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J'ai récupéré 3 articles qu'ils ont posté au cours de l'année dernière, portant sur plusieurs sujets qui éventuellement peuvent intéresser les gens voulant plus d'info. (enfin au moins sur ce qui est prévu, à voir ce que ça va donner)
http://www.shadowrun.com/shadowrun-o...dowrun-online/
As promised, it’s time to dole out some insight into the game’s plot. Fear not — there shall be no spoilers; just a sneak-peek at the story and an inkling of how we plan to treat story progression in Shadowrun Online (SRO).
As you know, SRO will be a little bit MMO, a little bit not. Many backers have expressed their wish to run with their friends, and while we’re all for that, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Any seasoned MMO player has surely experienced the effect of different progress speeds, i.e. you start off as one big, happy family; but then one guy (or gal) isn’t able to keep up with the group, and two of your street sams join another guild and pretty soon it’s a total clusterf***. This effect is even more pronounced when you add in different platforms and take our mixed model of campaign and free-to-play accounts into consideration. Ok, so what’s our plan?
First off, unlike many solo-RPGs, we’re not looking at SRO as a linear main story with side-quests. Instead, we view it as “experiential phases” – chapters, to the layperson – in a continuously developing 6th world (or at least the small corner of the 6th world inhabiting our servers), with the meta-plot moving towards certain key events. So, from the get go, you’ll of course experience YOUR version of the game, stringing together your specific path within the plot, which becomes your unique story; but everyone has their own unique story. What’s also notable is that everyone on the server will contribute to the game world’s advancement.
Obviously, with the world being moved forward by each player, we don’t want to leave anyone behind, or put off newcomers — which is where the “chapter plan” comes in. Many of our runs consist of “mission boxes” which aren’t necessarily linear, and whose successful completion depends on player strategy. For example: your Johnson – an overworked, desperate Ares officer – contracts you to stop a bunch of marauding, psychotic, “high on some new drug” gangsters. Occupying different locations, these loons are indiscriminately killing innocents. Now, depending on your team, you may want to tackle the gangsters hiding in the Talismonger’s Shop, or the ones barricaded in the Stuffer Shack, or the ones torching cars on the street corner, or the ones holding hostages in the office building etc. SRO won’t force you to take on the whole lot, though you’re free to do so. Instead, once you’ve secured a certain number of locations, you may discover a common pattern to the gangsters’ craziness, thus unlocking the next mission box and advancing the plot. After enough other players have advanced this far, Ares may order an attack on the gangsters and a new global mission box will unlock for all players, perhaps offering a special mission for those in Ares’ good graces. Also, there might be an additional mission box dealing with halting the drug’s production. All of these mission boxes may in turn improve Ares’ standing on the mega-corp “power board”, thus influencing the next layer of unlockable missions (for instance, other mega-corps might start hiring operatives for sabotage runs against Ares). Many of these boxes can be played at different power levels, or at least within a certain power tier. So while there is a slow, server wide-progression that coincides with runners’ collective effort, new players might start off seeing only certain box parts, and by the time they advance into the appropriate power tier, Ares may have already been brought down a notch. By then, NeoNet might ask you to steal a shipment of those drugs for examination in their SOTA lab. So while it technically means you play the same mission map with the same goal (i.e. hijack the drug shipment), the mission context changes and so does your personal story; and of course, enough successful runs means NeoNet gains an advantage on the corporate power board, thus unlocking new global missions for or against them.
What does it all mean for you and your band of not-so-merry men? For one, you don’t have to do every mission in order, which makes it easier for runners that “missed” a mission to join the team. Secondly, your group may choose to do runs together, or each player may do them at different times and then team up again for the “next” unlocked mission box. Thirdly, even if your team is at different power levels, you can still play the same missions and profit from them. And best of all, everything contributes to your favorite mega-corp’s standing.
