SHADOWRUN RPG trilogy released on console

It's taken a remarkable amount of time, but the Shadowrun RPG trilogy has finally arrived on console. Shadowrun Trilogy: Console Edition launches today on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox S/X and Nintendo Switch, as well as Xbox Game Pass.

Despite being called a trilogy, these three game are actually independent, self-contained titles. In each game you create a new character in the Shadowrun setting - think of a mash-up of Dungeons & Dragons and cyberpunk, with fantasy races and magic existing in a technologically-advanced near-future - and then embark on a story packed with puzzles, companion characters, dialogue and turn-based tactical combat.

The three games are Shadowrun Returns (aka Dead Man's Switch), Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Each game takes around 15-20 hours to complete, rather more if you go for a completionist playthrough, and they are all well worth your time.

CYBERPUNK 2077 lurches into life again

CD Projekt, the Polish development company behind the Witcher trilogy of video games and the GoG digital games service, seem to have begun the pre-release marketing for their next video game: Cyberpunk 2077.

They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step, and that's what this move seems to be: five years after its last tweet, the Cyberpunk Twitter feed has rebooted itself with a simple "beep".

Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012 as one of two large-scale, open-world RPGs the company was working on. The other was, of course, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which was released to a rapturous reception in early 2015 (I am playing this at the moment and should have a review in the next week or so). After an early concept trailer and a bunch of interviews, CD Projekt declared radio silence, not wanting to hype up the game before it was ready.

Cyberpunk 2077 is - shockingly - a cyberpunk video game set in the year 2077. It is set in the Cyberpunk pen-and-paper RPG universe created by Mike Pondsmith in 1988, a world of massive corporations, oppressive corporations and people struggling for freedom and humanity in a world of massive technological and corporate power. The video game will be set in one city (probably Night City, a post-conflict Californian city and the signature setting in the pen-and-paper game) and possibly its surrounds, and will allow players to create their own character. They will be able to pursue a detailed main storyline, numerous side-quests and lots of optional activities. There may also be a multiplayer component of some description.

Given the impact of the Cyberpunk RPG and the genre as a whole, which inspired the Deus Ex and Shadowrun franchises, among others, it'll be interesting to see what the final result is like. CDPR may also be fortuitously tapping into a renewed interest and awareness in the cyberpunk genre, thanks to the recent release of Blade Runner 2049 (out on DVD and Blu-Ray next month) and the arrival of the Netflix TV series Altered Carbon.

It'll be interesting to see how in-depth the marketing for Cyberpunk 2077 will be, and if CDPR are going to give us a short, sharp campaign followed by release or something longer. In either case, the hopes for a 2018 or early 2019 release have risen according.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 15

One of the criticisms levelled against epic fantasy and some of its trappings - worldbuilding, magic systems, maps, constructed languages - is that it runs counter to the more traditional idea of fantasy as being strange, exotic, weird. East of the Sun and West of the Moon is not a point on a map (to quote Pratchett expert Stephen Briggs) and knowing the metaphysical rules that allow a princess to be put into suspended animation for a century only to be woken up by a passing prince is a bit unnecessary to the story at hand.


There's also the fact that an awful lot of fantasy can feel like a history of the real Middle Ages but with dragons and fireballs replacing research. Starting in the 1980s, some authors wrote books that looked like epic fantasy and had many of the same trappings, but had rather different settings and were combined with other genres to create more interesting and original stories.

The Gunslinger


As a child, Stephen King developed a fascination with the poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1855) by Robert Browning. This was one of a number of poems and poetic works that would stick in the minds of various science fiction and fantasy authors, to be extensively quoted later on (see also The Second Combing by W.B. Yeats and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot). King's take was rather more literal: a man named Roland seeks out a dark tower. Working out exactly what that meant took King over a decade, with him writing down the first version of the short story known as The Gunslinger in 1970. He finally published it in 1978. A series of four further short stories followed, with them being collected together and published as one volume in 1982.

