Shadowrun Boston Unlocked
Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown was released in 2015, unplayable at first, barely playable later. It released an expansion in 2016, went into maintance mode shortly after, and got shut down in mid 2018. Efforts to revive the game with private servers were stuck in Limbo for eight years. But it finally happened last month! Shadowrun Online has returned.
The History
2012 was the year when Kickstarter exploded into the mainstream. Half a million backers spent 80 million dollars on game-related projects that year. Among those successfully funded Kickstarer projects was Shadowrun Online - a project started by Cliffhanger Productions, a development studio located in Frankfurt/Germany and Vienna/Austria. The campaign netted them just a bit more than the half a million dollars they had asked for. That the singleplayer game Shadowrun Returns had already made 1.8 million just shortly prior, was a bit of unfortunate timing. Many Shadowrun fans probably had already blown their money on that.
First signs of the project had already surfaced at the tail-end of 2011, when the website shadowrun.com showed up - just a placeholder/teaser website by Cliffhanger. Shadowrun Returns on the other hand came as a total surprise - with the launch of Kickstarter doubling as the reveal of the game. That two separate Shadowrun projects would coincide like that, was only possible because Microsoft (owning the rights since their acquisition of FASA Interactive in 2001) decided to split the license into two: one for offline, singleplayer games, and another for online, live-service style games. This split was less weird back then, than it is today - but it still was more of a rare thing, rather than common practice.
Jordan Weisman - the original creator of Shadowrun - was a founding member of Harebrained, but also acted as an advisor to Cliffhanger. That resulted into a deeper collaboration between both projects, with talk about potentially shared characters, and story tie-ins, and maybe cross-over events and stuff like that. Despite all that amicable cooperation, I still think that being second did hurt their numbers on Kickstarter. Nevertheless, half a million dollars is very good result. Even in that record year of 2012, only 17 projects on Kickstarter made over a million.
While Return’s 1.8 million (probably more like 1.5m after fees and taxes) might have just barely covered the development costs of a very small studio that also has some self-funding, working on a 2D game for one-and-a-half years - there’s simply no way that Boston’s 0.5 million could ever cover their roughly 3-year development cycle for a 3D online game, even if that game is rather smalle and limited. Cliffhanger even openly said so right from the start - and they probably took additional funding from their own pockets, as well as likely getting some funding from their publishing partner on top.
The Game At Release
The resulting game was a small, fairly limited, online game affair. I wouldn’t really call it an MMO, because of how completely instanced everything was - and espeically because players could not trade any items or anything. There was a hub area, where you could run into some other players - but all the missions were completely separated off into their own small instances. A bit similar to how Guildwars 1 handled things. The released game also was a lot more streamlined than earlier developer blogs, interviews and videos had suggested. They did have ambitions to lean more heavily into the pen&paper aspects of the game, and have more depth to hacking and lock-picking and environmental interactions.
In it’s “tactics” style gameplay, the game had many parallels to Cliffhangers previous title, Jagged Alliance: Rage! But where JA:R had reaction fire, suppression fire, directional visibility, etc. brining it somewhat closer to other tactics games like XCOM or Fire Emblem - Shadowrun Chronicles offered far less mechanical depth, and was a way more streamlined experience. It still was kinda fun to play, because the turnbased combat had great fluidity to it, and the mission-based structure meant you got to play a chain of individual, tactical combat encounters. The difficulty level of the combat also was challenging enough that positioning and methodical movement really mattered - which made achieving good runs feel greatly satisfying.
But, because of the severe lag-problems the game launched with - that fluid combat experience only ever materialized for a short time after a server reboot. On average, it took more like 30 seconds to end a turn, before the next turn started - and that turned combat into a slog. During the worst moments, delays could be upwards of a minute. Apart from that, some features and parts of the game were just broken or not available on the servers for most if not all of the time. That nullified most if not all of the benefits of the combat streamlining. The issue was never fully resolved either. Developers released some patches with attempted mitigations, started to do hourly reboots of the servers, but the biggest improvements in performance still came from quickly declining player numbers.
