Shadowrun

Bill Fulton of FASA said in an Gamespot interview that there will be no custom gametypes in Shadowrun.

“As for custom game types, we decided not to support those. There’s nothing to stop players from agreeing to play by “house rules” in private matches with friends (in fact, that’s the origin of attrition–a group of FASA artists played by house rules), but we don’t support playing public multiplayer games with custom modes. It often just leads to awkward situations where you join a game playing something weird that you don’t want to play.”

Bill also jumped in on the official Shadowrun forums to say:

“Sorry if I was unclear–Shadowrun doesn’t support customization of game types at all. I was attempting (and failing) to make it clear that, in private matches with your friends, players can agree to custom rules (house rules), but that there’s no code support for this. Enforcement will have to be done by the players themselves.”

The custom gametypes in HALO 2 were one of the things that made that game so popular. In fact, Bungie took direct feedback from the gamers and actually implemented custom gametypes in their official matchmaking playlists. Custom gametypes are also the heart of any LAN party or competitive league or tournament. Custom gametypes were at the heart of my buddylist. Being heavily embedded into the Bungie/HALO community, most of my friends list is made up of HALO gamers. On my list, custom gametypes were more popular than matchmaking (perhaps because of cheating issues on HALO 2 on XBOX LIVE). Even Gears of Wars, which has limited customization, allows the host to edit some gametypes and map rotations. GoW isn’t really a social game. I think there’s more to a game being social than being able to keep your party together.

Unfortunately, Shadowrun will not have custom gametypes. I think this is a serious blow to the average gamer all the way up to the competitive gamer. I think this greatly reduces the replay value of this game. After all, this is a multiplayer-only game! No doubt what FASA has provided will be fun. But, it looks like the gamers will have little control over how WE play this game.

I do not see a premiere gaming league like MLG being able to adopt Shadowrun as a tournament game (assuming the Shadowrun rights would be lent to those organizations). MLG and other leagues like CAL and CPL all run on custom game settings.