There's a new Shadowrun game on the way. We jacked into the matrix and hacked into Harebrained Schemes co-founder Mitch Gitelman's mind to get all the details
The first two Shadowrun games were excellent examples of what we at GameWatcher like to call ‘Kickstarter Done Right’. Smartly-written cyberpunk RPGs with great characters and tight mechanics, both games did a terrific job of rooting you into the cut-throat, deadly world of the gun-for-hire shadowrunner. Now developer Harebrained Schemes is crowd-funding another entry in the franchise, this time moving the action across to the bustling, corporate-controlled metropolis of Hong Kong. The fans are clearly wanting more – Shadowrun: Hong Kong reached its campaign goal in less than two hours. I chatted to a presumably very chuffed Mitch Gitelman, co-founder of Harebrained, about his team’s latest project.
GameWatcher: The first thing I noticed about your Kickstarter campaign for Shadowrun: Hong Kong was just how confidently structured it is. You clearly feel quite comfortable with the process now.
Mitch Gitelman: It’s funny, having lived through the two Kickstarters that we’ve done previously, this one was much more well planned! First off you’ve got to understand, when we did Shadowrun Returns, there had been only a tiny handful of video game companies, around ten I think, that had even done Kickstarter. So there was no path, we were just making our own, making it up as we went. We called it ‘organic’ [laughs].
With Golem Arcana, our second one that sold gangbusters on our first day, a hundred thousand dollars or so on the first day, and then the second day? Crickets. Third day, crickets. Then we realised we might be in for a bit of a knife fight here if we want to make this game. With Hong Kong we knew the score, we had earned our audience. I think that’s the key actually, releasing two Kickstarter games and doing our damnedest to exceed our backers’ expectations, we really understood how to do it this time. We worked out our budgeting, planning and stuff, and it felt like a real different animal to us this time around.
GameWatcher: Were you surprised by just how quickly you met your target goal for Hong Kong?
Mitch Gitelman: It was an hour and forty-five minutes actually. Yeah, that was fun. Surprised? Absolutely, you know all the research we’d been doing and all the people we talked to said that Kickstarter was way down, and that there had been only five or six video game projects in 2014 that had funded over around $350,000 dollars. We thought we were going into something of a depressed market, and we decided to just do our best. We have our plan, we know what we want to do, if people help us out then that’s great. If they don’t then that’s that. I guess the fates had something else to say.
GameWatcher: Do you think a certain part of your success is down to reverence for the source material, the pen-and-paper RPG?
Mitch Gitelman: I think originally it was reverence for the source material, absolutely. A sense of nostalgia. Whenever my partner Jordan [Weisman], who created Shadowrun, and I are at a convention or a trade show it is nearly inevitable that someone will come up to us to tell us their Shadowrun story. We were at GenCon, which is a huge convention that I’ve been going to since I was fourteen - that’s where I met Jordan actually - and this girl comes up to us. She’s dressed as a wolf shaman, and she tells us this story; she says her father loved Shadowrun so much he actually moved to Seattle, which is where the core game is set. That’s where he met her mother. Yeah, this is a pretty cool gig. There are people out there with really heartfelt memories of the PnP game. Because it’s so fun.
GameWatcher: So, on to the actual game! Setting is obviously key to each game in the franchise, so what makes Hong Kong a unique city to visit?
Mitch Gitelman: First of all the political climate is completely different. In Berlin, the setting of Dragonfall, there was this experiment in ‘stable anarchy’ called the Flux State. Where you never knew who was going to rise to power, and you were stuck in the middle of that. With Hong Kong it’s a free-enterprise zone that’s corporate-controlled. The corporations really are the government here, so that’s a major change. Also, in Hong Kong magic doesn’t work the way it does in other places. There’s something called ‘wild magic’. In Shadowrun you get these lay-lines that cross the Earth, and mages and sorcerers who stand on them find their power increased. In Hong Kong those lay-lines are called dragon lines, and they behave very differently. You don’t know exactly how they’ll affect your magic when you stand on them.
Other than that you’ve got bleeding-edge cybertech, biotech, things like that. Then of course the corps that are there, some of them have histories going back generations. It’s not like they all have this cold, corporate culture, they all feel very different. Then you have the other factions, street gangs, the Tongs, Triads and so on. Plenty to work with, and a great environment to write a story in.
GameWatcher: Your Kickstarter page mentions needing to earn ‘face’ amongst the various factions to survive. Is choosing a particular faction to support a key part of Hong Kong?
Mitch Gitelman: I’m glad you brought that up actually, because I missed that out in the last question. Yeah, that’s an important part of it, something called ‘guanxi’, that’s your social network. You can imagine as a shadowrunner that would be a pretty important thing. The idea in the game is that you’ll have to navigate these social networks and cultural difficulties, and as you do that you’ll go up in ‘Face’, which is your reputation. I don’t want to give too much away, but as your stature rises, you have more opportunities open up. Let’s just leave it there.
GameWatcher: Getting to know your companions in Dragonfall, and trying to get them on your side, was one of the best things about that game. Will we see a similar level of detail in companion interaction and backstory with Hong Kong?