There are several power tiers in the game, which coincide with plot phases — so after a while your runs will lead you deeper into the game’s scheme, churning up juicier missions. Ultimately you’ll arrive at a point where each faction/mega-corp is scrambling for control…in other words, the campaign’s ultimate mission box. What follows is an all-out shadow war for a unique item that holds the key to some of the 6th world’s deepest secrets…no, it isn’t an artifact or Anvil’s lost album. The struggle may take the form of actual PvP against other runners, or coordinated PvE conflicts within a given timeframe (think of it as one faction seeking as many successful mission completions as possible against the other factions).
The goal is to take the classical MMO structure and mix it with a “dynamic world” experience while allowing you to select your personal mission path, which you help shape. We encourage group play (or “association”, “network”, or whatever term we settle on) no matter whether you’ve been shadow-running together for the past few weeks, or just dropped in for a spontaneous, first-time session. As the game progresses and the stakes get higher, we want players to join forces with other players without requiring 30 people to be present simultaneously for a massive raid.
Sure, it’s an ambitious goal and it may sound slightly (or even very) complicated, but it’s all about creating a memorable game that plays fluidly and feels natural.
To maintain some level of control, one thing we need to do is lock you down in certain locations. All MMOs do this in some fashion (the world geography ends, areas unlock over time, etc.), but we’re going further: in SRO, the lockdown actually meshes with the story. In fact, even the SRO campaign book will be called Lockdown! How’s that for synergy? Anyways, instead of embracing some weird mechanic to keep you from veering off course, we decided to make the lockdown theory a cornerstone of the game. To wit: the city is on lockdown. Nobody gets in or out, which means resources are scarce and a lot of Johnsons are in need of assistance, since most law-keeping forces and mega-corp armies have their hands full enforcing the lockdown. In a total lockdown, many things (including most virtual connections) get cut off, which means fewer prying eyes; an ideal situation for the shadow denizens set to get some work done, for gangs to run amok, for old feuds to be settled (the hard way), for power grabs and for straight-up, citywide havoc. As violence erupts amidst a desperate struggle between several mega-corps (who by the way are hiring every disposable asset they can), the city descends into chaos. This means blood in the streets and more work for the Shadows.
A city left to its own devices while a shadow war wages? Who wouldn’t wanna be part of that?
We’ll finish with a story teaser: it all starts with a blurry trideo recording of a dragon bursting forth from an underground complex in mid-town, writhing in agony and then going mad, killing hundreds of people in a frenzy and laying waste to a corporate arcology. In its wake is found a weird trace of iridescent rain…and an entire city must deal with the aftermath.
http://www.shadowrun.com/shadowrun-o...lls-and-feats/
Hoi Chummers,
As many of you have by now played Shadowrun Returns from our friends at Harebrained and hopefully also picked up the recent Shadowrun 5th Edition, we are getting a lot of questions regarding how Character Creation and Skills will work in SRO. Well, here are a few answers and ideas on this.
Skills have always been one of the most fun parts of building your character, especially in an open, class-free system such as Shadowrun. In SRO they are the basis for all the actions a character can perform during a run, so the skill and its associated stat determine your chance for success, but we also have something we currently call maneuvers/spells (this may change), which is where the real fun starts.
In a combat and co-op oriented online game a lot of the SR skills don’t make sense or work differently (there is little use for your expertise with wine tasting or your aptitude for flying airplanes). Further, different from your game group or even SRR, where on some runs certain characters don’t actually see too much use of their primary abilities (spoiler alert: Don’t take a decker with you on the last SRR run ), we want everyone to be equally active inside a mission. AND we want everyone to be equally powerful! Now in normal RPGs, fighters are often strong initially, but at a certain point they are massively less powerful than mages, for instance, with their large area fireballs and group spells. In Shadowrun, where guns are still the primary means of getting your enemy to drop and magic drains the user, mages are often underpowered compared to an augmented samurai with several actions, especially when fights drag on for a while. Throw in hackers who usually do their matrix attacks alone for an hour while everyone else gets pizza and you see how this could be an issue for a game you are supposed to play with your friends simultaneously, but where there is no GM to switch actions back and forth continuously.
