Meg Jayanth, the wordsmith who so smartly crafted a steampunk yarn like none other for Inkle Studios' ingenious 80 Days, will pen the story for a free-to-play roleplaying game inspired in part by collectible card game Android: Netrunner.1
Her involvement is a big deal. I'd encourage you to give Jayanth's work on 80 Days a look if you somehow missed it. But it's also exciting because Android: Netrunner, based on Richard Garfield's original mid-1990s cyberpunk original, is one of publisher Fantasy Flight Games' better extensions of another creator's creation.
The game pits hackers against megacorporations with artfully asymmetric rules, but also taps culturally subversive ideas that challenge tabletop gaming's gender status quo.
Gamasutra reports that mobile developer Legacy Games will helm the adaptation. They're known mostly for mass market mobile game tie-ins to shows like Criminal Minds, Law & Order, and Doctor Who, so it'll be interesting to see them try to wrestle a beloved extant game designed for two players into a something brand new. Signing Jayanth seems like cause for cautious optimism.
GamesBeat spoke with Legacy Games producer Jamar Graham about the project last week, and Graham makes it clear the new game won't be a port, but something else, inspired by the card game's "story, the characters, and the art" rather than its ruleset.
Yes, the free-to-play angle chafes in principle, but Graham says the studio's hoping to sidestep pay-to-win criticism by targeting social players, who on the multiplayer side of things (it's not clear what this is or how it'll work yet) might be willing to spend a little to have a leg up on "special daily events."
We'll have to wait a bit to see, as the untitled game is due out sometime in 2016.
1UPDATE 19:11 ET 26/10/15: While the game's developer specifically mentioned Android: Netrunner multiple times during the GamesBeat interview, it contacted WIRED after this story was published to clarify that the game is based on the Android franchise as a whole, and not specifically on the Netrunner card game. The story has been updated accordingly.
