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Shadowrun Chronicles (formerly Shadowrun Online)

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Review roundup from RPGWatch:

Destructoid - 7/10

Dedicated Shadowrun fans will likely be disappointed at the lack of depth, and your mileage may vary in terms of the appeal of the multiplayer function, which seemingly took over some of the other more endearing aspects of the series. If you haven't played a game in the series since the SNES however, Boston Lockdown is a decent starting point, and a perfect way to re-acclimate yourself to the genre with friends. If you prefer to fly solo, just go with Shadowrun Returns instead.

Entertainment Buddha - 74/100

Shadowrun Chronicles has a solid premise, but never lives up to its predecessors. Trading gameplay depth for a streamlined experience, Boston Lockdown is an interesting online effort that is fun but relatively shallow.

Metro.co.uk - No Score

Shadowrun Chronicles is a fun, fast-paced action strategy and the co-operative elements are a very welcome novelty. But it feels lightweight and undercocked in almost all areas, most obviously the story and role-playing but the combat as well. We assume that Shadowrun Returns is a more authentic adaptation, if only because it makes more use of the franchise’s unique setting, but it, and particularly follow-up Dragonfall, is most definitely a better game.

Monstervine - 3.5/5

Now as we all know, no game is without its technical faults and Shadowrun Chronicles has a few. First off it suffers from a few weird visual hiccups that just come and go throughout play. I’ve seen things like a weird dot popping up in the middle of my screen and not leaving until I started a mission, to skill icons moving on top of other skill icons during a battle. These sort of things don’t happen very often, but they do pop their ugly heads out from time to time.

Hey Poor Player - 4.5/5

If you want a good taster of what this game is like, just imagine this concluding paragraph in the voice of a cyberpunk JFK, in-between long, soulful drags of a cigarette.

“Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown didn’t exactly set itself up with a milk run, trying to splice a turn-based RPG with an MMO. The visuals are sometimes a bit drek, but the tactical combat is pretty wiz. Overall, if you daisuki the thought of playing old-school CRPGs with another runner, this BTL is definitely worth some of your hard-earned nuyen, chummah.”
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Wot I Think: Shadowrun Chronicles – Boston Lockdown

SC1.jpg


How old will I have to be, and how much drek with a vague Gibson theme will there need to be, before cyberpunk stops being catnip to me? All being well I shall never tire of people with mohawks and cybernetic arms wandering through dark’n’neon future-cities with Tokyo overtones, but I worry I might have said similar about zombies or space marines many years ago. The going’s still good for now, and as such I was a moth to Shadowrun Chronicles’ flame.


A sort of turn-based action RPG, it’s not from the same stable as the Shadowrun Returns series of heavily-scripted singleplayer RPGs, but it does license the same, excellent what-if-elves-and-trolls-and-dwarves-did-cyberpunk setting, and the P&P ruleset which accompanies it. As such, many of the names, concepts, skills, aesthetics and even mechanics are extremely similar, and you’d certainly be forgiven for thinking Shadowrun Chronicles and Shadowrun Returns were companion products, whether or not each game’s developers are silently wishing doom and despair on the other.


Shadowrun Chronicles, formerly known as Shadowrun Online, is a poppier, simpler take on the whole thing. While there is an over-arching plot, unlike the Shadowrun Returns games it’s straightforward, plain, makes few efforts towards characterisation, and none at all towards offering player choice and consequence. The plot is just there to propel you between battles. It’s not terrible for sure, and a couple of the voice actors do a decent job, but I can’t advise that you sign up for this as a story game. Then again, there are people who think Diablo III has a good story; maybe they’ll dig this too.

Really it’s about the missions, though. These are turn-based and grid-based, not a million miles from combat in Shadowrun Returns but closer to the XCOM model. There’s a heavy emphasis on cover and flanking, on special abilities with cooldown timers or single-use gadgets, and on sporadically being swamped by enemies who pour out of a doorway when you walk over an invisible trigger. In essence, it’s a good time. It’s quick, you get to fight a lot of people (and magic mutant dogs), the Shadowrun archetypes – spirit summoning, hacking, spells, guns, melee – offer decent visual variety even if most every power has been homogenised to ‘do some damage’, and despite clearly being made on a limited budget it manages to go town on its environments.

SC3.jpg


Despite all of that, Chronicles is fundamentally repetitive and naggingly hollow. Do mission, return to the tiny section of future-Boston which acts as your base, talk to same man to get a reward and a new mission brief, maybe do some shopping from a very limited selection of guns and armour, repeat. There’s a distinct lack of a higher purpose: you push on with the vague aim of upgrading your character, but there’s no meaningful sense of growth and minimal sense that it’s heading somewhere worthwhile. Thus, the key to enjoying Shadowrun Chronicles is, well, enjoying it. As in, derive satisfaction enough from simply playing the missions rather than hungering for an ultimate outcome or a major prize at the end of each.

