Shadowrun Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition

[Nekot-The-Brave]

I thought the hub for Hong Kong was a lot cooler than the one for Dragonfall. I'm not sure why everyone is rating it so low, After every 2 or so missions things change, you get to meet new people, and after every mission you have new dialog with all of the intractable people (especially in the club, there are a lot of people who come in an out of there).

It felt a lot more interesting to explore and talk to everyone in HK than it was in DF, imo.

Also stuck in one of the last missions cus bugs yo

 

[His Majesty]

It's not the people, it's the design. Everything is too far apart. Kreuzbasar was much better in that regard.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Weird seeing people criticising the story. The story is my second favourite thing about the game (after the soundtrack). Dragonfall's story was worse. A heavily guarded laboratory under Berlin doesn't interest me as much as a creepy-as-fuck Walled City that has evil spirits and induces nightmares.

 

[Akratus]

Yeah I'm having second thoughts. Not that far in anyhow. Only at the part where I'm investigating the murders in the Whampoa Garden.

 

[Roguey]

"Why can't this RPG be x hours long "

"Why is there so much text/combat/walking "

 

[Akratus]

The writing is shit =/= there's too much reading.

 

[CptMace]

There's no problem with the story itself imo, but all the second plan npcs and interactions. The story hooked me well at the beginning but then you gotta do some unrelated random jobs and talk to random ballsacks.
I like SRR better in that regard, there was only a couple of side missions and the main stuff was crazy railroaded and rather expeditive but the side stuff concerned people and matters you already knew and you could immediatly jump in. Haven't played dragonfall so I don't know but it felt more coherent and better-rythmed in SRR.

 

[gestalt11]

Is the combat any more challenging? Did someone really say Hard is gone? Does the AI still stop itself from attacking more than once a per turn?

Seems like their efforts to 'improve' a fundamentally flawed feature (Matrix) hasn't gone so well.

There are three difficulties Easy, Normal, and Hard. The Matrix (as a level) is better IMO, but not necessarily perfect. The previous matrix was really just a solo combat slog, the new one is a combo of stealth+alarm resource management+fighting and you can do it in different styles. So its at least somewhat more interesting. I have not seen any dual jacks so be able to have two persona in the matrix at same time. The actual hacking part is kind of a funky dual mini-game, in that there is a simon says on a 10 digit keypad and then a fast symbol match. I am not actually entirely sure but I think the better you do at the simon says the more symbols you get during the matching part. But you can skip some of the simon says if you are good and the random symbol matching. I usually skip the last two simon says bits and do fine. I think I maybe be able to skip them all and still beat the matching game. Sometimes you can simply enter a password instead but not often.

I have seen the AI attack twice before but not always.

The games combat is prefectly fine IMO, but really you can clean house in the game if you really really want to just like in most RPGs. So far I would say you really don't need etiquettes and charisma as much as other two games. You get a number of options to use such things but you can usually do something else and you don't seem to lose out on much money and maybe only a couple of karma points. So making a really focused fighting character is easily doable.

Money seems a bit more limited or maybe that is because I am completely chroming out my guy.

As for people complaining aobut reading a lot. Learn to skim and click on the "..." button.

 

[imweasel]

It's not the amount of reading. It's the quality.

Agreed. The quality of writing ranges from god awful (e.g. whampoa garden murders ) to excellent. It almost feels like they shoved the game out the door without copy editing any of the writing. Pretty much a death sentence for a game with this much dialog.

Sifting through a ton of garbage text to get to the gems of writing - which the game has quite a bit of, no doubt about it - is fucking annoying.

 

[Tigranes]

Thanks. Nice to see a word in favour of the new Matrix.

All RPGs have the difficulty problem, but SR games are 90% combat - the writing has always fluctuated between pretty good and spam bin, and there isn't really anything else to do. I guess when/if I pick this up I could take less than 4 runners.

 

[Roguey]

It almost feels like they shoved the game out the door without copy editing any of the writing.

But it did have an editor, Elisa Mader. She also edited Dragonfall. (Nepotism alert: the lead writer's her husband. )

They seemed like they really knew what they were doing with the Kickstarter, so it should be interesting to see if they ever discuss what went wrong. I imagine it's related to http://www.rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=9828

Andrew and I have had the toughest time on the project so far. While I was managing the Kickstarter campaign, Andrew completed a detailed story outline. Once we had focused time together, we realized that our story was too complicated to tell within our time budget. We decided to step back and reassess our basic assumptions so that we didn’t end up with some sort of “Frankensteined” version of our story. When this proved to be a more time-consuming than I was comfortable with, I called in Mike McCain, the Game Director of Shadowrun: Dragonfall, to lend us his editorial perspective. I’m pleased to report that the process worked and we have a story we’re happy with.

Bad news, HBS!

 

[Jackalope]

For some odd reason I have zero desire to play this game any longer. It is very strange. Not sure why. Maybe the story doesn't grab me as much as it did in Returns and Dragonfall. I just don't care about the characters.
Or maybe it's all those lengthy descripions, that bog the game down. Reading this tiny yellow text on the ride side of my monitor is murdering my eyes. At one point I started skipping through entire lines - and I don't think it's my fault.

I think I'm just going to let the game sit on my PC for now.

