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Shadowrun Is Shadowrun Hong Kong worth it?

SausageInYourFace

Angelic Reinforcement
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In your face
Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
To be fair, if done somewhat tastefully, I get a kick out of a little reference. I find it kinda cute to play PoE and suddenly run into DU or Jaesun and think 'hey, I know these guys'.
 

Galdred

Studio Draconis
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
To be fair, if done somewhat tastefully, I get a kick out of a little reference. I find it kinda cute to play PoE and suddenly run into DU or Jaesun and think 'hey, I know these guys'.
Indeed, my main problem with the way it was done is that not-mind reading served literally no other purpose.
 
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For me, the biggest letdown was the level design. Dragonfall did a really masterful job out of it, where exploration and non-combat skills could be used to gain tactical advantage for the mandatory combat encounters. It was all very fluid and fine-grained. HK, on the other hand, goes the usual (dumb) way of "either you talk it through, or you fight it through". Plus, Dragonfall did a much better job of translating the mission premises into actual levels and encounters - while the premises of some HK missions are more creative, the actual scripts end up quite meh.

Yeah. There was a mission in HK where you had to sabotage a corporation by destroying Feng Shui in their offices. Great premise, so sad that all you were doing was clicking on all interactive objects you found in the office. Good designer would give player a Feng Shui guide and let them choose among several rearrangement activities, those which were most likely to break the Feng Shui rules.
 

Immortal

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Story isn't very good, but it has interesting bits. Companions are mostly good. I think the problem of Hong Kong is not that it is inferior per se, but that maximum you could accomplish with Shadowrun Returns engine and systems was already done in Dragonfall, and after that it would be better to make a completely new game.


Overall I agree with you, A few fan made campaigns actually expanded on what Dragonfall did.. AKA Open World-ish and contracts / missions. In that way I do think the engine can squeeze a bit more creativity than what we saw in Hong Kong but probably not much..

I felt HK was a little rushed.. One thing HK nailed really well though is level design / aesthetics, the set pieces are great and companions were good.. Main Story was meh and the module is way too verbose text wise, takes 2 paragraphs to say what a single sentence could.. Becomes a slog after a while for anything except your favorite characters. Dragonfall is miles better imo for that Shadowrunner feelz.
 

fantadomat

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Edgy Vatnik Wumao
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LoL just learned that the walled city was a real thing,tho they didn't do it justice. Also they overdid the muh misery and shit things,it looked pretty comfortable and people were kind off happy to live there.
 

gurugeorge

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Strap Yourselves In
Returns is basically the gameplay skeleton upon which DF and HK were built. Both of the latter have their flaws, but at least they're fully fleshed out.

Returns is a great little experience, with a great little story paced very well throughout though. Linear? Yep. Small? Yep. But HK is a worse experience for all the bloat IMO

This is a great set of games to play during the coronavirus lockdown, I'm really enjoying the rhythm of reading fairly well-written stories with good characterization, and nicely-tuned XCOM-lite combat. But I was just thinking about what you said here - to me, it was instantly obvious that the restrictions on what you can do in terms of exploration, loot, equipping, equipping squad, checking squad stats, and general inventory management, were probably quite deliberate. The restrictions occasionally irritated me, but the better part of me understood their function, to streamline me into being absorbed in the story with less distractions.

I haven't played HK yet (though I definitely will when I've finished Dragonfall), but even just with Dragonfall, even just the small concessions like more loot, slightly better squad equip, etc., functionality, was starting to give me too many options compared to the first game, with a consequent slight degredation of concentration on the story.

Of course I'd love to have a more open-world type of game like this, as the combat is pretty good, and you could easily have a game that was lighter on story, heavier on loot, etc., but it would lose some of the compact charm of these games.

I was also thinking about how this reminds me of the complexification and slight simmification of the combat from the tightly-circumscribed, almost chess-like gameplay of XCOM, to the major dlc for that, to XCOM 2. Still great games, but with the gameplay transitioning from a board-game feel to a more simmy feel.

tl;dr Simplification, restricting player choice, limitation, higher levels of abstraction, etc., are also valid gameplay elements. There's a tendency to want simulation (and I have it strongly myself, I love the simmy aspect of games), but there always has to be a balance between that and the types of abstraction necessary to make a game of whatever it is you're presenting. (Abstraction makes a world's rules easier to understand, so easier to "beat" than the real world.)
 
Vatnik Wumao
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HK tries to make things more challenging by heavily restricting the amount of nu-yen you get so you actually have to pick and choose your upgrades. Still fairly easy at the end of the day though.
 

Falksi

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Returns is basically the gameplay skeleton upon which DF and HK were built. Both of the latter have their flaws, but at least they're fully fleshed out.

Returns is a great little experience, with a great little story paced very well throughout though. Linear? Yep. Small? Yep. But HK is a worse experience for all the bloat IMO

This is a great set of games to play during the coronavirus lockdown, I'm really enjoying the rhythm of reading fairly well-written stories with good characterization, and nicely-tuned XCOM-lite combat. But I was just thinking about what you said here - to me, it was instantly obvious that the restrictions on what you can do in terms of exploration, loot, equipping, equipping squad, checking squad stats, and general inventory management, were probably quite deliberate. The restrictions occasionally irritated me, but the better part of me understood their function, to streamline me into being absorbed in the story with less distractions.