That shouldn’t be a big ask, but in this age of unlocks and OTT cutscenes, it is. The missions aren’t individually memorable, and are particularly unimaginative about how to present a stiffer challenge: sometimes a script will swarm more enemies than you possibly protect all your flanks against, which did mean I had to repeat some missions a couple of times, but it never musters the dread of XCOM or demands the same degree of risk-taking. The base, meanwhile, is just a menu screen with set-dressing: having to walk between vendors just feels like a waste of time. But I did keep going back, even past the point where I felt guilty about how I was spending my time. I think that’s a recommendation?

Most importantly, you can make ghost bears take cover:
SC2.jpg


I should belatedly mention that you can tackle Chronicles as a solo game, with your DIY character aided by 1-3 pre-fab buddies who you have direct control of but aren’t persistent between missions, or as co-op with friends or randos, or as a bit of each. There’s more scope for chaos and comedy, not to mention battlefield mastery, with co-op, but personally I prefer singleplayer as I get to play as the whole squad rather than one individual who doesn’t get to do all that much per turn. Chronicles is clearly setup to be a baby MMO, though – public chat is omni-present and your inventory fills with slew of items inappropriate for your character but great for ad-hoc trading.

Unfortunately, even played as an exclusively singleplayer player game, Chronicles is affected by its online nature. My characters have occasionally been tardy to respond to orders as, presumably, some distant server struggles with the load, and sometimes I’ve struggled to click on an NPC shopkeeper because there’s a small horde of other players in the way. There’s no offline functionality, which is perhaps fair enough for a game once known as Shadowrun Online, but it badly feels like the option should be there for those who want it.

SC4.jpg


The community seems small but generally amiable, in my experience. There’s lots of chatter offering up spaces or help for tougher missions, though equally I’ve seen gentle smackdowns of people repeatedly asking for items on public chat. Grud only knows how it’ll play out in the long term, as I have serious misgivings about Chronicles’ longevity, but if you dive in right now you’ll find apparently good-natured playmates easily enough.

What is, frankly, a slightly barebones game is lifted higher than it perhaps deserves to be partly because of the theme – it’s hard not to get a kick out having a cyborg troll summon a spectral bear to attack a mad, shotgun-wielding dwarf – and partly because of its character designer. It’s a slimmed-down take on City of Heroes’ wondrous avatar creation tool, with a less manic dose of Saints Row’s anything-goes ethos. I was pretty happy with making my katana-wielding Ork into a Commissioner Gordon-alike, and even happier when I decided to add denim hotpants into the mix.

SC8.jpg


You find bonus clothing items hidden around the missions too. While you’ll end up with a few too many repeat items, the temptation to try out new stuff as it arrives is irresistible. And there are no rules whatsoever about who can wear what:

SC5.jpg


Add in a freeform skills upgrade system (again very similar to Shadowrun Returns) which means your character can be all bruiser, part hacker, a mage/machinegun mashup or whatever mix you decide to put your points into, and you’re looking at a game which just about keeps its head above mediocrity. It’s a shame the same anything-goes mindset doesn’t apply to the mission structure and the story, because the dryness, repetition and general rudimentary air is what will ultimately keep me from coming back for more, but if you want a few hours of XCOM-lite with cyberpunk trimmings and the option for co-op, you could do a lot worse than Shadowrun Chronicles.

Shadowrun Chronicles – Boston Lockdown is out now.
 

Grokalibre

Savant
Joined
Apr 28, 2015
Messages
458
Location
Greater Europistan Caliphate
Found the game for a decent price at g2a so I figured I'd give it a try (I enjoy both x-com and the sr universe).
Well that could be a fun game but it's plagued by the worse lag I've ever experienced, something like a minimum of 30s between my click and the moment my character reacts.
I can actually feel getting older trying to get past a mission.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Devs go bankrupt: http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/115...nues-as-cliffhanger-files-for-bankruptcy.html

Hi all,

As some of you may have read on the forums, today Cliffhanger Productions Software has officially signed for bankruptcy. I will explain what that means for Shadowrun Chronicles in a second, but let me preface this with a personal message to the team: I have never been prouder and felt more privileged to work with you. The past weeks and months have been incredibly difficult and stressful and the fact that to the last man and woman everyone continues to work on this despite the situation out of dedication to the players, the game and loyalty to your team-members is simply amazing.

Now to the matter at hand.

Facts first:

1) Cliffhanger Software is the developer filing for bankruptcy. This does not mean it will close down automatically, we are in talks regarding the studio.

2) Sister company Cliffhanger Games owns and operates Shadowrun Chronicles and continues to do so (Next game update should be out next Wednesday hopefully). It is not part of the legal procedure at present.