So here is our simple solution (brace for impact): We’ve done away with the established skill groups altogether and tried to make every individual skill equally relevant. Furthermore, we put implicitly similar skills into one skill, to strengthen it. For example, Summoning, Controlling and Banishing a spirit are all sort of different aspects of the same thing: Dealing with spirits. But while a Street Samurai may choose different maneuvers such as the various burst shots with just one skill, the Shaman would need three skills to deal with spirits, putting him or her on a numerical disadvantage regarding skill development (add to that the cost for being awakened and the need for less combat-useful stats). A Shaman in SR has more versatile tools at his disposal since spirits can do a lot of things – but many of those are not relevant in SRO, so we need to compensate for that.
At the same time, the life of a Street Sam player can be pretty boring: Get maxed out on gun related skills, stats and actual guns and armor and you are pretty much done. There is no shiny new exciting spell to learn and no matter what cool gun you have, it does the same thing you first did – just a little better.
Which is where maneuvers come in. The higher a skill gets in SRO, the more new maneuvers or spells you will be able to learn (or hacks or rigging tricks etc.), but these will add a variety of flavors to your skill. This goes beyond aimed shot, burst and full burst, though, since similar amounts of maneuvers exist for single shot weapons and for automatics (so both can be viable options instead of single shot being the unloved stepchild), but they focus on different effect areas. Some of the maneuvers and spells may be familiar to you from the SR tabletop rules (such as the aforementioned burst variations). Whenever you apply a skill, you actually select the maneuver you want to use for it – you don’t just shoot your SMG with your automatics skill, but you can choose from a number of maneuvers that belong to that skill. They all have cooldowns, though your standard attack maneuver is the default with zero cooldown.
For example, with that automatics skill, you start out with the standard automatics attack which lets you shoot someone with any kind of automatic weapon, then you should get the long burst which adds an area of effect to your attack and after that you can choose (or get both, if it’s worth the karma to you) between suppression, which will hinder your targets movement and force them to hunker down, or spray and pray which is good against fast targets with high evasion scores, but has less damage. This means, that down the road, you will specialize in different tactics and spells for specific situations.
Each skill has between six and ten maneuvers attached (with awakened skills usually getting closer to ten for versatility) and to max them all out is similar to getting your skill to a solid 12 in SR5 and then some. Depending on how you combine these maneuvers you can get a pretty flexible mix. You may opt for being able to deal damage to devices, drones and headware with your Black Hammer or supporting your team through the more subtle interfere maneuver, which plays havoc with your opponent’s weapons and targeting, allowing your street sam to sneak in for the silent kill. You can spoof access to a camera to edit its feed with your rigger or create an illusion with your mage to fool it.
We’re still working on the final scope of skills, but so far we’re at over 50 maneuvers and counting. If you manage to coordinate well with your teammates there are a lot of great combinations of maneuvers – such as the mage whittling down a heavily armored enemy’s protection so that the gun adept can open up with all he’s got.
The idea is always for everyone to be useful in the majority of situations, to be able to learn new tricks as the character progresses and become more versatile (but NOT just get the same maneuver in a more powerful version) and for no two street sams or mages to be too similar once they get further along in the game (so theoretically you can max out everything if you play forever). What we did in fact is – since we are forced to reduce the variety and number of skills to the ones that are useful – to invest more variety into each skill area for those that we DO use. It is kind of a mix of melting skill groups into a skill and adding more spice to skills by coming up with fun and varied maneuvers. The added bonus is to make the system more user friendly – you don’t choose to first shoot your gun, then select a specific way in which to shoot, then calculate the modifiers, instead you just select the appropriate maneuver directly and also immediately get your to-hit chances, effects and other info displayed, so you can make an educated decision.