When The Gunslinger appeared, King was already a rising star. He'd published Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Dead Zone and the novel that had arguably defined him more than any other, The Stand. The Stand is itself a work of epic fantasy using modern American characters to stand in for archetypal fantasy heroes and the destruction of the modern world through a viral epidemic as its backstory. North America itself stands in for a fantasy landscape, with Las Vegas serving as the novel's Mordor. The novel was hugely successful, but some readers felt that there was a lot more to its mysteries - such as the enigmatically evil Randall Flagg - than King revealed on the page.

In the back of King's mind (perhaps influenced by Moorcock) had been the idea of a multiverse, a layering of fictional universes in which different stories could take place but where all these stories could intersect with them. What he lacked was a way of tying them together. The Gunslinger, with its ambiguous setting and the ability of its characters to pass between shifting planes of reality, provided that mechanism.

Seven more volumes in The Dark Tower series followed The Gunslinger: The Drawing of the Three (1987), The Waste Lands (1991), Wizard and Glass (1997), Wolves of the Calla (2003), Song of Susannah (2004) and The Dark Tower (2004), along with a stand-alone spin-off novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012). The novels focus on Roland Deschain, a knight and gunslinger who pursues a mysterious "man in black" across a desert, gathering allies along the way. There are hints of a post-apocalyptic world, strengthened by references to The Stand and its characters. Real-life figures, including (controversially) King himself, make an appearance. Many other novels King wrote during this period tied into the main work: The Eyes of the Dragon (1987) is King's only "traditional" epic fantasy novel and features the return of Randall Flagg and references to The Dark Tower. Black House, Hearts in Atlantis, Rose Madder and Insomnia (among others) also feature blatant references to the series. In fact, some King fans suggest that all of King's work (even the non-supernatural thrillers like Misery) is set in the Dark Tower multiverse and they may be right.

Cloud Warrior

Patrick Tilley had already had an interesting writing career before he started writing his magnum opus in 1983. His first novel, Fade Out (1976), had been an SF novel about the arrival of an alien spacecraft on Earth that drained the planet of electricity, throwing us back into the Middle Ages. His second, Mission (1981), had asked what would happen if Jesus turned up in present-day New York City.

For his next work, Tilley decided to fuse together Mad Max, Shogun, The Lord of the Rings and the American Western because, well, why not? The resulting series was The Amtrak Wars, the kind of inspired, crazy genre mash-up that we don't seen nearly enough of in the genre.

The books open in 2989. The Old World was destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse (which took place in, er, November 2015) but a group of American industrialists and billionaires survived in a massive underground shelter beneath Houston, Texas. With the surface world too radioactive to survive on, they expanded the underground facilities into a vast subterranean empire, the Amtrak Federation. Emerging centuries later, they found to their horror that the surface world had been taken over by "Mutes", the mutated survivors and descendants of less fortunate Americans who'd had to struggle to survive after the thermonuclear war. The Federation initially waged war against the Mutes to retake the surface world, but ran into problems when it was discovered that the Mutes had somehow gained mastery of the elements and magic. Complicating matters further was the presence of a large nation of descendants of Japanese survivors on the eastern seaboard, Ne-Issan.

The books chronicle the development of the Talisman Prophecy, which the Mutes believe will see the destruction of the Amtrak Federation, and the role played in it by four young people from both the Federation and the Clan M'Call of the Mutes. The books are also notable for their vivid action scenes and extraordinarily complicated politics and schemes-within-schemes developed by the central character, the Machiavellian antihero Steve Brickman.

Six volumes were published in the series: Cloud Warrior (1983), First Family (1985), Iron Master (1987), Blood River (1988), Death-Bringer (1989) and Earth-Thunder (1990). The sixth volume ended on something of a cliffhanger, intended to lead into a sequel series set 15-20 years later when the Talisman Prophecy came to fruition. However, Tilley chose to move onto other projects. There was a renewed attempt to continue the series in 2007 with a new trilogy, whilst an Australian production company licensed the film rights in 2010 with a view to making a movie called The Talisman Prophecy, but neither came to fruition. Still, the series remains remarkable for the ease with which Tilley brings together a myriad number of sources and ideas into a coherent world and story.