3) We have several plan in motion right now on how to continue but obviously there are a lot of moving parts at work, so we cannot be completely sure how it will turn out.

4) We are not called Cliffhanger for nothing. We not going to give up and we remain dedicated to improving the game and servicing our players.

How did we get here?

Building SRC has always been an uphill struggle, as many know. We obviously had a horrible amount of bad luck in our launch week seriously affecting our vital week one sales and our ratings and the game has received mixed reviews for various reasons. In the end sales are not at the level we had hoped for. This in itself would not kill the company, Shadowrun did and continues to generate revenue, which is why we are confident we can continue to operate it.

However in order to get to the release of the game we had to borrow money and we had to ask our team to forego part of their wages to be paid back to them once the revenue from Shadowrun came in. The team had agreed to this, risking their personal financial welfare while slaving away in crunch time. I have thanked them for this privately and now publicly and it is a rare display of dedication in this day and age.

With the bad hit our sales took the future prospect of SRC is limited – we can operate it with a smaller team but we cannot pay back the debt we owe to our current team and the people we borrowed money from at the due dates. Thus we are legally required to file for bankruptcy in the development studio. This procedure may end in several ways ranging from restructuring the studio to selling it or shutting it down. We are working on a number of plans and have to see which if any will come to fruition.

So what happens to Shadowrun Chronicles?

The game will continue as is, with the upcoming first challenge mission planned for Wednesday and be run by Cliffhanger Games. (I played that challenge today and we made it past Wave 2 on the second attempt having used up all our DocWagon Gold cards and Rocket launchers, so it may still be a little on the easy side). The license is not for sale (even if we wanted) and we either need to do this ourselves or hand it back to Microsoft.

I cannot pretend that future patches will not be affected by this, but we have plans to rebuild as a smaller, more agile team that can survive from SRC revenue for a good long while. These plans entail not being able to employ everyone who is currently working on the team. The amount of personal grief this brings me is immense – it may be the reality of the labor market, but these are not some anonymous employees, this is the team that has carried SRC all the way. I hate to be in this situation and powerless to prevent it and the last time I was forced to cut down a sizeable team as a manager due to a company restructuring (back at Vivendi Universal/Blizzard) I quit alongside the team. But I am not quitting Shadowrun Chronicles.

The next two weeks will likely be affected by the legal procedures and we will not be able to keep working fully on the upcoming Gamemaster PvP Mode, but I do hope we will be able to pick up mid June and in the meantime have at least one more challenge mission released.

Now the game has a lot of shortcomings, which I am the first to admit. It is a labor of love but it has also been driven by circumstances and it shows in some of the slightly hurried states parts of the game may have been released in (Hello Karma and Hello Nerfbat). But at the same time it is FUN – in single player and especially co-op. In fact co-op is MUCH more fun than I anticipated and SRC is pretty unique in combining turn-based action strategy, co-op and RPG elements successfully in this way. And I believe it has not yet realized its full potential by far.

And now?

In a situation like this some people will be skeptical about buying the game for fear of not being able to enjoy the game they bought. What we need is actually the opposite. We need more people buying this right now to support it – every penny we make is helping us keep more team members to work on this and is an investment into more future for Shadowrun. Because in order to survive the game needs a team, but it also needs a community. A community ranging from the wonderfully whacky to the critically inquisitive, filled with wonderfully supportive people united by a love for Shadowrun. We will continue to engage this community as best we can. If you think this is a project and a team worth saving, we can use all the support we can get right now to hang in there.

What about my SWAG? You owe me a (insert backer reward package)

Cliffhanger Games has the funds to fulfill the rewards. However obviously any buck we put into this will take away from potential development budget of the team (we put back a bit of money according to our initial estimates of what the swag would cost).

We are sorting this out (we are still waiting for deliveries of the boxed versions, the Lockdown books have not even been shipped from the printers yet and we are still collecting feedback from backers on T-Shirt sizes and delivery addresses). In light of the current situation I need to ask for a little more patience from you (I know delaying by over a year may have stretched that pretty thin already). We will come back with news about that once we have a clear view ahead. Please understand that we strongly feel our obligation to deliver, but we need to take care of things at home first.

:hero: :hero:
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1964352341/shadowrun-online/posts/1278391

Hoi Chummers,

we have been silent for a while here at Cliffhanger Central, as a consequence of the insolvency procedures involving Cliffhanger Software. We've had a lot on our hands and are still in the process of getting the Cliffhanger Games company into shape, with our main goal being the continuous maintaining and expanding of Shadowrun Chronicles.

