Shadowrun Returns, from #HarebrainedSchemes, hit Kickstarter back in 2012 with a reasonably modest $400,000 goal. It promised to bring back the #Shadowrun role-playing game franchise, offering a mixture of technology and magic set in a #cyberpunk alternative future, as a proper RPG – as opposed to Microsoft’s 2007 reboot, which re-imagined the franchise as a multiplayer first-person shooter. The project smashed its goal, ending with $1.8 million in funds, and launched on tablets, smartphones and PCs in 2013 to generally positive reviews.
So this Hong Kong spinoff still has a ways to go before it can smash Harebrained Scheme’s previous record, but it’s got until 17th February to do that. So far it smashed the $100K goal in two hours. By hour three, it had achieved its first stretch goal of adding enhanced player controls. It’s since raised a total of $276,761, enough to fund stretch goals for animatic scene transitions, new party member Ractor the Russian, and more animatic endings.
[kickstarter url=https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/webeharebrained/shadowrun-hong-kong width=”480″]
An expansion, Dragonfall, followed both as an add-on for the original game and as a standalone title – and now the company is back for a third crack of the whip with Shadowrun: Hong Kong. ‘We’ve already begun development of the Hong Kong game,‘ claimed Mitch Gitelman, co-founder of Harebrained Schemes and executive producer of Shadowrun, at the launch of the Kickstarter campaign. ‘We’re self-funding the first 12 hours of gameplay at the quality level of Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Director’s Cut. But we have plenty of ideas for features and runs that didn’t fit into our budget. We love Kickstarter and we think there’s no better co-funding partner than our fans to help us take our game to the next level.‘
The promise that development is already under way from a studio proven to have succeeded with Kickstarter projects in the past, and that backers will be given an opportunity to influence the game’s design, appears to have struck a chord with the company’s fanbase. Its extremely modest $100,000 goal was smashed within two hours of the project going live, with the current total standing at nearly $316,000 with 34 days still to go.
At this stage the developer is only looking into developing the cyberpunk RPG for Linux, Mac and Windows PC. “We have elected to focus all our efforts on PC in order to deliver the best game we can without the current processing and memory limitations of tablets,” the developer noted on its Kickstarter. “This focus allows us to have higher-fidelity visuals, larger map sizes, and more stuff on screen.”
‘[Hitting the goal] means we’ll be able to add Enhanced Player Controls, Animatic Scene Transitions and Racter, our favourite Russian, to your team,‘ the company announced in its first update to the project. ‘All we want is to do our very best work for an audience who wants what we’re making. So, thanks for the (rapid) outpouring of support.‘
The game is expected to launch in mid-2015 for Linux, Windows PC, Android, Mac, and iOS. More details are available on the official Kickstarter page, where rewards start at $15 for a digital copy of the game on PC plus soundtracks from all three titles.
