Shadowrun Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut

Time to delve into user-created campaigns.

The Price of Conviction, Antumbra, From the shadows run, Silver Angel, A lost lamb and Nightmare Harvest are the ones that seem to come up most often when searching for reviews of good user-made modules. I haven't played any of them yet, but I got them downloaded. We need a separate SRR user module reviews thread. :3

 

I think I will give them a try. My friday night is saved!

 

Nightmare Harvest is the best one. It's pretty much DMS-level writing. On the downside, it's a storyfag module and you only ever control a single character.

 

I'm a somewhat of a storyfag, so I'm playing this one first.

 

I'll add A stitch in time to that list. I found it surprisingly long and well made.

 

Keep in mind that most of them have amateurish storytelling at best, grease your hand palm to not hurt your face because you are going to facepalm alot.

 

I quit Nightmare Harvest after some 15 minutes, when it pitted me into two exciting and unavoidable 1v1 fights in just that timeframe.

 

I quit right after that, how about you killing a whole building with an overpowered AI controlled companion as company. Sound like fun, isn't it? I seriously questioned the intelligence of the guy that made it, after that boring slog.

 

Finished the game, I had a good time. Dragonfall is better than DMS. The atmosphere is great, runs feel like runs, the story is nothing special but good enough and you actually want to read what people are talking about, which is a success in itself. Also, the quality doesn't drop after 2/3 of the game this time. Even though the consequences weren't too big, choices were interesting and I had to ask myself what to do several times instead of mindlessly going "LAWFUL GOOD ALL THE WAY => ALWAYS THE BEST WAY" which seems to be the standard at the moment. Being a nice guy isn't always the automatic best choice, which is quite refreshing. On the minus side, it's also never a bad choice, and there are a few occurrences where the game tends to hammer the "good" decision : "do I want to free the rigger ?" "WELL, HE'S A MANIAC, SO YOU REALLY SHOULDN'T" ; "Do I want to put out of his misery MKVI ?" "NO PROBLEMO, YOU WILL STILL GET YOUR MONEY". It would have been a lot better if they kept things greyish (like with the AI or with the dragon, somewhat). I think that being a shadowrunner is often about making judgment calls with consequences way above your paygrade, and they shouldn't have tried to sugarcoat it during a few runs. Also, the whole take on Humanis is childish and doesn't go farther than "racism is bad ".

Companions are fine, even though their obligatory sad stories sometimes feel forced. But then again, to make them feel alive, they should talk about something and a sad story is an efficient way to make people care. All in all, it was ok.

Combat was interesting and more challenging than DMS on very difficult. Nothing impossible to handle, but you have to remember to pack a few medkits and revivals during the last runs or your ass can get handed to you real quick (most notably the last one which uses up your equipment slowly and where you start to wonder after a while if you'll be able to make it through). No wipe to declare here, but for the wrong reasons. More on that later.


Too bad this game could have been a whole lot better with just some little INFURIATING things fixed :

- CAN I OR CAN I NOT USE MY TEAM TO HELP ME DOING A TASK ? YOU NEED TO CHOSE. CAN THESE MOTHERFUCKERS GET A GRENADE FROM THE FUCKING CRATE OUTSIDE OF COMBAT, PLEASE ? WHY CAN I ONLY ACCESS THEIR INVENTORIES DURING A RUN WHEN I'M BUYING SOMETHING FROM A SHOP ? This is so fucking stupid it makes my head hurt.

- I understand the decision of having a mostly fixed inventory for your runners. It gives them a personality, it helps with the balance, etc. But it comes with a price : the toys you're playing at the beginning are almost the same at the end. You have almost no room for testing. Your money is basically used on healing material + stuff for your PC once in a blue moon. (And tipping the dancer obviously. One more time and something will happen. I'm sure of it.) I found the half fixed inventory of your team interesting (who would take Glory without her medkits really ?), but having also one slot to fill for weapons / spells would have been better. New toys means renewed fun.

- Cyberware is still not worth it for 75% of the characters, and so-so for the rest. Moving on...

- Entering a room where you know enemies are without being able to place your team better is stupid. To make maters worse, enemies often have the first turn. I thought this was a team on a job, not a fucking Sunday family stroll.

