There's a very tactical nature to the action, since you have so much flexibility and mobility at your command.

In raid mode, each match is divided into rounds, and there's an escalating nature to the rounds. Shadowrun has a purchasing system that's similar to Counter-Strike. Your performance in each round earns you money, and you get more cash for getting kills, resurrecting fallen teammates, and so on. At the beginning of each round, you can purchase a new magical ability, tech item, or weapon depending on how much money you have. So in the first round, you might only be able to purchase one magical ability (we recommend resurrection) and the default pistol, but by the last round, you might have a slew of magical abilities, tech items, and weapons, such as the sniper rifle, the minigun, and the rocket launcher. Once unlocked in each match, magical abilities and tech items remain with you throughout the rest of the match, even if you die. But should you end a round in death, you'll lose any weapons you had purchased, which means you'll have to buy them again in the next round. The team that wins the most rounds wins the overall match, and everyone starts at zero for the next match.

If you die in a round, you're not exactly out thanks to the resurrection spell. As long as your body is intact, you can be resurrected by a teammate, but your life is now tied to that player. If that person is killed, you'll slowly bleed out and die unless another teammate can resurrect you again. That makes it important to protect the person who resurrected you, or if you witness an enemy player resurrecting other players, then you know if you take out that player the others are in trouble. Of course, if there's no body to resurrect, you're permanently dead in the round, so there's a complete game within the game, where you attempt to lure enemies out into the open so your team can kill them and then "clear the body" by unloading rounds into the corpse until it disappears. Once a player's corpse is cleared, that player can't be resurrected and brought back into the battle, and that can give you a numerical advantage for the remainder of that round. We found that this can create plenty of desperate cries for resurrection before a player's body is cleared, as well as plenty of cries to "clear the body" when dealing with an enemy corpse.

We played a couple of matches, and Shadowrun is certainly a compelling experience, thanks to the wild action and the team nature of the game. We were constantly yelling out to one another during the gameplay session, an experience that will be akin to that of playing online on Xbox Live, as teammates will be able to talk to one another constantly through headsets. And you may be talking to more than Xbox 360 players, as well. Shadowrun will be one of the first games to incorporate Live Anywhere, Microsoft's new initiative that makes it possible for PC and Xbox 360 players to play against one another in multiplayer. We were able to experience it ourselves, as we played with some players on a PC and others on the Xbox 360, and it was virtually impossible to tell who was using a PC and who was using an Xbox 360. Some of the designers told us that PC players have a slight advantage when using a sniper rifle, thanks to the quickness and accuracy of a mouse compared to a gamepad thumbstick, but for the most part, the game has been balanced from the beginning to make for a roughly level playing field between the two platforms. Put it all together, and Shadowrun's impressive gameplay is certainly something that both Xbox 360 and PC fans can look forward to. The game is scheduled to ship early next year.