The Shadowrun game (recently discussed here) came out over the last week or so and… well… you owe it to yourself to try the demo out. Disregarding whether or not it is true to the Shadowrun license’s feel (as well as my own personal longing for a Bioware-style RPG set in the SR universe), it does some very interesting things in terms of design.

The game is unabashedly a shooter, but the powers have all been tweaked to stretch what has been done in FPS titles previously, most notably things like using powers to see through walls, glide between buildings and teleport at will into the next room over. It’s… well, it’s very different.

I realized today that I actually have a Shadowrun team member on my contacts list, and so I decided to ask the obvious question. Why an FPS?

It’s what the FASA team is good at.

Fair enough. You go to war with the army you have and all that. But what was more interesting was what was said next.

They had an idea for what might happen if you took the cheats people did in most fps games and integrated them as part of gameplay.

That’s right. Shadowrun is, for lack of a better term, a game that has incorporated wallhacks into it’s core gameplay. And the results of this ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ mentality is so fascinating that every armchair designer should take this title for a swing.

(Unfortunately, I’m still hopeless when it comes to aiming a gun on a console. PC version, here I come).

Original comments thread is here.