The Wizards and the Warriors

Few could accuse New Zealand novelist Hugh Cook of lacking vision. In 1986 he published The Wizards and the Warriors, the first novel in a series he called Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Cook's plan was for this series to run to twenty volumes, to be followed by two series of equal length, Chronicles of an Age of Wrath and Chronicles of an Age of Heroes. The sixty-book plan was overly ambitious despite Cook's high speed of output, but ultimately he only finished the first half of the first series (ten novels in six years) before it was halted due to lack of sales.

Unusually, the series was not one massive epic story. Instead, it was more episodic with some novels taking place simultaneously alongside others, with events varying depending on who was witnessing or instigating them. The books used unreliable narrators and a prose style that could vary significantly from volume to volume. The books also eschewed a lot of epic fantasy tropes, with the books not following a set chronology and not having a central hero or villain. The books featured whimsical humour and influences from sword and sorcery as well as planetary romance. Some books were reminiscent of the later New Weird movement (China Mieville was a big fan). Some books were more like roleplaying games, with Paizo Publishing reprinting one of the volumes, The Walrus and the Warwolf, as part of its Planet Stories line.

After the series concluded (prematurely) Cook published several more books before sadly passing away in 2008 from cancer. His massive mega-series was never finished, but its breadth, vision and general batshit insanity remain intriguing (and echoes, intended or not, of the tonal variations, dark humour and continent-skipping structure can be found in Steven Erikson's Malazan novels).

Wolf in Shadow

We have already looked at Legend, David Gemmell's first novel, published in 1984. Gemmell subsequently produced several more books in the same setting and he was soon being pigenoholed as a heroic fantasy author.

In 1987 he shifted that perception with Wolf in Shadow (sometimes published under the title The Jerusalem Man). This was a post-apocalyptic novel, set in a world devastated by an unspecific event known as "The Fall". An episode later in the novel has the titular Jon Shannow, a gun-wielding antihero, discovering the wreck of the Titanic, indicating the action is set on the now-bone-dry floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The novel and its two sequels featured post-apocalyptic tropes combined with fantasy, particularly with the introduction of the Sipstrassi or Stones of Power, items with magical capabilities.

The core series featuring Jon Shannow is among Gemmell's most popular works, but it was later expanded with a duology set in ancient Greece and featuring Alexander the Great. The duology initially appears to be historical fiction, but the introduction of the Sipstrassi linked it to the Jon Shannow books and hinted at a grander, weirder scheme in place. Gemmell later returned to his Drenai setting and several new fantasy worlds before concluding his career with pure historical fiction, so it is unclear how this series would have continued.

Shadowrun

Released in 1989, the roleplaying game Shadowrun has a central premise which it executes very well: epic fantasy meets cyberpunk.

The roleplaying game and its attendant video games and novels postulate an existential catastrophe which takes place in 2012. The world is transformed, with some of the human population transformed into fantasy races like elves, dwarves, trolls and orks. Magic also suddenly comes into existence, other planes of existence are revealed to exist, allowing demonic entities and dragons to enter our world. Despite widespread death and destruction resulting from the catastrophe, humanity manages to survive and prosper, with technological advancement proceeding and the new races integrated into human culture.

The roleplaying game is set fifty years further down the line, with massive mega-corporations controlling the world and people surviving best they can. The game focuses on "shadowrunners", freelance agents who act as corporate spies, soldiers of fortune and mercenaries, working for themselves or corporations or underground resistance groups.

In Shadowrun's case, the mashing together of epic fantasy races, tropes and magic with science fiction and cyberpunk is wildly successful, bringing both a sense of fun from simply colliding the two worlds together and also allowing the creators to investigate themes of technology versus spirituality in unusual ways. After a lengthy period of relative quite, Shadowrun recently exploded back into popularity with the release of three new video games, Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall and Hong Kong. Its future seems bright.

