Shadowrun Returns, ...need more content Options

[Wounded Ronin]

I certainly appreciated some of the in character questions you had to consider at the end of the game. And I felt the game did a good job of keeping the adrenaline level up and intensity on in the end game as well.

[ Spoiler ]

I was interested in the question of if you could exterminate the dragons would you? My instinctive reaction would be "yes", but then the next question that comes up is how is this different from the instinctive human urge to destroy that which is not fully understood or controllable? Not bad in terms of philosophical reflection for a video game.

HBS just put something out on Facebook asking about your favorite character. For me I would have to say Dietrich. Everyone else was sort of a drama queen, I thought.

[DrZaius]

HBS just put something out on Facebook asking about your favorite character. For me I would have to say Dietrich. Everyone else was sort of a drama queen, I thought.

Plot: Probably Glory.
Effectiveness: Eiger by a mile.

I ran with Glory, Eiger, and Dietrich throughout the whole game for the most part (my guy was a Decker named DOS BOOT). Dietrich was really good at... casting Haste on Eiger so she could shoot more fools. Glory was mediocre with her pistol, and tended to get into trouble when she was clawing people, but her Biotech saved my keister a number of times.

[Vegetaman]

Actually working on my own UGC after enjoying Dragonfall so much. Lighting and Conversation Trees and Triggers seem to have their nuances and complexity. About 30 hours in and still on the first map...

[DrZaius]

Actually working on my own UGC after enjoying Dragonfall so much. Lighting and Conversation Trees and Triggers seem to have their nuances and complexity. About 30 hours in and still on the first map...

Keep at it! I need to get around finishing my UGC one of these days. I tell myself it's 80% done, but I imagine it's probably closer to 40.

A trick: Try to cut as many maps as possible. They take up so much time to make (at least for me) that if you can get rid of them they can make the process much more efficient. Having the Johnson call your runner as opposed to meet him in a generic bar just saved you 5 hours of fiddling with rugs and jukeboxes.

-DrZ

[Vegetaman]

Keep at it! I need to get around finishing my UGC one of these days. I tell myself it's 80% done, but I imagine it's probably closer to 40.

A trick: Try to cut as many maps as possible. They take up so much time to make (at least for me) that if you can get rid of them they can make the process much more efficient. Having the Johnson call your runner as opposed to meet him in a generic bar just saved you 5 hours of fiddling with rugs and jukeboxes.

-DrZ

Oh man I just spent like 4 hours last night working on an exterior map and only made like 3 buildings and a street. It's hard to make it look good or reasonable. I need to rethink some of my maps, lol.

[bannockburn]

Try importing the maps from the official content and have them as scenes in your content to look up stuff.
It helps.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Try importing the maps from the official content and have them as scenes in your content to look up stuff.
It helps.

I would advise this only if the scene is actually the same one. Meeting at the actual bar from Dead Man's Switch is fine - it must be a Redmond fixture, that's understandable. Meeting at a bar that inexplicably looks exactly like it, but isn't, breaks immersion faster than you can say "Deja vu."

[bannockburn]

Uh. I wasn't suggesting outright copying the stuff. But you can learn a lot about how the dudes making the original campaign(s) mask issues with graphics tiles, or which tiles to use to achieve a certain look.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Ah.

See, one of the largest UGCs for Dead Man's Switch is the one that's trying to recreate the feel of the Shadowrun game. They do re-use maps from the single-player campaign wholesale, and often try to pretend that some of the most distinctive set-pieces are new and unique locations, which is very derp.

[bannockburn]

Yes, I've seen it. It would be cool if they just said that it were the same places (bit lazy, but okay, I guess, at least the DMS campaign established a few locations), but that's one of the reasons I don't particularly like that UGC.


One of these days I'll resume working on DNA / DOA.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Yes, I've seen it. It would be cool if they just said that it were the same places (bit lazy, but okay, I guess, at least the DMS campaign established a few locations), but that's one of the reasons I don't particularly like that UGC.

Yeah, that, and you could throw in the NPCs from those campaigns. Coyote as a Hero of Another Story, fr'instance, or Cherry Bomb...

But no, he just threw set-pieces at us and pretended they were somewhere new. >_<

[Wounded Ronin]

The amount of time to create a good mod has always been the biggest obstacle in my opinion.

For a number of years I was really preoccupied with the idea of a good Deus Ex (original) mod. I tried my hand at level design but never got more than a test room with a staircase even though I spent a lot of time researching and fiddling around.

So, yeah, I would concur that for something that a person wants to actually release especially for a contest they should decide which scenes are essential and most cool, and cover the rest with in game phone calls or stuff like that.

That kind of reminds me of Planescape: Torment. You could theoretically have a world class game based on characters, dialogue, or whatever, just by writing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Tolstoy novel and having that be a major part of the game. If you did it well you could portray all kinds of things that would be hard to portray using animations or what have you.

I guess inspiration comes easy but so does burnout and time constraints, so rigorous project planning is actually the foundation of a successful mod/custom scenario.

