Shadowrun Shadowrun: Hong Kong Pre-Release Discussion [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Stompa]

Use Blitz to take control of the turret.

As of latest version this is no longer possible, Blitz now lacks the necessary Drone Control skill.

 

[Ovplain]

Why can't these stupid games be set to just unlock at 00:01 worldwide, whichever timezone the buyer might be in? Gotta wait the whole day now, goddammit.

 

[eXalted]

For all butthurted:

Press Alt + F1 in game, click on Cheat > ALL 100% and increase the speed. Press Alt+F1 again.

 

[omega21]

Blitz is pretty shit anyway

 

[Alfons]

Jesus you motherfuckers are retarded. Read one post and fuck off. Nice way to go about things. I said that the game didn't updated for whatever reason. After reinstalling it's just fucking boring.

GarfunkeL Explain to me oh retarded one. How do I avoid the initial crirs without quickloading? Or how do you drop the troll which requires 3 or 4 turns of focusing before he hits you and knocks you out of cover or outright stuns you?

Even after updating the game is riddled with fucking bugs, or shit that isn't explained. Been playing with a melee guy primarily using the -AP attack and I can't figure out if the game is broken or if it's supposed to work the way it does. When you hit a person in cover it shows you -2ap but it doesn't actually work. So either cover blocks ap damage and that's a visual bug or it's just a bug, when you crit they received all ap damage. Again either a bug or crits bypass cover defense, fine. But why the fuck when you attack enemies before they have a turn 2AP damage does nothing to them. It would be nice if cover was explained in their shitty little in game faq, but fuck it, the fans eat their shit anyway I suppose.

I have no fucking idea why you motherfuckers hold these people in high regard. When you look at their steam page one of their most active subforums is the bug reports. It's August 2015, almost a year after release and people are still consistently finding bugs. But no, they know what they're doing.

 

[J_C]

WOW! Look at all of those animations. All those cool, unskippable animations. Christ, this shit is gonna suck. Battles with a lot of NPC's took fucking forever in DC because of this shit. This is worse than a cutscene. I think the spread of actual gameplay to animation is about 1 to 5. Make your decisions, execute them and then sit there for 30 seconds with a thumb up your ass. When the fuck is anyone going to look back at Fallout and realize that the combat speed slider was a good idea. FFS.

Wow you are an idiot. What do you want to skip on a 2 seconds long attack animation? Do you want the NPCs just stand in place, doing nothing while damage numbers are floating above their heads. Jesus people can whine about ridiculous things.

Sure. 12 NPC's which are fucking about the whole map. Each probably takes 2-5 second to finish a turn depending on what they do, that's 24 seconds up to a minute where you aren't doing shit.

Wait wait wait, I think Fallout is shit now, because when NPCs move, it takes seconds to move from one spot to another. They should just teleport from one spot to another.

Seriously, you talk like you have to sit through that 24 seconds to 1 minute in one sitting. Sure, if you add up all the animation time of a hundred NPCs, you get 5 minutes, but when you play, one attack only takes a second or two. I'm sure you won't get bored out of your life between 2 attacks if they take 2 seconds.

 

[ArchAngel]

Jesus you motherfuckers are retarded. Read one post and fuck off. Nice way to go about things. I said that the game didn't updated for whatever reason. After reinstalling it's just fucking boring.

GarfunkeL Explain to me oh retarded one. How do I avoid the initial crirs without quickloading? Or how do you drop the troll which requires 3 or 4 turns of focusing before he hits you and knocks you out of cover or outright stuns you?

Even after updating the game is riddled with fucking bugs, or shit that isn't explained. Been playing with a melee guy primarily using the -AP attack and I can't figure out if the game is broken or if it's supposed to work the way it does. When you hit a person in cover it shows you -2ap but it doesn't actually work. So either cover blocks ap damage and that's a visual bug or it's just a bug, when you crit they received all ap damage. Again either a bug or crits bypass cover defense, fine. But why the fuck when you attack enemies before they have a turn 2AP damage does nothing to them. It would be nice if cover was explained in their shitty little in game faq, but fuck it, the fans eat their shit anyway I suppose.

I have no fucking idea why you motherfuckers hold these people in high regard. When you look at their steam page one of their most active subforums is the bug reports. It's August 2015, almost a year after release and people are still consistently finding bugs. But no, they know what they're doing.

Whiner gonna whine..

 

[Karwelas]

Alfons For now you are most 'Oh gud it is shite, kill it, fuck you, why do you like it duh huh huh' guy in this thread I have ever seen. Seriously, I don't understand how someone can be so edgy becouse his luck is retarded and he have bug inside of his game. (what is weird for me as I played Dragonfall and didn't find any)

I don't know, go to doctor to get antibutthurt medicine, hang yourself, or whatever you want to do.

