IGN Feature
Shadowrun Interview
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To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 20 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. October 19, 2006 - Shadowrun's reemergence as a first-person shooter has certainly irked many hardcore fans. We sat down with John Howard, Lead Game Designer at FASA Studios to discuss what went into the decision process to move the Shadowrun IP in this direction on both consoles and the PC, as well as where it could go in the future. As a launch title for Microsoft's Live Anywhere technology, Shadowrun's development involves a number of unique issues. Live Anywhere, if you didn't know, will allow PC and Xbox 360 gamers to compete directly against each other. It's set to release sometime early next year, with Shadowrun launching alongside. Howard was more than willing to talk about how security programming has been progressing, how the control systems on both PC and Xbox 360 will be implemented, and speak to the age-old argument of whether PC or console gamers are the better twitch players.
IGN: What games have you worked on in the past that have influenced Shadowrun's development? John Howard: The biggest one was Halo. I was the design lead on Halo and there are some elements of that that lead into this. I mean Halo was the first game to really, well it's the first shooter on a console to hit a really broad audience, and the big thing that we carried over from there was the control model. There's a lot I think that works really well with the Halo control model that people maybe don't see and don't know about. It's not trying to replicate what works on the mouse, but trying to give you that same sense of fine control when you're targeting, and so that was really one of the foundation elements.
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IGN: Could you describe some specifics about the targeting elements you're talking about? John Howard: There's nothing we're doing in Shadowrun that we didn't do in Halo in terms of aiming. There's a couple small things that if people want to sit down and play Shadowrun or Halo or Halo 2 they'll see. There's a little bit of aim assist inside the reticule. So if you have a reticule over a target rather than having to put an exact point on a guy, it'll help out a little bit there. There's also something called friction. As you move over a target, your rate of turn will slow down a little bit. It's almost like the guy's made of sandpaper and when you move really fast and get over him, your cursor will move a little bit slower. So what it does is it basically takes the stick range and says you have to push further on the stick to go faster, so it basically creates fine motor control out of gross stick movement. And then there's something called adhesion which as that target moves, it'll drag the reticule around a little bit with it and actually rotate you. And this was happening in Halo and Halo 2; it's there and people don't even know it's there. We've had developers come in and asked them "are there any sort of cheats or aim assists in Halo?" and people go "no." Well, there are, but they're not like target lock or any of these gross ugly ones. They're really there just to help to make it possible to aim, it's all based on skill.
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IGN: And these assists are going to be functioning while Xbox 360 players are facing off against PC players? John Howard: The short version: yes. What we did is we took the best possible aiming system or control system for a console, which is Halo, Halo 2, and the best possible system on a PC which is obviously mouse, keyboard, both of which are known really well and have millions and millions of players. We do a little bit of tweaking on both sides to sort of even that out, to make the two systems play well together.
IGN: So is this going to finally settle the debate as to who the best first person shooter players are, PC gamers or console? John Howard: I don't think you can ever settle that debate. I think it'll create a lot of good competition and some interesting smack talk, but hopefully people approach the game because they think it's fun. The main reason we wanted to do Live Anywhere for Shadowrun, the ability to play on Live 360 and PC together in the same game wasn't to create this grudge match, although that's a really interesting part of it. It's just about, I want to play with the control scheme I'm most comfortable with, I want to play on the platform I'm most comfortable with, and I want to play with the largest potential number of players. I want to find people that are closest to my skills that play the game the way I want to play it. If we can take this pool of players and this pool of players and put them together into one big pool, it's going to create a larger community and it's going to probably increase the amount of time you spend with the title.
IGN: So there'll be PC and Xbox 360 achievements in Shadowrun? John Howard: Absolutely. One element of Live Anywhere is to take a lot of the things on PC and X360, in terms of the Live experience, and bring them together. So friends lists, the ability to chat outside of a game, voice over IP, and then things like achievements.
IGN: How many players in a server for Shadowrun? John Howard: We limited the game to 16 players which in a day and age of 64 player games may seem like a small amount. But the reality is putting 85 players on a side in football doesn't make the game any more fun. So what we wanted to do, and at the same time when you have the ability to cast trees, create demons, block doors with stranglevines, and create all these things that exist into the world, you don't run out of room but you basically need to reserve some of that horsepower to be able to do those things. So that was one of the reasons we limited that. And also because we wanted to do smaller, tighter maps for the game.
IGN: Why use Shadowrun for a first-person arena shooter? John Howard: Two reasons. We've always wanted to do a Shadowrun game. FASA created the Shadowrun IP and holds all the digital rights to the Shadowrun IP. We've tried to come up with ideas for Shadowrun games in the past and come up with some different ones, and one of the challenges in the past was trying to find a game that, you know, it's such a big IP. There's so many things you can do, you're always going to leave something out. It's like trying to do the movies The Lord of the Rings, you're always going to leave something out and it's always going to bum someone out. The other thing was, FASA Studio, FASA Interactive is known for mainly doing action games, going back to the BattleTech pods, MechWarrior, MechAssault, Crimson Skies are the games we're known for making. We just really wanted to make a game that was the best possible Shadowrun game we could make, and for us that was an action game. The evolution of the idea of the game really just grew out of our commitment to prototyping. We started building the game, we did a prototype of the game in another engine to get it up an running and really just got it up on the screen as quickly as possible.