[Tiralee]

Finally got around to smashing through Dragonfall - So much better than the Dead Man's Switch, it was embarrassing.

Juicy characters, simple, effective story (some awesome shoutouts and easter eggs.) and it really did feel like a good, decent run with friends. Even down to the point where the longest a spirit would hang around for Detrich was 1 (one) turn. Through the entire game. It felt like a running gag (and it was left on AP 1)

I would have loved to have fed some decent guns over to my teammates (I used some of the mercs for one mission, wasn't impressed) but there were some missions that were stand-out great, like the "Assault on Azzie-land" which only got to shooting once I met the bloodmages. (CHA 8 elf:)) made it out of there with 1 turn left on the generators (yeah, I timed that badly) and 2 turns before the response team came bursting through the door.

The other standout was the final battle. Messy, chaotic, stupid rolls on the part of my team, but we overcame.

Worst aspect? Running my sorry ass through the dungeon-like underpassages of the lair and once again stumbling across crap that's just designed to suck up precious med packs. Way too much like the end of the Switch, where you're just SICK of seeing bug spirits magically pop out again, when you KNOW that a decent weapon foci could make it all better.

Less bugs - seriously great music. Made Blitz cry. Loved Dante (He was a wrecking-ball!) but I'd have really liked to have ported my characters from the switch to this one, because that would have been some serious pink-mohawk running.

Someone smarter than me can answer this, but is there a save-editor for your character, so I can re-create favourites and punch them through dragonfall?

I also concur with previous posts - I'd prefer it if my stupidly-expensive powers be "always on" - same goes for the opposition. If I'm a wired street monster and they're popping Kam to meet me on even footing, so be it. Modifying weapons would be awesome as well - but I did think the Ruger Thunderbolt with all the trimmings and a very high quickness, ranged and pistols got way OP pretty fast. (The Alpha remains balanced though - but it'd be nice to be able to fire grenades through the inbuilt grenade-launcher)

BTW, who else enjoyed using the blooper on the junkies during MkIV? Hilarious.

-Tir

[binarywraith]

You can use the Editor to enable character import for Dragonfall, if you want to run it with your Dead Man's Switch character.

[Tiralee]

Ooh, thanks B-Wraith.

I've another odd question, before I do it - Run with a smartlinked thunderbolt, a normal thunderbolt and the Expensive handbuild? As a stupid-high quickness with ranged and pistols, the ability to do burst-fire, burst fire, high crit and then think about taking cover looks good.

...Oh dear, I think I've worked out why I'd run with 2 x Areas Alphas - full-auto for EVERYONE! (Although the free pistol reload is so awesome.)
And yes, full-auto works so much better in SRR than SR3..or 2 for that matter.

-Tir

[Stahlseele]

6 bullet full auto is trivial to do in SR3 O.o

[Tiralee]

6-round burst, yes.

Going full-auto with the HVAR, turn after turn, after turn, made for fun rolls:)
-Tir

[Sendaz]

Is it true in the next expansion they are adding a Full Auto Taser Dart Rifle? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

*watches CanRay start going purple*

[ShadowDragon8685]

They had a taser pistol in the game. One shot only, and, wouldn't you know it, it was exempt from free reload from having a high enough Pistols score. I shelved my Ares drone for one when I found it in a ground-level locker on the final mission.

I called it Herr Zap. It was very handy. If it had had free reloads and I could have stacked Haste and the adrenaline surge bioware together... Ooooh, that would've been potent.

[Wounded Ronin]

Definitely, some of the battles going on at the end of Dragonfall were hairy and epic indeed.

For me, few things are as exciting at the end of a long campaign than an epic battle. It's like the end of Platoon, or Zulu.

I remember playing the old first person shooter Damage Incorporated, which was one of the first FPS games where you go to command a squad of marines in real time in a 3d FPS environment. One of the things that made it memorable was your squaddies would make smartass comments while mowing down enemies. One guy was basically like John Wayne and while firing, he would say in a John Wayne voice, "By the time we're through, we're going to need a garbage truck for all these bodies."

In Jagged Alliance 2, since you could repeatedly fight battles in the same maps, dead bodies would not only stay but eventually they would decay and get eaten by crows.

Would it crash SR:R to have persistent bodies? In those end battles where there are loads and loads of enemies, I think it would add to the sense of desperation or Zulu-ness if you started accumulating big piles of bodies getting closer and closer to your defensive line. I wonder if someone has or is going to figure out a way to have persistent bodies for a particularly desperate final battle. And then afterwards all the characters are standing around and going through their final dialogue lines surrounded by the persistent mountains of bodies that had organically grown from the preceding battle they had just survived.

[Umidori]

[ Spoiler ]

I was interested in the question of if you could exterminate the dragons would you? My instinctive reaction would be "yes", but then the next question that comes up is how is this different from the instinctive human urge to destroy that which is not fully understood or controllable? Not bad in terms of philosophical reflection for a video game.