 

[Ulminati]

Not sure who's more retarded. Alfons who can't manage to figure out an early encounter or the ADHD kids on the last page who couldn't handle a turn-based game having animations.

 

[Karwelas]

Not sure who's more retarded. Alfons who can't manage to figure out an early encounter or the ADHD kids on the last page who couldn't handle a turn-based game having animations.

In this one thing... I think we can say they are both retarded on same immeasurable levels of retardation.

 

[ArchAngel]

Not sure who's more retarded. Alfons who can't manage to figure out an early encounter or the ADHD kids on the last page who couldn't handle a turn-based game having animations.

If you check the last page you will notice you are talking about the same person :D

 

[Alfons]

What do you want to skip on a 2 seconds long attack animation? Do you want the NPCs just stand in place, doing nothing while damage numbers are floating above their heads. Jesus people can whine about ridiculous things.

Not exactly fucko. I want no animations at all. I want the character to appear in the place they moved to with an arrow showing how they got there and instead of attack, numbers floating overhead just have the name of the attack pop over their head as the numbers appear. That 2 second animation is not offensive until you consider that you watch 10 of them every 10 seconds for the nest 12 hours.

Whiner gonna whine..

Says the fanboy.

Alfons For now you are most 'Oh gud it is shite, kill it, fuck you, why do you like it duh huh huh' guy in this thread I have ever seen. Seriously, I don't understand how someone can be so edgy becouse his luck is retarded and he have bug inside of his game. (what is weird for me as I played Dragonfall and didn't find any)

I'm talking about DC, DF was fine.

Not sure who's more retarded. Alfons who can't manage to figure out an early encounter or the ADHD kids on the last page who couldn't handle a turn-based game having animations.

Here's a cookie for being a retard. So now bullshit design isn't bullshit because it's manageable? This is the mighty Codex. Give them TB combat and a story that isn't completely shit and their critical thinking is reduced to that of the average COD player.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Whose alt is Alfons anyway, this style of edgy shitposting feels very familiar to me.

 

[Ulminati]

If you check the last page you will notice you are talking about the same person :D

Oh my, so I am. I guess that makes him doubly retarded.

 

[Infinitron]

Whose alt is Alfons anyway, this style of edgy shitposting feels very familiar to me.

*looks at IP address*



He's not anybody's alt that I can see, though.

 

[Alfons]

"Edgy"

Pointing out shit that's shitty is edgy.

 

[Fredward]

Not to interrupt the hair-pulling but RPS has a review up.

Or for those who hate clicking:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/08/20/shadowrun-hong-kong-review/

Shadowrun: Hong Kong [official site] is the third-and-a-half time around the block for this cyberpunk-but-with-elves roleplaying series, and by now there’s a routine and a rhythm. You build a Shadowrunner, a secretive mercenary who can fight with technical or mystical powers (or a combination of the two), leading a team of fixed-spec allies with big personalities through real-time exploration and turn-based action. This time, the setting is one of the touchstones of 80s cyberpunk, and we’re dealing with Triads, social segregation and city-wide nightmares in addition to the usual gang war, troll mercenaries and magic-assisted corporate espionage.


The scope is larger – some of the environments are enormous – but broadly speaking it’s business as usual. Further Adventures In Shadowrun rather than Great Leap Forwards. Granted, this is what was promised in the successful Kickstarter (the series’ second), but there is now that nagging sense that this could perhaps be an expansion pack rather than whole new game.

The most obvious place the money’s been spent is on art: these massive locales and missions with bespoke, hugely ornate decor, most of which is purely backdrop. Take, for instance, the main hub, a sprawling, dockside underworld town which houses your base, quest-givers, a load of different shops, a bunch of oddballs to chat to and a smattering of micro-missions.

In theory, it’s great that there’s so much to look at, from Majong parlours to docked battleships, magic dens, caravans full of mad drones and illicit augmentation labs, all adorned with dirty neon or sinister leylines. The art is meticulous, luxurious (at least within the confines of this series’ slightly cardboard cut-out presentation). In practice, it’s a hell of a lot of schlepping around static scenery you saw hours ago, absorbed and then took for granted because all you need from it is to hit the same few spots again and again. It’s big for big’s sake, and not supported by quite enough to do.

The other big focus is story, deemed to be What The Fans Want, and that too feels Big For Big’s Sake. The central mystery, of why a foster-father you haven’t seen for years has summoned you to a nightmare-plagued Hong Kong, only to immediately go missing and for you to be framed for a crime you didn’t commit, certainly has some grab, probably more so than the conspiracies of the two preceding games. There are also some wonderfully detailed character descriptions and conversations which amp up the ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek hardboiled atmosphere, but by and large every conversation goes on just a little too long. There’s too much front-loading of exposition too, several hours of prescribed plotting – albeit with plenty of options about how your want your character to treat others – before it releases you to quest and shop and chat to your gang at relative leisure. I suspect devoted Shadowrunheads will lap this stuff up, but some of it really seemed like needless bulk to me, as though Hong Kong was trying to be a more substantially new Shadowrun game than it really is.

