Shadowrun Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition

[razvedchiki]

I didnt find the texts of hong kong a problem,just as agris already wrote most players expected either a karma reward or quests after so much text.
The low overall difficulty is what bothers me most,no point to invest your karma/nueyn if you can breeze through the game with the starting equipement.

 

[DalekFlay]

I never finished HK. Got to about half way, then went to talk to everyone around the HUB and all my companions with the plan to exhaust all conversation options (like I would do in Dragonfall) and it was sooo boring and bad. I kind of lost interest at some point and went to play some other game. Later I lost the saves in windows reinstall.

I'm about halfway if you count the added missions and struggling to go back to it. I think my save is from March. Unlike Dragonfall I just don't find the narrative or characters that compelling, and other than great style the rest of both games is sort of meh. That style makes me want to finish but who knows, lots of games to get to. It's not the amount of text, I just don't find it compelling text.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

How dangerhaired are they Roguey? I mean weren't the characters all around better in Dragonfall, granted Hong Kong is definitely pretty decent but I didn't particularly care for any of the npcs in it.

Not at all.

Hong Kong has the cool psychopath, the autist, the chill trashy ratgirl, and the stoic zombie samurai. The only outright terrible person is the whiny brother.

The brother was the best character after the zombie samurai
Also, I remember the HK DLC being pretty good and short.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

I actually like the writing in HK better. The companions are more interesting and it is the one that best conveys the feeling of actually working in the criminal underground. The antagonist was legit scary once she showed up.

But it bothered me that they have to shoehorn yet another 'rescue the world' (sort of) plot into the game. A simple revenge plot would have been perfectly fine and fit the whole setting and narrative better. One last big job, go on the hunt for Josephine Tang. It would have been so easy, as Auntie Cheng as well as you yourself would have had a motive. And then you could still have plenty of choices; betray auntie, kill Josephine, extort money, double crossing, return to normal life with Raymond, whatever. Plenty of interesting choices that perfectly fit the setting. Instead you gotta rescue the world (sort of) again.

I will say that the idea of a city where everything turns to shit yet through some creepy power you are somehow unable to leave and free yourself from this evil is terribly scary to me. It reminded me a bit of Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things but then again, it didn't do enough with that setup because you are busy running the shadows.

Edit: Since I am on it, I will also say that the engine looks good but belongs in the trash. I still encountered shitty bugs like the one where you can't click on things for a while. That ones been there since SRR, I think. And I also had a shitty bug with a companion questline which I couldn't really finish, which in turn influenced the ending I got. Playing games years after release and still being bothered by bugs relating to major stuff like companion quests or the games ending is just horseshit.

 

[FreshCorpse]

Yes it's incredible how badly the engine runs given the time and effort apparently put into it. 15s+ to save your game towards the end of SR:HK for example

 

[FritzedProcess]

I also liked the writing in HK more. The characters were more varied in their backgrounds, as opposed to the invariable betrayal/emo stuff from Dragonfall which at some points got tiresome. The hacker's mission had me in stitches, with the same type of mess you usually end up having in pen and paper sessions.

Also, multiple endings depending on whether you paid attention to what some characters had to say about myths and legends.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Guess I'll replay HK for the third time then.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Well, think its time for a new playthrough

 

[DalekFlay]

I just finished the main campaign of this. It was... okay. Not nearly as good as Dragonfall but decent fun. I feel like the ending is pretty solid and Outer Worlds comes out soon, so I'm thinking of skipping the bonus campaign. I'll read through the thread a little in the morning maybe but a few quick answers would be good about whether it's worth doing or not.

 

[Nano]

I just finished the main campaign of this. It was... okay. Not nearly as good as Dragonfall but decent fun. I feel like the ending is pretty solid and Outer Worlds comes out soon, so I'm thinking of skipping the bonus campaign. I'll read through the thread a little in the morning maybe but a few quick answers would be good about whether it's worth doing or not.

It's worth it. Then again, it seems that I enjoyed the main HK campaign a lot more than you did, so YMMV.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

I feel like the ending is pretty solid and Outer Worlds comes out soon, so I'm thinking of skipping the bonus campaign.

Bonus Campaign is worth it, it's not very long and the optional side missions are fun.
The fight at the end of the tower extraction mission was such a beautiful clusterfuck, best encounter between the three games.

 

[HoboForEternity]

bonus campaign is like 4 hours long, 5 if you stretch it as much as possible, and it more of a dense and cohesive experience than the main game. it's worth it.

 

[Darth Roxor]

ye, the bonus campaign is noice

 

[cvv]

I played this right after Dragonfall, which is one of my fav RPGs ever, and I was shocked by the drop in quality. Almost as if Harebrained outsourced it to some for-hire Chink studio. It was boring, flat, stale, by the numbers. I guess they blew all their idea savings on Dragonfall and got nothing left.

 

[Galdred]

I played this right after Dragonfall, which is one of my fav RPGs ever, and I was shocked by the drop in quality. Almost as if Harebrained outsourced it to some for-hire Chink studio. It was boring, flat, stale, by the numbers. I guess they blew all their idea savings on Dragonfall and got nothing left.

