Shadowrun Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut

[Excidium]

Can't actually remember a single corporate etiquette check in the game. Where do you find those?

I found security to be extremely useful - it pretty much allows you to skip 3/4ths of the Aztechnology run, which is actually one of the more difficult runs in the game.

Fuck the etiquette system, by the way. Having to guess what the campaign designer considers to be valuable social skills while making your character really annoys me. It sucks spending all your hard-earned karma on corporate, security and street etiquettes only to find out that the campaign is set in the land of Oz and you should have invested in Munchkin and Flying Monkey etiquettes instead.

Most of the PnP sessions forces you to create your character without knowing which skills/options would be most optimal. That is what we call creating a Player Character.

Are you for real

 

[Koschey]

Greatly enjoing the game so far, just entered the APEX basement. Definitely a big improvement over DMS.

I also consistently run with Dietrich, Glory and Blitz. Playing a street sam focusing on shotguns, so Blitz is pretty much a given, Dietrich is nice to have for Haste + Aim and Glory I mostly take along for her medkits, though I've only really need them once or twice. Strangely enough early in the game she had a habit of hitting her targets almost as consistently as my sam, despite only having a hit chance in the thirties. I avoided melee because of the shotgun.

Talking of shotguns, hasted sam with wide shot plus minigun wielding cyber zombie was a sight to behold against clustered Knight Errant forces. The riggers especially never saw what hit them.

To add to the etiquette discussion: Of course my 2 charisma sam took the shadowrunner etiquette.

Later bought charisma up to 4 + secu for Bloodline. Luckily. From what I've seen, I would also add the gang etiquette to the list of useful ones in Dragonfall, though mostly in the early game. I didn't have it, but judging from the dialogue nodes gang options appear in, the gang etiquette seems to be a universal solution to avoid fights and keep your nuyen together in the first few missions. Can someone who took it confirm or confound it?

 

[Lujo]

Finished it yesterday, having done most fo the stuff I could get away with with a high charisma Decker (Gang, Corporate, Security). I used Glory for the high AP because I didn't need another decker (allthough I did take Blitz on a few runs). I was actually really, really dissapointed that there aren't any Blitz and Glory specific runs like the one with Dietrich.

I'm on the fence about the game - the writing is very, very uneven. Monika is completely unconvincing as a worshipped leader figure and the way everyone adores and respects her comes across as artificial. She's a flightly manic pixie girl, the way everyone revere's her just doesn't work and comes across as saccharine. The guy with the glasses who works as your intel guy is also too much of an exposition bot - the whole firewing thing really ought to have been introduced through stuff you peice togather from more sources than just him and the DVD info-dump. He comes across as more of a crazy conspiracy theorist than the actual crazy conspiracy theorist from the DVD's does. It REALLY doesn't work, and is almost impossibly bad compared to the stuff that's good. And there's plenty of that.

Eiger is brilliant. Yeah, it's a game set in Germany with a very Germanic Valkyre like monster girl who's also a blond cold sniper military nut, but she's incredibly well written and strangely endearing. I'm not sure if getting to her to become frineds with you opens up more of her dialogue during missions, but once I did she started playing along with zany charisma based scheemes during runs and showed a great sense of humor. Bluffing and fast talking security guys with her along is what I'll remember the game for, for sure ^^

Deitrich is cool. His story is a bit too much of a berserker story for a support caster, but he's got a variety of stuff he can do in a fight, so you feel like you're interacting with him the most. Eiger mostly shoots people, but is dependable and thats what you've got her there for and it complements her no-nonsense persona well. Glory...

Glory doesn't have much to say, and doesn't have a great variety of stuff to do. I don't mind her story concept, but her combat moves are samey. I replace her with the last free companion you unlock towards the end (not Blitz, but don't want to spoil), simply because there's more variety to what he can do.

The missions were rather nice (I think I've done all of them, I had 8000 extra on the account for Alice without paying anything into it). I did skip a lot of combat through decking and charisma (and some rather morally questionable choices I made towards the end). I'm not sure if you can choose which spells to equip on your companions, but I whish I could've done so for Deitrich, just for variety. This is why I enjoy decking sequences - I don't spontaneusly play a mage, so that's where I got to cast different stuff. Yeah, they're simplistic, but I liked them.

