f13.net

Well, a Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1613260297/shadowrun-returns) for one, for the time being.

2D, turn based, single player, for PC and tablets. If they get the funding, which at current rate seems likely as they've picked over 30k in a few hours.

The first major failure/scandal of this Kickstarter trend is gonna be awesome.

That being said, this is cool and I will likely contribute to it anyway.

Oh gods.  I'm going to go broke with all these Kickstarters.

Also I need to leave work early... :drillf:

Playing 2050 before the screwed up Shadowrun? Sold!  :awesome_for_real:

That guy being pelted for making the FPS shadowrun was "The funny".

I actually heard the FPS was pretty fun but it wasn't Shadowrun.

I'm willing to be that scandal.

Order of the Stick had a kickstarter, trying to raise 60 grand to do some republishes and a few other things.  They raised nearly 1.25 million dollars in pledges.  2127% of goal.

 :ye_gods:

WTF universe.. give me a decent kickstarter idea so *I* can has money, too.

I'm surprised it wasn't included as one of the tiers, actually. So easy money there.

edit: 85k already. Looks like the Mac port is a go too if it keeps up for just few days.

Sounds like you are planning to follow through with your idea.

To be fair, you could buy all of the old books with the Order of the Stick kickstarter, if I didn't already have three of them I would have gone to a higher tier myself.

I have a good idea, I just don't want to put it on kickstarter because any corporation can clone it overnight. Because it's got nothing to do with gaming.

Kickstarter for porn movies!

There should have been a tier where they give you a bucket for all the D6's you have to roll.  :oh_i_see:

I'd be down with this.

I cant play Srun if it's not multiplayer.  It just loses too much flavor for me otherwise.
I mean really, all we're looking at here is an old-school turn-based squad-rpg with Srun skin.  Which sounds cool, but not what many have had in mind.


I smell a dice-boot/tower in your future.

Does anybody know why Weisman and a bunch of other people left Smith & Tinker which he started to form yet another video games company?

He's still chairman of the board for S&T apparently. Maybe it's some sort of bookkeeping maneuver after their toy project flopped (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/125413/InDepth_Smith__Tinkers_CEO_On_The_Fall_Of_Nanovor_iOS_Rebirth.php)? Can't really find anything about it other than a brief mention (http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/16/reflections-on-gamesbeat-2011-and-the-road-ahead-in-mobile-games/):


edit 2: looks he also formed another company, Go Go Kiddo (http://gogokiddo.net/the-go-go-kiddo-team/) too which is pretty much his wife, him and few other guys. A separate company for each semi-separate audience, or smth.

edit: Kickstarter just shy of 200k. Don't think they'll get it all in one day but it's quite impressive.

I'm not usually one to hope for failure, but I was a little disappointed to see that people were contributing to the Leisure Suit Larry remake.  Anyhow, Shadowrun is the first one of these Kickstarter things I've donated to.

What's wrong with the Leisure Suit Larry remake outside of the whole franchise not aging well at all and its audience (teenaged boys who were excited by the hidden nudity/porn in the game) being acclimated to free porn all over the internet?

245K currently.  Kickstarter is crazy.

These Kickstarters are fueled by nostalgia, so any old franchise is fair game.

If you cast the net widely enough you don't need that much from each person to make an interesting total. And I assume they realise many projects are going to fail.

Exciting times though.

To me though, the difference between say, Double Fine doing a new point and click adventure game, and a remake of Leisure Suit Larry, is like the difference between getting excited about Ridley Scott going back and doing a movie that's Alien related, and getting excited over something like a shot for shot remake of Porky's.  Not all nostalgia is equal.

I put $15 on the Shadowrun one. Seems kind of lame without a physical game box.


You can also buy traffic directly to your Kickstarter from places like AdWords. I saw at least one project doing that which was fully funded (but only around $3k). With the right conversion rate you can fund as much as you need. Better yet post awesome concept art from whatever Kickstarter to Pinterest for the win.


This project also looked interesting (and already fully funded):

http://www.indiegogo.com/CraftStudio

Minecraft meets Second Life?

aaaand it's pretty much done.

395k at the moment timer switched from "24 days" to "23 days".

Since they're sitting now at over 550k with 22 days to go, they're talking (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r192hVs02G8) about potentially adding new features to the planned game. Co-operative multiplayer included so you might get your wish, perhaps.

Shadowrun Returns First Look - Alpha Gameplay Footage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9MiMjQwd2VE)

20 Min of Developer talk while playing the alpha.

Can I say HELL YEAH? I think I just did.

I'm some ways, as i was watching that, it kinda looked like this would have worked as a MOD for X-com. I have not been following this title, is it multiplayer?

I think they've said they could be adding co-op multiplay but I haven't followed it either.

I contributed to it; IIRC for right now it's single player only.

Watched the video when the email went out- it's looking really good for an alpha. They did a great job with the art for it to fit together that well.

is it wrong that my nipples are hard?

It is not.

I'm impressed.

This was almost enough to turn around my day.  Well done.

This looks great.

However, I work in downtown Seattle, right in the areas in the game.  Today's downtown Seattle looks more dystopian than 2050's.  :)  Needs more homeless people selling Real Change newspapers.

Hawt. With this and Wasteland 2, this year may not be so bad for the CRPG. And then of course PE and Torment++ in 2014...

Completely random nitpick: why was the enemy wizard chaincasting a heal spell only to have 2/3 of the heal undone due to drain? He could've stood on a leyline tile at least  :awesome_for_real:

Stand in line with the rest of us waiting for the x-com editor.  However, tbh I'd prefer whatever they're currently using in the game.  X-com is fairly one dimensional, albeit well presented. 
As for MP, no it is not, but there's no way in hell the SR releases w/o at least the option.

My guess it'll minimally come with local co-op.   :rimshot:

Thing with tbs games is all they really need is a shared desktop to work perfectly fine; wouldn't require much netcode really and what little there is remains 3rd party.  I had a mod I'd thought of in another engine that pulled this off whilst locking out certain players when it wasnt their turn.   No reason they couldn't do something like that here.

Stamina drain.  It'd only be physical damage if he really overdid it.

Hmm, that could be, though I thought it was hp damage based on the floating damage text. As you can tell, I don't play mages -- I prefer mad scientist types.

(Let me tell you about the SR4 campaign where I was the only person in the group without any extra initiative passes... hey, at least it allowed me to think up witty one-liners while everyone else was busy being useful in combat! :why_so_serious:)

I wonder how much intelligence/charisma/etc are going to play into the game.

Like, a chromed-out troll sammy is goddamn near invincible in straight up combat if built right (ignoring the low essence), but in PnP you'd have a lot harder time with basically having anti-charisma and being so stupid you need sticky notes on your guns to know which end to point at the enemy.

It wont play a roll in a squad, which is the point of the game.  Let the hacker telepresence in for all that smartay shit.  I'm gonna assume they'll balance the statpoints through the squad and/or scale encounters accordingly... just like in the PnP version.  Shadowrun is not an IP where a jack-of-all-trades type character should survive the night.

I am super excited for this game. The important part for me is that everything in the game is created with the editor which will be included in the game. If the editor is more like NWN's than NWN2's, this may be the game that at least rivals BloodBowl for hours played with me. The most exciting thing for me about that video was that the camera never rotated, which hopefully means that I won't have to deal with 3d art assets while creating a run to punish entertain my friends.

edit to add: I normally avoid DLC, but this game could make money off of me for a very long time if they charged a few bucks for a new 5-10 hour run, especially if it included new skins for the editor.

Provided their editor allows for art assets to be imported and has good documentation on how to make tilesets I dunno if you'd have to worry about that.

Now I'm even more excited  :grin:

I mean shit, remember the community packs for NWN? I still install NWN at some point after I format an HDD or build a new PC to play some of the fan modules I really liked.

Speaking of that, I really should just download everything good and back it up since we can't count on NWNVault being around forever.

Damn yous guys.... I just bought NWN from gog.com. Of course I had to call my bank to release my debit card for international transactions to do so.  While on hold I also bought System Shock 2 and something called Starflight 1+2 that looked interesting.

Go play Excrucio Eternum and Elegia Eternum again. Those were great. Ditto with Honor Among Thieves.

I am downloading those now even though I never played them. My nostalgia for NWN comes from having been in  the USNavy when it came out.  Most of my division would smuggle their computers on board when we went underway and connect them in a LAN, but internet access wasn't an option. Worms and NWN took up most of our free time, worms for the PvP and NWN for the story telling.  If you could craft a decent adventure for your shipmates to crawl through, it lead to pretty decent bragging rights :)

Dang, starflight is old school. I played those back in the day. They're very much "you can fuck yourself and make the game unwinnable" games. Although they're both hilarious in places too. :)

Hm.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=539736






And a features comparison:

Splitting community content requirements like that seems a fine way to shoot yourself in the foot.

Honestly, I'm fairly sure there was going to be a shadowrunnexus (or whatever) springing up after launch anyway, splintering the mod community... simply because the workshop will be limited to campaign files. There'll be a lot of mods that go deeper than that (including adding custom tilesets or portraits, which is a pretty big deal), so they wouldn't be supported even if there wasn't this microsoft DRM hurfblurf going on. See also: Skyrim nexus v steam workshop.

Having save points instead of 'real' save functionality is annoying. Is this a Moai limitation or something?

Looting... eh. I actually don't remember loot being much of a thing in shadowrun (except maybe bringing dead street sams to a street doc to cut out some of that sweet cyberware). Plus you can still have quest items and stuff scripted via the editor. Still, this is one of those features that may or may not be hacked into the game via a mod if their scripting layer is really as powerful as they say (other such features would be a special ammo system and maybe reputation).