For the last few weeks we had to go through a lot of administrative stuff, dealing with banks and trying to come to an agreement with our partners, who were understandably scared about the prospects of Cliffhanger Games also going down. Our equipment was seized and we lost access to our former office, which had us working on an alternative that would allow us to regroup, set up an external server, get our systems running again and get everyone remote access to them, in order to keep working. Things did not come to a stand still; we've went on preparing the next update with the Red Challenge and a bit of crit chance un-nerfing (as well as Mark improving crit chances), but with all our employees enjoying forced holidays and limited access to a joint server, things have not exactly been speeding along either. That being said we are testing the update build and should hopefully be ready to release it in two weeks, as we also have to fix the nasty grouping issue that has been popping up repeatedly.

We've also had meetings and talks with the remaining team to see who would be willing to keep going and how we could work together most effectively. Everyone has been working incredibly hard during the last months and the exhaustion and frustration over the turn of events hurt all of us personally and as a group. Our deliberations had us look back at the mistakes we made and formulate a plan to sustain our vision of an ideal company in a less than ideal world. The emerging vision has certainly energized the team and got the creative and collaborative juices flowing. Now we need to pour this into concrete terms and structures in order to bounce back with full force.

Our current plan is to release an add-on for Chronicles towards the end of October (once you are all done with the no doubt excellent SR:Hong Kong), and we are in the process of discussing and estimating the features and content for that. The rough plot fo the campaign part is done and greenlighted with Catalyst and now we need to detail things out a little more. The fate of Jane (determined by your decision at the end of the campaign) will play a large role in the story to come – currently a slight majority of people have decided to kill her, but with the next update we will make the choice and consequences clearer hopefully, so people how their decision will affect Jane, which may change that. Of course, the winner of our recent band contest will also influence the future of Bozeman (who vanished from the Market) and two more contests in July will determine the fate of a couple of more people such as our fearless reporter Alison Sanborn as the puzzle pieces come together for the fall of the megacorp. Yes, that one is still on and we are building up to it (albeit slowly).

Some more changes are going to be made to the way we operate - we want our players to take a more active role in beta testing (and get out of the frantic balancing patches) and will grant access to our staging servers again. If you are interested in joining this (everyone who had access to the "backer" beta version in the past will have so again) please send a mail to support with your email, steam account name and OS - we love to get feedback, especially from all you experienced players out there.

We are also done with the upgrade to Deluxe edition DLC, it is sitting in Steam's review cue and should hopefully see the light of day soon.

For the Kickstarter backers we already mentioned we would try to save as much of our physical rewards budget as we can for game development and some of you were gracious enough to be willing to forgo the physical rewards completely to support us. Thank you again for that! Thankfully, our friends at Catalyst have agreed to allow us to put up a number of their books in pdf format as a replacement for any physical swag we intended as rewards. We will send out details on this in the coming weeks, but basically you can swap your physical reward tier for a number of coupons of equal value and redeem those for pdfs. We know not everyone will go for this, so we will send out yet another survey about who would be willing to do so.

That is it for now – we will keep you updated as things continue to evolve, of course, but expect us to still be less responsive than we usually are for the next two weeks. There is just SO much stuff to set up and organize, that we are pressed for time.

see you in the shadows primetide
 
Last edited:

naossano

Cipher
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
1,232
Location
Marseilles, France
I guess it is wrong link.

Anyway, they should reconsider their pricing. If they aren't as good as the other SR series, they have to be way cheaper.
 

butchy

Prospernaut
Joined
Jul 23, 2006
Messages
493
I honestly think this game is better than any of the SRR games. It had better combat, upgrades, etc. I had a ball getting to cap, well worth the money I spent on it. I don't like playing with other people, I only like killing them, so the end game wasn't appealing to me.. I definitely don't see it as a waste of money though.
 

Infinitron

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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Hey, they're still alive: http://store.steampowered.com/app/267750/

Shadowrun Chronicles: INFECTED! is Available Now

October 23, 2015 - Nordic Games and Cliffhanger Productions Games have released INFECTED! The first add-on for the turn-based, tactical co-op game, Shadowrun Chronicles, INFECTED! continues the Boston Lockdown story arc set in the 2070s of the Shadowrun timeline.

INFECTED! puts players in a race against the clock to save themselves from the nanite-induced disease that has struck Boston following a failed experiment by two megacorporations, costing the lives of thousands and turning the city into a battlefield infested by crazed cyborgs trying to take over any metahuman they can find. After discovering that they were infected during one of their fights against the headcases, they players struggle desperately to find a cure for the Cognitive Fragmentation Disorder they are suffering, while an AI inside them tries to assert control over their body and mind.

The add-on for Shadowrun Chronicles features all new enemies, missions as well as skills, weapons and cyberware for the player’s Shadowrunners and various improvements to balancing and solo gameplay. The players will have to face evolving headcases, a cult of fanatic technomancers and a competing team of runners (chosen from actual player avatars in a recent contest) crossing their path time and again.

The game is available in digital stores for $9.99 and is also part of the Deluxe Edition of Shadowrun Chronicles.
 

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