The Aztechnology run was at the same time cool (even though I didn't fire a bullet), but at the same time fell a bit flat (like many other things) because the writing in general hugely fails when characters overemphasize their emotions / opinions. The way the employer talked it up as evil and monstrous, I was expecting it to be more frightening than it was. Her description of everyday cruelty in South America was more outlandish and nightmarish compared to what the project turned out to be. Heck, the "morraly dubios" run with the imprisoned dwarf was more gruesome, as was the tower job.

There was a lot of good stuff, some nice curveballs, nice moments, actually good dialogues, but the whole dragon bussiness, the main plot, could've been done a lot better. I've never had much truck with dragons in RPG's (played a lot of D&D back in the day, never involved any dragons), and in this setting they actually really take me out of it. There could've been more investigation, more buildup, and more sense of confusion (or doubt from the characters that there is in fact a dragon involved), it would've made all the twists and missdirections more impactful.

Anyway, I'm pleased I met Eiger, Deitrich, Glory and the others (except the infodump guy), there was quite a lot of nice moments and stuff, but there was also dialogue and pacing problems enough to fire whoever was responsible. When so much of your game is ambience and dialogue, the unintentional narm and dissonance take it from a B to a C- whenever they happen. Eiger woulda strangled him in advance so he doesn't cause a team wipe.

 

[Eyeball]

Can't actually remember a single corporate etiquette check in the game. Where do you find those?

I found security to be extremely useful - it pretty much allows you to skip 3/4ths of the Aztechnology run, which is actually one of the more difficult runs in the game.

Fuck the etiquette system, by the way. Having to guess what the campaign designer considers to be valuable social skills while making your character really annoys me. It sucks spending all your hard-earned karma on corporate, security and street etiquettes only to find out that the campaign is set in the land of Oz and you should have invested in Munchkin and Flying Monkey etiquettes instead.

Most of the PnP sessions forces you to create your character without knowing which skills/options would be most optimal. That is what we call creating a Player Character.

Min-Max plays requires meta knowledge beforehand and they aren't required to be allowed to get a good campaign.

I get your point and I agree, but PnP allows you a lot more freedom in how to utilise your skills. You could perhaps tell your GM that you'd use your etiquette skills to look for informaiton pertaining to your quest in a way he hadn't anticipated. This is creative roleplaying by using your chosen skills in unexpected ways and should be rewarded.

A video game cannot adapt to you wanting to go off-track in any way, Thus you cannot improvise how a suboptimal etiquette pick may be made useful for you. This annoys the crap out of me in this game, because all etiquette skills should either come up at least a few times in a longer campaign or they should have some non-conversation side effects - like Street etiquette making it possible to find good drug dealers to buy combat drugs, Shadowrunner etiquette giving you contacts to buy better gear from, Corporate giving you flat better payouts for missions and so on. This would make it easier to build a character depending on your needs instead of simply picking a few etiquettes off the list and hoping the campaign writer gives you a few dialogue options for them.

One of the better mods for SRR (I forget which) gave you this option from your home PC - Shadowrunner etiquette gave you access to the Black market for guns, academic gave you a talismonger contact

 

[Horus]

Can't actually remember a single corporate etiquette check in the game. Where do you find those?

I found security to be extremely useful - it pretty much allows you to skip 3/4ths of the Aztechnology run, which is actually one of the more difficult runs in the game.

Fuck the etiquette system, by the way. Having to guess what the campaign designer considers to be valuable social skills while making your character really annoys me. It sucks spending all your hard-earned karma on corporate, security and street etiquettes only to find out that the campaign is set in the land of Oz and you should have invested in Munchkin and Flying Monkey etiquettes instead.

Most of the PnP sessions forces you to create your character without knowing which skills/options would be most optimal. That is what we call creating a Player Character.

Are you for real

Sorry that didn't came out fine.

What i ted to say is, you don't design your character or pick your skills by how useful they will be in the future. You just pick you skills for your character by how much they suit him/her realistically. You don't normally give latin academics skill to a serf pc even if it would be immenselly useful to him for example.

This is the situation when designing a good character for PnP game. It's not suited to gaming though(it's called Larping in games) but i wanted to mention it because this game seems close to the pnp games than most.