Sooooo....as someone who missed the chance to kickstart this, and as someone who does not hate Steam, this changes nothing for me, right?

The only difference I can see is that you have to pay from the Berlin DLC (if you want it). KS backers get it for free.

I've got no dog in this race, but it seems that there are two major sticking points for people:

1. The game was marketed as being DRM-free in the general Kickstarter. Now it's DRM free, but only for backers, and only with a laundry list of restrictions. People are pissed due to a lack of transparency on the part of Harebrained, when they failed to disclose that Microsoft still owned the Shadowrun IP and that negotiations were ongoing. A reasonable assumption would have been that all of the potential licensing stuff was hashed out before the Kickstarter even came to be.

2. The second city (Berlin) was backed as a stretch goal on the premise that it was going to be part of the main game for everyone who plays the game - backer and non-backer alike - to have as part of the base package. This mentality is borne out if you look back at when Harebrained was tossing around the idea of a backer-only storyline revolving around Jake Armitage from the SNES Shadowrun that would tie into the story of the old 16-bit games, and how the backers were largely against such a thing because then non-backers would never see it.

The other stuff like the lack of a save system or loot are head-scratchers, but the two things above are what people are really drubbing Harebrained over.

Dear gods!  A game will be on Steam.  What a shitty world we live in.

That all seems a bit silly (splitting the versions like that), but the part that made me raise an eyebrow was the "previously undisclosed license agreement with Microsoft" bit. Aren't you supposed to disclose if you can or cannot do things like that in your kickstarter? Not show up months later and go "hey, you know all that shit we said we'd do? We actually can't, contractually. Teehee!"

All my games are on steam. I guess I'm doing it wrong.

I can understand somebody who was promised a DRM free direct download and got a Steam key might be angry about that, but as far as I can see they're providing DRM free direct download of the main game, editor, and the add on content that was part of the Kickstarter rewards / stretch goals.  Being outraged that future content (which has not yet been created) beyond that which was part of the Kickstarter is not going to be available DRM free seems a bit excessive.

Sounds like they do have a save system, just that it's classic checkpoint based (perhaps a little old-fashioned for modern gamers).  Didn't see the thing about no loot.  OMG NO LOOTZ!!!!111!1one

There is some speculation that the exact terms of the license agreement were actually still under negotiation while the kickstarter was going on. It's also possible that MS was originally OK with a no-DRM setup, but once they saw that the game made almost 2mil and was slated to have multiple DLCs, they changed their minds.

The less favorable speculation says that HBS knew this from day 1 and was keeping quiet about it... but this scenario doesn't pass the basic "would I do this if I was a small dev house that lives and dies on the goodwill of players" test.

And hey, at least it isn't GFWL.  :ye_gods:

Nothing forces you to declare anything in your Kickstarter other than how awesome your game is going to be.

Yes, it should be disclosed, but then so should all sources of investment / revenue going into a title so that you know where the other funding is coming from and if you can trust it. But boring stuff like that gets in the way of SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY, so companies leave it out.

Insert popcorn eating image macro here.

Oh hey, people aren't going to get what they were expecting from a Kickstarter project.  How could this be possible?

From all the reasons you can get mad at a Kickstarter this is by far the dumbest one.

People that didn't participate in the Kickstarter don't get the things promised to backers, that was to be expected.

People (that didn't particpate) who are too cheap to get the expansion can't use Mods based on that expansion, big shocker there.

The company wants to make money off expansions after the one they promised. Oh no, who would have thought.

Kickstarter is a fool's game anyway. If a business wants my money, they better have the product at hand, or they can give me a slice of the profits.

This is one of the reasons I've been willing to go in on alphas for games when they are willing to give me something playable immediately(Minecraft, Natural Selection 2, Project Zomboid, Prison Architect), but am very much not into Kickstarter for video games.

Ha ha yep.

Games change A LOT in development - and they should. A lot of these high-profile KS games raise money before they have any real design, and half of what they promise should realistically be highly subject to change or are straight up nonsense. Many of these companies are not particularly successful - if they don't have the ability to compete in the marketplace under normal circumstances they sure as hell don't have the crack planning ability to promise features before they've really even started work on the game or have a design beyond 2 paragraphs. The larger issue here is that mediocre companies finding old projects to remake has become a business model.

I'm not sure I care if I get a completely DRM-free GOG-style installer for the game or the least intrusive/annoying DRM platform version of the game.

So yeah, who gives a shit.

Actually, I'm hoping they'll offer a Steam key for the KS version. As long as it's not straight up malware/spyware or keep me from playing the game, DRM doesn't bother me at all.

Be happy then, thats what they said they'll do.

Steam Key + Direct Download Link for all Backers.

The only real negative I can say about this choice is that it's sure to create some confusion among the potential customers as well as adding a layer of WTF complexity to the backers' versions. It's not smart but it won't affect me as I didn't back it and will likely buy the Steam version anyway.

Potential customers can only get the Steam version.  It's nothing more than bitching by people looking for a reason to bitch.  They're getting exactly what was advertised, which is the Shadowrun game DRM-free.

So they can't get future expansions without DRM?  The studio hasn't even gotten the first game out yet and they're whining about something two games out.  Big fucking whoop.

All I want is a Hong Kong DLC/expansion so I can recreate my gaming group's various hijinks in that 4-year megacampaign we did...

The things that stood out to me were, 'Oh, uh, hey guys, saving the game is like, hard so we're only offering checkpoint saves.' and 'Wait, you mean you wanted to be able to take guns from the security guards you just shot?  Um.  Well, we probably could have put that in the game, but that's hard too.'  Those squeaking sounds alerted me to the clownshoes worn by the developers and made it very apparent to me that somebody was in way over their heads on this project.

I think it's been mentioned here in the past that Shadowrun as an RPG was never really a loot game in the way that something like D&D is. You aren't going to find a +2 handgun or anything, and chances are whatever weapon you are using is going to be more suited to you due to weapon skills, smart link jacks, and such that you aren't going to want to just pick a random gun up off somebody. Money > loot.

It may actually be entirely possible that at the time they made the promise, they weren't thinking of Steam as even counting as DRM.

At the very least, enemy weapons worth anything would have a bio-lock on them.  At most you'd pick something up for emergency use.  At worst you'd give the corps a way to trace the run back to you...

Maybe a really hard up runner could sell stuff to their fixer, but generally that's not going to be something they want to bother with, and the rate of return is going to suck.  Now if you came back with a prototype, that might be worth the neuyen, but then that'd already be accounted for by the GM / game engine.

Yep, the only semi-profitable "loot" (other than nuyen and information, and maybe an emergency weapon) was the cyberware inside enemy street samurais. And there was the tiny problem of lugging 150 kilograms of metal and flesh to the nearby shadow clinc to do the extraction... which took a lot of effort and time. Time the runners probably didn't have if they were encountering groups of cybered up enemies with betaware+.  :why_so_serious:

e: I actually don't remember if magic doodads had much value... weren't those bound to the mages anyway?

So I guess the question is, are kickstarter projects required to provide more than what is promised to backers? Appearantly to some they are. You missed the complaints that the DRM free version will not be available to non backers as well.

Supposedly it's a time thing. They can't allocate the time for a save system and get all the content in they want for release so the save system gets the chop. Which I think in a game that's going to be drowning in user content is a bad decision.

Shadowrun as a game has never been much about grabbing armloads of magic swords from fallen enemies, yeah, but if your team's in the shit and that dead guy next to you has a bunch of grenades on him, well.  Being able to scrounge ammo off of enemies is a perfectly legitimate thing to want to do.  Getting their weapons are an iffier proposition because of the possibility of them being smartlinked and therefore useless without a hacker to unlock them, and a shadowrun team likely doesn't have the luxury of enough time to strip down every person they shoot for their belongings, but leaving out the option entirely is just lazy.

Meh, would have been worse to have looting imo.  Most runner ops are fairly covert, resource-mgmtey affairs.  Being able to loot every corpse would be kind of anathema to the IP unless you wanted a more wide-open sandboxey game.

A more important concern with this game will be how they handle the "little" things like Hacking and smart weapons.  Did they even decide if they're gonna have any kind of Net or not?

The Matrix and spiritual plane and all that are actually overlaid over the world and can be seen like a separate layer by characters with the required hardware/skills to use them.

Which is more of a Shadowrun 4 thing than the previous editions, most hacking's done in AR rather than jacking into the Matrix.  On one hand, running a game's much much easier when the hacker hasn't fucked off to the Matrix and the mage isn't busy drooling while her astral body's off doing something magical.  On the other, the distinct separation of worlds in which hackers and mages operated in added a lot to the flavor of the setting.

Is there a reference to the specifics of "not having a save system" somewhere?  It seems inconceivable that there would be no way to save a game, so I've been under the impression that it's more of a lack of some specific feature or property...

It's mentioned in the gameplay walkthrough.  They will have a checkpoint system instead since its 'easier'.  I'm not too butthurt about it since I always end up saving way too many time as is.  And chances are with a heavy mod system someone will make their own.  But year seems lazy.

Lack of save games is a distinct minus for me.  This feature was annoying as hell in Bioshock: Infinite.   I can't see how it wouldn't be 100% worse in a game like this.

Are save games all of a sudden difficult now?

For consoles designed to use their storage to hold games and not a million saves it is.

I don't understand how "checkpoint system" equals "lack of save games".  The former means "can only save at certain times" (annoying but not necessarily the end of the world), while the latter means (or sounds like) "cannot save at all" (surely not) or maybe "limited save slots"  (annoying but survivable).