Overall it just wasn’t a very good game - but despite it’s flaws, it still garnered a loyal following - a small niche audience, deeply into the game and it’s cyberpunk world. An expansion called “Infected” was released, adding more story missions to the game, and also more multiplayer focus - while playing solo with NPC henchman turned more into “hard mode”.
The game ran for only 3 years before being shut down in 2018. At that point player numbers were so low, they were barely able to cover the server costs of running the game. The license for the Shadowrun IP was running out, and Microsoft had no real interest in renewing it. There also were reports of “persistent ransomware attacks” driving up the costs. At that point in time, the game had already been running in “maintenance mode” for quite a while, and what remained off Cliffhanger Productions was an empty shell of it’s former self. Both the company and the shadowrun.com website ceased to exist not long after.
The Revival
Plans for enabling the community to host their own private servers and keep the game alive that way - even after the official shutdown - started right away. One of the remaining developers even went so far, to imply that if everything else failed, the game’s files and source code might mysteriously appear as a downloadable torrent at some point.
But things did go better than expected: after the MADE (Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment) expressed an interest in leading the effort to preserve the game, it was somehow possible to get the blessing from Microsoft to go ahead with that, and the developers did hand over the game files to the museum. Now, I don’t know what exacty Microsoft said or did - but it seems unlikely that there is an actual contract or license invovled. Feels more like an informal: “okay, we won’t cease&desist you as long as the museum is involved” to me. But maybe I’m wrong about that.
Then Covid happened, and the MADE went into total hibernation. For many years there was no real update or any information about any progress being made. One lone developer streamed one or two sessions of him trying to get the game servers running - with no success. Then silence. The main problems seemed to be, that the received files and data were incomplete, that the game run on some obscure version of Windows Server, used some strange middleware that wasn’t even commercially available any longer, and also required expensive database licenses and other stuff that really stood in the way of releasing any of it as open source.
In the end, the only way to actually get the game back online was to completely re-implement the server from scratch - without re-using any of the existing source code or old tools or technology at all. This method is called clean-room reverse engineering, where the resulting “clone” of the software should behave identically - but without sharing any internals. With access to the binaries of the original server and client, it should be possible to analyse every possible server-request and the corresponding response - and re-implement a new, different server, that delivers exactly the same responses for exactly the same requests.
And that’s exactly what happened in April this year. After a whole 8 years, an open-source re-implementation of the server appeared - together with a private online server, that you can connect to, if you own the game on Steam (or have the latest version of the game files through some other source). To me it seemed like this game was simply gone forever - but here it is! A great victory for game preservation.
This shutting down of games is what the “Stop Killing Games” initiative is trying to prevent. But this “having to do a clean-room re-implementation from scratch” also shows why keeping a game alive often isn’t as simple as “just release the source code”. The developers may not have the rights to release any third party source code they used, or some publisher in-house engine or tools they used, and there might be commercial middlewares involved that are no longer available at all at the moment of the shutdown.
My Own Experience
I’m a fan of tactics style games and greatly enjoy playing these kinds of squad-based tactical battles, where positioning matters and you really have to be methodical and careful. I love XCOM (both old and new), I love Fire Emblem, Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics. When I got the game at release, or shortly thereafter, it was basically unplayable. But a few weeks later, I was able to have some fun playing it, despite the incessant lag and non-working systems.
I just love the ability to jump into a tactical combat encounter, that is challenging, requires some methodical approach to positioning and usage of characters, and that doesn’t take forever, but also allows me take short AFK breaks midway through (because there’s no time limit on turns). It’s in some ways very casual to play - but also kinda hardcore with regards to the difficulty and how easily a single botched move can cause an entire run to go south. But being able to control the entire squad - and in any character order you want, including moving a character forward to uncover more map, and then acting with the others, before pulling that first character back again… that allows for being very tactical and methodical in your approach. Which also allows you to beat even challenges that should theoretically be too tough for you.