- Combat is flawed. I felt like my team was a bunch of good-for-nothing (Glory can only heal and has no way to deal damage without getting buried, Eiger can't aim better than fucking Blitz, Dietrich is alright but nothing special), but I still never died, even though you can get crited for 40 damage (mostly because all my money was going into consumables, but even then). All this, just because the AI is beyond stupid and only attacks once per round. I want my very hard to be very hard. Some fights were tough as is, but I would have liked it to be more punishing. Enemies waiting for you behind doors with overwatch, enemies not running after you like morons, mages doing different things than "DAMAGE SPELL => BUFF". Combat was good anyway (better than DMS too), and some gimmicks were indeed interesting (UbEr PaTrOL going after you, time ticking bombs, riggers hacking your teammate etc.), but I'm sure they had the recipe for something that could have been truly amazing.

- I don't know if you noticed, but there is a recurring typo in the game : everywhere, it's written "Physical Adept" instead of "Physical Inept" as it should.
Don't get me started on this class. Yes, it's still shit, at least the unarmed road. It's very good during 2 runs, then, as you start starving for karma, it goes downhill. You need to invest in 6 categories (Body, Str, Close Combat, Unarmed/Melee, Willpower, Chi). What I know now is that I should have stopped at 4 chi because anything besides Stride is clearly not worth the cost. Wait, maybe I should have stopped at "unarmed damage buff" even, which is 1 chi or 2. The only way to play it is to buff your character to 4 or 5 ap, run all the way to the enemy, hit 2 or 3 times and run back behind a wall. The Adept has low hp, bad aim, can't attack from range unless you level spellcasting (which slows your progression even more), can hardly buy cyberware and doesn't do AP damage with unarmed. It's "manageable" with full buff (but what character isn't good with full buff). I did a few runs with "Lucky Strike", the street samurai you can recruit, and anything my PC did, she did better (while also being able to attack from range by the way). I really missed my "HASTE 2/HASTE 3/HASTE 4/X/X" shaman from DMS.


Anyway, this game still made me long for more and i'll gladly play any new story in this setting. Keep up the good work HBS (and fix these things, PLEASE).

 

Yup. I'm heading towards the finish of my 2nd playthrough, decided to take an unarmed adept for a spin, and I just keep slapping myself in the face all the time for committing such a retarded decision. I think the worst part of playing the adept is how squishy it is, combined with the fact you can't pinpoint from which square you'd want to attack, which in 90% of cases leaves you out of cover. Eventually I just said "fuck it" and got myself the +2 dodge bioware on top of some quickness/dodge advances because I figured I'll never manage to even get to the higher chi casting abilities without gimping everything else, so I don't really need another spell slot, and the higher cooldowns don't bother the adept that much.

Also, concerning KNIGHT ERRANT EXTRA DEMOCRACY JUSTICE FRIENDS! in Bloodline, I lol'd today when all it amounted to were groups of 2 dudes that would spawn at random intervals in either exit of the map.

 

Adept survival: go for quickness and dodge as top priority + have Dietrich loaded with at least force 2 Earth elementals or you can invest, at least, 3 points into charisma and summoning to be able to summon force 2 earth spirits and get one totem bonus(maybe eagle to compensate a little for the low accuracy from your starting low strengh). The Force 2 earth spirit can create a protective bubble than can follow you wherever you go and provide the equivalent of medium cover protection against anything and from all directions. If you want to invest more money and karma, you can get force 3 earth spirits to get a spell that add 3 points to body to one runner of your team. If you complete the anarchists side quests, you get a cyberware that adds 1 ap for 0,5 essence and with the +1 from Dietrich with haste + Stride, you can do some damage.

 

What else is there to say about that? They gave the general reasoning, job competition, wanting to look out for you own kind, trolls and orks are violent, elves have unfair advantages relating to their lifespan and abilities(Privileged as fuck). And they touched on the fact that not all in the racist ass nazi regime were scum, they worked alongside metas when it benefited them, what more should they have done to make it not "childish"? Killing the leader in the youth camp was also an absolute negative, likely only to incite more violence.

 

"Childish" probably wasn't the appropriate word. I just found it very predictable. Of course, the bad human supremacists have a masterplan to kill all metahumans, while the nice metahumans crews are building civic centers. Maybe it wasn't so bad and I focused too much on the reactions of the crew (which were cringe worthy imo), I don't know.

 

Well, at least I can answer myself now.