Yeah they thought you can't lose when they give you ammo, health and money periodically in Bioshock Infinite.
Guess what, I'd trade away that little slut for a save game option, Levine.

Being able to save when you want lets you quit when you want rather than pause the game all day/night long if you are not at one of the predesignated checkpoints?  Maybe there is a spot where a save would be really nice that was not thought of by the designers?  Maybe you engage in lots of activity in an area that does not have a save trigger? 

Lots of good reasons to have player made saves.  The lack of this does not mean no saves but it may mean players have to learn how to trigger them, which is annoying.

The no saves thing is probably due to them using the Moai engine. Apparently, non-checkpointed savegame handling (aka object persistence) in Moai is hard (http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/8271/).

More importantly, there's a new update (http://harebrained-schemes.com/post/mitchs-dev-diary-theres-something-about-decking/) about the Matrix system they're using... it's basically an entire second layer of the world where the decker can run around and do decker stuff while the rest of the party takes care of the physical threats. Sounds pretty cool!

Environment video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UZNfXWwn2I)

The release date is July 25. (http://harebrained-schemes.com/?p=3233&preview=true)

And it's on Steam, for pretty cheap. (http://store.steampowered.com/app/234650/)

I'm kinda bummed about this -- but on the other hand, it leaves me more time to prepare the campaign I'm planning to create! Now, if only they released the editor a month early for preorderers...  :awesome_for_real:

e: there are several let's play videos for custom missions made by early access backers floating around youtube already, in case anyone wants to take a look at the 'final' gameplay

Damnit, freaking steam has been teasing me with their "releasing in june" on this game for months.

noloot is probably significantly better for this game.

in the future any loot worth taking has to be jailbroken afore you can use it.

We once managed to scoot out of a job with a couple of ares lasers which we put in shielded boxes so they couldn't be tracked. took them to a fence who wouldn't touch them with a nine foot pole and told us to get them the fuck out of his shop. eventually found a gunsmith who we paid good money to to painstakingly hack into the thing, burn out all the trackers and crap, and rewire it so we could use it. A timer went off in the other one because it hadn't received a link code from the corp that owned it in 24 hours, setting off microexplosives that ruined the gun.

And the better part of that outcome wasn't that we got an ares laser,  but that we learned a lot about how to hack that corp's guns and send a kill signal to the explosives inside.

Since this is coming out next week, ARISE! And have a launch trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UFYsQ0M2Jrg).

The developers have said a few times that they have basically no marketing budget... yeah, it shows. :awesome_for_real: That said, this trailer does show a bit more about what the game looks/plays like.


edit: there is also a Let's Play video series being done by the current manager of the 'Shadowrun Missions' campaign setting who is also one of the game's beta testers. Not going to link it here due to heavy spoilage... but you can find it if you search for 'Bulldrek' on youtube.

What, like spare ammo?

Backers should have their key to add the game to Steam, but there won't be a pre-load :(

Almost forgot about it - I'll probably pick it up on Steam.

Been plowing through IWD lately, and this seems different enough.

Anyone know if it's possible to play this on a shared desktop (every command would need to be clickable onscreen)?  I'm not going to invest in this (yah, I said it) unless I can port in some MP somehow.  It can be done with TBS (long turns) and a good editor; assuming one can tweak each squadmember to be a player character equivalent.

And no, I cant be arsed to find this info. myself.   :grin:

Too funny.  I gorged on GOG and got every game I ever owned on CD and started up IWD in anticipation of this as well. 

Sure is a lot of loot dropping in the let's play linked earlier, for a no loot game that is.

So.....it is a very rare thing when I preorder games. Does Steam always unlock stuff at midnight?  Should I just get some sleep instead?

20 hours until unlock. I so hope tis is good...

From what I'm reading it unlocks at 10am pst or something dumb like that

Unlocking in approximately 12 hours.   :heartbreak:

Looks quite interesting those Let's play clips on youtube. But it does have lots of bugs in the version he is playing, so that's putting me a bit off for now.

RPS liked it, but apparently the campaign is a bit short.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/25/wot-i-think-shadowrun-returns/

I was going to post that too; on the other hand, for €12.59, it's not too bad; I haven't read anything about the editor potential and its accessibility. Hopefully, a decent modding community will build around the game and put out some good adventures.

I would assume the editor is the main selling point. If they can tap into user generated content they can sell tile-sets, assets and extensions of the game mechanics for a long and lucrative time.
 

I got a bit into it. It's pretty simple and a bit clunky, but reasonably fun and well written. Also the art is really nice IMO; the game looks good.

I'm about 4 hours in. Game's really good, even though the main campaign is super-linear and there are a few typos and such here and there.

Now I just need like... 3 months of uninterrupted free time to make a campaign for this game based on my SR4 gaming group's exploits  :awesome_for_real:

Dabbled a bit to get a feeling for the different archetypes and loving it so far.

It seems extremely linear, but all the tools are there to make great modules. And the story (unsurprisingly) plays out like a typical run. Which hits my nostalgia really hard in a good way.

I just feel the Rigger might get a problem with scaling real soon and the physical Adept feels underpowered. Melee isn't what it used to be in P&P  :awesome_for_real:

Yea, melee seems to have the advantage of being more accurate, but also a lot more exposed... enemies really like focusing on whatever is closest to them (for me it's usually an earth spirit... have fun beating on granite, drekheads). It -may- get better once you pick up the disarm ability. There are also some neat buff abilities like the water spirit's +2 dodge bonus that can help a melee char.

I ended up going with a rifle-toting shaman character. It's really powerful and I haven't been in any near-defeat situations so far... then again, one of the developers said that 'normal' difficulty is intended to be easyish to begin with. Anyone playing on hard/very hard?

Yeah this is pretty nice.

I agree about the simplicity & clunkiness, but I don't mind that so far. It's very nostalgic feeling - reminds me of Fallout (1, 2 and Tactics) mostly, and is definitely triggering old pen & paper memories!

I actually like the fact that it's not got any voice overs too. Looking forward to seeing what the community produce for it in short order :)

I wonder if a lot of people are going to 'get' that Shadowrun generally has a pretty shallow power curve for players.

At this point most people who play it are fans, so they should know. Progression happening mainly by gear is a reality to them.

Also, I find that the game has more progression than the PnP game due to the unlocks in skill tree.

An hour or so in, taking my time and enjoying the ride.  Elf Street Samurai, Rifle specialization.  There is a little clunkiness, but nothing horrible, and I really like the art style so far.  Hopefully they'll do a bit of further polish to the controls/UI at some point, but nothing's so bad that it's seriously interfering with my enjoyment of the game.

Game has a very "Developed to be put on tablets" feel; or possibly the people who did the UI/general design were more used to tablets.

Ran into something fairly frustrating.  Finished a matrix run and had to sign some runners up for a mission.  Ok, browse runners.  Choose a runner, add them, and a different one is added.  It does not seem to matter which runner I try to hire, I get the same set.  Maybe it is a glitch?  Cannot change maps at this point so  I decide to close and relaunch the game.  My save point is just before the matrix run.

Finishing a matrix run does not save your game.  Not sure why the runner selection was wrong yet.





Other than that I find the game decent.  It really does have a feeling close to the older games.  So far it has been linear.  Community mods are already popping up, so maybe great campaigns will appear. 

Pezzle, I had the same problem. You can not click on the 'add character' box at the bottom of the screen. You have to use the big yellow plus sign on the selection menu to add the correct character.

This and several.other UI oddities are beginning to wear on me

Will try that tonight, thanks.  Even with that problem AND the lack of manual saves the game is fine.  The game has not frozen or crashed, not getting stuck moving around etc.  I am pleased.  Hopefully they release more campaigns!

I'm liking this a lot so far.  It sounds like they stole the soundrack from Eve Online, which I like. 

The soundtrack was done by the dudes who did the SNES and Genesis Shadowrun games, which is pretty awesome.

WHAT?! I was buying this anyway, but what you two just said about the soundtrack just made me want it immediately.

In fact if I'm not mistaken the music that starts playing during combat is the same from the SNES version (obviously updated a bit).

Watched a stream of this for a while, it looks kind of cool but something about it seem off. I think it's the environments - it looks too clean, the individual pieces of art don't come together very well (stuff looks sort of pasted together, without proper shadows to tie them to the same space) and you can't really do much with anything in the environment. It feels less like you are walking around a gritty city and more that you are walking around on a set.

The overall resolution and fidelity works against it in some ways - now that you can clearly see individual doors you want to be able to open them, if you can clearly make out a motorcycle you want to be able to ride it or blow it up. It's sort of in the uncanny valley of interactivity.

That said overall it seems pretty decent.

That's not a bad take on it, Margalis.  You definitely won't be playing this one for the gameplay, and it is definitely a "throwback" game.  I liken it to Torchlight in feel, although Torchlight was a lot smoother in its production.  This isn't to mean that the games are anything alike.  Maybe a good comparison would be Torchlight is to Diablo I as Shadowrun is to Neverwinter nights?  This is definitely a story driven game.  Actually, now that I think about it, it reminds me a lot of Arcanum.

Is there character progression across user-made content or do you reset to a default state at the start of each?

I dunno, it looks pretty good to me. It's a weirdly clean, crisp artstyle. More neon/shiny than dark/grimy. There's not much to the engine other than some sorta weird perspective scrolling of foreground objects and characters kinda look pasted on. It's what $1.8 mill buys you though.

I'm really enjoying it outside of the really slow movement speed. It's a bit agonizing moving through areas in combat mode.

This is awfully fun.