The mashing up of fantasy with SF and other genres has generated interesting results, although success and sales have often been patchy when this has been attempted. The once exception is historical fiction, which epic fantasy has riffed on with frequent and ongoing success.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong

2056. A youngster from Seattle, raised in tough conditions and left behind when their foster-father, Raymond Black, moved to Hong Kong, is summoned to a meeting with him. Also attending is Duncan Wu, another orphan raised by Black. The meeting turns out to be a trap set by corporate police. Soon both of Black's wards are on the run. Their only hope is a disreputable triad boss, who agrees to help them on the condition they accept a new life as shadowrunners in their employ.

Hong Kong is the third game in the Shadowrun Returns series of games, following on from Dead Man's Switch (2013) and Dragonfall (2014). Like those games, Hong Kong is an isometric roleplaying game where you create and develop your own character, interact with others and carry out missions using tactics of stealth, frontal assault or hacking (or some combination of the three).

If you've played the previous two games things will be familiar, bordering on the identical. The game is bigger than the original game and perhaps matches Dragonfall in size. The story, which is more personal and complex to the player, is actually stronger, as is the writing. The rich background of the pen-and-paper Shadowrun roleplaying game is called upon to provide depth and backstory to the setting, which works pretty well.

Combat is still turn-based, tactical and fun. The other key mechanic, decking or hacking, is much-improved. The original decking mechanic was a bit dull but it's now been replaced by a new version in which you have to stealthily move through the Matrix to find the information you are after. Once you reach your objective you have to use a key-memorisation routine to actually get the info. Failure at any point triggers a response from the automated security systems. It's an entertaining way of handling hacking, certainly a big improvement on the previous two titles, but it also feels a little more cumbersome and time-consuming, especially when most objectives can be achieved through combat or dialogue instead.

The characters are highly memorable this time time around, with your band of adventurers consisting of Duncan Wu, a tough fighter with a chip on his shoulder; a genius dwarf hacker named Is0bel and an orc mage named Gobbet. Optional additions to the party include Racter, a fanatical transhumanist rigger living in the cargo hold of a grounded boat (which serves as your party's HQ). It's the strongest cast assembled so far for a Shadowrun game, with the characters each having fully-fleshed-out backstories and motivations for doing what they do.

The main mission hub is a floating criminal town, which is great. Running across the huge map between your base and the subway does get a little old, however.

For the unimaginative, Hong Kong does pretty much the same stuff as Dragonfall and the original Dead Man's Switch, so if you really liked those games, get this one. It isn't perfect, however.


First up, the game felt a little easier that is predecessors on the equivalent difficulty level. It definitely required less constant updating of equipment or armour than the previous games. I only upgraded my gun to a new one once, and I updated my armour only twice in over 15 hours of gaming. Despite this, enemies remained relatively unchallenging throughout and even the end-of-game boss (who you cheekily have to kill three times to make sure they're actually dead) was a relative pushover. If you want more of a challenge, Hong Kong may not really provide it.

Secondly, the developers went back to Kickstarter to ask for more money to make a bigger and deeper game. They definitely made a bigger game, with some truly huge environments and more NPCs in each area. However, there isn't a lot more actual content. The game takes roughly the same amount of time to complete as Dragonfall, there aren't much more quests and the number of talkable-to NPCs and interactive elements in each location remains fairly low. A struggle of the series has been that it's fairly sparse in terms of things to actually do in the game apart from to follow the main story. There isn't a lot going on in terms of optional missions or little moments of side-flavour. What is there is excellent, well-written and atmospheric, but it's having to support quite a lot of time when you're doing nothing more than running across the huge hub area for the fiftieth time.

If Hong Kong (****) is pushing the limits of the game engine and design to breaking point, at least it remains mostly entertaining when doing so. It's a well-designed, well-written and fun game which is certainly well worth playing and doesn't outstay its welcome. However, I hope it is the last game in the series on this engine and future Shadowrun games will be a little more ambitious and rich in content. It struck me while playing Satellite Reign (which came out a week after Hong Kong) that if the designers of the two games could join forces and combine the gorgeous Satellite Reign engine with the combat and writing of the Shadowrun team, they could produce something really impressive. Hong Kong is available now on PC from Steam.

