Designing Shadowrun: Crossfire has been a happy blend of translation and innovation.
Translation matters because Shadowrun goes beyond being a beloved roleplaying game. Shadowrun is one of the touchstones. Even gamers who have never played Shadowrun know that the game takes cyberpunk, magic, Native American shamans, elves, and orks, and purees them into its own brand of Kurosawa-touched street noir.
Shadowrun struck a chord when it was published in the 80s and it’s still finding new chords for new audiences. I’ve met Native American parents proud that their kids were playing a game in which Native Americans take the country back. I’ve met gamers who shudder when they talk about what happened to Chicago.
From a game design perspective, we had to translate the things that give Shadowrun its identity into the framework of a new type of experience. Catalyst helped by providing a list of ten essentials for the Shadowrun universe, a list I think you’ll see in SR5. But even before he had that list, Crossfire lead designer Greg Marques had established a core gameplay experience that takes the familiar figures of a shadowrunning team and forces them to cooperate turn-by-turn to take down threats that no single runner could deal with on their own (at least not until you play the solo missions!).
As a game designer, I believe there is a special line where translation and innovation blur. To truly translate an originally innovative game into a new genre, you should come up with ideas that strike the audience as new, and that get people excited the same way they felt about the original game’s innovations. It wouldn’t do justice to Shadowrun to produce a deck-building game that struck dedicated deck-builder players as the same-old/same-old.
Of course, it’s a bit strange to talk about the deck-builder genre originally created by Donald X Vaccarino with the brilliant Dominion as if it could already have a same-old/same-old. But the new mechanics created by Crossfire co-designers Greg Marques and Mike Elliot point out that there were some assumptions that other deck-builder games have been making and that those assumptions can be elegantly refreshed. Dedicated deck-builder players are going to uncover something new playing Crossfire.
And when they do, they’re going to be doing it as the members of a team of shadowrunners, embracing the roles that long-time Shadowrun players know from hours around the tabletop: Street Samurai, Decker, Face, Mage. When Crossfire players start looking for more on the world behind their game, and Shadowrun 5 players note that the Crossfire Level must have increased because there sure-are-a-lot-of-people shooting-at-them-all-of-a-sudden, then everyone ends up with new people to play with.
Yours in a bright Post Mayan-Apocalypse,
Rob Heinsoo
Lead Designer, Fire Opal Media
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