Heh, unarmed Adepts feel a little overpowered to start with, their first ability is a spell that gives +10 damage in unarmed combat for 5 rounds.  Maybe you should try it without the machete untill you can find a decent sword :) 

As for the no loot thing, I kind of like it. Personally, I find there are a lot of situations where I use skills to avoid combat, knowing there is no loot for killing enemies and the same amount of karma for avoiding combat as there is for killing everything. In the newest Deus Ex I would always feel like I had lost out if I missed the chance to loot corpses, even if avoiding combat was the smarter choice for my character. Not having to worry about what great items I might miss by avoiding combat actually allows my loot whore self to relax and choose the path that makes the most roleplaying sense for my character.

Also with loot unless you go straight to fighting high end corp security you're not going to be all that impressed or make all that much money.

Like pretty much all the guns in the core book are relatively balanced against eachother. An Ares Predator is a good allrounder, a Super Warhawk is the typical big bang with the shallow ammo pool, etc. And a starting character in PnP can pretty easily afford any of them + some attachments and smart link. You really aren't going to find a gun of shooting mans better +2.

Now, the lack of ammo types is kind of a bummer.

Shit, I'm already falling into the reroll to try another class --> get sick of repeating content trap.

The developer for the game had only cranked out semi-good tablet games before, which is why Shadowrun has a feel of tabletitis.  This sadly is not a game made by the XCOM crew and it shows.  Time and patches can take care of some of the rough edges though, and hopefully they do take the time and effort to improve the game, as Shadowrun is a fantastic setting and deserves the effort.

Liking it so far, feels like I've plowed pretty far through the campaign without breaking a sweat.

Two questions:

 - If you're going to use ranged weapons, is there a point to using anything besides a rifle? A shotgun I can maybe see, but I'm struggling to see the point of SMGs or pistols.
 - Do Deckers have a point? I've hardly seen a point to having one around. The one time I took one with me, all there was for her was to mark enemies, which wasn't particularly necessary.

Make sure you're playing on Hard or Very Hard -- Normal is way too easy. According to a developer, you have a stat advantage over enemies on all difficulty levels under VH.

Shotguns are very powerful for aoe, especially once you get 'wide load' (basically a cone attack) or if you can Kneecap multiple people. They're especially nice when you need to hold a position. SMGs are kind of meh... they are a bit better at hitting soft targets than shotguns/rifles (since every attack is a burst, and SMGs do decent damage on each hit), but they consume ammo like crazy and shotguns can do even better burst against the same targets. Pistols are a late bloomer with the disarm and triple-shot (chainshot) abilities, both of which are quite awesome. They're also free to reload.

Deckers aren't useful at all for the first 1/4 of the game except for a few skill checks, but it picks up once (almost) every mission starts to have a Matrix part that can be used to turn turrets to your side and whatnot.. they're also required to get data from those matrix sections in at least two missions. That said, IMO it's better to bring an NPC decker, or -even better- an NPC decker/rigger (there's one guy in the Nephilim group who does this, Aruba?).

Hmm...


I've only seen one Matrix section so far, and I was given a decker for it.

I am past that point, Strazos. There is a lot more decker use past that point. I made my character a decker -- kind of a bad choice for the first 1/4 of the game.

Really plowing through, been interesting, though I think I've seen everything my SMG/Swords Streetsam is going to be able to do - he dodges a lot, can put a hurting on from range with his smartlinked H&K (is there even a difference? It's not evident in the stats), and can annihilate groups with a katana - taking out out a group of 4 Lone Star guards in a single round while haste just by using whirlwind slash was pretty neat.

Thinking next I'll go with an adept/mage - magic from range, multislash in the face. Or perhaps a decking sniper.

Will be interesting to see how different modules will hook into the main campaign - think we'll be able to use the Union as a hub and simply access different missions from there?

The Matrix combat can be pretty mean at times. I got knocked out of the matrix like twice on one of the later missions since if the AI decides to attack your avatar instead of your programs you can get blasted to dust in one round.

Finished the campaign. Was pretty fun but I had a much harder time than I should have since I brought a decker to the endgame...and you don't need a decker there. That sucked.

The writing was pretty good; the homebase chock full of super-friendly allies you can trust is very video-gamey though. Also, I think like half the etiquette aren't used in the game?

edit: also, even if you have a decker in your team, any objects that require decking check against your score instead of theirs even if you make THEM do the interaction. That also sucks.

Yep... that's apparently a design choice in the original campaign. There's a mod out there ("A late night call from your fixer") that works the way it should, ie. the skill of the person doing the interaction counts for the skill check.

Same with the "stuck in combat mode" bits, btw. It's easy to set up a trigger that takes you into free-move mode as long as no enemies are active, but most of the official missions don't use it.

Beat the campaign also - I played it on Hard, but I only really lost in a combat encounter once, and it was technically in the Matrix, where I just made some dumb mistakes. Your character is just far and away miles above as far as potential stats go, so I played as a rifle-using decker and just walked through most of the game.

If I were to play it again I'd play it on Very Hard.

So is this a tick for the first cab off the rank in the KS nerdgames revolution, then?

I'm confused.  Does this mean there's no point in bringing an NPC decker for anything?

NPC deckers can jack into the matrix sections for you no prob; however if a static object you inspect has a decking skillcheck (like a locked crate) only your score is counted.

It shames me to not get whatever this slang is but if you mean "Is this the first reasonably good/okay game to come out of kickstarter?", I don't think so actually...Chivalry is supposed to be great, sells well, and was kickstarted wasn't it?

Shadowrun Returns however is good. Like old-school good where writing/story carry the game to enjoyable past workable but janky gameplay.

I meant the Wasteland/Torment/Project Eternity group of isometric RPGs done in Unity.

Though maybe Shadowrun is less like that? I've never played it I admit.

An inability to use your teams skills for skill checks is a design choice?! I am unconvinced.

Waited so long for this game and it comes so very very close to being greatness. I think I would view the game more favorably if it straight up sucked. There are so many aspects of the game that are either not implemented at all or are obviously unfinished. There is about 1-2 circumstances for a PC decker to enter the matrix, as of now the entire class has no real use. And from my superficial use of the editor and hearing from others with more knowledge its going to be very difficult (mayhap unfeasibly so) to finish all the mechanics that as of now are worthless. On a bright note there is all manner of tools and assets in the editor that do not exist in campaign. I feel as a kickstarter supporter I funded an editor for Shadowrun Online.


I pray the tools exist for the community to make this game everything it could be.

The only part of the PnP game I kinda wished they had added was character perks/flaws.

Granted in the splat-campaign they give you the majority wouldn't be useful but it'd be kinda cool if they had supported user-made content using them.

Getting such a NWN1 vibe from this.  The campaign is fine, but it is really more of a demo for the 20$ editor we bought.

I really hope the community has the tools to make this fun. I love the setting, but Margalis's comment about walking through sets is dead on. It feels very scripted. At least the script is decent. Only up to Pike Place Market or something so far. As a native Seattle-area-ite I am bummed that the maps have no basis in reality. That was always one of my favorite parts of PnP Shadowrun.

Well, you can check it yourself -- open the official campaign editor and check the conversation for the safe. The skill check will be 'if triggering character has a decking skill of at least 5'. If you check similar conversations in the "late night" user mod, it'll have a skill check 'if nearest actor with tag X has a decking skill of at least 4' which works as expected (the item has an interact range of 1, so whoever is interacting will be nearest -- alternately you could just tag whoever has the highest decking skill with X at the start of the run). 'Course this is kind of a hacky solution, but hey, it works!

Of course that doesn't make the skill check behavior in the official campaign any less silly. :p

e: I'm totally not ninja-editing, honest guv.

Basically any of the weapon specializations become god mode beyond 5-6. Handguns will have 95%+ accuracy at any range, reload as a free action and when you get a 3rd action point you can chain attack (3 shots between 2-3 targets) and double tap (2 shots one target enhanced crit) in one round with a base crit rate of 25-30%. Guns and samurai are beyond the pale compared to any of the other classes. The SMG tree appears like its incomplete, I believe it has 2 skills that get unlocked. Anything lower than Very Hard is so easy that one will get bored and even on the highest difficulty you can solo 95% of the game with little difficulty.


Yeah, I was just doubting that behavior being an intended choice as opposed to one of the dozens of inexplicable "features" in the campaign caused by it not being completed. As you get towards the end it becomes more and more apparent this campaign was cobbled together with little care. Dont even get me started on the save system.

Edit: I noticed the work around as well. If the decker was closest to the object they would use their own skills.

I went handgun only with high amounts of dodge and my guy was borderline unkillable outside of a couple situations where multiple casters were targeting me with no cover. You suck really bad early on but after you get towards the end of it you crit almost every hit and can shoot up a whole room of people even if they aren't next to eachother.

Shotguns seem really really good too; Coyote literally one-rounded whole groups of guys by herself during a section where you have to cover two different sets of doors to defend your decker.

Also, there's one really bad bug I noticed- with scene transitions during combat. This includes Matrix<->Meatspace transitions. Doors and enemy positions seem to reset to previous round values when the scenes change.

For example: I got my character watching a door; there's a guard on the other side who runs in on his turn and pops a shot at my decker in the background. After my meatspace guys go, it transitions to the matrix. After the Matrix turns are over it switches back to meatspace and the guard is magically back at his starting position with any damage he incurred, and the door is shut...he gets to run in the door again and pop a shot at my decker and I eventually just had to run up to the door and bodyblock it open so I could finish the fucker off.