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It seems Laine and Simmi are killed off if you don't donate

Which is pretty much a useless moneysink then cuz it doesn't change shit

 

On the setting, Humanis is way more subtle, having terrorists and gangs affiliated with them to do this kind of low level stuff. If those gangs and terrorists are caught, nobody could trace the shit to them, that was one of the reasons that they could still be considerated "legit". They were hypocritical power hungry fascists butthurt with humanity being potentially dominated by magic users and other metahuman races as the humans don't excel on physical strengh of the orks or the life longevity of the elves. It is just a lost opportunity, instead of you fighting a Machiavellian asshole, the Humanis leader has a comic book villain level "plan".

 

The civic center is also racist, but it's a different type of discrimination. They help everyone but only accept orks and trolls to join the organization, the justification being that the other species have it easy getting jobs somewhere else. You can even contest that policy in a ork/troll race check but it doesn't do anything, even if you shower them in donations.

 

The game doesn't try to paint racism as an exclusively human thing. Look at the graffiti right out the subway you take from the first mission to Kreuzbasar.

 

I remember now, my main problem was with the fucking nephew. "They are all bad except my nephew, he's a good boy". Turns out, they were all bad except his nephew, which was a good boy and killed all his friends because uncle D showed up ! Utterly predictable, even though they try to lampshade it.

 

Are you asking why they didnt have you round up all the moms of the members and took them there to confront their sons and have them shot their boss?
Because maybe he wasnt the only good one, just the only good one that had a family that gave a shit.

 

This storyline felt very deja-vu and easy for me. But maybe this whole "my xxx is stuck with bad people, but I just need to show up to change his mind" is new to some of you. Good thing if you enjoyed it.

 

If you read the Shadowlands BBS after that mission, someone mentions that the facility housed a bunch of kids who were in it just for the roof and meals, and that they didn't deserve to die.

 

Jestai
-That same shit they said.-

Also he didn't turn on them in my playthrough, but then I don't really remember what lines I used.(I was a troll with no CHA that might have contributed.)

 

Oh, I agree with that, deffinitely. The game has serious writing problems in that department. Possibly of the kind that you can't even discuss with the writer because sometimes it's so bad that it wouldn't pass any decent editiong/quality control other than "he's/she's my buddy/life partner" allready. If I were making an RPG and my writer did so much of this stuff so consistently, and I had an option of hiring another writer I'd seriously consider it. It's a technical issue, tbh, this has nothing to do with personal taste.

There's also a lot of echo-chamber like dialogues where all your lines sort of lead to "no, shit sherlock" responses from whoever you're talking to. In fact, you know that you'll get "no shit, sherlock" before you click, and then you do. I mean, there's enough of this that writing about it makes me feel more like I'm repoting a bug than complaining about actual content.

Two things which lead to this sort of stuff:

1) too much upfront info dumping makes deduction through dialogue and team brainstorming with your NPC's impossible. There's actual room in the current dialogue trees even to fill with deduction and speculation about stuff, except it's filled with completely pointless (literally, not aestethicaly) stuff.

2) The character of Monika is the basis of everything being off. It's hugely naive, which leads to the player being in a postion where filling her shoes as a revered saint of the krausbazar is a foregone conclusion. Mourning for her as if she were the best thing since sliced bread sets the game out on a wrong note - everyone in the game is more attached to her than the player character, for unconvincing reasons. You never, ever get any proper reason to care for her or even respect her, you're just constantly told everyone's upset. Everyone, even the emotionaly detached folks, who just don't express anything, otherwise they'd be crying for her too. This sets a very strange and off tone and dissonance making the delivery of a lot of stuff and the basis you use to build trust with characters (not just your team) lack a sensible foundation. Caring for Monika is INFODUMPED on you, and that doesn't work. It also wastes an opportunity to differentiate between characters who'd be emotionally affected (Deithrich) and those who wouldn't. Which then makes a whole lot of things not really work or fall flat.

This is kinda serious stuff, and, well, the cat's out of the bag since the game is out, but if there was a way of patching this I'd deffinitely do it. Or at least have a serious talk with the writer, or hire another one. There's great stuff in there, but this is fan-fiction grade amateur structural damage which could've and should've been avoided.

 

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Huh? What's with Simmi saying it was dr. Douche who saved her by shoving onto some mortuary shelf?

 

Would've been cool if you could've decided to work for humanis instead.

Hmm, I should learn to use that editor...