Details emerge on SHADOWRUN: DRAGONFALL

Harebrained Schemes have released some new info on the first major expansion to their recent hit RPG, Shadowrun Returns. Formerly entitled Berlin, the new expansion has now been renamed Shadowrun: Dragonfall, though it will still be predominantly set in Berlin.

In addition to the name change, the expansion will feature upgrades to the engine, including the much-requested ability to save anywhere (this feature will also be patched back into Shadowrun Returns itself). The expansion will differ in format from the linear main game and will instead be based around hubs where, as well as pursuing the main storyline, the player will be able to pursue a large number of optional side-missions.

Shadowrun: Dragonfall will be released in January 2014.

Shadowrun Returns: Dead Man's Switch

The mid-21st Century. The world has been changed by an extraordinary event that has returned magic to the world and transformed millions of people into other races: elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls and other creatures of myth and legend. Technology and magic coexist in the shadow of vast skyscrapers, used by both the super-corporations that are supplanting the nation-states of the world and the shadowrunners, agents and mercenaries working for hire. When an old friend dies and sends a message from beyond the grave, you are called upon to run the shadows once more and find out what happened to him, and why.

The story behind Shadowrun Returns is almost as interesting as the game itself. Not satisfied with the course of the Shadowrun RPG franchise on computers in recent years - particularly the poor action game from 2007 - the franchise's creator Jordan Weisman licenced the rights back to his world and set about funding a new, 'old-school' RPG set in the world. This would be a somewhat small-scale game that eschewed modern, cutting-edge (and very expensive-to-create) 3D graphics in favour of story, writing and a more stylised art style. It would also be made for fans and funded by them: Weisman raised just under $2 million for the game via Kickstarter. A number of other companies have followed suit, but Shadowrun Returns is the first major Kickstarter-funded CRPG to make it to release.

Shadowrun Returns consists of two elements. The first is the base game code and a built-in editor, with which you can make your own campaigns. The editor is quite powerful, and allows for more elaborate campaigns than the one that ships with the game. Thus, new campaigns or modded versions of the base one will be released in the coming weeks and months. Amongst the listed projects are a remake of the famous SNES CRPG from the early 1990s, for example. This will extend the game's longevity extensively.

The second element is Dead Man's Switch, which is the campaign that ships with the game. Limitations in budget and development time have restricted the scope and scale of this episode, but it's still more than 10 hours long and features a large number of locations and characters, as well as a huge amount of writing. Rather like the Neverwinter Nights base campaign, Dead Man's Switch can be seen as more of an extended demo of what the editor is capable of, although it is certainly better-written and more entertaining than that older game's base campaign.

You start off by creating a character and choosing your race and gender. There are no classes as such, but archetypes that automatically set you up as a warrior class (a 'street samurai') or a cyberhacker ('decker'), a user of drones ('rigger') or a magic-user ('mage'). You can ignore these and funnel points into different skill as you see fit, to create a combat-focused character who can also do a bit of hacking on the side or a rogue-like character who can drop the occasional healing spell. This allows for a great deal of variety in the way you play the game. Your skills are reflected in dialogue choices, some of which open up equipment and even quests that are otherwise unobtainable in the game. Other skills can be used to open up alternate routes through maps, allowing players to bypass combat.

Completing missions (or 'runs', in the game's parlance) results in the player gaining karma points, which can be used to improve their skills and learn new ones. Karma points are only gained for achieving objectives, not engaging in combat, which means the traditional RPG standby tactic of killing every enemy in sight (regardless of it being necessary or not) to help level up is unnecessary. This allows for a greater focus on roleplaying, conversations and characterisation than on simply wasting everything in sight. Combat, when it does happen, is pretty solid. It's a turn-based affair similar to the system used in last year's XCOM, allowing for the use of cover and a mix of movement, firing and going into overwatch to guard against newly-arriving enemy forces. You can use magic, guns, swords, drones and thrown weapons (like grenades) in combat, making it varied and entertaining. For extra variety, deckers (or characters with hacking skills) can sometimes use computer terminals to hack into and turn defences (like turrets) against enemy forces.

