Stahlseele wrote:Soo . . does that mean you might have more knowledge on stuff yet to come that you might be willing to share? ^^
OK, you probably have more knowledge, but you also probably are not willing to share i guess *grins*
Also: Yes, the DOTA stuff is pretty dumb, as seen by Mary Sue Frosty and the such . .
Sort of. Let's take a step back for a moment and consider the fact that in addition to being a
story, Shadowrun is also a
business. Which means that in order to get a book made you have to have someone who
wants to get that book made (from an artistic standpoint), and you also have to convince someone that the book will sell decently enough to justify the investment. This is where the "Format Wars" come in. Everyone wants to have plotlines go the way they want them to and to add stuff to the world that they think is cool. And everyone has a different idea of how to best sell the compiled books to the audience.
Here's the core, inescapable fact:
The Core Book sells more than
Toy Books sell more than
Story Books.
That's just a fact. There are a couple other facts that throw a monkey in there though. If you have more Toy Books, it drives people out of the hobby (bringing in a third or fourth Magic Book for an edition would probably cost more sales of the Core Book as people abandoned the line than it would sell). And then of course, there's no one right way to do a story book.
That's the part that has really killed the spirit of cooperation and the unity of focus in production plans. Because opinions are like assholes and so are game designers. Everyone has an idea about how they want the books that aren't Man and Machine to look like. And they've been variously (un)successful. I don't have great data from the SR3 days, but go ahead and look back through the library and see the
massive formating differences between Shadows of Europe, Target: Smuggler Havens, Cyberpirates!, and Aztlan. And those are all just location books. There are also adventures (contrast Dream Chipper and Universal Brotherhood), world event books (contrast Bug City and Year of the Comet), faction books (Threats vs. Lonestar), and concept books (Underworld Sourcebook vs. Shadowbeat).
So when SR4 launched, the Format Wars were still burning, but the powers that be (mostly Peter and Rob) had their pulse on what kinds of books they wanted and how they wanted to have them formated. And that's why your basic world events book was Emergence (in turn set up a lot like System Failure), and the new location format was unveiled in Runner Havens. The Faction ad Concept books were pretty much on hold. And the opening adventure was On The Run. If you want, I can give the argument
for any of those decisions. But right now instead I'm going to give you the argument against: Runner Havens sold like a flavored enema.
The original concept was to do the whole Shadowrun
world Runner Havens style - a snap shot of a few major cities per book until they ran out of places that weren't Milwaukee. After Feral Cities there was supposed to be Cities of Intrigue, Awakened Haunts, War Zones, and some others that hadn't been named yet. But the problem was, the format sold like
ass. And you can probably armchair calculate
why, but that's not even the point. The point is that it did. So after Feral Cities was too far into it to pull back but before anyone had penned anything for Cities of Intrigue or Awakened Haunts - the program was scrapped. And a new location book format was sought. And that's where things diverge. And by diverge, I mean about twenty different formats getting suggested, and that's not even including the "Why don't we go back to (fill in book)'s style? That seemed to work fine."
So here were the two winners: 6th World Almanac (my favorite), and a new version of Tir Tairngire that was also an advanced magic supplement in the back. I didn't like that one as much, because I don't like the idea of not knowing how the magic system for
the world works because I haven't read a book about
a country that I don't care about. I think that one is probably dead in the water now, because the company is on fire and it was still stuck in development hell at the end.
But really this all gos back to gross mismanagement. And Dickery. Lots of dickery. Consider, in the
three years that Shadowrun 1st edition was up and running, they managed to get out The Grimoire, the Street Samurai's Catalog, Virtual Realities, Rigger Black Book, Paranormal Animals of North America, Shadowbeat, Sprawl Sites, Shadowtech, Two Native American Nations books, Seattle, London, and The Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America. That's 13 books, more than four a year,
before we count the 4 novels and 9 Adventures (Universal Brotherhood, DNA/DOA, Mercurial, Dreamchipper, Queen Euphoria, Bottled Demon, Harlequin, Dragon Hunt, and Total Eclipse). Which in total doubles the output. And that was with a writing staff that was basically four core guys writing (Tom Dowd, Robert Charette, Paul Hume, and Jordan Weisman), pulling in additional talent mostly for adventures. We are 5 years in to the SR4 experience, and we only get to 13 books if we
include adventures
and the core book rerelease.
The idea that it would take 9 months to rope together a book in the modern age when you can email drafts back and forth in moments is
insulting.
-Username17