FASA founder Jordan Weisman has said that once Microsoft bought the studio, things changed.

When Microsoft bought FASA Interactive and incorporated it into Microsoft... the two reasons they bought us was, one, they wanted the catalogue of intellectual properties and, two, they felt that we had developed a really good development culture. And the reality is that, pretty much from the day we moved to Redmond, that development culture was destroyed.

I don't think the studio ever really had a chance. It was destroyed right in the beginning.

Well. Not much more to add to that, really.

Microsoft "destroyed development culture" at FASA - Weisman [GI.biz]

One of these titles has already been announced: Piranha's Mechwarrior reboot. But more might be on the way, with Weisman telling GameSpot:

Most of my time is invested in [Smith & Tinker], but in the wee hours of the night, I spend time thinking about the older properties. I think Crimson Skies is something we'd love to get some energy around, and we have some devious plans—we'll see if those materialize.

That'd be nice! But while there's encouraging news on the Mechwarrior and Crimson Skies fronts, Shadowrun fans shouldn't get as excited, as 2007's disastrous multiplayer shooter has Weisman saying "Shadowrun was recently...not treated well...shall we say, so the thought was let a little time pass before approaching that one again".

Crimson Skies revival planned [GameSpot]

IGN say that tomorrow morning they'll be running an interview with a Mr. Jordan Weisman, who will explain what the trailer is all about. Jordan Weisman runs the company that now owns the rights to Mechwarrior. Jordan Weisman formed FASA, who used to own the rights to Mechwarrior.

So, yeah, it's probably a new Mechwarrior game.

Mystery Mech Game Solved [IGN]

If you frequented the official Shadowrun forums, they are planning a new place where people can meet in an off-Microsoft type property. Honestly, given that most games have digressed to a chaotic free-for-all (with a fair share of team killing to boot), and troll katana has become absurdly unbalanced, it pains me to say that you might be better off just saying bye for good.

Announcement: Forums Closing Soon [via n4g]

We're not quite ready to announce our plans for each property, but please be assured that our goal is to surprise and delight old fans, while welcoming new fans to these fantastic worlds.

Smith & Tinker's License Procurement Announcement [Smith & Tinker via Gamasutra]

Still, there are a handful of options we'd still like to see implemented in a currently nonexistent, future patch:

1. Even if I set my options to only find one map, I often cannot play that map. Why, after no suitable game is found with my preference, can't I have the option to begin my own?

2. Server connection losses can be common when server players quit. How about a clear notification when you are server, with the option to be like, "Hey, I'm just playing this one round and I don't want to screw 16 people so don't make me server this time, ok?"

3. DLC DLC DLC DLC DLC

4. UPDATE: Splitting parties. Yeah. What's up with that?

I've been digging Shadowrun. And while there aren't 1,000 levels, the only downside I've seen to the design is that character models are limited, sometimes confusing identity of attackers by repeating skins (and cutting my bloodlust as I mow over endless streams of pitiful katana elves.

In summary: New patch works. Pick up the game. Lose to me often.

"We went to E3 with our most neutral environment, which was only meant to be neutral. We didn't have our lighting working right...the characters blended into the background, so we quickly learned our lesson on that and everything we've done is about making the characters come forward. " -Evan Hirsch, Art Director, FASA Studios

When I visited FASA a few months ago for an early look at Shadowrun, I talked for a long time to Art Director Evan Hirsch about E3—and more specifically the royal spanking that the game's graphics design had received at the event. He was clearly humbled by the situation—not just the negative response from fans—but from his own peers in the business.

At the time, Hirsch was retooling characters while testers played a game full of trolls running around in red and blue footie pajamas. Given my long infatuation with footie pajamas, I just had to see how this story turned out. So I set a date to talk more around the game's release. Hirsch and I, along with FASA Studio Head Mitch Gitelman, talked for nearly 45 minutes as I baked in a hot car under Texas sun (a necessity for a quiet interview on the road). Still, I enjoyed the conversation and Hirsch's blunt explanation of Shadowrun's art design.

In other words, yes, this article is long as hell. Yes, Hirsch said a lot of interesting stuff. Yes, there are lots of pretty pictures for those too lazy to read.