You can only create and consistently use one character, but you can hire additional help for runs. Some other characters may also volunteer to join you. Hired help require funds to pay for them, and along with a steady stream of weapon and armour upgrades (which, in a refreshing change, have to be bought from vendors rather than found on dead enemies) this makes for a more involved money-management system than in most roleplaying games. That swanky new shotgun or suit of body armour may be awesome, but buying it will also mean having to do the next run with only three people rather than four. Shadowrun Returns is a more thoughtful game than most recent RPGs when it comes to managing your resources and it's possible to make some serious mistakes, so be careful with the decisions you make.

The game's storyline is fairly basic (a colleague's murder automatically triggers a message from him asking you to investigate) but unfolds with a number of intelligent twists and turns. The writing is above average for this kind of game, helped by the fact that there's no expensive voice acting. This allows for much more dialogue than normal in these sort of games, which opens up a lot more information on character and worldbuilding. The bouncer at the nightclub/bar which serves as your HQ for most of the game is more fleshed-out and has more of a personality than many major characters in AAA RPGs, for example. Unfortunately, the story takes a turn for the bizarre rather later on and the introduction of a previously-unknown power group who helps you out for the final mission, whilst a treat for long-term Shadowrun fans, feels like an unsatisfying deus ex machina for newcomers to the franchise.

The good writing (a ropey ending notwithstanding), solid characterisation, satisfying combat and great artwork are let down by a few problems, however. The game sometimes gets confused about your characters' placement and it's not uncommon to click on an enemy to fire at them and instead send your character running towards them. Killing all of the enemies in a location often doesn't end combat as it should, forcing you to undertake the rest of the role-playing-based exploration of the area in turn-based mode, which is slow and labourious. The game is extremely linear, not allowing free exploration of already-reached areas (so make sure you've combed every single location for potential items of interest before moving on). More annoying - to the point of losing the game half a star - is the absence of a 'save anywhere' feature. The game saves on loading new areas, but not necessarily on area transitions. There is no quicksave or manual save option. The game's linearity doesn't make this too much of a problem until the final few areas, which are both extremely large and packed with combat encounters. Bad luck can force you back 15-20 minutes to the start of the area, which is frustrating and unnecessary.

Shadowrun Returns: Dead Man's Switch (****) belies its low budget with impressively stylised visuals, great combat and good writing. Seeing the return to the deeper and more interesting RPGs of a decade or so ago is satisfying, but the game confusingly also embraces some of the more irritating weaknesses of modern RPGs: an iffy ending, relentless linearity and checkpoint-based saves which are often badly placed. Overall, though, the game is a lot of fun, its low price, focus and intriguing setting overcoming some minor frustrations. The game is available on PC from Steam right now. A second official campaign, Berlin, is due for release at the end of the year.

Trailer for SHADOWRUN RETURNS

Shadowrun Returns is a Kickstarter-funded, turn-based RPG based on the Shadowrun franchise. A mash up of cyberpunk and fantasy, Shadowrun Returns is set in a future where magic has returned to the world, along with non-human creatures like orcs, trolls, dwarves and elves.

Funded mostly by fans and created by Jordan Weisman, the original creator of the Shadowrun world and game, Shadowrun Returns is the the first major Kickstarter-backed video game to be created and released (FTL was also Kickstarter-funded, but only after most of it had already been finished), and is being seen as an important litmus test for the whole notion of crowd-funded video games. The second such game, Wasteland 2, will be released at the end of 2013, followed by the first half of Double Fine's Broken Age early next year.

Shadowrun Returns is looking good at the moment. It will be released on 25 July and will be available through platforms such as Steam.