The wait is over, Chummers! We just released Early Access Update 8 of Shadowrun Online. This update marks the next huge step forward for the game including much wanted features that have been in the making for quite some time.
As you will be able to play a slice of our second act, every character gets Karma points, Nuyen and weapons to start out with. Be sure to learn a few skills and equip the appropriate weapons BEFORE going into a mission!
Here are the patch notes:
New Features:
Create your Runner! The Character Creation Screen is now available in game, including metahuman traits, lots of different backgrounds and many new portraits! In later versions this will only be available when you create a character, for this version however you can come back and play around with the settings!
All new hub! An extended real-time hub has been added to the game, featuring not only quest givers, but also shopkeepers and NPCs to talk to! Later your team will be able to play in the same hub as a group!
Improved grouping: You will now be able to form groups with people who aren’t on your friend list – just click on them in the chat and invite them to join you. Groups will also not disbanded anymore once you finished a run, so you can keep playing together i to the next mission!
Ready for Combat! The gear selection has been added, allowing you to select weapons, armor and consumables for your run.
Wanting to buy? Shopkeepers will now sell items to better prepare you for the upcoming challenges!
Dressed Up: The new clothing screen allows you to change your outfits and see which new pieces are available in your considerable wardrobe.
Improved UI: The in-mission UI has been updated again and now shows more information about your characters and enemies. Hover over any character or enemy to find out more details.
Quest Rewards: Questgivers will now reward your efforts with Nuyen (and sometimes also items).
Protection, please! Armor is now in the game, protecting you from all sorts of damage.
Use this! Grenades, Medkits and more consumable goodness!
More Skills: All skill trees have been extended to rank 10 and skill values have been rebalanced.
Drones Incoming! The Rigger skill tree is now in the game.
Specialist: Henchmen are now archetypes with a primary skill group.
Check Me Out: In the team selection screen hovering over a henchman will show you vital information about the character.
New enemies: Fight the raging hordes of the Headcases faction!
More and prettier! More Missions, more effects, more weapons, new customization items, more animations!
Bug fixes & Improvements
We exchanged the font used in the game with a better readable one.
The workflow for adding friends has been improved.
The portraits of the selected henchmen will be displayed in the team selection now..
Pressing F11 will turn off all UI elements during a run – perfect for those who want to take a screenshot without showing the interface.
Characters can now be rotated in the gear, customization and clothing screen.
Pistols, Foci and Cyberdecks are not stored on a character’s back in Character Customization and similar screens anymore.
The floating text won’t report critical hits against an enemy immune to that type of damage as critical anymore.
Characters won’t be affected by status effects caused by attacks of a type they are immune to.
Shadowrun Online – Dev-Diary #25: You could look like this!
Shadowrun Online - 23.01.2015 3:52PM
Ever since our Kickstarter Campaign ended, we were looking forward to the portraits of our backers that were part of the higher reward tiers. Some of you know the stories about the artist who started working on them and then vanished, leaving us high and dry and the production stalled for quite a while. This time however we’re not going to discuss the past. We’re discussing the present. And that means: Backer portraits are back in production. Here are a few of them for your viewing pleasure – and keep in mind: You will see some of them pretty soon in the game, be it as NPCs or even as selectable portraits for your character to choose from …