The embiggenation is not limited to presentation, fortunately. The game proper has a little more flex than the last one, a couple of more memorable squad members (one, a cannibalistic, Samurai ghoul who’d like to be a more valuable member of society, particularly feels like he walked right out of one of the better Bioware games) and some big, setpiece missions which often offer a choice of violence or avoidance. An open world it is not however, which I think is why that massive hub level feels a bit off. It’s as though SHK is trying to carry itself like a freeform game, but didn’t or couldn’t fill it with enough #content. I enjoy the setting and characterisation of this one more than the preceding Dragonfall, but the latter’s scale felt like more of a sweet spot. SHK might up the stakes, but getting around is a little fatiguing.

It also takes few prisoners in terms of explaining its many systems, classes and abilities. Token efforts are made to explain how to build a capable character or use advanced skills, but it’s pretty clear it presumes that most of its audience has played at least one of the other games. The last thing I’d do is request more tutorial before the game begins in earnest, but an optional, more extensive one would make a lot of sense if you don’t know your Conjuring from your Chi. Fortunately it’s not a terribly difficult game, being much more about the hours you put in rather than strategic skill, but expect some brow-furrowing if this is your first time. A new system to occasionally choose new powers for squad members, similar to the upgrade tree in XCOM, is at least far better explained, given it involves essentially brand-new, bespoke abilities.

I like Shadowrun: Hong Kong well enough, and it’s certainly the series’ glossiest, most generous instalment yet, but I do feel I’m repeating myself to some degree. Building up a character, accruing cash to spend on only marginally better weapons and armour, unravelling a conspiracy, occasionally diving into Tronish cyberworld sequences: I’ve done this twice before, and though I don’t resent doing it again I am ready for something different now.

On the other hand, I suspect the developers know exactly what fans want and exactly what they’re doing, and I’ll be surprised if Hong Kong isn’t considered the series’ new high watermark. While the fantasy elements sometimes felt air-lifted into the earlier games’ cyberpunk setting, this meshes the mystical and the science-fictional from the off, using Eastern mythology as a framing construct for its high concepts without tumbling into stereotype too often. Though a section in which you try to improve the feng shui of a slum was a bit much, admittedly.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a substantial and in some respects lavish cyberpunk romp, which, if looked at purely in its own right, is only really guilty of a bit of visual and narrative flab. It’s got fun characters, loads of skills and spells, eschews melodrama in favour of allowing you to choose how seriously you’re going to treat the world you’re thrown into, and pretty reliably offers multiple, if slightly perfunctory, quest solutions. If this is your first time with the series, you’re in for a merry old time, although I’d still point to the tauter Dragonfall: Director’s Cut as a slightly superior Shadowrun experience. If you’ve been round the neon block a few times already, then Hong Kong’s going to feel pretty familiar despite having a wider and more ostentatious stage than ever before. This might well be what you want, of course, but I’m not entirely sure all those Kickstarter funbucks have been spent quite as effectively as they could have been.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong is out now.

 

[veevoir]

(one, a cannibalistic, Samurai ghoul who’d like to be a more valuable member of society, particularly feels like he walked right out of one of the better Bioware games)

Did HBS... decline?

Rest is a lot of whaambulance this is not a super-new game with 180 turn, but improvement over old one..

 

[Infinitron]

Did HBS... decline?

No, because Dragonfall's companions also feel like they walked out of a BioWare game

 

[Alfons]

Someone posted about a guy who's going to do a release stream can someone repost the link?

 

[Maelflux]

Not exactly fucko. I want no animations at all. I want the character to appear in the place they moved to with an arrow showing how they got there and instead of attack, numbers floating overhead just have the name of the attack pop over their head as the numbers appear.

But you do realize that with your complete lack of skill at playing, that whenever you enter a new map, you will just end up in a room with all your players dead, and no clue how they got killed?

 

[ArchAngel]

Someone posted about a guy who's going to do a release stream can someone repost the link?

Please don't. We don't need him to be negative in the stream chat as well :D

 

[ArchAngel]

That review was... I can understand the reviewers point of view but I totally don't agree with him.

 

[Alfons]

But you do realize that with your complete lack of skill at playing, that whenever you enter a new map, you will just end up in a room with all your players dead, and no clue how they got killed?

I realize that. Preventing an 80% to hit from missing 3 times in a row or getting that 52% to hit definitely requires skills I don't have. It would at least make those 40 move back and forth, shoot turns the AI takes to get there shorter.

 

[Fredward]

New video on the Steam page too.