Edit: Also I didn't take any other adepts so this could be wrong...but there's a plot guy you get at the endgame who is a ridiculously powerful and kitted out melee adept/caster. He has a shitload of moves and he SUCKED. SUCKED. Missed like 90% of the time, got shot/meleed to shit over and over, etc. Only good thing was that he had the heal spell so he could consistently undo his incoming damage every other round. Melee seems kinda weaksauce.

Plot guy's best use is using the plot gun. Also his magic wasn't half bad, all those AOEs fried bad dudes like nothin'. Though I'll say adepts are really kinda... strange? Killing hands is great, but everything else in the tree just screams 'meh'.

Even Plot guys heal sucks. It only treats the most recent injury?! Those bugs either do tons of dmg with a DOT or 1 dmg and -1 AP. So often he is healing 1 hp. Plot dude also has access to high level magician skills and he comes nowhere close to anyone with a gun.

The whole scene change reseting the state is something inherent with the editor (ive seen it mentioned in the official forums). I forget the specifics, something like you cannot have a static "area" when you transition between scenes. So when you are inside the matrix and jack out to the meat world the scene you are returning to is an entirely new scene or some nonsense. I believe its also related to why you can only have checkpoint saves?

One thing that bothered me about the game was that the "correct" path in the game is always the moral one. Anytime you make any attempt to behave other than a hero you will miss out on some benefit (superficial benefit sure, but still). It does not make much sense at all in the setting.

Yep. While the first part of the game is mostly true to the setting (except for a few silly things like the super-friendly Shadowrunner bar), the second half was very... un-Shadowrun-y? Though I guess many SR tabletop groups SAVED TEH WORLD at one point (ours included). However, since the second half had better combat / tactical sequences than the first part, I'm willing to give it a pass.

The straight-on corp run is pretty Shadowrun IMO; straight up to the property destruction and the kind of casual annoyance the suits and corp security registered at someone shooting their place up and killing goddamn near a whole security detail.

The ridiculously over-the-top friendly safehouse/bar and the very final act are about the only things that really smacked of being videogamey/not Shadowrun. The shadowrunners that get characterized in the game are pretty alright (Jake, Coyote, etc) and about right. Part of the whole PnP thing is that even if your team got along and were professional in-so-far as you don't literally betray eachother, everyone was supposed to have various personality differences and tics that made your runs more interesting and complicated.

Having a complete chiphead decker who is either obliterating every system he touches, or is completely leaving you out to dry not because they're an asshole but because they took a severe addiction to BTLs. Or having a gigantic bullet-sponge troll sammie who is great in a fight but is so stupid he needs sticky notes on his guns telling him which end goes towards the badguy. That kind of thing.

Ironically the SNES version kinda got that part more right than this game did, if not in a really narrow circumstance. If you took a specific runner with you on a specific run, they suddenly turn on you at one point and you have to kill them. Here they're just NPCs I slot into my party, and even if I'm a goodie two-shoes I don't need to give a shit about them.

I liked the story though. The A and B plots being connected was neat.

I wish they had more totem choices

I found the end-game Adept guy to be a bit underwhelming, but I didn't particularly need him at that point.

I actually used an adept merc once, much earlier in the game - she annihilated some folks for me. But by the end of the game, my Samurai could have probably solo'ed everything (on normal) tier-6 skills in SMGs and Melee weapons, with the top smartlinked SMG (still not sure the smartlinking makes an in-game difference) and a katana, along with 10 armor and 6 in Dodge. I was night-unhittable, while wading into melee range while hasted and just making things melt. I even tossed random points into CHA, WIS, and INT, because I thought etiquettes mattered and screw getting hit by magic.  :grin:

Is it normal to eventually accumulate that sort of Karma in a normal campaign?

Started a Decker/Sniper on Hard - practically one-shot the first "boss" with a single AK burst. Such a shame that Deckers are so bland when it comes to actual combat, though at least this playthrough I can have fun by marking targets and buffing his ACC to make him auto-hit everything from long range. Maybe I can make the Matrix stuff fun? Seemed kind of bland and perfunctory to me, not much strategy involved beyond Summon ESPs, focus fire.

Nah, the stats/progression aren't totally analogous to pnp Shadowrun. Shadowrun has a pretty flat power curve compared to say DnD where a mage starts out nearly one-shottable and slinging worthless cantrips but ends up literally being able to decimate armies in a single round at epic levels.

I mean, you can get pretty powerful, but barring some unusual circumstances you're not going to see a single standard Metahuman PC slugging it out mano-a-mano with a dragon and winning or winning a head-on shooting war with an entire arcology's security staff. More power in Shadowrun usually equates to like; being rich, having a decent home, having a decent safehouse, having a secure bolthole after THAT, having a shitload of high quality SINs, having really obscenely awesome fixers/johnsons to call in favors from, having high level maglock passkeys, having ridiculously baller alphaware cybernetics, having the best DocWagon account, having a good arsenal to choose from to fit the needs of the run, having high-spec vehicles, etc.

A badass experienced street sammy is going to be able to have a matrix lobby scene style gunfight with a security team and win, but Shadowrun power is more being able to engage a problem on your own terms rather than someone else's.

Perhaps we should have tried Shadowrun in our old IRC online campaign (though I still have my CoC book).

Is there any point to spells like silence or quiet bomb?

A few weeks before release one of the devs was saying how it was possible to do "stealthy" runs with melee kills that didn't alert enemy guards that much... but I'm not sure how much that actually works here, considering most fights are scripted setpieces.

In the editor, NPCs have various 'awareness' values that may have an effect on whether they'll assist if a buddy gets attacked. There's a specific "Call for help" trigger too, but I'm not sure it's actually used in the official campaign... maybe the silence spell would nullify it, if so.

From what I hear pieces of a stealth system in the game. But none of it functions correctly and even if it did the level design would still nullify stealth.

Almost all of it was actually true to the setting, they're just generally not the parts you tend to think of when you think about Shadowrun (and to be honest not all that stuff was good either). It's a somewhat surprising direction for them to take with the first Shadowrun video game in ages, and with them currently doing a lot to try to rebuild the franchise though, with 5th Edition having released a couple weeks ago. It almost feels like they're getting ahead of themselves a bit.

Regarding plot dude:

Yea, I meant more that the "saving the world" concept was un-Shadowrun-y to me, especially compared to the gritty murder investigation that makes up the first half of the game.

The reasons why are always fine to me in RPG's because it can always be written off easily as "You are the destined one" even if that destiny is to only do this one thing.

Anyways I got stuck on the last mission with the plot guns. I think something was supposed to happen to let me advance through the map but I killed everything and couldn't find any interactable objects so I just kinda wandered back and forth for an hour before quitting.

I had a weird thing in the last mission where I went in a room, 3 enemies busted in, I killed them, then I couldn't figure out what to do and had an adept running around the whole map looking for stuff.

Turns out I had to move everyone out of that room, then another enemy busted in through the wall and opened up the way out. Guess everyone needs to leave.

So Dummy me didnt realize the lets play was of a fan made mod.

Still haven't won the final fight yet.

The 200mb patch that was released the day after the game released was supposed to address parts of the final confrontation. You guys using the steam version and have updated it?

I have played it through before the update.

So has anyone found any worthwhile modules yet? I know it's early...

Jacked-Up seems to be getting good reviews, though it's still a work in progress. Lost Lamb is fine, though the author is called "Dyslexicoedr" for a reason. There is a really quick "Food Fight"-esque run out there, and a few other shorter ones I haven't tried.

"Life on a Limb" is really ambitious (and probably has the most content right now), but also unfinished and buggy. Also, at least one of the writers seems to have some... issues. I'd avoid it for now.

e: "Kraken Myth" is said to be pretty good as well, though short. I think "short" will be a common thing in high-quality UGC for a while... in COH, creating a really high-quality story arc took a MONTH, and that toolset was a lot more primitive.

Fawk.  Unity is eating huge amounts of space.  5.3 GB on my SSD C-drive (AppData).  Check this out:

http://www.shadowrun.com/forums/discussion/31959/huge-amount-of-cache-files-generated-by-the-game-in-c/p1

edit: Unity!

Cold blooded.

If you use an SSD as many people are now you are probably better off moving your user directory off the ssd as constant writes and deletes aren't particularly good for the SSD's lifespan. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/312e210e-f0c7-4e47-ad59-c39eed759ffe/relocate-your-user-folder-to-a-different-drive

And what happens when your mechanical drive fails (which is probably more likely)?

Not sure if serious but if so you restore the backups you've been religously making to a new one. What? You don't make backups? SSD's fail too you know.
I use a 500gig usb drive and just zip up my entire user directory every few months.

Glad someone is on the same page as me. This made me giggle  :grin:

The kickstarter rewards are out now and the Doc Wagon badges feature a QR code which leads you to this awesomely terrible promo trailer for the PnP game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GPGQoR6f6w (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GPGQoR6f6w)

Expansion has been confirmed for sometime in Jan. 2014, with a save anywhere, anytime feature.  :heart:

http://e2.ma/message/x05eg/9tgots

Expansion has been out for a few days FYI, and it's pretty good!

It still has a bit of the "TILESET AND FEATURE DEMO" feel to it but its way more engaging and so far a lot less buggy than the original campaign. Saving almost anywhere is nice too.

It wastes some of its strengths though; like you now have a big team of runners and they all have stories/conversations/character arcs and they have personality quirks where they react to how you talk to them or conduct yourself on runs...but for your initial team the game literally hands you dossiers on them that're like, "Oh, this person doesn't like it if you're overly polite, you'll need to put them in their place a bit to get their respect." Gee thanks, I know what dialog options I'm not picking now?

