So my first new Shadowrun experience was with DF. At the time people said to skip DMS because it's crap compared to DF, so I never played it until now.
Ok, the interface got improved in later games, but DMS is actually the superior game of the three, by far. And even with the interface improvements, the DMS interface had the advantage of having shortcut keys for your weapon skills.
So DMS story feels much more like a classic Shadowrun story, I get the feeling with this one that the devs actually played the SNES game. The architecture is a little overdone, reminding me of Syndicate and some noir story which doesn't exactly fit the setting, but it's grandiose which the later games never achieve again. You're limited to small areas as usual, but the central hub is a small interior location and you get a larger sense of scale constantly traversing from one location to the next than you do with the later ones. The story is interesting to read, and so are the characters. A little cliched, but atleast they're not constant text dumps from angry emo people. I don't understand where the emo came from in DF and HK, it was all fine in DMS and it was working. The pacing's a little too fast though. The story had darker elements, but it wasn't focused on those, it understood storytelling.
Just about everything I can think of is done better in the first one. Groupmates are just hirables from a roster like in Jagged Alliance, or sometimes just transients that you barely get to know and it makes you curious. The worldbuilding and world is more descriptive but keeps it interesting. It knows when to mix in investigative gameplay and combat, without long slogs of nothing but the former like in HK. The world is more reactive and there is C&C, sometimes with immediate obvious results. Dialogue actually gives different responses, unlike in HK where I had 4 different choices that all gave the same response for example and constantlly tried to undermine the player for no particular reason. The are also a lot more skillchecks from what I can tell, charisma choices and charisma for that matter actually come into play often. Karma is also handled differently - it's no longer a large dump at the end of events, but small increments during the events, which makes you feel like the individual elements in the events matter more.
There's more that I forget, but DMS feels like it was made by a completely different team than DF and HK. Some things got refined, but at the same time, most other things got much, much worse. That said, I wish you could get the DMS experience with some of the later improvements like the better UI of HK and cyberware.
