Remember Shadowrun? No, not the tabletop RPG with the incomprehensible rules. No, not the very good 1993 game for the SNES. And no, not Shadowrun Returns. Instead, we're talking about the often overlooked, largely forgotten multiplayer FPS for the Xbox 360. It wasn't a very good competitive first-person shooter, but if you want to relive the halcyon days of 2007, now's the time, as Microsoft has just fixed the game's matchmaking services.
See also: Xbox: New feature to report abusive voice chat
Shadowrun, originally a tabletop role-playing game that first came out in 1989, has been adapted into video game form a few times, and the 2007 version for Xbox/Windows Vista was definitely one of them: A multiplayer-only first-person shooter that strayed far from its RPG origins. Shadowrun wasn't terribly notable as a first-person shooter, and it didn't necessarily gain a following from RPGs. But the game did something very good for 2007: cross-platform play between Xbox Live and PC (using the terrible Games for Windows). Otherwise, Shadowrun has drifted into relative obscurity since then. Could it make a comeback? A new update for the classic Xbox 360 Call of Duty games completely broke multiplayer matchmaking recently, but a subsequent update made Shadowrun's online play work better than ever.
As documented in a thread on Resetera, Shadowrun's dedicated servers were shut down a year after launch, leaving the game to rely on very slow, peer-to-peer matchmaking. And the small group of people who still played Shadowrun '07 weren't too happy when updates for Call of Duty games on Xbox Live seemed to completely break matchmaking.
Suggestion: Indiana Jones: Became an Xbox exclusive after ZeniMax acquisition
Thankfully, Microsoft was quick to patch up the new technical flaws of the unpopular, 16-year-old game. After fans reached out to Microsoft, the publisher restored the service on Xbox and PC, and it's apparently better than it was before. According to wwm0nkey on Resetera:
the game used to use a fake server search that would take a long time before putting you in a match, whatever [Microsoft] did, they completely eliminated that process and now Search > Match takes about 3 seconds, whereas before it was about 30+.
Between Shadowrun and the 360-era CoD games, now's a good time to get nostalgic for the late '80s. Dare we hope that more old online games will be revamped?
Read also: The Valiant: Coming to Xbox Series X/S in July
source of information:kotaku.com