Mitch Gitelman: We’re hoping for more depth this time. I think that we were getting our feet under us last time with how to do that, and we got a lot of positive feedback about it. We love those characters and a lot of people have affection for them, which is a pretty cool thing to come out of a video game. So yes, definitely your crew won’t always get along, we tried to gather a bunch of characters that are culturally different, and mix in different ways. Everyone has a different backstory to discover. And as we did in Dragonfall Director’s Cut, we’ll get to go on some sideruns and personal missions with these guys. We’re pleased to be able to tell those stories.
GameWatcher: And you’ve got a ghoul on the team this time, which I imagine won’t go down well with everyone.
Mitch Gitelman: Yeah, it turns out that flesh-eating ghouls aren’t always the best companions.
GameWatcher: How about your hub town, will there be a version in Hong Kong similar to Dragonfall’s Kreuzbasar? I liked the idea of all these tertiary characters around you whose lives you’re affecting. Are you planning to take that further this time, with more opportunity to impact what happens in your hub town?
Mitch Gitelman: That’s a hot topic around here right now as we transition from pre-production into production. Yeah, we absolutely intend to… one of the first things we did when we started planning Hong Kong was to say, “okay, what went well last time, what can we add to?” We really felt good about the Kreuzbasar, and we wanted to make it feel like you had an impact on the hub, that it is dynamic, that you have people to talk to. The thing about Shadowrun is that there’s over twenty years of detail and world-building on it, so many fascinating layers of story-telling that these background characters allow us to expose. You can allude to all these cool things without having to write a dissertation on it. We already know where our hub is, we already know where things are, and we’ve started laying things out and considering them.
GameWatcher: Moving on to gameplay mechanics, one of the things I was never quite convinced by in the two previous games was the Matrix, the virtual world. Jacking in felt sort of repetitive and limiting. Are you looking to do more interesting things with the decking in Hong Kong?
Mitch Gitelman: For one thing we’re going to revise the look and feel of it, and we’re going to revise the sound of it, so that’s one thing. Just like you we believe that it’s repetitive, and so we’re going to try and make things feel different depending on where you jack in to the matrix and where you’re trying to go within it. So we want some more variety there. More important than that to us is the gameplay; previously it was kind of a combat mini-game, which is what we had time and budget for, but now we intend to make it feel more like what we call ‘leg-work’. The idea is that you’re doing investigation, jacking in to the matrix to search out clues, put two and two together – not just unlock a door. That tactical side of things will still be there of course, but you’ll see new intrusion countermeasures to interact with, and the way you interact with them won’t always mean shooting. It won’t look as repetitive, it won’t play as repetitively, and you’ll really feel like you’re investigating things in cyberspace, working things out.
GameWatcher: You added a companion levelling tree in the Dragonfall Director’s Cut. Are you adding to that, or are you keeping essentially the same system?
Mitch Gitelman: No, we thought that we’d take this version out for another spin. The first time we did it we thought “this is pretty cool, we can do this”, and people were very positive about it. Now we’re just experimenting with various different progression tracks for you to go down. So you have something cool to look forward to, and get to from your team around your own capabilities.
GameWatcher: As for combat itself, that underwent some pretty big changes in the Director’s Cut as well. Are there more changes on the way in Hong Kong?
Mitch Gitelman: Well, what we’re doing is… one of the funding goals we unlocked was ‘More Cyber’, so if you’re a character who uses a lot of cybertech you’ll find a bunch of new options. We have a new skill track for cyber, new cyber weapons that you can equip, each with their own special animations and effects. We also unlocked some more magic, so we’re going to do some new things with magic. Things like foci, like shrine spirits, so the guys who like magic and the tech guys each have some new things to play with.
GameWatcher: Obviously the focus is on Hong Kong right now, but how do you see the Shadowrun video game franchise evolving?
Mitch Gitelman: You know, I don’t want to speak for the whole studio, but it’s easy to fall in love and stay in love with the Shadowrun setting. It’s very easy for me to see what to do with it. We started in Seattle because it’s the iconic Shadowrun location, but for me the interesting thing is visiting all these new places and seeing how they’ve changed in this cyberpunk, cybertech future. How has the return of magic changed the world, changed culture. So I mean, Australia, South America, there’s so many places to go. It just seems like such fertile ground for a storyteller and game developer. I would love to carry on making Shadowrun games set all around the world.
The other things I would love is these tight stories that we tell, these hand-crafted stories with great characters. We’re not using kitchen sink-style design in these games, we want you to focus on what’s important – characters, story, your own role-playing. That’s something we really want to ramp up in Hong Kong. That feeling like you’ve really created this character and you’re making the choices they would make. After that, who knows? Success opens doors. I can really see us taking this thing in the 21st century vein, fully 3D and all that kind of stuff. So I can see the next Shadowrun game going all over the world and adding all kinds of new features. The important thing is to always be improving. We like to keep learning, to read what our fans are talking about, think about how we can incorporate their ideas. That constant feeling of improvement is great for a studio.
Many thanks to Mitch for talking to me. Shadowrun: Hong Kong continues to bust through stretch goals like there’s no tomorrow. The latest goal, if funding reaches $1 million, will add a little mini-campaign for characters that make it through the main story, free for backers who spend $15 or more. You can find out more on the game’s Kickstarter page. Mitch tells me that the team are aiming for a late Summer release.
