So, there's this cool mod that's getting close to dead, but somehow still alive.

It's essentially Shadowrun in multiplayer, so think cyberpunk with neat gizmos and implants and badass weapons.

Probably the coolest thing is customization of the classes. You get to pick out of 4 different weapons (each set unique for each class) and then pick up a set of implants. Lots and lots of different styles come out, and the varied maps and push-style objective gameplay forces the team to experiment and work together to win.

Oh, and there's a separate cyberworld that influences stuff in the meatspace (realworld) so cyberfragging, hacking and such play an important role as well.

Overall, it's my preferred change of pace from NS. The tough part is it requires people to talk to each other, so pick up games tend to end badly, but if you get a good 8v8 going, it's an awesome game.

Very fun game. Just wish you could build stuff.

An engineer-based implant or class would be kinda cool. Would break so many maps on several levels though.

I think i remember playing that when it was in demo. The maps were all attacker vs deffender and attackers could hack in and such to unlock doors and take control of automated turrets, while defenders could hack in and and cyberfrag the attackers from taking a certain point, along with encrypting certain areas and whatnots.

I remember it was pretty cool but there were only 1 or 2 maps in the demo, which got old after too long.

The armor types and weapons were cool though. <3 cloaking device + cyber samurai sword.

Have any of you guys ever played the table top RPG that all the shadowrun video games are based on?

and 1, 2, 3, hijacked.

Fairly certain I’m the only other one, given that those games were popular in the early 90’s and all. Some of my old buds and I actually *tried* to resurrect an old Shadowrun game not too long ago, but meh, not enough of us left to sway the newer quazi-larpers – although, oddly enough, the gals were more up for it than the guys.

This game sounds interesting, although the hacking end of the Shadowrun genre was always the worst part of it. 4th Edition came up with The Wireless Matrix, in which, basically, the Matrix overlayed itself on the real world if you had the proper cyberware, thus made the deckers much more interactive with the meatware guys – and the internal cyberdecks were kind enough, essence wise, that most street samurai started having at least rudimentary hacking abilities. But we only played with the idea, never haven gotten past 2nd Edition. I’m not sure how you’d work that out in a video game. (Then again, I’m not sure how you work out wired reflexes either – I’ll have to see that).

Do they have riggers? I mean, customizable half-life vehicles would be fun fun.
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“Never make a deal with a dragon.”
Thothie

I've done some Shadowrun RPG. Not bad. Definitely worse systems out there, such as BESM (BigEyesSmallmouth, Anime RPG).

There's also a very poor Shadowrun game out there. =[

Also, no vehicles in Dystopia as of yet. Apparently they're doing a bunch of 3rd party content contest right now to get stuff for next patch. Personally, kinda a crappy system, but I guess the team is too lazy and small to do it themselves.

Really? I thought it was pretty well done for an RPG. 'course took awhile to work out what the decker was doing -- while pretty much everyone else just sits around. Our GM worked out the decker pretty fast, though.



Weird. Not sure I like that.


I always ran with an external deck, and just put a jack in my character's head. My decker had wired reflexes, and doubled as a team sniper.


We started in 2nd, then migrated to 3rd. I liked 3rd edition. I thought they'd made some pretty reasonable changes -- but I can't remember what they were now! I last played shadowrun something like 5 years ago. Our GM had to stop running it because he just didn't have time. We play D&D and Alternity: Dark Matter now.

Cool of you to put a quote in from the game.

You must have been better at rushing the hacker processes than we were. Seemed to take forever, and basically separated the decker from the group. Got to the point we basically decided to NPC the decker or have an all-decker team, depending on the campaign (and yes, converted at least one decker to a samurai). I’m really interested to see how this video game deals with that separation of time aspect. Hopefully I get to play it when next I’m home. (Although falling in love with yet another dead mod is not a pleasant prospect).

I was chit-chatting with the RP crew last night, and the conversation as to why our attempt to resurrect a Shadowrun game failed came up. In addition to the interpersonal reasons, and that a lot of the crew feels they have “grown out” of the tactical shoot-em up, and that Shadowrun doesn’t lend itself towards the human drama everyone’s into now, the main reason, we concluded, was that it was just too depressing comparing the Shadowrun world, conceived of in 1990 or so, to our own, given the way things have progressed…

I mean, if you take out the magic and the cyberware - politically and economically, in terms of “mega-corp” corruption running the government and such, for the most part, we’re already living the 2050 nightmare. I suppose this was all easy to see coming back in 1990 - and indeed, a lot of it was already manifest then, but the privatized military, police, jails, and more recently demonstrated, fire departments, really just rub it in. The Shiawassee decision is already in effect, for all intents and purposes: If a corporation feels it can defend itself better than the government’s military, it‘s allowed to raise its own to do so, and it generally enjoys even greater immunity from international law than the US military when taking military actions. The government itself has also, more or less, been reduced to the capacity of the fictional USCAS, and serves only as a collection tool, and forum for disputes between the megacorps, when they so choose. We were discussing ways to intensify the Shadowrun nightmare to make it look less like our own world, while retaining the corporate tyrant theme, but also realized that several of the scenarios we were coming up with were also likely right around the corner, and again the depression set in. >_>

At least in a videogame there’s no social interaction with the world or, as an FPS, presumably, no awareness of its world’s political state, so maybe I could convince the crew to join me on the mod. I know at least two of them have HL2, and one plays multiplayer FPS’ers from time to time.
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“You shot me, I understand, that's business. You shot the slotting bitch, that's okay, I've wanted to do that for some time now. You shot the Kraut; hell, everybody shoots the Kraut. But you shot my fraging car, that's against the rules!” - Doger, Shadowrun Novel
Thothie

Hm... interesting commentary.

I personally wouldn't say the mod is dead, it's just they made the mistake of releasing it almost half-cocked and have taken waaay too long to fix stuff. So, it could still live if the dev team actually put some time into it (like the NS guys do) but right now it's in a sort of stasis as they do their little competition. It feels like all the good mods I like these days are kinda in limbo while the dev team gets into gear to pump out our next fix.

Not to mention all the new games coming out for holiday season are stealing quite a few hearts in new and interesting ways (Forged Alliance, CoD4, etc.)

Hmm... Gonna have to fiddle with it some more, as I could barely tell what was going on my first time in. It does seem to have too much down time for the instant-death stuff. I took the n00b guide's advice and started Medium, but after the first few instant deaths I went Heavy, hoping to avoid that, and sure enough, died just as fast... So I figure, if everything dies instantly, you midas well go light - which got me quite a few more frags and kept me alive longer than the heavy, but not enough so to make up for the respawn time.

Might help if I had a better idea as to what was going on, so I'd actually be able to plot strategy in spectator mode, rather than sit going, wtf?

Sneaking up behind people with the Katana is fun and all (and way too easy, even without the cloak) - but it's very clumsy. The graphics are very poor for a source mod (and mind you, my primary Source mod is FF). I suppose I'll have to mess with the decking sometime, but it was a packed server, and there's a limited number of decker ports, so I didn't want to screw the team practicing. (As it was I fried at least one teammate in the meatworld.)

It has quite the learning curve. give it a bit of time.

Cyberspace in that game is the best part of it. Its like tron meets M.C. Escher.

I'm gonna try this mod tonight... It doesn't seems dead at all, in fact there is a bunch of servers out there running... Thanks beowulf, you rock!