 

[John_HBS]

Guys, is the Bloodline (Aztechnology) mission bugged? I set the generator to self-destruct, run to the yellow glowing door to the right and hack it to open, but when I try to exit the fixer calls me and tells me to meltdown the generator. Problem is, when I wait for the meltdown counter to hit zero, the Whole place blows and game overs me.

There was a jackpoint at the generator itself I didn't bother to deck into because I couldn't be bothered to do the side mission given by the guy in the NeXT room, but do I really need to Jack into that when the "overload in X turns" counter is already there?

This looks like a bug and some Guys on the Steam forums seem to have the same problem. Am I doing something wrong or did today's patch break the mission?

Looking into this, appreciate the details.

I'm pretty sure it should also be possible to just force her to spawn via the debug console, but I'd have to dig into the level with the editor to find out. (edit: also, the Aztech run is really well done imo, so skipping it would be sadface)

If a solution could be had, it would be much appreciated! <3

I think something went wrong in my installation as I've had some other issues, which is why I'm trying to transfer my savegames to another computer which has a clean installation. However it won't detect the saves, so that solution doesn't really work either.

Spoiler

Double check you've made the most recent payment at the Rabbit-hole terminal via the U-Bahn station.

If the issue persists after that, let us know!

 

[Excidium]

This is the situation when designing a good character for PnP game. It's not suited to gaming though(it's called Larping in games)

Exactly? Why the hell did you make that post if you acknowledge that?

i wanted to mention it because this game seems close to the pnp games than most.

It really isn't apart from the fact that the IP is from a tabletop game.

 

[Grunker]

Spoiler

Double check you've made the most recent payment at the Rabbit-hole terminal via the U-Bahn station.

If the issue persists after that, let us know!

Eh... I don't even know what this means? I checked both U-bahn tunnels and there's no terminal. I only remember using a u-bahn terminal when I first contacted Alice.

 

[John_HBS]

Spoiler

Double check you've made the most recent payment at the Rabbit-hole terminal via the U-Bahn station.

If the issue persists after that, let us know!

Eh... I don't even know what this means? I checked both U-bahn tunnels and there's no terminal. I only remember using a u-bahn terminal when I first contacted Alice.

Apologies, I had the issue confused with a different root-cause.

This issue was fixed in our latest patch, however if you are already stuck in this situation you will need to rewind your save game to the Kreuzbasar immediately before going on the Sewers mission. Now you should be able to successfully talk to Frau Muller again which will activate the final mission at this stage of the game.

The feedback and raising of issues is very appreciated, and you have our deepest thanks.

 

[Grunker]

Spoiler

Double check you've made the most recent payment at the Rabbit-hole terminal via the U-Bahn station.

If the issue persists after that, let us know!

Eh... I don't even know what this means? I checked both U-bahn tunnels and there's no terminal. I only remember using a u-bahn terminal when I first contacted Alice.

Apologies, I had the issue confused with a different root-cause.

This issue was fixed in our latest patch, however if you are already stuck in this situation you will need to rewind your save game to the Kreuzbasar immediately before going on the Sewers mission. Now you should be able to successfully talk to Frau Muller again which will activate the final mission at this stage of the game.

The feedback and raising of issues is very appreciated, and you have our deepest thanks.

I completely forgot I could just rewind my saves. Thanks for the heads up, will check if that does it for me.

 

[Kem0sabe]

You're in luck Secret World becomes boring in shorter time compared to other MMO's. Just find some people(2 people is generally enough for fast playthrough) to run the main missions with and you'll save yourself a lot of grinding during boring missions.

Yeah, even in the second zone im getting tired of the ridiculous mob density and agro ranges. Makes it a pain to explore and do quests

 

[Sodafish]

Recently played through DMS, and am part way through Dragonfall now. I'm digging the writing and art style of the games, although the games are way too easy.

Spoiler

Just finished the run to grab the MKIV - really cool level. It was quite a nice surprise for me for the game to have a chemistry problem as part of the mission, although they fucked up the written formula of phosgene (they wrote it as cobalt chloride ). Still, I reasoned ammonia as a plausible answer on the first try.

Who needs biomed skills?

 

[clemens]

Recently played through DMS, and am part way through Dragonfall now. I'm digging the writing and art style of the games, although the games are way too easy.