With the fully re-implemented private servers and the lag mostly gone, this style of gameplay is great fun to me. Just have a little tactical battle whenever you want, at your own pace, at a decent challenge level. And while doing so, you also progress through the story-line, get Karma (XP) to upgrade your character and unlock new abilities, as well as money to upgrade your equipment. It’s easy to get hooked on the “just one more mission” effect. And the streamlined nature does help with making this enjoyable, since you control 4 characters of different classes, and already have to deal with positioning and timing all of them… it helps keep things flowing well, while you solve the puzzle of which character’s attack to use on which enemies from which position.
But that is where the game’s multiplayer focus comes in. And I don’t think it’s bad that the game heavily incentivices team play with other players, instead of going solo with henchmen. It is supposed to be an online-game after all, and does make it very easy and convenient to team up with others, and the loot is shared with everyone, and teaming up is the only way to replay missions and earn more XP and money. The problem I have with that is not the other players, or the teamwork, or the “lfg” part of the equation. My issue is, that it suddenly becomes a very different game. When you play with others and control only one single character… that whole challenge of using every character in the squad in the right order, right position and right way goes completely out the window. Everyone controls their own character, and there’s little to no coordination about who does what, and attacks when and where…
That whole tactical and methodical approach… just evaporates. Players act in random order, without consultation. Everyone does their own thing, and with many players having significantly more upgraded characters, it becomes just an exercise of steamrolling the enemy. And when you get only one single character to control - and that tactical layer is gone - then I start to get a feeling of lack of depth. What was helpful streamlining starts to feel like things being dumbed down too much. If you got only one character, and without the tactical coordination layer - things get rather monotonous quickly. And since I’m the newbie, I just tag along, barely able to keep up. I can’t take an afk break either, because that would keep the others waiting. Everyone has better equipement and haste - and I have the “wounded veteran” trait, which reduces my movement speed by a square. I can’t even keep up - everyone’s far ahead of me on the map.
Sure, I do get XP and money - and that’s what you’re grinding for, to max out your character. And it’s definitely faster and more efficient to do so in a group - rather than doing those slower and more methodical battles solo. But it no longer feels like playing a tactics game. It’s absolutely nothing like XCOM or Fire Emblem, when played that way. Instead it becomes a grind to make numbers go up. Which is a shame, because I now do have access to the Infected expansion as well, which would continue the storyline and offer more mission chains. But neither those, nor the repeatable daily and challenge missions are really doable solo - at least not at the character and equipment level I am at.
I managed to do the first story mission of Infected well enough, even solo with henchman. But they are a step up in difficulty, compare to the original campaign. Still doable, still fine - but the second mission then also seems to significantly increase the size of the map and the number of enemies. Not just that - it also seems to increase the “aggro-range” of enemies, meaning you trigger a lot more at once, which will come running at you from further offscreen. Or maybe they are being spawned in on the fly? I don’t know. I just know, that the smallest wrong step will cause you to fail the mission - you must do it perfectly all the way through, and that “all the way” is getting increasingly long. It’s definitely meant to be taken on with other players. Which I’d love to do - if it just wasn’t… that different of a play experience.
I just so happen to love that tactics style gameplay, which solo play with henchmen offers, but multiplayer simply does not. So what am I suppposed to do? Either repeat tough-as-nails missions until I finally make it through - or submit myself to just being the fifth wheel in a group of players?
The main campaign is still great fun to play, and if you own the game on Steam, you totally should go check out the new private server. And maybe - in contrast to me - you do enjoy the multiplayer part. After all, the community is very welcoming, and will happily invite and join and friendslist you. And gladly help you with whatever mission you need help with.
Would recommend overall. Check it out.