NDA

So I knew a lot of things about Shadowrun before I began working on the project. The following article uses only public knowledge that I had before participating in the testing.

I am, in my own small way, a part of the gamer community. In particular I'm part of the community over at Evil-Avatar, a game news discussion forum. The people at EvAv tend to be the early 30s life long gamer types. They hold a strong distrust of anything done by a major company, and while bitterness and skepticism aren't considered merits they certainly aren't faulted.

So when Microsoft declared that they were making a version of their live online gaming service for windows, and integrating it into Vista as part of their giant "Games for Windows" push we were skeptical. I'm contractually forbidden from telling you stories about the issues we've had with regular X-Box live, but when you think Microsoft and Networking you probably don't envision something enjoyable. The general lack of faith in the "Live For Windows" program is pretty well founded, even if it is founded on a history of bitterness and here say.

This bitterness rubbed off on Shadowrun, which is going to be the first game to use the Windows live features. That's a well known thing, not a violation of my NDA. This leads to people saying things like "The only reason anyone knows about Shadowrun is because MS is using it to cram vista down our throats, it's not going to be anything worthwhile."

Knowing what I know now, that which I'm not allowed to divulge, my response would be a torrent of derisive laughter followed by the statement that "My NDA with Microsoft forbids me from explaining that to you."