From the creator of Shadowrun... Shadowrun

[CmdrSlack]

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.

[Strazos]

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?

[Fabricated]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Zetor]

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.

[Nonentity]

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.

[lamaros]

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

[Nevermore]

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.

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

[Fabricated]

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.

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

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[Aiwass]

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.

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Threash]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Zetor]

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.

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

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.

[Aiwass]

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.

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.

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

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Zetor]

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'.

[Aiwass]

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.

[Zetor]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Soln]

I wish they had more totem choices

[Strazos]

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. 

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Strazos]

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

[Threash]

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

[Zetor]

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.

[Aiwass]

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.

[Velorath]

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?

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.

[Fabricated]

Regarding plot dude:

[Zetor]

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?

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.

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.

[Lakov_Sanite]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Phred]

noloot is probably significantly better for this game.

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

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

[CmdrSlack]

Still haven't won the final fight yet.