Characters In Differing Environments: Making them Shootable

"Our characters are effectively a studied signal to noise...The problem is, the more realistic you make [them], if you go with, say, Gears of War, the signal to noise is really hard. That works in a Gears space but it doesn't work in a wicked-fast, twitchy space," Hirsch explained. "We didn't want to make them cartoony, because we know how people thought about that... For me it was about finding that balance point - how do you make it very different and very visible?"

Easy: Profiles, Color Pallet and Lighting (I may have been given the answers.)

Racial profiling may be frowned upon in real life, but it's essential in Shadowrun. Knowing a troll from a dwarf is relatively simple to design, but what about knowing an RNA (corporate) troll from a Lineage (native) troll—just from their profiles? A solution was found through symmetry. The RNA is symmetrical, from the characters to their monolithic environments. Meanwhile, the Lineage assets are equally asymmetrical, breaking the corporate mold, so to speak.

Color Pallets are organized in a similar fashion, with cold tones (blues) denoting RNA and warm tones (reds) denoting Lineage.

"Why'd we go with blue [for RNA]? If we went with green then it's the military in the Tom Clancy games...Why don't we go with brown? Then it's Smokey and the Bandit and the forest service," Hirsch said. "But we had to explore all this, because we wanted them to look like mercenaries. Blue is really the only color that made them look like mercenaries without being the army."

Using lighting, Hirsch and his team solidified the color palletes of both the characters and the maps. Since these environments (in essence) match either red or blue color palletes, lighting clarifies any potential blending issues that may crop, and allow fine tweaking on the "moving target" factor. Note: I just made that term up and have no clue why I put it in quotes.

Ultimately, these decisions combine to a relatively unconscious gaming experience in which a player simply feels like their character does or does not belong on a certain map or alongside a certain team, adding a sense of story and identity to a game that technically has no story other than that in the manual.

Or as Gitelman put it, "whether or not anyone reads the story or not, they know that one's there."

Creating Drama on a Budget

"The biggest challenge of Shadowrun for me - as an art director - was I had 16 characters on screen that could, at any given time, each spawn three characters. Each one of our characters is carrying roughly 65 bones," said Hirsch. "That means I've got 3,072 collision detection calculations potentially in every frame...And I've got 30 bullets a second per character."

So disagreements can become petty slap fights easily.

"John (lead designer) and I had many screaming matches over whether or not I could have weeds in hallways," said Hirsch. "Because if I draw weeds, is that gonna cost him bullets and frames? Everything on that screen costs you something."

Hirsch also gave me the example of rails on stairways. He needed them to invoke a sense of speed, but those working on gameplay could use those resources for any number of other things. In very few cases designers had to compromise hugely to squeeze them in: like by omitting collision detection.

Another price of the online game environment was that the entire map had to be loaded into the 512MB of RAM at all times, since buffering simply isn't an option when you can teleport indoors to outdoors or up 5 stories of a building in a manner of seconds.

To make the game work, Hirsch had to "rob" the RNA level's development time to give the team a longer window to make the complex Lineage and slum levels possible. And by choosing International Style Architecture for the RNA, the art team was able to create a look that wouldn't require painstaking technical compromises at every turn.

"They're a simple form, but they actually, to your eye, don't look like simple extrusions like they normally would in a hallway shooter because these buildings have been around for hundreds of years, you understand that style of architecture...We just add texture and color and lighting to mess with your eye, but that was it."

And Hirsch is right: the ultra-sterile RNA maps are simple without making you feel cheated. The non-RNA levels, as we talked about before, fall back on the property of asymmetry to create identity and tension.

"One of the big goals for me and John was that in the slums maps, you always feel like you're being closed in on, you always feel like you're in a Alfred Hitchcock film."

"All the angles are odd angles, nothing is perfectly linear, everything is off. All The buildings if you look up are coming in over your head more than they're going away. And we do all that on purpose to make you feel more anxious and uncomfortable," Hirsch said. "In the corporate spaces they're much more ordered, and actually you have a different problem that in some cases they're so symmetrical that you get lost."

So What's Missing?
Every developer has things they wanted in a game but just couldn't make happen. Here are Evan Hirsch's top three:

More Effects/Shaders
"The look we came up for the magic like teleport, smoke and resurrect, all had this wonderful unique look. What I wish I could have done more was getting more of a tech look to work on the tech effects... we hired in a new guy who comes from the film industry and wrote his own shaders, and it wasn't until the last month of the project that he figured out how to work it within our engine. The shaders he wrote for something like the minion are just stunning. The minion's hot shit... I really wish we had gotten our head around it much earlier."