Spoiler

Just finished the run to grab the MKIV - really cool level. It was quite a nice surprise for me for the game to have a chemistry problem as part of the mission, although they fucked up the written formula of phosgene (they wrote it as cobalt chloride ). Still, I reasoned ammonia as a plausible answer on the first try.

Who needs biomed skills?

Spoiler

I actually found the Knight Errants fights in this level more difficult than any previous encounter I had played... It was getting a little interesting at least.

 

[Sodafish]

Recently played through DMS, and am part way through Dragonfall now. I'm digging the writing and art style of the games, although the games are way too easy.

Spoiler

Just finished the run to grab the MKIV - really cool level. It was quite a nice surprise for me for the game to have a chemistry problem as part of the mission, although they fucked up the written formula of phosgene (they wrote it as cobalt chloride ). Still, I reasoned ammonia as a plausible answer on the first try.

Who needs biomed skills?

Spoiler

I actually found the Knight Errants fights in this level more difficult than any previous encounter I had played... It was getting a little interesting at least.

Spoiler

Not really. Just be sure to kill the deckers quickly and the MKIV just ploughs through everything with his axe.

As a general point though: is it just me or is Eiger a fucking atrocious shot? I mean wtf, she has high ranged skills but whenever I use her she misses probably 90% of the time. And before you say it, yes I'm aware of the close range penalties of the sniper rifle; this happens with both sniper and shotgun attacks.

 

[Excidium]

Never had much problem with her accuracy, other than shotguns being really bad ever since they patched them.

 

[Sodafish]

What, they nerfed the shotguns?

 

[Shadenuat]

Apparently they did. In the endgame, I never used them, started to play her as a sniper. Haste for 5 action points, an aim bonus from here and there, and that valkyrie can take an enemy or two per turn (on Hard difficulty), provided there is some distance between her and the enemy.
Glory on drugs and buffed with various spells was a party tank instead. Final boss couldn't kill her point blank with a minigun.

 

[Excidium]

What, they nerfed the shotguns?

Release 1.0.2
New Features, Improvements
Shotgun: Kneecap now has a HP DMG penalty of -6, up from -3. It now has a -5% accuracy penalty, and a cooldown of 3.
Shotgun: All shotguns have had their accuracy falloff increased slightly, lowering hit chance at long ranges.

 

[serch]

As a general point though: is it just me or is Eiger a fucking atrocious shot? I mean wtf, she has high ranged skills but whenever I use her she misses probably 90% of the time. And before you say it, yes I'm aware of the close range penalties of the sniper rifle; this happens with both sniper and shotgun attacks.

She works far better paired with Dietrich (12-15 % bonus to aim). Dragonfall is a charming campaign, could be glorious with some reactivity.

 

[Decado]

Okay, I guess I will buy this.

 

[Sodafish]

Thanks for the shotgun info. I've been playing a rifle-focussed samurai in Dragonfall, so have barely used them and didn't notice the difference between games.

Yeah I always bring Dietrich for support, but even when aim-bonus is on her she still misses a hell of a lot... I think I'll stick with Glory instead.

 

[opium fiend]

I am playing on very hard and it's frustrating how a supposedly super trained spec op like Eiger can't hit the broad side of a barn. Glory and my pistol/decker are more useful in a fight than she is.

Anyway, I like some of the hard choices in this game. Do I

Spoiler

purge Apex or release it? I decided not to let loose something that can kill deckers at whim but I'm still torn on whether I made the right choice.

 

[Jaedar]

Spoiler

I am fairly sure purging Apex is the correct choice. It still goes around killing deckers for no reason if you let it be. Letting it be does unlock a new ending though, so that's nice. But does the ending of your choice even affect the epilogue?

 

[Eyeball]

Can you Rat Diplomacy the ending, by the way? There were a bunch of etiquette options I didn't have the skill for at the very end as well as a lot of really hard biomed and spellcasting checks on a console earlier in the level.

Is it possible to talk Big Bad Evil Down from the Evil Plan without firing a shot if you've done the right Things in the game up to thta point or do you need to end with a boss battle? That would be pretty cool.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Can you Rat Diplomacy the ending, by the way?

Nope. The etiquette checks essentially result in the big bad saying "haha no, ur ronk".