Also, it's an expansion in the old sense of the word -- it is longer than the original campaign the game shipped with, and is better in pretty much every way. A lot of people are going to go "DLC for $15 when the game was only $20?! Get out.", only in this case the price is actually warranted.

Loving it too, although it still has some minor bugs which will undoubtedly be squashed in the near future.

For example, the whole  part completely bugged out on me after the first payment I got from them. But then I wouldn't know what to do with too much money anyway!  :awesome_for_real:

I wish I could import my character from the original campaign, balance be damned.  Adepts still blow chunks, and I don't want to start yet another sam or rigger from scratch, so I'm not sure what class to choose.

I'm not sure if it's a feature added with the expansion, or if I just never noticed it before, but max ranges on weapons are annoying.  Get behind cover > select throwing knife > click on enemy to attack > RUN OUT OF COVER IN TO THE OPEN TO CHUCK KNIFE AT ENEMY > stand there like a moron for rest of turn because you're out of AP. 

Minor griping aside, it does seem like a solid expansion so far, though I haven't seen much.

I had a lot of fun with this over the weekend, definitely worth the price of admission.

It's steam so it'll be on sale sometime. I'll get it then. Game was kind of bland, combat wise, and I have no real desire to start my character over. I think if I was continuing my char I'd be picking it up whenever I had a lull, rather than waiting on a sale.

I haven't checked yet, but there's probably a mod out there that lets you import stats.  It didn't take long for the original game to have a New Game + mod, after all.

Basically to make Dragonfall capable of importing a character you just run the editor, load up the campaign, edit the campaign's properties being sure to check the box for "allow character import" and then make sure the right starting scene is selected so the module runs.

Heh, didn't even know there was an editor. Just checked the nexus, shadowrun: 84 files, skyrim: 32,285.

Yeah, but 31,869 of the Skyrim files are just nude mods.  :why_so_serious:

Most of the SRR files are in the steam workshop.

That said, it's still too early in the game's life to have any decent campaigns out (though Nightmare Harvest is good, I hear).

Nightmare Harvest is indeed really, really good. Well written, multiple endings I think (only beat it once), lots of stuff to do, very well made.

I think it's a tad generous on the Karma but you get a shitload of dudes thrown at you in some sections.

I think I'm pretty far into Dragonfall; this is really good. Like leagues better than the base campaign and about the limits of what you can do with their pretty simple engine.

Trying my luck with the mods now that I finished Dragonfall, any tips which mods are finished and good? Doing Nightmare harvest right now and loving it apart from the loading times

Finally completed it. Final battle setup certainly looks cool but is only hard because there's a time limit and is kinda disappointing in the end.

The ending is pretty good.

Shadowrun Online on Steam Early Access next week. (http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/27/5555676/shadowrun-online-hitting-steam-early-access-next-week)

Did they fix the cache issue by any chance?

Is this game worth the 3.73 they're charging for it right now ?

My gut says yes ! but please tell me if it's just acid stomach.

Yup.  I am hesitant to ever recommend anything to you, but this easily passes at this price point.

Is it because I'm a moaning bastard ?

Took your advice and got the Dragonfall one at the same time.  Thus far I'm gloriously lost.  'Feels' great;  just what I was looking for.

If ever there were a $4 game, this is it.

Aye, this is quite cool.  Can't quite figure out the multiclassing thing though;  don't think I'm doing decking right.

You say shite a lot.


Multiclassing?  Only major rule I'd say is if you're doing tech or magic, pick one.  Geeking yourself out with implants seriously hampers your ability to do magic.  Otherwise, I'd probably just pick a weapon and pick "something else".  That's all you'll have points for if you really want to specialize.

As for decking: always use the best deck possible.  Make sure you focus on getting some of the good "bots" (don't remember what they're called).  Load up the best DPS programs you can.  Heal helps a lot as well.  And.. I'd probably hire a decker until you think you have enough skill to handle it on your own.  There's not always enough jacks to send two in.

Crap, I missed the sale.  :heartbreak:

The Humble Store (https://www.humblebundle.com/store) is running the exact same sale if you're still interested.

Also don't mix decking and rigging, if you're playing the base unmodded game.  The way the weapon slots work makes it so you can't take full advantage of rigging.

Oh For Fucks sake, you chaps have all kinds of bad news today.

I guess I'm starting over.   :why_so_serious:

I had a lot of fun with Dragonfall; it's a pretty good experience. I hope there's some more good mods for it.

I'm playing the Returns for the first time right now -- it's pretty fun. Shaman/Mage is pretty nice.

Rigging looks like a lot of fun. I keep getting annoyed at secret rooms I can't ever get into, and my biggest complaint about Shaman is how freakin' hard it is to see the summon points.

Picked up the dlc when it was on sale recently. It had a good story and did better at fleshing out your team mates. With more of a story focus on being a team, it felt wrong to hire any of the filler npcs for a run. I guess they need them so people can make whatever team they like, but story wise they just don't fit.

The addition of save anytime was great. But like the original, the dlc ended just as my character was getting enough abilities to be bad ass. With an open skill system they can't really synch up the story with your character's progression. I still think their color palette has too much brightness in it to really sell urban decay.

The ending text that gives a summary of what happens over the next couple of decades doesn't hold out much hope that they'll continue this story line. The start over nature is what put this one in the sale purchase during a dry spell category. Obviously it still worked out for them, cause I bought it, but it wasn't the day one full price purchase a continuing narrative would've gotten from me.

Rigging is most definitely something that's fun on your main character. NPC riggers have the unfortunate side effect of often being kind of shite.

And I definitely agree on the Shaman summon points. I've gone through so many fights in both Dead Man's Switch and Dragonfall where I didn't see the little skull icon until the very last turn of a fight.

Anyone try the iOS version of this? I'm looking for a decent rpg on iPad for traveling.

Having played a shaman to the final boss fight, I think the summon mechanics are just plain broken. It's basically an instant quick load whenever your spirit switches sides (and I could swear the percentage shown is not accurate), because if you can survive that, you never needed to summon in the first place. And that leads to save scumming or just not summoning, both of which are dumb ways to play.

  

If a summon 'breaks', they stay hostile to the enemies as well as your team, so if you have them stay in melee range of the bad guys, they serve as a useful crowd-control / 'free' damage even after control breaks!

I played through DMS with a shaman with some marginal shooting skills, and I found summons to be extremely useful even if they broke early.. I never reloaded if one of them broke free. In fact, I deliberately moved environment summons (since they are more likely to break than fetish-summoned ones) deep into enemy lines and gave them 4 AP every turn so that they'd break and I'd get full AP on my shaman again -- if they didn't break, that was fine too, I could abuse their uber spells like petrification, AOE DOTs, etc. Also, the closer the spirit is to the summoner, the less likely it is to break -- though I don't think this is explained anywhere in-game.

edit: one bug that was sorta annoying was that if you had a previously-broken environmental summon still active on the map, trying to summon a second environmental summon would result in the second spirit being locked at zero AP, but still counting as a summon -- so the shaman got -1 AP until the 'bugged' summon died. This was only really a problem in the very last fight, though... and it probably got fixed since then, too.

I like to use the close range disease ability of the trash spirit, but it seemed like the spirit always started spitting acid at my guys even if there were bad guys next to it. Oh well, too late to experiment more at this point, because I wanna roll a decker for Dragonfall. And spend some time min-maxing because my first char was a bit of a mess.

 

   

BTW just played the opening act of Dragonfall. How can something so awesome exist in modern gaming?

Dragonfall is such a huge improvement over the already good DMS.  I'm really enjoying it.  Already to what I believe is the last mission, unless this is the typical gaming fakeout and the real baddie is in another dungeon.

Minor spoiler not worth spoilering:  there's a lot of decking stat checks.  So, if you wanted to play a decker, this is a good expansion for it.

I like some of the little touches. I guessed the password on a computer in one of the areas and laughed my ass off when it worked.

admin? :) Me too. Had to work eventually.

Any of the player made campaigns any good?

The ones that keep coming up in conversations are Nightmare Harvest, Shadowrun Unlimited, From the Shadows Run, Stitch in Time. There are a ton of big ones that are still being worked on, like the SNES remake (which is getting pretty big at this point).

My campaign will be the best of them, obv (after I finish it in 2029  :why_so_serious:)

Picked this up from the Steam sale and played through Dead Mans Switch. Absolutely worth it.

Fairly surprised the game is so well liked around these parts. I found it a pale linear RPG with half implemented or entirely worthless mechanics (Cyber,magic,conversation). What really killed the game for me was the editor and how gimped and useless it was. The editor could have redeemed the entire debacle and not only was it quasi-broken but had intentional limitations in what you could do. Which is why how many months later there is a non-existent modding community and every large ambitious project has vanished or is in stasis.

yeah kind of a mediocre tactical RPG mechanics-wise, but the story saves it makes it worth it, really good for both campaigns.

Well, I disagree with this assessment and I think it's mainly due to different expectations.

SRR has been designed to be a linear "rpg lite" with nu-xcom style tactical combat (which, btw, is actually better and more enjoyable than some other games e.g. Wasteland2... when it's used properly that is) that you could play on a tablet, made on a shoestring budget. The design was so constrained from the start that anyone thinking it would be a sprawling openworld RPG was setting themselves up for disappointment. That they managed to deliver a good campaign (and an even better expansion) in this mold and combine it with good graphics & decent writing is pretty good, I'd say.