In two months at the most we had something that was rudimentary playable multiplayer and really fun. At that point we started to show it to people outside the studio and outside the company and get them excited about it. From these it kind of took on a life of its own, so that's sort of the combination of what's the best game we can make and wanting to make a game with this really interesting IP. That doesn't preclude doing RPGs or MMOs or RTS games or something like that in the future. I think it's important for us to make the best game that we know how to make and to really reestablish the IP out there. There's a pen and paper game that still exists, and there's been digital games and console games in the past, but they're, you know, 10, 15 years old. The idea was to really reestablish that and make the best possible game we could to really reintroduce that IP to a broader audience because that's what opens the door to doing another version of this game and doing an RPG or something like that.
IGN: So the next Shadowrun title wouldn't necessarily be a sequel to this, it would be... John Howard: Yeah exactly, I mean look at World of Warcraft. Warcraft was an RTS. How do you do an MMO on an RTS, you do something totally frickin awesome right? When you look at the two products you're like, yea it makes perfect sense. When you find people that are passionate about that type of game and you figure out what's great about the world and the setting and what works in both of those and you make the best possible game out of it.
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IGN: Like even though Shadowrun is a first person shooter, it still has RPG elements. John Howard: One of the ways I described the title when we first started working on it was it was like an RPG on crystal meth. So in an RPG you play like 40, 80 hours and you build this character over time and you're slowly adding skills to that character and weapons and abilities and things like that. A game of Shadowrun works kind of the same way. In 20, 30 minutes, however long it takes to play through a full game, you start with a character, pick a race just like you do in an RPG and you start with some very basic abilities. You start with one or two skills. As you go through the game you acquire more and more and more until you have a broad swath of abilities and skills. The interesting thing is that I don't know a lot of people that replay RPGs over and over again, but you're going to play Shadowrun because it's a multiplayer game. You're going to play different maps, different environments, different objective types, different races, it gives you a really good opportunity to experiment with the game and not only figure out well I'm defending on power station, well I'm going to play a troll and I'm going to start with this and I'm going to have vision so I can see where my enemies are. Then I'm going to take smartlink and add that and then I'm going to pick a minigun. Then I'm going to get teleport so finally I'm going to be able to see that enemy through a wall, flick on my smartlink, spin up my minigun, and teleport into the space and lay waste. As soon as I start taking damage I just pop back through that wall, right. That's just one example of how I can play that map. If I'm playing on the attack team I might play differently. If it's a different game objective I might play completely differently from that. So that ability to create a character, to pick a race, and then add skills over time is really that RPG arc of building a character but condensed down to a 20 minute version.
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IGN: Player cheating is more of an issue for PC gamers more than console. How are you planning on addressing that problem of people using aimbots and wallhacks and that sort of thing? John Howard: The same way we've done with titles in the past. We've done several PC titles before and have had really good success with security and preventing cheating. The same developer that did the security for MechWarrior 4 is the same guy that's doing security for this. It's a big deal to him, he takes it as a personal challenge. From a development point of view the way you have to look at cheating is people will always try and cheat and people will always try and hack your game, but they're probably going to go for the lowest hanging fruit. You can't make something 100 percent hack proof, but what you can do is make it such a pain in the ass to hack that someone tries to find lower hanging fruit somewhere else. That doesn't mean that we put in as little as possible and then just wait for people to do something else, you basically have to make it as hard as possible to hack into the game. It's something we take really, really seriously. Creating Live Anywhere is an interesting challenge from a security point of view, you're basically taking a secure environment which is the Live system that only 360s connect to, then you bring in these PCs that could have any number of different applications on them so security for that whole system becomes really, really important. Not only are we working on security and think it's a critical element for our title, but the entire infrastructure behind Xbox and the entire infrastructure behind Live are also acutely aware of how important that is. So there's a lot of smart people working on that and making sure that we can provide as cheat-free an experience as possible for Shadowrun and for all the other games that'll work over the Live Anywhere service.
IGN: Aside from Shadowrun, which game are you really looking forward to playing over the next year? John Howard: The one that perpetually jumps out at me is Assassin's Creed. The reason I say that is because, aside from Microsoft, Ubisoft and all their studios and all the titles they do probably do as good or better than anyone else. They know how to make games that really look good, that really get your attention, they know how to make games that are fun: Beyond Good and Evil, the Splinter Cell franchise, the Rainbow Six stuff, the Prince of Persia stuff, they really know how to make games that are fun and they do it every year. That one just always sticks out at me.
IGN: Thanks for your time. 
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