True and I was having trouble figuring out what I would want to do with the setting. I looked at existing adventures and was dissuaded. The core setting as it was presented left me confused as to what to do with it.
Look, I don't mean to be excessively glib and dismissive, but honestly, your failure of imagination is entirely personal. I mean, Shadowrun has to be somewhere in the top five of all time successful video games, which means a whole bunch of people 'got into' the setting and had no problems imagining what to do with it, and I can't for the life of me justify assuming that every single one of them was purely satisfied playing street-mercs that would inevitably be betrayed after every single mission by their employers, the way the writing for the setting seems to put it, so clearly a significant number of players took that setting and premise and made it their own.
That YOU can't do that is, again, a PERSONAL problem. Its not a problem with the setting, the writing, the edition wars. YOU can't imagine. That's... well, its tragic, doubly so for a gamer, but I suppose it is what it is.
And you can't really chalk this up to adventure design either. The core premise of the game is 'criminal street mercenaries working as disposable muscle for corporate espionage', and one of the first and biggest adventures involves an entirely personally driven quest to pull someone out of a scientology style cult that is secretly a front for interdimensional bugs possessing cultists as part of their plan to take over the world. Its about as far from the core premise as you can get, demanding very little 'mercenary', 'street' or 'corporate espionage' from any of the characters in order to work as a premise, and to my admitedly hazy memory, doesn't involve the promised betrayal by one's erstatz employer at the end either.
The very first significant adventure published for this game essentially refutes every single one of your complaints about the setting, as it subverts the expected game play and it involves the player characters being involved in fundamentally altering the setting, hopefully for the better, right out the gate, and the big bad isn't even a megalithic, unstoppable, inexorable megacorporation but an heretofore negligible psuedo-religion that existed, benign and harmless, on the fringes of the setting.
Disagree. Usually, I would not be interested in post-apocalyptic stuff. Movies, books, games. You name it. No interest. But the artwork and the presentation of Darksun made it really interesting.
Huntdown is a videogame where you're a disposable bounty hunter hunting down gangs causing a ruckus in a post-apocalyptic city-state controlled by a mega-corporation. By the end of the game the Megacorp pretty much announces that this was all a ruse for land acquisition and that you're next in line to be hunted down. However, your employer realizes she's a loose end as well and kinda wishes you luck that she knows she won't have. But it does it with style and pizzazz. It makes even gruntwork seem cool and interesting, and the frantic energy of the setting makes even going into the abandoned subways to deal with gutter trash seem radical and neat. Huntdown is way bleaker then Shadowrun but I left it with more enjoyment than from Shadowrun.
Its a case of framing. Imagine if the D&D Monster manual was 90% only demon lords? And 90% of the adventures or modules or settings were talking about the demon lords plans and how powerful and untouchable they were, and how awesome they are and how the players should never really get a shot at defeating them, and how if they do its only because another demonlord let them.
Except that Shadowrun does none of that. Megacorps have fallen and the truely scary GMPC characters (the greater Dragons) have also fallen. I can't think of a single Shadowrun product that every says you can't take down a Megacorp (A greater dragon, on the other hand, but honestly if you don't/can't handwave those more or less out of existence for the good of a Campaign, I have to wonder... do you even GM, bro?). Player Characters are, BY DEFAULT, expected to challenge Megacorporations in every single game, as the core conceit. What part of Heavily armed mercenaries doing Corporate Espionage makes you think 'jeeze, they couldn't possibly challenge a megacorp'? that's... a massive non-sequitor. Heck, you even reference the Shadowrun vidya games positively... which should also disprove your own god-damn point.
The setting. ANY SETTING. Is a Starting Point. Not an End Point. It is entirely your own personal cross to bear that somehow you can only see Shadowrun as the End Point.
D&D doesn't expect you to challenge demon lords for 90% of the games. I would be surprised if even 1% of a D&Ds campaign ever reached or tackled dealing with demon lords. But in D&D it makes the lower stuff feel important with a focus on the smaller players. Its because the writers are less interested in the smaller players then the proverbial demon lords. And the proverbial demonlords are even more frustrating because they primarily have plot contrivance on their side then logic or even any source of magical power.
Descent into Avernus Disagrees with all of this. Suggested starting level: 1. Plot? Defeat and possibly redeem a Demon Lord.
It's like the writers are just writing for themselves. And I felt awkward to interlude into their session of smashing action figures together. While the shadowrun videogames assume a actual person being involved in their writing so it ends up stressing the impact even your low level actions have, and end up undoing many sacred shadowrun cows.
What?
WHAT?
Motherfucker: Do you have any idea at all how many writers have worked on Shadowrun? ALL OF THEM are just... smashing dolls together? This isn't one man's little passion project setting where he can be the king of the world (Dunklezahn the dragon? Llofwyr the Dragon? Who is this GMPC God Character that runs all of Shadowrun and can't be confronted and defeated, or are you suggesting FASA, the company itself, developed an ego and wrote itself into the setting as some sort of Mary Sue in the form of... all the Megacorporations? ). In fact I could make a point, based on the cover art posted earlier in the thread just how HARD Shadowrun failed at creating signature characters, if that was even their intent.
I mean, the quoted part I'm actually replying to here is actually contradictory, in that you seem to think Shadowrun... what, wrote itself and thus fails to neglect for setting growth or character involvement, while a vidya game that has an actual writer (just one?) somehow is less prone to self insertion mary sue fanfic god characters? Don't get me wrong, I've played and enjoyed many of the various Shadowrun Vidya Games over the years, but...
Look, maybe I'm not tracking your point here. I'm not trying to strawman, I'm trying to understand your actual complaint.
You seem to be saying, and please do correct me if I'm wrong, that Shadowrun, the RPG (not the Vidya Gaems) is Unplayable, to you, because the setting is fixed and unchangable by Player Character actions due to the existance of powerful, unstoppable God Character Mary Sue Inserts, this time in the bizzarely inhuman form of the Megacorporations themselves?
Never mind that Powerful Megacorporations are a fucking mandatory Genre Trope, hardly unique to Shadowrun.
Never Mind that the great complaint about Shadowrun among many fans for DECADES has been the motherfucking Living Setting Metaplot that explicitely contradicts the idea that the setting is unchangable, or that the Megacorporations are all powerful and Unstoppable.
And it seems like you base ALL of this off of your personal interpretation of the... artwork? And apparently mind reading the intentions of the designers?
Or is it that Dark Sun had as its first major adventure the already written (and novelized) story of taking down a Dragon God-King, while Shadowrun's infamous Food Fight example adventure doesn't end with bringing down the entire Quikie Mart Corp? But Dark Sun had Brom, so its cool, right?