The 1989 cyberpunk fantasy-style tabletop RPG has been adapted into several games, but the 2007 adaptation fell short of the concept the developers envisioned for it…

In 2007, FASA Studio and Microsoft released Shadowrun, a multiplayer shooter in the style of Counter-Strike, and it quickly disappeared into obscurity, as it was released at full price and there was no single-player mode to play a story. (Valve did a similar thing with Team Fortress 2 later that year, but we also got Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal as part of The Orange Box!) Fans said the genre didn’t suit the IP, so it’s no surprise that it didn’t sell many copies!

Game designer Bill Fulton has previously stated that Shadowrun was initially envisioned to have a campaign mode, and now, we’ve heard more details about the unrealized story mode in a Q&A. Community manager David Abzug said it was to be a linear, progression-based System Shock-style RPG experience. It would not use the same maps used in multiplayer but would have had unique levels, and the developers would have also tapped into Shadowrun’s virtual world, The Matrix.

This decision was ultimately the crux of the matter: one of the reasons for cutting it out was the size and scope. It was a broad concept because the Matrix, the Astral Plane, and all the significant areas of Shadowrun were in the developers’ plans. Microsoft decided to narrow the focus a bit. So it ended up being a multiplayer-only game, which could have been more than that. Nowadays, the official servers are long gone, but Microsoft’s matchmaking service has broken peer-to-peer solutions. There was a demand for it to be made official again, and it was, even though we’re talking about a game that was released sixteen years ago…

In the second half of the 2000s, Microsoft’s approach to the gaming industry was significantly different…

Source: PCGamer