Shadowrun Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut

[dryan]

Thanks all for the suggestions. I have just started playing Fallout Tactics, and I'm already acquiring the other ones.

 

[Darth Roxor]

whoever designed the locked down clinic level was a genius

A GENIUS

 

[Zetor]

PEASANT REVOLT!

 

[SwiftCrack]

That run was indeed pretty fucking good.

 

[Darth Roxor]

PEASANT REVOLT!

The cheesy tune from the KNIGHT-KINGS OF LIGHTNINGDOM playing over the PEASANT REVOLT had me piss myself with laughter.

 

[SwiftCrack]

That dude's world being shattered when he finds out that there's another episode that he never saw.

 

[dryan]

It was the only DC run that I liked better than the original ones. The "companion quests" sucked IMO (Glory's was OK for the setting, but the enemies were way too easy). I also liked Trial Run at first, because I had hard time, but then I repeated it so many times that now I can do it without breaking a sweat.

 

[pippin]

What should I play after this game? I'm looking for something with very similar combat, little story, strictly non-medieval.

X-Com, Expeditions: Conquistador, XCom and Halfway.
In that order.

I am sure there are many more, and the last two are not that great, but thats a strict criteria.
I'll try to come up with some more.

How's Halfway? Some early GoG reviews were a bit negative about the game.

 

[Shadowfang]

What should I play after this game? I'm looking for something with very similar combat, little story, strictly non-medieval.

X-Com, Expeditions: Conquistador, XCom and Halfway.
In that order.

I am sure there are many more, and the last two are not that great, but thats a strict criteria.
I'll try to come up with some more.

How's Halfway? Some early GoG reviews were a bit negative about the game.

Its nothing much. I don't know why i got it, but still i dont regreat getting it.

The atmosphere, the music and pixel art are really cool, the story is light but serves its purpose. I am a sucker of phantom ships and thats the vibe i got the whole game.

The character progression is almost none. You get these stims that boost one of your stats, or all three of them if you get a special stim (only 2 avaiable).
Your stats consist in: Health, Agility and Aiming. Pretty slim, no? Even so you can a bunch of different combos with the also slim variety of items.

Even though its pretty simple, no character felt the same (most thanks to the fact that each both one unique passive and active skills).

In the weapon department you have shotguns, rifles and sniper rifles. There are other varients like plasma rifle and railguns. I found shotguns to be suited to more agile characters. Characters that could move in close and had a higher dodge chance.

In the armor department you have an exoskeleton; (one of a kind, boosts your aiming and agility by 3 but offers no shield nor dmg res. Gave it to my sniper) Tank or Scout Suit Mk I, II, III, IV and so on. These last two are fairly similar, the Tank models offer more damage resistance and a small boost to health and aiming while the scout offers a tougher energy shield and a small boost to agility and aiming. I personally found the scout armors to be better.
There might be more armors than this one. I know there is another unique, like the exoskeleton, but i believe this one offers a lot of damage res but little or none shield energy.

The combat its pretty simple aswell. You have 2 ap. Costs 1 to shoot, but you can increase the cost to 2 for better accuracy (liked this last part).
The game has no overwatch, but something similar called retaliate. You don't shoot if enemies react near you, but you will shoot back if they shoot at you no matter the distance.
Basically its a counterstrike. Its useful when an enemy is taking cover behind a pillar, because you can't hit them behind hard cover, and when he decides to pop out to shoot at you, before he gets a chance to hide his head in a hole you get to shoot his way too.

If you pretend you are back at 1993 playing snes, or whatever, you can enjoy it for what it is.
If you are looking for something more, you are bound to become disapointed.

Edit: There also are Assault Suits Mk. They fall in between the Tank and Scout.

 

[agris]

did part of the combatfag thread get randomly mixed into the top of this page?

 

[TheFilthyJack]

I just finished a tool to allow modders to have custom soundtracks in Dragonfall Director's Cut.
I hope we'll see some good UGC with custom music finally... Because unlike Harebrained Schemes I do think music is a big part of modding.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/shadowrun-soundtrack-manager.95037/

Cheers!

 

[SwiftCrack]

I think they're afraid of people putting in licensed songs and them being liable (don't know if that's true though, or if it is an issue at all since mods are (supposed to be) not for profit).

But nice tool anyway.

 

[Zetor]

Yeah, one of them (Mitch?) said in the QA section of the official forums that they didn't put in support for custom soundtracks due to copyright issues. It's not a completely unfounded fear -- anyone else remember the legal trouble Irrational got into when Marvel started sending out C&Ds to Freedom Force modders for daring to create meshes and skins of Marvel superheroes? Granted, that was trademark 'defense' instead of suing for copyright infringement.

Regardless, good job TheFilthyJack! I did some work on this in vanilla SRR (my hexedit tutorial for replacing songs may still be floating around on the steam forums and/or pastebin somewhere), and found that it was a massive PITA that would break if a patch was released... this solution will definitely help mod makers add some extra personality to their work.

Out of curiosity, is it also possible to replace/add sfx and ambient tracks?