Female Elves
"The biggest compromise was the female elves. We had a whole set of female elves that we just loved, but...we agreed that to bring females in we'd need to have them move differently, and we just didn't have the time to get that done. We had the models built and the skeleton built and we just couldn't get it in on our date."

Various 3D Atmospherics
"The last one is, and this was a conscious decision, we had to cut a lot of the real 3D atmospherics that we had in. If you see in the intro video there's a waterfall. That waterfall was actually in the game. It was the waterfall or the minions - guess who won."

Too bad...that waterfall was "hot shit".

Bungie's Frankie had a little sit down with some of the FASA team working on upcoming shooter Shadowrun.

In the short Q&A Team FASA's John Howard, Lead designer; Sage Merill, Core game design; Derek Carroll, AI / Core game design; Christopher Blohm, Training / Level design; and Bill Fulton, Matchmaking / UI design talk about Counterstrike, Halo 3 and dendrophobia.

Most interesting is the team's take on the similarities between Shadowrun, Halo and Counterstrike:

On Counterstrike

Sage - Counterstrike is an awesome team based shooter, so yeah we consider it a compliment. On the surface, Shadowrun does share some basic design elements with Counterstrike. For example, it is round based, there is no automatic respawn, and you purchase equipment/powers based on your performance. So ignoring the races, round one is kind of like a CS game. However, that is where the similarity ends. By round 4 of a Shadowrun game your avatar is like a tiny god, and when gods fight, it's nothing like Counterstrike.

Derek - Counterstrike is an awesome game. Shadowrun is awesomer.

On Halo

Sage - Shadowrun combat its less about perfect aiming, and more about superior position. You choose when you enter and when you leave combat. It is a constant chess match to maneuver into situations where you have the advantage. In Halo 2, you win the fight, or you die. Halo 2 is all about your aiming skill, and it's difficult to disengage once a fight starts.

Bill - Halo 2's multiplayer was very focused on 'fair competition'—visible player skill levels, had to play new opponents after every match ended, etc. Shadowrun's multiplayer is more focused on social play—you can play with the same opponents after the match is over, no visible skill (although we still matchmake according to player skill) and strong team work is required to win. And of course, we stole Halo 2's party system, 'cause it rules.

I had a lot of fun playing around with the Shadowrun beta and I hear the graphics look much better in the final product. My only complaint was that the beta had a very limited mapset, but I'm sure that won't be the case with the final game. Brian Crecente

Shadowrun Shenanigans [Bungie]

An alleged former FASA employee lashed out at the company and its management on the forums, hinting that a mass exodus was in order and that decision makers have opted "to cut the tumor that is Fasa studios from the body of Microsoft." Ew. The same poster also had some fairly unkind things to say about the quality of the game, suggesting gamers "wait for Halo 3."

1UP contacted Microsoft to learn more, but, sadly, got little in the way of confirmation or denial. FASA programmer and forum mod Kimona added to the thread:

Shadowrun will be shipping soon. It's been a long three years for many on the team. I'm certain that some folks will be leaving us to do other things after we ship. That's normal, and it's healthy, too. As for our contingent staff here, they're just that - contingent. They have a maximum amount of time they can work here before taking a mandatory break. Many of them are complete star performers, but when the job's done, they move on, and the job's almost done.

Personally I've enjoyed my time with Shadowrun and hope that FASA nails it when they ship. And that the Shadowrun license can extend to more games. Michael McWhertor

Rumor: FASA Studios Shutting Down [1UP]

I was told that over the next month they would be adding more poeple to the beta program, with a release date more in line with the June date that Gamestop has in their computers. We also need to keep in mind that this is a print magazine, which had all of its stories written well before GDC, where our information comes from. Things could very well have changed between now and then.

So, Shadowrun in April? I highly doubt it. I believe this is just a case of old information, which print mags are chock full of these days. Don't worry little print mags. People will always need something to read in the bathroom. Michael Fahey

EGM: Shadowrun releases in April [Xbox 360 Fanboy]

I might have been a bit harsh, but I am a rather large Shadowrun fan, and I don't just mean the amount of water I displace when submerged. I religiously bought the RPG supplements, and I own a grand total of forty Shadowrun novels. I once owned a hamster named after the character Striper, who much to my chagrin could not kill a man with her bare hands...paws...whichever. Maybe not as fervent a fan as the ones who sent the developers death threats, but definitely a strongly worded letter level geek.