I haven't played HK yet (though I definitely will when I've finished Dragonfall), but even just with Dragonfall, even just the small concessions like more loot, slightly better squad equip, etc., functionality, was starting to give me too many options compared to the first game, with a consequent slight degredation of concentration on the story.

Of course I'd love to have a more open-world type of game like this, as the combat is pretty good, and you could easily have a game that was lighter on story, heavier on loot, etc., but it would lose some of the compact charm of these games.

I was also thinking about how this reminds me of the complexification and slight simmification of the combat from the tightly-circumscribed, almost chess-like gameplay of XCOM, to the major dlc for that, to XCOM 2. Still great games, but with the gameplay transitioning from a board-game feel to a more simmy feel.

tl;dr Simplification, restricting player choice, limitation, higher levels of abstraction, etc., are also valid gameplay elements. There's a tendency to want simulation (and I have it strongly myself, I love the simmy aspect of games), but there always has to be a balance between that and the types of abstraction necessary to make a game of whatever it is you're presenting. (Abstraction makes a world's rules easier to understand, so easier to "beat" than the real world.)

Be interesting to see what your opinion of HK is. It really disapointed me after the brilliance of Returns & Dragonfall
 
Vatnik Wumao
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It really disapointed me after the brilliance of Returns & Dragonfall
Eh, I agree that HK was somewhat of a downgrade from DF (though it still had its better parts, particularly in terms of characters like Racter and Gaichu), but the 'brilliance of Returns' - really? To reiterate my earlier point, Returns was basically a playable test run for the gameplay format offered by SRR as to test the waters before having the team focus on the more robust and chiseled experience that was DF (and later on HK). Really don't understand how anyone could rate it above HK.
 
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InD_ImaginE

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Pathfinder: Wrath
Jeez, returns for all intent and purpose is just a "beta" campaign.

It is just a module that works to introduce people to the engine/game. There is really nothing comparably good on Returns compared to anything later in the series. Heck some fan-made UGC are better than Returns.
 
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Falksi

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Nottingham
It really disapointed me after the brilliance of Returns & Dragonfall
Eh, I somewhat agree that HK was somewhat of a downgrade from DF (though it still had its better parts, particularly in terms of characters like Racter and Gaichu), but the 'brilliance of Returns' - really? To reiterate my earlier point, Returns was basically a playable test run for the gameplay format offered by SRR as to test the waters before having the team focus on the more robust and chiseled experience that was DF (and later on HK). Really don't understand how anyone could rate it above HK.

I just love Returns story. It's a bitesized, simplistic game, but I saw it as an appetizer for Dragonfall, and in that context it was superb.

HK however feels like a massive pile of cabbage. Just too much filler.
 
Vatnik Wumao
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It really disapointed me after the brilliance of Returns & Dragonfall
Eh, I somewhat agree that HK was somewhat of a downgrade from DF (though it still had its better parts, particularly in terms of characters like Racter and Gaichu), but the 'brilliance of Returns' - really? To reiterate my earlier point, Returns was basically a playable test run for the gameplay format offered by SRR as to test the waters before having the team focus on the more robust and chiseled experience that was DF (and later on HK). Really don't understand how anyone could rate it above HK.

I just love Returns story. It's a bitesized, simplistic game, but I saw it as an appetizer for Dragonfall, and in that context it was superb.

HK however feels like a massive pile of cabbage. Just too much filler.
Pretty much my stance, though I also enjoy HK. It might not be perfect, but it ain't that shabby either. Then again, it's a matter of taste.

My favorite character from DF is probably the Turk patron of that cafe (followed by Dietrich), while I've enjoyed the whole companion rooster of HK. So the storyfag in me prefers HK, even though the main plot and the distribution of written content in-between missions were inarguably better in DF.
 

Darth Canoli

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Yeah. There was a mission in HK where you had to sabotage a corporation by destroying Feng Shui in their offices. Great premise, so sad that all you were doing was clicking on all interactive objects you found in the office. Good designer would give player a Feng Shui guide and let them choose among several rearrangement activities, those which were most likely to break the Feng Shui rules.

Rearrangement activities ... And what next ? Stitching and macramé ?
That quest just needs a destructible environment, either you put some explosives or you use the walls and furniture as target dummies.
 

normie

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Insert Title Here
an exercise in clicking on objects in the environment to unlock the next text dump on queer intersectionality

and there's your companions to help take in the lessons - a quirky woman with poor hygiene who has animal babies, a Somali STEM refugee who has the ability to take revenge on people she disagrees with on the internet, your gay step-brother who, like all men should, subordinates himself to the women in his life to control his toxic masculinity lest it be used for harm to reinforce heteronormativity, a sackless transhumanist with an emphasis on trans and a sterile ghoul who surpassed his ghoulish condition through abandoning fascism and becoming an ally of intersectionality
 
Vatnik Wumao
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a sackless transhumanist with an emphasis on trans and a sterile ghoul who surpassed his ghoulish condition through abandoning fascism and becoming an ally of intersectionality
Cool story, brah.
 

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