NEW Shadowrun Online Newsletter released

Some time has passed since we last sent you an update about our upcoming Shadowrun Online Game. Over here at Cliffhanger Central, we have been busy with the beta of our current project Jagged Alliance Online, so SRO took a bit of a backseat. However as the fateful Christmas 2011 approaches, we will join the impending Awakening, and rise to go full force on SRO.

News from the Vaults

However we haven’t been slacking in the meantime either. Firstly, we have been gathering more of the creative talent behind Shadowrun such as Jason Hardy and a number of other current Catalyst writers as well Tobias Hamelmann from the German side and we are especially proud to count Tom Dowd - one of the original creators of Shadowrun - amongst the SHE (The Shadowrun High-Council of Elders, as we call our board of advisors). With them helping us to develop ideas and honing the design, we are now set to dig deeper into the 6th world and emerge with a number of plot nuggets that will define the backstories to our game.

Secondly we have already created a visual prototype for an action map level, which we are pretty happy with, so we wanted to share some impression of that with you as well. We hope it does capture the SR atmosphere and it also shows what we can do within a browser game (so for those who worried: We won’t do Shadowrunville). See for yourself in our gallery.

The playable level currently is based on our Jagged Alliance Online gameplay, so a lot of things are missing from that, but it allows us to iterate the game early and often with a playable version, which always helps honing the gameplay much better. We are also playing around with visual effects as you can see as our artists like to fiddle with the possibilities of the graphics engine.

Dragons Away!

For those that haven’t got the Shadowrun timeline in mind: 2011 was the Year of Chaos (we can vouch for that) culminating in the Awakening of the great Dragons. Commemorating that, what better Christmas present than a cool picture of a freshly awakened dragon? This will actually become the background picture for our upcoming SRO webpage.  From the looks of it he/she doesn’t seem to be too happy about being awakened... As a special Christmas present you can find this ready to use for your new desktop wallpaper in our gallery. 

With Jagged Alliance launching early next year to the public, we are doubling our efforts on SRO. We also have a couple of things we want to share with you, so you will definitely hear more from us in 2012.

For now we invite you to visit our Facebook page, where we regularly post small updates on the project (please make sure you “like” and share it with all your friends out there!) We are gearing up for a few surprises trying to self-publish SRO and working as close as we can with the backbone of the Shadowrun universe- namely you, the fans.  So do share the news with everyone as we can always use more support in our way forward.

See you in 2012 and remember….

Watch your back.
Shoot straight.
Conserve ammo.
And never, ever, cut a deal with a dragon.