How has playing the game changed my opinion? Well despite the massive differences between the RPG and the game (magic spells that don't exist, storyline changes, no cyberspace) the developers have managed to inject the essence (no pun intended) of the series into a first person shooter that, even without the Shadowrun license, I can see having a great deal of fun playing.

Like the RPG, the FPS game lets you customize your character to reflect the way you want to play. If you want a big bruiser who can take a hit, choose the troll, who has the power to get tougher the more hits it takes within a certain period of time, to the point where spikes visibly form on its body as you shoot it, fading away as time passes. If you want something a bit more run and gun, pick the agile elf, the fastest of the characters who can leap into the fray, score some choice hits, and then leap out again, keeping the slower characters on their toes. You can be a melee fighter. You can be a sniper. You can be an essence syphoning Dwarven bastard, who drains power from the people, powers, and constructs around him.

Much like the RPG, the balance of technology and magic plays a pivitol role in the game. The more tech upgrades you get, the less magic you can cast. In the RPG, the more of your body you replaced with machine bits the less you could tune tap into the world of the spirits. Once again, not perfect, but the feel is right.

The magical powers themselves provide new strategies never before seen in an FPS. One of the gentlemen showing me the game told of a FASA player that would teleport down into the middle of a firefight, summon a creature to cause havoc, then teleport through the floor, letting the mellee continue above him, only to teleport up again after things had slowed down a bit to mop things up. As he talked the other presenter was playing the game. He fell off a roof towards the firefight, and at the very last possible moment kicked in the glide power, landing safetly and suprising the heck out of the bot players below.

One controversal power is ressurection. In Shadowrun the RPG, there wasn't any, but that doesn't work too well in an FPS format. The devs have come up with an interesting middle ground that delivers a great new twist on bringing the dead back to live. If you ressurect a player, their essence is linked to yours. If you die, they slowly start to bleed out. If a player rezzes you, and then you rez someone else, the guy who started the rez chain suddenly becomes one of the most important people on the map. Should make for some very interesting rounds indeed.

Yes, bots. As a novice FPS player, bots are an element of the genre that are sadly underused. I love to practice with them, and if I find myself getting my ass kicked in a game with real people it is something I can do to vent my frustrations. Bots in Shadowrun might give me a run for my money, however, as the presenter (really need to start writing down names) told me they had to tone them down a bit to give players a chance against them. Bots will use powers effectively and even ressurect a dead player if they get the chance.

After much talking and many questions, I finally got a chance to play the game. They had it running simultaneously on a PC and an Xbox 360, with the PC running Windows Live. For some reason seeing the Xbox Live blades on a PC was very odd, but the two integrated seamlessly. I played a few rounds on both machines, and I'm going to have to give the thumbs up to the PC controls over the 360 controls. Much more precise using good old mouse and keyboard I'm afraid.

Gameplay starts off like a regular FPS, but soon I was seeing the possibilities that the title has to offer. I chased a character around the corner only to have them turn into smoke as I chased them, temporarily invunerable save for the blow spell, which I did not have. Using my smart link upgrade I unloaded a chain gun into a crowded melee without hitting y teamates even once (there is no friendly fire option, carebears). I beat a dwarf to death with the butt of my rifle before figuring out that the rifel will not fire unless you are zoomed in using the scope.

Gameplay was tight yet frantic, and finding a spot to camp with my rifle was made a lot harder by the fact that other players could use special vision to see where I was, even through obstacles. One of the other writers there had mastered the art of teleporting, and was really beginning to piss me off. Luckily he ran out of magic power on the wrong side of a wall.

As I played I not only saw the gameplay possibilities in this Shadowrun title, but also the possibilities for expanding the series in the future. While they couldn't talk about future plans for the franchise, it was obvious that these guys had a great love for the series, and while the success of this game could lead to the RPG all Shadowrun fans are craving, the FPS is looking to be a really exciting entry into the series for all but the most hardcore of purists. Michael Fahey

While the game will also make a PC appearance, the Shadowrun public beta is currently open only to the console crowd and will run from mid-December to March 07. That's, like, over three months of free gaming!

Don't count on getting into the beta, as there will surely be a sea of applicants begging for a chance to play, but don't let that (or the site slowness) deter you. Go now! Michael McWhertor

Shadowrun Beta Applications