Ditto for the editor. It is just plain not designed for creating anything that goes past the simple design of the game, and if you want to create a sandbox or even just an open-ended campaign with it, you will be disappointed... and some missing features (such as object persistence when revisiting maps) are quite painful to work around no matter what. OTOH if you are planning to create a typical shadowrun, it works well. I certainly find the editor a lot better suited for my needs than e.g. FONV or NWN where you are expected to do a ton of busywork for every small thing.

Also, play Nightmare Harvest. :grin:

It's $3.74 on Humble Store right now.
https://www.humblebundle.com/store

I got it + expansion for all of like $7 bucks and blew through the first expansion in 12 hours with a hermetic mage. Storyline was fun, and sure, it's got some rough edges, but it's not like Shadowrun has ever actually been hailed for its mechanics.  If we were talking some $60 AAA title, then sure, that's a different set of expectations.

I thought it was a pretty fun little popcorn game and didn't have much in the way of expectations because it was a KS project. It delivered more than I thought it would.

The editor being gimped kinda sucks but at least Dragonfall's update fixed a lot of the most egregious stuff. If it was more powerful then yeah I think the mod community for it would've been more active but well, who knows. Torchlight 2's editors were literally the dev tools and the whole engine for the game was a homegrown thing made with open source tools/libraries, and it's effectively dead sadly.

I was unable to complete DMS, last stretch in the bug hive.  Game would crash, scripts would bug out. The editor being so very shit-show wouldn't be nearly as bad if it was not toted as the redeeming factor and prime focus of the entire project for untold months. You use the freedom and flexibility of the editor to counter-balance the downright broken campaign upon release AND THEN it sucks? Shady

Genesis game is superior in nearly every way.


Didnt the KS receive 2-3 times the initial request? I weep to think of what that piece of shit could be produced with a fraction of the budget.

It was originally planned to be an even simpler turn-based tactics game (no RPG elements, minimal story) for phones/tablets, similar in scope to HBS' previous products, ie. 'casual' phone/tablet games. In fact, the devs were using the Moai engine until halfway through the project, then ended up switching to Unity for more flexibility (whether this was a good choice or not remains to be seen).

Yes, they got more money than they expected, but if you were expecting an AAA (or even AA) quality game done in 1 year with a $1.2mil budget (the money they actually had for development after the KS), I'm not sure what to tell you. FWIW I enjoyed SRR and especially SRR:Dragonfall a lot more than a number of AAA games in the last few years I paid 4-5x as much money for, and that "shitshow" editor is a lot better for creating content in my genre of choice (turn-based RPG with a party) than anything else currently on the market. ymmv.

This explains every post you've made in this thread.

It's one of the bang for your buck RPG's available IMO.  Same can be said for a game like Van Helsing.  I don't know what people expect for a $15 game.

DMS's hive area had some fucking awful bugs in it on release. I can't remember the one I ran into specifically other than the lass boss becoming unkillable. Patch and a checkpoint revert seemed to fix it but I was pretty annoyed when it happened. DMS was too linear/shallow IMO (like you have opportunities to use like...2 etiquettes in the game?), but it paved the way for Dragonfall which I greatly enjoyed.

That the last 5% of the game was broken beyond the point of playability most certainly supports every post ive made in this thread, correct.

 :oh_i_see:

Stay butthurt or maybe stick to your xbone?

Every game has people like you who had a bug they couldn't fix and now make it their mission to try to convince everyone that the game was utter shit. I get that bugs suck and sometimes they aren't even your fault and there really isn't a fix besides waiting and hoping but I don't get why people insist on getting so mad that they feel the need to write a bad review on every site they can think of. Shit is tiresome.

Apparently commenting on a game breaking bug as it impacted my ability to play said fucking game indicates I am SR hating fanatic.  :uhrr: Xbone? Really?

Game was heavily bugged and outright broken, inexcusable "save" system and the editor that was supposedly the saving grace was made with the intent to limit mods and is a piece of shit. I love SR and had a boner for months anticipating playing it. If the game was a fully realized small budget project that would be one thing, but half finished with tacked on mechanics that serve no purpose and a broken editor AND multiple game breaking bugs? Dont be a sucker kiddo.

The game never crashed on me.  I loved this game.  It was awesome.  10/10

I think I had 1 crash in the 12 hours I played the original. I didn't see the bugginess and have recommended it numerous times.

I beat it and Dragonfall. No bugs. Would buy again.

Shaman's not as fun as I'd like, though. I kinda wanted more out of it, I guess. It wasn't bad, and it was awfully fun to run a Spirit around a corner and deliberately lose control to keep enemies busy, but especially the original campaign I didn't even spot the summoning points until after the fight.

Dragonfall was a serious improvement. If they make another expansion of that quality, I'll be first in line.

RISE!

I'm not sure if anyone else has followed along, but HBS has been posting updates on a "GOTY version" re-release on Dragonfall, called Dragonfall - Director's Cut. It will be a standalone title that doesn't have any dependencies on the original SRR (finally giving Dragonfall the full-game status it deserves instead of DLC) and - better yet - it will be given to everyone who backed SRR or bought Dragonfall free of charge! I thought this was an unusual move, as most of these kinds of re-releases usually try to milk existing customers for a second round. Steam page here (http://store.steampowered.com/app/300550), release date is Sep 18.

They've been posting dev diaries every week for the past month on KS, and the things they've been saying about the re-release are pretty impressive. TLDR version:

• new content (and quite a bit of it -- one mission for each teammates and two additional shadowruns) and more endings
• improved team customization (equip your teammates and select their advancement paths depending on how you want to use them)
• new graphics and 10 new audio tracks
• updated combat mechanics (armor and cover improvements, better AI)
• improved editor (including a custom AI scripting system)
• new interface and animations (including messy kill animations)
• better Steam integration (achievements and cards)... most important thing ever, right?!

The re-release also has a new trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyUktyFHrb4

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to this very much... especially since it's free! It'll probably spur me into finally finishing that mod I started ages ago, too (of course it'll have to be rejiggered to use the Director's Cut as a base, which may or may not be a PITA... we'll see)

I guess that means I'll delay playing Dragonfall until this releases. What a nice free bonus.

I had just started playing Dragonfall when I saw this and put my playthrough on hold for the super-extra-fancy version.  Looking forward to it.

As the official necromancer of all things SRR: RISE! RISE AGAIN, THREAD!

So, the third campaign (Shadowrun: Hong Kong) is coming this year... and even though it's already budgeted, the devs decided to launch a KS to get some more $ to add more content / game+engine improvements / etc*. In an hour and a half, it's already two-thirds of the way to the goal :awesome_for_real:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/webeharebrained/shadowrun-hong-kong

Notable goals / objectives of the KS:
Being freed from the shackles of tablet game design should help! Most of the stretch goals are about more/shinier content, with the exception of...
I'm pretty sure they have already coded and tested this stuff, but they had to add in something to get some eyeballs. Anyway, they've significantly improved the game with Dragonfall and the free Director's Cut, so this maneuver has my seal of approval for now.


* "Yo dawg, I heard you like kickstarters..."

Looks like they already met the main Kickstarter goal, so at this point all that remains is to sit back and yell "gimme gimme" while they keep working on it :awesome_for_real:

Maybe they can throw in some Star Citizen wallpaper or something. That should be good for a cool $10m.

Less than 300 keys left of the original game on Gog.com for $2.99. GET IT NOW!!!!

Bought Dragonfall Directors Cut for $3.00 on Steam (paid half of with CS:GO proceeds, not sure if that makes me a winner or a loser.:P). Enjoying it so far, only had a passing knowledge of Shadowrun but the game is easy to understand, UI fairly friendly. Giving me a XCOM/BG vibe with a little syndicate nostalgia thrown in.

Release date for Hong Kong is set for 20 Aug. 15.  Pretty impressive turnaround for a game that only initiated it's Kickstarter about 7 months ago back in Jan.  Can't wait.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/webeharebrained/shadowrun-hong-kong/posts/1303417

I'm looking forward to it. I got my money's worth out of their first two games (more so with Dragonfall, which I played several times).

Aww yiss. Between next ep. of Life is Strange in two days, Bounty Train early access in ~3 weeks and right afterwards this, it's like early Xmas or smth. :awesome_for_real:

I keep buying this games, i keep playing them for about two hours then putting them away because every fight is the same.

Dragonfall (especially the Director's Cut version) has some decent encounter design... but overall the battles can get pretty samey if you're using the "right" tactics.

The games are at their best when they force the player to go on the offensive via time limits and whatnot.

FYI, if you backed Hong Kong on KS you should be getting your keys tonight.  I just got mine literally 5 mins ago.  Can't wait to get home to start playing.  Fuck shift work!

Edit:  For some reason I thought there was some sort of early access but there isn't.  Oh well, I'll have to wait until 20 Aug. I guess. :heartbreak:

So far i like this way better than the first two.

Hong Kong seems really good so far.

Gameplay is very good, but it seems to be extremely buggy atm and i would wait a few patches before really digging in.

Biggest bug so far worked out in my favor --

Yeah it is mostly stuff like that, it doesn't make the game unplayable it just messes up the continuity of the story, which is very good and i rather not have it screwed up.

I talked to one of my party members after a run and they spoke about an alternate reality where I apparently did the exact opposite of what I actually did on the run.

It's a good thing I like the writing because reading all of the npc dialogue after a run literally takes twice as long as some of the runs.

I started the other two games imagining doing multiple playthroughs, but never did, so this time I decided to just use console commands to give me enough karma to buy almost all the dialogue options.  I'm much happier this way.

Mine spoke of something that just left me wondering what sort of drugs she was on, since it had zero connection with reality whatsoever.

OTOH I haven't really encountered out-of-place debriefings elsewhere in the game (I finished it 2 days ago, completionist run)

I did not actually get the wrong text after the mission.  