 

[GarfunkeL]

The writing is shit =/= there's too much reading.

It's not shit. Get out of here with this hipster poser crap. If you don't personally like it, that's fine, but this isn't AND RUN HE DID "quality" of DGaider.

I like that the map are more "authentic" and not as crowded/small as they were before. Sure, bit more walking but NEWSFLASH: scroll the zoom out, click on your destination and your guys will run faster if it's far away.

 

[Akratus]

Agreed. The quality of writing ranges from god awful (e.g. whampoa garden murders ) to excellent. It almost feels like they shoved the game out the door without copy editing any of the writing. Pretty much a death sentence for a game with this much dialog.

Yeah, I've seen some typos here and there too. SHOCKINGLY.

It's not shit. Get out of here with this hipster poser crap. If you don't personally like it, that's fine, but this isn't AND RUN HE DID "quality" of DGaider.

I like that the map are more "authentic" and not as crowded/small as they were before. Sure, bit more walking but NEWSFLASH: scroll the zoom out, click on your destination and your guys will run faster if it's far away.

Hey man, I'm not the one that's saying it's shit. Ok I did a few posts back, but I'm reconsidering. Not far enough yet to judge the story as a whole.

 

[Hell March]

A "Frankensteiened" story is pretty much perfectly on point with how I would describe HK, though it's at least a Frankensteined version of a good story rather than a bad one.

 

[Gruncheon]

It's not the people, it's the design. Everything is too far apart. Kreuzbasar was much better in that regard.

The design is of the hub is honestly terrible; I think it'd be difficult to design something that makes it harder to get from point A to B. There's just some really basic stuff wrong with it: there should be a path to the left of Maximum Law's leading to the MTR station, there should be one to the left of Kindly Cheng's going up towards Maximum Law's, the ship should be closer to the MTR station and the whole area at the bottom with Drone Man and the 3 guys playing MahJong is just a confusing mess of overlapping platforms. The whole thing would've been better for being more condensed, because the unused areas (shipping warehouses, that weird limbo down near the bottom of the map where NOTHING happens)

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

Anyone want to start a Poetry Slam?

 

[Owlish]

It's not shit. Get out of here with this hipster poser crap. If you don't personally like it, that's fine, but this isn't AND RUN HE DID "quality" of DGaider.

Spoiler

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

Spoiler tag?

 

[His Majesty]

Jacques?

 

[Owlish]

Spoiler tag?

O yeh

 

[eXalted]

I'm shocked. Just now I saw in Steam that I have played for 10 hours and these are the missions that I have completed:

• The beginning
• The Walled City
• The Gaichu meeting

Do I have a problem?

 

[Excidium II]

Hmm is it normal for Duncan's items to disappear?

 

[Silva]

This game is the final specimen in a evolution path that began back in the late 80's where RPGs were all about story exposition and "Gotcha!"s and modules advised GMs to "not let the players deviate from the story written here!" and where GMs instead of inviting you to a game by asking "Let's play a game?" he sayed "Ive got this cool story and world prepped! You wanna join ?" and then when you sit down with your friends to "play" it you realize the only agency/choice you have is how your character is dressed because, really, the whole plot is prepped from start to finish and the GM guides you by the noses from point A to B to Twist to Climax, all the while exposing to you all this cool NPCs backstories and cool world facets, etc that he has been writing for two months during his class time (and getting low grades in mathematics for) and that he filled entire notebooks with. Then he comes to the "game" like a maniac barfing forth all those crap at the players faces, exhilarated as the group follow the plot twists he so minutiously prepped and cumming all over the table at the end when he sees the (fake) satisfaction at some player face, and feeling like the ultimate writer. Jordan Weisman is a product of that age. Shadowrun is a product of that age (damn, open the latest edition book NOW and you will see the exact advice Im describing above).

So complaining that the game is "too easy" or "linear" is like asking feaces to smell good - challenge and player-agency was never the point in the first place, gratuitous exposition is. Its even debatable if this is really a game. X-com is a game, as is Jagged Alliance or even that shittty Baldurs Gate series (ok, ok, Im not so sure about this one). But this ? See, the "game" here just function as periodic breaks to the exposition, and its not supposed to challenge the players too much otherwise it would risk eliminating the remaining exposition.

But enough rant. Lemme go back to the exposition.

Spoiler

 

[Jick Magger]

Played around ten hours now.

Overall I'm liking it. The hook was decent, if not quite as bombastic as Dragonfall's, and the plot immediately following doesn't have the same level of focus and intrigue that DF had, but the missions so far are good. Don't think the party-members as a whole are quite as interesting as DF's are, either. I share the complaints that Iszerobel's just a boring character, who's entire personality seems to revolve around being a socially autistic whiner, and her personal sidequest did nothing to make me like her more when she tried to trick me into kicking the shit out of someone for what amounts to a petty insult. Luckily I'm a decker, so I don't really need to bring her on missions. Racter and Gaichu are probably the two most interesting companions in the game so far.

Do like the small expansions to gameplay, especially the more diverse range of drones available, unlike DF: DC, which only really had a linear progression of Drone types to use. Like the changes to The Matrix for the most part, but agree that the wonky click-controls make precision movement in stealth much more difficult than it really should be.