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Ulminati]

Yeah, one of them (Mitch?) said in the QA section of the official forums that they didn't put in support for custom soundtracks due to copyright issues. It's not a completely unfounded fear -- anyone else remember the legal trouble Irrational got into when Marvel started sending out C&Ds to Freedom Force modders for daring to create meshes and skins of Marvel superheroes? Granted, that was trademark 'defense' instead of suing for copyright infringement.

They did the same with City of Heroes/Villains. "Oh no, people are using the generic spandex patterns to make characters that look like one of the 326983245621 versions of an X-mens! SEND IN THE LAWYER BATALLION!"

 

[TheFilthyJack]

I'm aware of their policy but honestly I don't give a frek, they get like 2 millions $ for their campaign and can't be bothered to add custom music support? Boo....

Btw the tool doesn't inlucde any resource file, it does all the job on the fly, and modders don't have to include any other file than their ogg music, it works for Dragonfall DC but I will eventually make it compatible with all versions. DC has 61 available tracks to replace so I thought it would be a good starting point.

Zetor: Thanks for your work on SRR audio files, I have credited you in the ReadMe because I did read your steps and found it very helpful.
My method consists of appending resources to the existing file, the offset will always be sizeof(resources.assets.ResS) before appending, and duration will be sizeof(your_audio_file.ogg). This way you don't need to extract the resources or modify all the previous offsets.

About sound files, yes they can be replaced as well, I'm wondering if there are enough sound effects to replace by voiceover dialogs we could then trigger in conversations. Because custom music + voiceover in SRR? I mean come on...

Edit: did you know HBS actually also said: "I wouldn't be surprised if a clever modder found a way to have custom music."

That leads me to think THEY would have problems if THEY made it available in the editor.

 

[Zetor]

Yeah, definitely -- your solution of appending the resources is waaaaaay more robust than my dirty hack. Good to hear that there's a decent pool of entries to use this time around, too.

Honestly, my second* biggest beef from a modding perspective is SRR's handling (or lack thereof) of individual files inside those huge Unity containers. If the game had an 'override' directory that parsed all files within it as if they were inside its asset bundles (like in IE games, Wizardry 8, JA2, etc... just off the top of my head), it would be possible to just dump a ton of ogg files (and maybe accompanying metadata files) in something like /override/music and we'd be in business... but nope. Is this a Unity limitation?


* biggest beef is lack of map/actor/dialogue-level persistence, obvs

 

[TheFilthyJack]

I think there is some kind of limitation in Unity add-ons/plugins if the developper didn't code them himself, the engine would then be subject to a bunch of copyright shit. For example: I use XModelLoader plugin which tells me I can't make the model meshes/textures available to the user and I have to pack them into encrypted .bundles.

I have very little experience in Unity, but from a programmer's perspective, it would take no more than 5min to change the resource loading code and include an alternative (higher priority) path like "override" folders do in Infinity. Provided you don't have hundreds of copyrighted resource manager plugins.

Lack of persistence can be worked arround with variables but it is a pain in the ass, I agree. On the other side I was kinda happy to see all my doors being reset on zone transition.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Finished it and loved it from start to finish.

One thing, though, and it is a really really minor complaint.

The villains in both Dead Man's Switch and Dragonfall both have rather...contrived(?), far-fetched(?) motives?

It seems that just for the sake of introducing a plot twist, these games give you a rather unconvincing reason to be confronting the final villain. At least in Dragonfall, there was more of a motive for the player. Even if you didn't care about Berlin or saving people, you did what you did because your life was in danger and you are a marked man. But otherwise, in Dragonfall, you find very little hint early in the game for suspecting the actual final villain, and when he is revealed, it seems they forced it into the game.

 

[Darth Roxor]

in Dragonfall, you find very little hint early in the game for suspecting the actual final villain, and when he is revealed, it seems they forced it into the game.

Speak for yourself, I started suspecting that very early on.

 

[Jedi Exile]

in Dragonfall, you find very little hint early in the game for suspecting the actual final villain, and when he is revealed, it seems they forced it into the game.

Speak for yourself, I started suspecting that very early on.

Yeah it was quite obvious. A very predictable plot twist.

 

[Darth Roxor]

wouldn't exactly call it very predictable though

 

[Starwars]

New interview with one of the HBS devs: http://morbidplay.com/articles/shadowrun_returns_q&a/page1.html

Of interest:

Whistler: So what does the future hold for us with Harebrained Schemes and by extension Shadowrun, will we see more of the Shadowrun Return games/expansions or are there plans to move onto the next big project?


Mitch Gitelman: The #1 question that Shadowrun fans and our Kickstarter Backers ask us is, “When are you going to tell another story?” and I can tell you that we’re actively exploring that right now. The Shadowrun setting is absolutely *overflowing* with great story ideas and we would love to tell another. Who knows? Maybe there’s another Kickstarter in our future? The best place to keep updated on Shadowrun news is http://harebrained-schemes.com/shadowrun/

 

[SwiftCrack]

I'd back another Xpac.

 

[Abu Antar]

I'd back another game from them. Dead Man's Switch was their weakest Shadowrun release. Dragonfall was a step in the right direction and the DC of Dragonfall seems even better. I'd back more xpacs but I'd like to see them make a Shadowrun with slightly more exploration.