While it breaks a bit with the current SR and differs a bit from the SRR system, we think it makes the whole thing more fun for our game, which is what it should all be about.
See you in the Shadows
Primetide
http://www.shadowrun.com/shadowrun-o...ath-and-taxis/
Hoi Chummers,
there have been discussions some time ago about perma-death and the relative danger a Shadowrun mission should pose. A lot of this has to do with the mission structure: things like how often can you rest, heal-up and stock up on equipment. Today we want to give you a bit of background on that.
In Shadowrun fights are dangerous. Not “Level-1-D&D-get-killed-by-a-rat-bite”-dangerous, but as health does not massively increase over time, character death remains a constant threat. On the other hand, if you are wearing some standard equipment and have invested into Body, you can usually withstand a couple of shots from an Uzi without being mowed down. For SRO, we want combat to be even more dangerous, making fights more tactically challenging.
Unless it makes a difference what you do each step of the way, tactics would otherwise quickly degenerate into a mix of ‘stock up on equipment’ and “geek the mage first” and you’d be pretty much safe in all but the most dangerous circumstances. But we want to keep you on your edge and thinking in any combat situation. So, combat will be deadly. Walking into a fight with a bunch of Halloweeners without looking for cover and using your skills and tactics should get you killed for being stupid. And it will.
Although turn-based combat has a tendency to feel less nerve-wrecking than real time stuff, we want to keep the pressure up. So you have a turn-timer (which also makes sure you don’t leave other players waiting in co-op) and you’ll have to take actual life- or-death-decision when making moves. Our rule of thumb will be that any serious combat situation should get the better part of your average three-person team killed unless you behave cleverly.
What is a combat situation? Well, the way we design maps (remember we are cross platform), a map should take something around 15 minutes to play. A map thus holds 1-2 ‘situations’, which are challenges. This could be just a warehouse filled with nasties or a string of connected offices, forcing you to plan your advance door by door. It could be stealth or combat, though both require tactics. For us stealth does not simply mean ‘use an invisibility spell to walk by any guards’, although that could be part of it. Infrared cameras, motion sensors, drones and magic sentries are not easily fooled and knowing when to hack the camera without raising alarms or how to mute the magic sentry require tactical decisions and the clever use of skills as well.
A Mission may consist of a string of maps called a Mission-Chain and you cannot get back to the hub during the time you are in it unless you abort the whole chain. So, no healing up, no re-stocking or spending Karma within a mission chain. Think of it as for example the different levels of a building you have to go through to reach the top floor or a chain of underground caverns. Your alarm level, your damage and the things you did carry over to the next link in the mission chain. So if one map is usually dangerous, a mission chain should be fragging hard to accomplish. Especially because, if your team dies, you are going right back to square one. Not to ‘the last convenient safe point’, but to the start of the chain.
On top of that, your equipment will be limited. This is not a dungeon crawl with tons of equipment in your trusty backpack right next to the 1 million gold coins you collected. Shadowrunners travel light and thus the amount of stuff you can carry is limited. This goes for healing as well … Which is where DocWagon comes in – DocWagon taxiing into combat will be one thing that will allow you to carry on even if you are shot to pieces. They can stitch you right up … for a price. In SRO, your friends will actually be able to extend their contract to you, so generous friends will be in much demand.
Well, initially, when everyone is learning their way around town, things will be a bit nicer, a limited time DocWagon contract will sit in your pocket as you get used to life in the Shadows. But after a while, you will have to earn your Nuyen the hard way, just like Shadowrunners do.
There will always be easier missions around, some paydata grab or a little breaking and entering to get you back on your feet, though. And of course if you are really careful, plan well and know your opponent’s weaknesses, you will always have an edge. But if you want to play with the big cats of the megacorps and become a name on the streets (whispered in awe and respect) – well, you will have to bring your best game. Because this is what it means to be a Shadowrunner!
See you in the Shadows,
Primetide
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