What I loved most about dragonfall was the amazingly succint writing. Yes, other adjectives apply, and I *almost* used "amazing" but it is not amazing writing; it is writing that will immediately give you a firm grasp of the personality of the NPC with whom you are conversing with, and it is writing that will properly set up an NPC's characterization in a surprisingly few amount of paragraphs (and sometimes even with simple sentences).
For example:
- The teenaged girl who runs errands for the Turkish Coffee Bar owner. I *loved* conversing with her and even though HBS never finished her dialog, the little bits of conversations you can have with her really made me feel like she was living in this town you're currently adventuring in, and the way you can unlock bits and pieces of her past and her relationship with the TCB owner was very interesting.
However it does not lead to any extra missions, items, or anything of the sort. She was literally an *unfinished NPC*.
- Another easy example is the BTL-addicted woman with whom you can talk to throughout the game. As with the Turkish Coffee Bar owner's errand girl, talking with her does not lead to anything gameplay-related, but with the brief interactions I had with her I felt empathy for her and every time I wished there was something I could do to help her.
- The Player Characters, i.e. your Party Members, all had interesting backstories which utilized shlock and tropes, but were also written in believable ways. There were lots of interesting things you could discover about them that smacked of stuff a real-life person would have experienced:
Example: Dietrich's little confession about how he used to be in a punk band. The conversation you have with him about this subject, while brief, was more interesting than the reams of text that your brother spouts at you in Hong Kong.
- Even underdeveloped characters with trope-y archetypes, such as the Sniper party member (I don't even remember her name!), manage to make lasting impressions with her simple, but direct characterization and the way that this perfectly ties into the gameplay aspects of bringing her with you during missions.
Cool moments like getting the chance to morph your dog into a motherfucking Hellhound is pure Shadowrun shlock at its finest, and it was memorable and fun to play through.
There are simply too many examples of interesting and memorable stuff to cite from Dragonfall.
I have not finished Hong Kong and probably never will because every time either an NPC or a party member decided to speak it meant I had to read 2x/3x the amount of text than in Dragonfall, and it was always uninspired, trite and derivative of bad Hong Kong gangster/triad bullshit that... is not really very Shadowrun-y.
My god, I remember when you meet the Auntie who organizes your campgain missions... I simply can't think of a more boring NPC in any of the 3 Shadowrun games from HBS.
EDIT: Oops, sorry, your brother is the most boring one.
...so does what I'm talking about get fixed in the EE?