Hairbrained Schemes has had a pretty decent run since the relatively okay release of Shadowrun Returns: Dead Man’s Switch and the even better Dragonfall. For a company with no real track record, they have done pretty good out of that one Kickstarter and the September release of the Dragonfall as a separate campaign was meant to appeal to those who found the basic Dead Man’s Switch one to not be challenging or particularly engaging.
Last week news started coming out about their next project – Necropolis. A third person action rogue-like, Necropolis invites you to dive to the depths of it to reach the tomb of Archmage Abraxis and gain his secrets. In a combat system based around timing and animation, it offers a different experience then many rogue-like games, featuring a mixture of attacks that rely on the player to know what is going on.
While that is interesting, the bigger news to come out is that Hairbrained Schemes is looking for “a talented Lead Artist to guide art production on our next Shadowrun campaign!” For those who were fans of Shadowrun Returns, and think especially in the wake of the improvements to Dragonfall better might come this is huge news given that in the past Hairbrained Schemes has been non-committal at best about whether there would be another campaign.
The post has been up since October 8th, which is after Dragonfall was well done so it’s not referring to that. They are talking about a 6 month project (minimum) assuming it gets off the ground, and that means it almost certainly is going to be another Shadowrun Returns campaign rather than a fresh engine with Shadowrun. That sadly does mean that some of the limitations of the engine will remain, but Dragonfall showed that Hairbrained Schemes had learnt to work with the engine and create more compelling, dynamic stories with it as well as more complex combat encounters.
With the success of Shadowrun Returns and it seems the greater critical success of Dragonfall that another campaign makes perfect sense to bring to both the PC and iPad.
What would you like to see in another campaign? Where would you think it should be set? What improvements could be made to their engine to make modding better?
You can buy Shadowrun Returns and the Dragonfall Director's cut at Greenman Gaming.
