From the creator of Shadowrun... Shadowrun

[Phildo]

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

[Ironwood]

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

[Rasix]

Is it because I'm a moaning bastard ?

You say shite a lot.

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

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.

[Ingmar]

Crap, I missed the sale. 

[Rasix]

The Humble Store is running the exact same sale if you're still interested.

[Ard]

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.

[Ironwood]

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

I guess I'm starting over.   

[Fabricated]

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

[Morat20]

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.

[PalmTrees]

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.

[koro]

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.

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.

[CaptainNapkin]

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

[jakonovski]

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.

  

[Zetor]

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.

[jakonovski]

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.

 

   

[jakonovski]

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

[Rasix]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Morat20]

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?

[Zetor]

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  )

[JWIV]

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

[Aiwass]

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.

[Speedy Cerviche]

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

[Zetor]

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.

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.

[Ginaz]

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

[JWIV]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Aiwass]

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.

The design was so constrained from the start that anyone thinking it would be a sprawling openworld RPG was setting themselves up for disappointment.

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.

[Zetor]

The design was so constrained from the start that anyone thinking it would be a sprawling openworld RPG was setting themselves up for disappointment.

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.

[Hoax]

I was unable to complete DMS, last stretch in the bug hive.  Game would crash, scripts would bug out.

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

[Ginaz]

The design was so constrained from the start that anyone thinking it would be a sprawling openworld RPG was setting themselves up for disappointment.

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.

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

The design was so constrained from the start that anyone thinking it would be a sprawling openworld RPG was setting themselves up for disappointment.

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.

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.

[Aiwass]

I was unable to complete DMS, last stretch in the bug hive.  Game would crash, scripts would bug out.

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

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.

[Hoax]

 

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.

[Aiwass]

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