That may be a bit harsh. The main drop in quality for me was in the writing department, especially the "get NPC to tell you their boring life" part of the game. The worst offense was having the best ending hidden behind having to "talk" to a shopkeeper (almost) between each mission.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

The worst offense was having the best ending hidden behind having to "talk" to a shopkeeper (almost) between each mission.

Honestly this parts make the most sense. After all it takes someone years and getting insane to get the whole picture about the walled city.

Talking to NPCs is a choice one made (you can always say fuck off I am not interested when NPC try to tell you story).

The actual character and the way the information is given of course is of debatable quality. The process could perhaps be more engaging as well. But putting the best ending as a "side quest" of sort is a plus in my book.

 

[Galdred]

The worst offense was having the best ending hidden behind having to "talk" to a shopkeeper (almost) between each mission.

Honestly this parts make the most sense. After all it takes someone years and getting insane to get the whole picture about the walled city.

Talking to NPCs is a choice one made (you can always say fuck off I am not interested when NPC try to tell you story).

The actual character and the way the information is given of course is of debatable quality. The process could perhaps be more engaging as well. But putting the best ending as a "side quest" of sort is a plus in my book.

Making the best ending depend on a sidequest is a good thing indeed. But sidequests should not be about enduring countless lines of poorly written loredump.

 

[DalekFlay]

That may be a bit harsh. The main drop in quality for me was in the writing department, especially the "get NPC to tell you their boring life" part of the game. The worst offense was having the best ending hidden behind having to "talk" to a shopkeeper (almost) between each mission.

Yeah he's being harsh, but it just didn't have that higher quality feel that Dragonfall did. The writing being more boring is part of it, but I also feel like the missions were less well designed and the feel of the game less open. However I did play it in two big chunks so I barely remember the first half I played in like March, so maybe I'm being overly harsh as well.

Also had no idea about the endings, I like to just let C&C play out naturally. I'm guessing it was the magic shop lady? I only went in there once and she gave me a huge info dump. Oh well, I like the ending as it is. I'm guessing what the difference is (a death versus no death) and I like the normal ending I think.

 

[Roguey]

The worst offense was having the best ending hidden behind having to "talk" to a shopkeeper (almost) between each mission.

IIRC, you just have to talk to her once and then she later sends you an email when she has the pertinent info you need to know. I don't think you need to constantly talk to her.

 

[V_K]

The worst offense was having the best ending hidden behind having to "talk" to a shopkeeper (almost) between each mission.

IIRC, you just have to talk to her once and then she later sends you an email when she has the pertinent info you need to know. I don't think you need to constantly talk to her.

You need to talk to her several times for the option to ask her about research to present itself.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

DLC has the true ending imo. The more interesting theme was the 'breaking bad' part of the story, the being drawn into a criminal underground and then kinda doing it against your free will or actually just 'running' (haha!) with it. The demonic resuce the world thing is a bit tacked on macguffin. I liked the antagonist but really they might as well just left her out and focus on the other element more, it would have been more consistent this way. Thus you kinda need the DLC to really wrap up what is in my view the core of this whole story.

Spoiler

I really liked that you could say fuck it in the end just return to normal life or to say that you are actually into this Shadowrun shit and stay. The only thing that felt a little artificial was that it pissed off Duncan so hard. Whats really the issue to give him his ID back while remaining underground yourself. Well, in my headcanon thats excatly what happened.)

 

[Zombra]

How does everyone know about the hidden ending in the first place?

 

[Lacrymas]

All the nu-Shadowrun games are decently entertaining, nothing mindblowing, but worth a playthrough (or 2) nonetheless.

 

[V_K]

How does everyone know about the hidden ending in the first place?

It's not really hidden. Any magic-oriented character would visit Xu regularly anyway, and the relevant dialog clearly implies the "more info later" structure, so it's not terribly hard to get. It just comes off as a bit of surprise when what you thought to be an optional loredump turns out to be vital information in the final encounter.

 

[DeepOcean]

How does everyone know about the hidden ending in the first place?

Everyone got to read about it, got pissed then get mad with the game afterwards. I liked the best ending being hidden behind a side quest and while the writing is of debatable quality, finaly a game that doesn't deliver the best ending on a silver platter. It makes sense that the NPCs that are more involved with the lore of the Walled City are the ones that suggest the concept that you can make a deal with the big bad spirit thing and if you are clever about it you can escape being made for a fool.

I liked that the game mention feng shui all the time and the whole plot is about some feng shui machine that steals feng shui energy from the area to benefit the big bad corporation, that smells like lefty BS but was clever lefty BS and I liked that. I liked how you can blackmail the spirit thing when she says you can't destroy her, reminding her that you can't but you can release the other bad spirit things that for sure can, your character get to know about that possibility when you are talking with the hacker girl (not sure about if it was her or the girl that owned the magic shop), of someone that managed to fool a Kuama king by making a deal with another Kuama king that contradicted the deal made with the first Kuama King.

I liked how your character needs to learn something before he can use that knowledge, character knowledge is different from player knowledge and I liked that. People can argue that they could have implemented this on a better way and I agree but this thing of the best ending being hidden behind side quests is the best thing about Hong Kong.