Figured last year is good and over, might as well review what we actually got from what we were promised back in December of '12.
First off :
SHADOWRUN : CROSSFIRESpring 2013
For the first salvo of the year, Catalyst will publish Shadowrun: Crossfire, The Adventure Deckbuilding Game. Designed by Fire Opal Media, it features the very best designers in card games: Gregory Marques, Mike Elliot, Rob Watkins, Rob Heinsoo, Jay Schneider and James “Jim” Lin.
... Nope. What was supposed to start the year off never came around. At all. Details have been kept quiet. While one would expect card lists, descriptions, and game mechanics to be readily available by this point, FOM hasn't even updated their website. Laughable. The Catalyst crew was doing their best at GenCon to promote the game for FOM, but it seemed like 'The very best designers' wanted nothing to do with the product.
Grade : FNext up, Shadowrun 5th.
Summer 2013
The year will continue with Catalyst’s launch of the Shadowrun, Fifth Edition RPG. Shadowrun, Fifth Edition is the latest version of one of the most popular and successful role-playing settings of all time.
Released first at origins, and then late re-released at GenCon, the latest edition of SR arrived 8 years after the 4th edition launched. The product improves greatly upon 4th in a number of ways, but seems to skew heavily against things that were never broken in the first place. It seems likely that 5th suffered from an incestuous playtesting and development cycle, where mechanics and ideas hat were perceived as problems by a select few, were destroyed or otherwise heavily nerfed. For example, when asked during a public Q&A session at GenCon why Technomancers were nerfed so heavily, J. Hardy infamously responded : "Because we thought they were too powerful." So they went ahead and made Technomancers useless. I suppose that was some sort of compromise between the old grognards who hated anything new, and the few reasonable writers left. Bizzare choices for inclusion also abound. Why the fuck is their a Shark mentor spirit? Do we really spend that much time in the water to justify such a silly addition? Why is it even in there? Oh. Because once again, insular design and playtesting. Pure stupidity.
The Matrix section received a very nice mechanical upgrade, being more streamlined and easy to use then ever, but left several key questions unanswered. Further, while it seemed early on that deckers would be able to participate in combat using their matrix skills, the character generation system presented in 5th doesn't actually allow a decker to do anything meaningful in combat, and most times, unable to hack as well as they could in the matrix. The defenses suggested for basic hosts and targets, when they aren't downright illegal by the rules of the game, are too high for an "average" decker to break with any regularity, making the work done to improve the basic matrix gameplay in the firstplace almost useless.
Further still, despite an earlier promise to keep up with questions asked, be more open to the community, and not leave unanswered problems festering like they did in the past (which they at times vaguely blamed on a number of reasons), needed errata has been noticeably absent. Instead, there's an obvious push to crank out new product instead of fix the existing ones.
Grade : C+ Next up, Sprawl Gangers
Fall-Winter 2013
The next big release for the year occurs with Catalyst’s publication of Shadowrun: Sprawl Gangers, a tactical miniatures game designed by Ross Watson and Randall N. Bills.
Still no sign of a release date. Their choice to go with CoolMINIorNOT, who's creations of oversexualized, gravity-defying bizzarely-proportioned naked women for most of their miniatures product, clearly puts their target market at sex starved nerds. Perhaps if the choice was made to use a less scummy outfit, the game would have been released already.
Grade : FI'll combine the snoozefest of the save-less SR Returns, and the complete absence of SR:Online, and put the video game grade at a D.
OVERALL Year End Grade : D-Could have been great. Addled by delays, broken product and promises, and completely lack of accountability. Maybe this coming year we can look forward to last years product? Maybe?
