Evolution in a Setting (Shadowrun)

This is from an essay we wrote back in 2012, when Shadowrun 5e was first announced. A lot of this still holds true to this day. We're going to tweak it slightly, but for the most part it holds up well.

Shadowrun 5e is slated to come out this summer.  I decided to make a wish list about what I would like to see in it, and I was (not entirely) surprised to see people wanting a reversion back to the first edition "feel" of mirrorshades, cyberdecks, and the removal of the wireless world from the setting. Having just finished writing an essay on science fiction, this debate was already fresh in my mind.

Good science fiction uses the setting as a framework to reflect aspects of the modern world and raise questions, while near science fiction will usually extrapolate from where we are to where people think we will go. Shadowrun, I feel, does this very well, which is why it is one of my favourite roleplaying games. When dealing with many science fiction games, I tend to think 'if we can do this now, why can't we do this in the game?'  This often involves how we use technology in the modern age, and how many science fiction games do not build on what we have, but build on the usual science fiction tropes. A thought experiment I have run through many times for personal amusement related to this has been "if we ever encountered actual alien races in real life, how many science fiction books, movies, and games would add alien races as de-facto part of Earth life?"

This is still something we consider from time to time. What aspects of our life now would be added to our fiction if it was a significant change. For example, you can now expect to see cell phones in modern fiction, it's just a part of society. We also see computers and the internet in our fiction connected to modern times, and to some extent in our science fiction as well (though sadly still not often enough).

So what would our fiction be like if we wound up having a proper first encounter and an alien trade partner. Would our 'modern' fiction include these aliens? Would our science fiction include them? Or would we exclude them entirely?

"Well, in this setting, we never encountered aliens at all."
"It's set 5 years from now."
"So what? No aliens. They don't exist."

Wouldn't that be like writing a book and saying "this Earth culture" doesn't exist?

For science fiction to remain relevant, it needs to be able to be relatable to modern times. We're living in a wireless world now, which has caused a tremendous shift in our culture. SR4 reflected this, and I believe it did that very well, as it tapped neatly into the wireless vein and how it altered our world. I don't want a Shadowrun setting which remains stagnant as our civilization moves forward. I want a setting which evolves and shifts as we evolve and shift. I'd feel much the same way about an RPG which starts 'in the 80s' such as Tales From the Loop to give us that 80s feel, but never moved towards the 90s (Things From the Flood). Sure, the 80s is fun, but the world moves forward for the characters, and they need to move forward with it.

Shadowrun's timeline began in 2050, and has since moved forward into the 2080s and beyond. In that time, our technology has moved forward by serous leaps and bounds, and I'd prefer to see that reflected in my science fiction. If someone doesn't like this new wireless world, they can run the game in the 2050s, and just keep it there. That's an entire decade to use. The evolution of the setting is what makes Shadowrun feel much more alive. It's one of the things I've hated about traditional fantasy settings - you have cultures sitting around for hundreds or thousands of years, but not shifting at all from where they had started.

I'm sorry, but that just doesn't happen.

And in a high-tech setting, such as Shadowrun, cultural evolution should be lightning fast - new innovations and technology being created and pushed out the door. And that is something this game excels at. In first edition, cyberdecks had RAM limits, and had upload / download limits, and storage limits. Then Virtual Realities introduced wireless cyberdecks. Next, in SR2, they removed memory limits from your deck, making it unlimited. They introduced 'smart frames' - semi-aware programs that handled a bunch of programs for you and that could be sent to run tasks. They introduced 'grades' of cybertechnology, showing how the tech advanced and was less of a strain, bioware got improved as well, and then they introduced genetic engineering after that. As the game moved forward, you could see technology in the setting move forward as well as it reflected our real-world innovations and advancements.

I've seen resistance to the "commlink" in Shadowrun, but I see it as a natural evolution of the cyberdeck. In the modern age, we have tablets and cellphones which blow away anything we had 20 years ago, so why can't the game evolve its technology to be more "personal" in 20 years? In SR3, I was annoyed that I couldn't do basic hacking using a wrist computer - simply because I knew for a fact that people were hacking from their laptops as far back as 2001. I saw a parallel between the wrist computer and the laptop, as opposed to the cyberdeck and the PC. I'm quite glad SR4 accepts that your PC was now something you could wear all the time.

In this day and age, our feelings still hold true. A roleplaying game with a built-in setting should be willing to let that setting evolve and move forward over time. An example of this not being done and it reflecting poorly on a game is the new Cyberpunk Red - the next edition of Cyberpunk (with Cyberpunk 2020, then Cyberpunk 3rd edition, and now this).

We reviewed it. Basically, it's Cyberpunk 2020 with more limitations on character creation. The cybernetics are all exactly the same, right down to their names, the classes are the same, the technology is all exactly the same.

If you own Cyberpunk 2020, you don't need Cyberpunk Red. This is an excellent example of doing it wrong.  30 years have passed in the setting? What the hell have the corporations been doing for those 30 years? Were they all in stasis? You want people to buy your new stuff, so you make new stuff - you're competing with other people making new stuff.

Look at cell phones from 2012, and compare them to 2022. Back then, you didn't have good cameras, you couldn't record videos, you couldn't watch shows or really browse the web on your phones worth a damn. Now you can do all sorts of things on your phones ... like play Final Fantasy 6, which required a dedicated machine for gaming when it came out.

Needless to say, we were disappointed. We were expecting innovation, and we were given the same game with minor rule tweaks and a bunch of limitations on how you create your characters.  Feh.

If we wanted the same thing, we'd not be buying a new edition of the game, would we?