[ Spoiler ]

I dunno. There's something to be said for instinct, particularly survival. Dragons in SR treat humanity like cattle. If cows were somehow able to rise up against humanity, would we really be surprised at their wanting to exterminate all of us out of fear and self preservation?

Here's the clincher for me. The dragons don't have to exploit humanity - they choose to.

Humans who eat cows are in a similar boat, but with a few major differences. Firstly, we have to eat something - if not cows, then pigs, or plants, or whatever you prefer. Sadly, up to a certain point logistics trump morality - eatting cows is problematic, but we're willing to accept the practice within certain parameters because doing otherwise would be really, really difficult. Of course, the major ethical concern isn't the consumption of cow flesh, it's the treatment of the animals prior to that - a concern we struggle with, and far too often fail to address adequately, but one that could be met without hindering our ability to subsist on hamburger.

Now, if cows suddenly became capable of speaking out against our actions, things would change. If they had the capacity to recognize their situation and to communicate their feelings on the matter to us, we would have a very different sort of moral quandary. We would have to choose what to do next, and morally we would be compelled to cease our exploitation of the bovine species in light of such developments.

The trouble for the Dragons is that they know that humanity recognizes their own situation, and humanity has communicated their feelings on the matter to them, yet they persist in their exploitation. They willfully choose to exploit humanity regardless of the suffering they cause and the lives they destroy.

Worse still, it isn't even a matter of survival for them - they don't feed upon humans, they simply toy with them like sadistic puppeteers, using them as pawns to further their own agendas and fuel their internal bickering. If Lofwyr has to kill a million people to get a leg up on one of the other great dragons, he'll do it in a heartbeat so long as it doesn't hurt his own interests. He isn't doing it to have enough to eat, he's doing it because he wants to be the big shot dragon ruling the roost, just like the rest.

So when you ask me, would I kill the dragons? The only reason I say no is because I know the Horrors are waiting out there somewhere, and like it or not humanity needs the dragons to keep them at bay.

...of course, I wouldn't let Herr Brackhaus hear me say that...

Plot: Probably Glory.
Effectiveness: Eiger by a mile.

I ran with Glory, Eiger, and Dietrich throughout the whole game for the most part (my guy was a Decker named DOS BOOT). Dietrich was really good at... casting Haste on Eiger so she could shoot more fools. Glory was mediocre with her pistol, and tended to get into trouble when she was clawing people, but her Biotech saved my keister a number of times.

I actually had the exact opposite experience.

Glory's backstory was too "broken bird" for me and strangely predictable, while I found Eiger to be realistic and relateable, if not all that much harder to read. It also helped that the interplay between Eiger and the player character felt more meaningful, trying to keep the team running smoothly despite her active dislike of the PC.

As for effectiveness, maybe it was just the dice gods or gremlins, but Eiger couldn't hit the broad side of a barn for me. She'd have solid hit percentages and she'd just miss over and over and over. Meanwhile, Glory was just reliable through and through - she'd miss every so often, especially with the Savalette, but she always seemed to come through at just the critical moment where I needed a kill because Eiger took four 95% shots in a row and whiffed every last one of them.

~Umi

[Blade]

Would it crash SR:R to have persistent bodies? In those end battles where there are loads and loads of enemies, I think it would add to the sense of desperation or Zulu-ness if you started accumulating big piles of bodies getting closer and closer to your defensive line. I wonder if someone has or is going to figure out a way to have persistent bodies for a particularly desperate final battle. And then afterwards all the characters are standing around and going through their final dialogue lines surrounded by the persistent mountains of bodies that had organically grown from the preceding battle they had just survived.

I don't know if it would crash the game. Probably not unless there really are hordes of enemies. It might make the screen more difficult to read, though.
In a UGC, I think it's possible to have a hack that will leave a persistent body when an enemy is killed.

[Iduno]

[/spoiler]
HBS just put something out on Facebook asking about your favorite character. For me I would have to say Dietrich. Everyone else was sort of a drama queen, I thought.

Dietrich was solid for me the entire game, although it was to keep up haste on other characters towards the end.
Eiger was good, but I kept wanting to change her ware or weapon.
Glory felt weaker than she was supposed to be, until I figured out she had +1 ap cyberware and could choose different types of attacks for her blades. It took me way too long to figure that out.

I remembered the mercenaries in the original campaign being better than the other characters you got, maybe worth the money they cost. I don't think I would have used any of the mercenaries in Dragonfall, even if they didn't cost anything.

[Remnar]

Haven't finished Dragonfall yet, I've been saving the end for a bit... to savor it before I replay.

I HAVE, however, just started playing the Shadowrun UNLIMITED UGC again and, wow, that's gotten much better. I love the current rendition of the matrix and matrix runs (I almost always play deckers), reminds me of playing the old Genesis game in the sense that I just toss the game on while watching TV and do random matrix runs for cash, over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

If you haven't tried that UGC or haven't played it recently, give it a spin.

[Stahlseele]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCuBvFUrKY
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