Shadowrun: Dragonfall Interview

Diehard GameFAN managed to track down Harebrained Schemes executive producer Mitch Gitelman for a Q&A about Shadowrun: Dragonfall, their forthcoming Berlin-based expansion pack for last year's crowd-pleaser Shadowrun Returns.  Here's a little something to get you started:

Diehard GameFAN: Approximately how long will it take to complete Dragonfall'˜s core storyline and how many options/side quests will it contain?

Mike McCain: Our early playtests suggest that the campaign is actually longer than anticipated. We initially set out to create an experience somewhere in the 8-10 hours range. It currently looks like even a bare-minimum playthrough would take more than 10 hours, and I think you can count on at least 12 to 15 hours if you're exploring and doing more of the game's side content. We're also trying to tune this campaign to a slightly more challenging difficulty level than (Dead Man's Switch), so that may factor in as well.

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Diehard GameFAN: Is there a chance of Harebrained getting the chance to re-release or do HD remakes of the Sega Genesis or SNES Shadowrun games? Bluesky, makers of the Genesis version, shut down in 2001 and all their assets belong to Interplay now. Between Interplay and Sega (the original publisher), you could probably work something out. Likewise the SNES game's creators, Beam Software, are long since dead and their assets now belong to struggling Australian company Krome Studios. Has there been any attempt to reach out to any of the retro rights holders to make something happen?

Mike McCain: You know, I think this is where the power of the Shadowrun Editor really comes into play. I think it would be difficult for us to create something like that as a commercial endeavor, but the truth is, we don't need to! There's already a passionate project underway to re-create the original SNES game in Shadowrun Returns. This is exactly the kind of thing we hoped that fans and creators would be able to do, all the way back when we were planning the Kickstarter campaign and decided to emphasize the creation and release of a robust toolset for user-content development. There's already a lot of great content out there, and we can't wait to see what the completed SNES remake is like.