Not very far into this. First impressions:

Minor: Loading times between scenes is slightly better. Despite SDD and decent PC this got somewhat annoying in Dragonfall.
The new real-time part of the Matrix game-play. It's basically dodging moving sentries, but bit iffy in a isometric game. Not a big deal if one is good at it, after all DF matrix was just meatspace combat re-skinned. Unfortunately I suck at it and it's basically trial & error by save & reload.
Less combat, more non-lethal ways to solve missions compared to Dragonfall (at least for the part I have done so far).
Lots of text and dialogue.
The writing is very good (for the most part). Especially Auntie. I am curious what people think about her  :-) Very love-hate for me...

The problem with the matrix minigame (or rather, set of minigames) is that it's really simplistic and samey -- no matter what the patrol routes look like, you get to play a low-budget Pacman clone as you follow one of the sentries around, occasionally dodging the vision cones of the other ICs. The engine also isn't responsive enough for this to work well. Then you're rewarded by a... Simon minigame? c'mon.

However (and this is the funnysad part), the entire matrix dodge-the-sentries thing works REALLY WELL in turn-based mode. It turns the annoying clunky realtime stuff into something resembling Invisible Inc, with planning out routes for the decker's persona across the room that don't intersect any of the IC as they move on their turn. If they just added a TB/RT switch to the matrix (like they did to meatspace, allowing the group to get the jump on enemies), I'd be OK with the entire setup. Well OK, except for that fucking Simon minigame.

I confess following a sentry didn't really cross my mind -- I just noticed early the sentry routes are painted on the ground, so my approach so far is instead, find spots which never get covered by sensors and then jump from one to the other when the sentries are covering other parts of their route. Granted, this is mostly to minimize the skill required; makes me wonder though what approach they envisioned when they made it.

Hmm. There's a lot more ways to sneak by or talk past people, but I think the fights are a bit harder. Then again, I'm playing an Adept and haven't done that before.

I am no fan the Matrix overhaul for the simple reason that it introduces Real Time sneaking into a system that obviously isn't made for it, but otherwise I'm loving this game.

Unless there's a bug preventing it from working I wish you could turn on turn-based mode in the matrix when you're sneaking since trying to do it with fiddly clicks in real time is frustrating. It would be a kinda fun puzzle if it was turn-based.

I'm actually kinda wondering if I'm doing myself a disservice- I keep doing the non-story runs instead of advancing the main story and I don't know if that's good or bad since it seems to advance time in the game anyway (the dreams and NPC conversations keep advancing, even though I haven't talked to Kindly yet after doing my first couple of runs).

Unfortunately the matrix sequences were designed with realtime in mind; if it was possible to toggle turn-based mode, you could use Suppression (the -50 trace thing) infinitely to keep trace at zero, and - more importantly - time actually passes in matrix turn-based mode unlike real-time mode, meaning that all of the matrix scenes with time limits (shutting off vents in the Ares run, getting the pieces in the ASIST run) would need to be redesigned.

I'm on what I think is the final mission and had to quit my game for a few hours.  When I game back and loaded my save, I was stuck behind an invisible door and couldn't open it.  Stuck and couldn't progress.  So I loaded an earlier save and tried the floor out somewhat differently, this time getting into combat.  Unfortunately, I had to step away again.  This time, I reloaded my save and it seemed fine, but once I cleared all the enemies it wouldn't take me out of combat and I couldn't find a way to progress.  Those and the afore-mentioned dialog issue on that one mission are the only problems I've had, though.

It got another patch today.  I've seen quite a few bugs but so far none have bugged out whole runs, yet.  I crash at least once every night though.

That's the way I did it and I just went past the explicitly stated "point of no return".  It seems like there aren't really that many main story line missions but you do have to do X number of side missions to unlock the main missions so doing all the side stuff is fine.  The only thing I would worry about is ensuring you do the Wampoan mission before you run out of other missions.  You can (if you choose to) pick up another team member there but since you have to talk in between missions to your group to unlock their personal missions if you do the Wampoan run last you *might* not be able to do that character's mission.  I'm not sure.

This game is really well scored too, even compared to the first two. Great music.

Think I got another bug.

I come back from a job and Law is talking like I did some job I don't even know about, and there's a meatpuppet standing next to him that is clearly meant to be his replacement for some reason.

Yeah, i put the game down the first day until they get their issues sorted out.  The bugs don't make the game unplayable but they are screwing up what looks like a very good story.

Finished it, luckily I didn't run into any major bugs along the way. Got used to the matrix, and otherwise I really loved the game. Pistoleers are still overpowered (3*Chainshot in the first round effectively takes out the most dangerous enemies at the beginning of every fight), but there always will be overpowered skills for people who want it easy, so I don't care all that much.

The story was indeed very good, and even the conclusion was satisfying. Not knowing shit about Hong Kong it felt unique to that place.

Same, game (client) itself was stable and I encountered only two minor story bugs: In one instance a dialog-skill-check failed despite me having the requirements. The other was email that was on the personal workstation that wasn't readable.

spoilers:

Yea, I just encountered two minor bugs even though I did a fairly completionist playthrough: an unsellable piece of paydata from the kidnapping mission and an unread email. There ARE a few bugs out there, though, based on what people are saying on the steam forums anyway.
Regarding the spoilers...

Some 450mb large update to the HK game just happened, tho no info (yet) on what it fixed. But hopefully, things!

If for some crazy reason you don't have the original Shadowrun Returns (and why the fuck don't you?), it's on a flash sale on the Humble store for less than $2 (https://www.humblebundle.com/store/p/shadowrunreturns_storefront). Only good for the next 12 hours.

Fuck you, Good Ending. You are apparently impossible to achieve.

Seriously, two tries at the 'good' ending and I can't figure out what I'm missing. (The conversation options aren't there at the end, so clearly I didn't do something. Despite doing all the things I needed to to get said ending).

Ugh.

Fun game other than that. :)

I got the good ending on my first playthrough. Git gud!  :why_so_serious:

Just to make sure, have you done everything on this list?

I got the good ending today as well. I was towards the end and MGSV came out and I only just now finished it.

Great, great game. I'd love to see them keep cranking these out honestly if they could make the combat a tiny bit more interesting and balanced. I kinda ripped the last boss to shreds despite the game's RNG shitting on me at every turn.

Yeah, the last boss was easy. There were some fights that were rather difficult my first playthrough -- just a couple of places where I didn't have a good crew mix AND awkward positioning.

Second playthrough, I cleared the Assist attack before my decker was even done integrating Raymond. (Pistoleer might be a little overpowered, especially given there were two grenadiers tossing grenades at me and I had the Magnet arm).

I still haven't finished it because I was too pissed off about the progression-stopping bug I encountered, but I recently got a nice note from their support team telling me that the issue I brought up has been patched out now.  I'll finish one of these days!

Pistols seem to suffer really bad if you're not flanking dudes or are longer ranges. You can however completely outdamage nearly all other weapon types if you catch a group of dudes in the open at close-ish distance. With a burst-fire pistol you can shoot like...7 times in one round I think if you have all the skills? Duncan's full-auto bursts are about the only thing that can really outdamage a pistol slinger if 1) they all hit, and 2) most of them crit.

The last bit saving Raymond is when I blew the gigantic pile of grenades I had collected along with all the nades on Racter's bot. 2-3 waves of dudes spent their entire fight either stunned, on fire, or both.

Magnet arm and placing yourself up front basically means they do that to themselves. Gobbet added some poison fog to the doorway too. Also their mage lost control of his summon. Really, they mostly killed themselves.

If I run through again, I'll finally try a decker/rigger setup. Run with Gobbett, Duncan, and Gauichu.

I don't know if it was bugged but I'd say four out of five times an enemy summoned something it instantly turned on them.

Summons turn on summoners in general, but the AI seems to really push it -- or has low charisma summoners.

Summoning in general is pretty crappy except for Gobbet, because she has those regenerating summons. Not enough money in HK to keep buying your own, never enough summon spots, certainly not enough summons loot.

Necro.

So, if I have all three games which are worth playing and does the order matter?

I would skip dead man's switch (shadowrun returns) and just play dragonfall and Hong Kong. Order doesn't really matter.

Order really doesn't matter. I personally think Deadmans Switch is also worth a playthrough if you have the spare time.

While both Dragonfall and Hong Kong are leaps and bounds above it in both story and characters, it still feels like as short little Shadowrun slice of life. So if you still have that Shadowrun itch after those two, go for it. Otherwise, skip.

Yea, the story of each game is separate, there's no need to play them in any order (there are a few minor references to earlier games' events in the Shadowlands BBS, but that's just flavor)

At a basic level, the combat gameplay of Dead Man's Switch is a bit weaker / more shallow compared to the later installments -- however, like Tebonas said, if you enjoyed the later games, playing the first one is probably worth it. Especially since the first half of it is a pretty cool atmospheric cyber-noir story...

If you play the better ones first you'll be disappointed in dead man's switch.  It was good before the other two showed up.

I enjoyed the first one, and it's short enough and good enough that you wouldn't feel your time is wasted by playing it. But yes, playing it after the other two is a bit of a retrograde. I haven't played Hong Kong, but Dragonfall was better than Returns.

The first game is pretty eh overall since it's really basic.

Dragonfall and Hong Kong however are great.

The only thing that bugs me about Hong Kong is that the extended mission that wraps the thing up is a gigantic wet fart after the main campaign's potential endings were great.

Cheers. Playing Dragonfall now and it's good, though the inventory system and team upgrades are a bit underwhelming the other bits are fun.