Shadowrun Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition

Did Weisman actually re-acquire the rights to Shadowrun, or is he on a contract from Microsoft?

 

He's licensing, which is why Cliffhanger is able to also make a Shadowrun game (which seems to have hurt HBS' Shadowrun games - I've seen a number of people confused about which is which).

 

Breaking news: a video game isn't 100% realistic!

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It's funny how haters, not finding anything actually wrong in SR:HK, desperately try to invent artificial "issues" to justify their bashing the game. You people are worse than SJWs.

 

What the fuck are you talking about. There's plenty wrong with HK. It's a depressingly mediocre game.

 

I enjoyed SRHK well enough, I don't regret playing it - but in my entire playthrough I couldn't shake the feeling that this could have been so much better. Still, considering the "competition" it's one of the best ones out there for tactical/story RPGs.

 

I'd say this: if you are okay with with HBS vision of a Shadowrun RPG - a story-based linear text-heavy CRPG with pretty simplistic TB combat and roleplay systems - you get your pleasure playing. If you want anything more than/different from that - you will be disappointed.

I like the approach, so I loved all of the games since SRR. On the other hand I can understand the complaints.

 

This installment has some of the worst writing of the series, even worse than some of the mods.

Is0bel seems to have been written by an autistic teen: she's WHACKY and cannot into SOCIALIZING and she feels at home in the Matrix! And she suffered so much and oh she's so lovable, you just have to accept her attitude.
Her presence and role is forced the most during the game however plausible the reasons are.
And the worst. fucking. part. is that in conversations with her YOU CAN NEVER TELL HER OFF. Seriously, every reply to her, you either acknowledge her FEELINGS or try NOT TO OFFEND. Sometimes that shit is even spelled out for you in dialogue nodes. Jesus Christ im so mad

Duncan Wu more like Duncan Wuss is another example of horrible writing: in every conversation with him or dialogue trigger during mission, every descriptive adjective about him literally says that he's a badass, cold, confident and all that, however every word he spouts is just a bunch of emotional drivel heavily contradicting with his angsty badass role in the story. There is no depth to him, you will learn his ENTIRE character in the first 10 minutes and it doesn't bulge from there till the rest of the game.

Kindly Cheong is an excuse for edgy and trying too hard conversations. I couldn't for a second accept that she would be running triad.

Gobbet is just lolrandom, but mostly bearable since she is actually written as someone competent enough to be a shadowrunner.

There is also Crafty Xu who dumps on you heavy exposition the moment you step foot in her shop without so much as a hello. The pacing is clearly off with that character and she seems to be incredibly happy to tell everyone about her mommy issues.

The characters that I actually liked were Ricter, Reliable Matthew and, surprisingly, Gaichu.

Those characters have some actual depth, consistency and thought put into them, although Ricter goes into trying too hard territory at some points.

Matthew is a flair character but his flair is well written and gives a very melancholic perspective on the setting. I'd go as far as say that the writter seems to have been drawing inspiration from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Everything else in this game is painfully average at best. Missions vary from meh to shit, combat is a boring slogfest all throughout, increasing difficulty doesn't make it any more fun, all it does is exhaust patience, character progression is still as dull and uninspired as ever. Matrix levels are much worse now, as well.

Overall, the shift in writing seems to have went down into the watered down descriptions, that no longer provide food for imagination or fuel the atmosphere, they cut corners and describe attitude and make assumptions FOR the player instead of giving the player something to work with.
Majority of the dialogue could as well have been pasted into ANY modern-ish setting without cyberpunk backdrop and still work which is a testament to its genericness

 

Ending felt a bit rushed, and the final boss wasn't that impressive. I think it was supposed to be very-very scary, but I just lolled when I saw the thing. Otherwise, there isn't much to complain about. It's a solid game.

 

As a longtime player of Shadowrun the mohawk/trenchcoat debate has always confused me since the (earlier at least) adventures, novels, and sourcebooks seemed so clearly to paint a pink-mohawk world to me. One of the things I've enjoyed most about Weisman's recent Shadowrun games is that they completely gel with how my groups have always envisioned/played Shadowrun whereas a lot of the newer (starting with Year of the Comet imo) pnp material had a real off-the-mark fanfic-y feel to me.

 

Man, this forum's purpose of existence is bashing games. Examples of what's wrong:
Grammar etc.
Lore chunks shamelessly copy-pasted from Shadows of Asia and Runner Havens.
Some NPC's are plain boring (club 88, random Henoi inhabitants).
Too easy to finish run without combat.
Too easy to get info, everybody feels to friendly despite they are triad thugs and SINless people living in xenophobic community.
AI still suck dick (for example enemy attacks, and then casts Aim on himself, cast Aim and damage boosts on stunned allies.)
Combat too easy. Everything that reduces AP or stun enemy is too powerful especially combined with other abilities. Reduction of cooldown time for some spells and spirits from environment that cannot break free are making game even easier than DF.
Companions are unbalanced. Koshei is ridiculously overpowered, has 5 AP and spam criticals (but he's cute mechanical arthropod so I can live with that). On the other hand Gaichu is relatively weak and hard to use.
Generally combat encounters design is meh.
Boss fight is very easy and simplistic.
For some people matrix can be worse than in DF.
I understand complaints about amount of text and pacing of the story.
Some graphic issues.
Feels rushed here and there.
Most of the technical problems of other SR games.

I like it more than DMS and DF, but all those games are mediocre RPGs.
6/10 would buy again.

 

They seriously fucked this up.

 

Well, I prefer good writing with bad grammar (SR) over the reverse (D:OS).

The rest of your complaints is either highly subjective (for instance, I don't think that borrowing lore from the setting books is a bad thing) or applies to about 99% of video games out there (like poor AI and class balance).

Makes me wonder what you would consider a good RPG then. Because even if we take the whole post-IE era, HBS SR series easily make it to top 10.

 

It seems so in the 'stories' included in the sourcebooks. But at the same time pnp has a lot of thought and effort put into alowing and detailing stuff for folks who are more into trenchcoating. Which is a great design.

For me it was great to find out if the father of the setting is a mohawk or a trench :p

Agree about the HBS stories - they do nail worldbuilding incredibly faithful to the lore. Down to some really obscure details.

On an unrelated note: whoever wrote BBS boards in HK should get a raise.

 

Were there any news regarding the mini-campaign since the main game released?

 

That has me curious too. I keep writing this off until I remember there's going to be a high level campaign.

 

It's going to be a pretty limited experience unless they fix the 1 attack a round thing. I mean, obviously they're going with a more cinematic, heroic power fantasy where everything works out for you if you qualify for the stat check, but the balance is way off by end-game.

What's annoying is many of the adventures had really vicious traps for players - invisible assassins alongside a standard hit team, etc.

 

Anybody else not getting any achievements?

 

I had no problems getting them.

 

Well my game isn't even tracking the progress of them. Whatever, I just hope nothing else is broken.

 

no not cheevos

 

Request a refund NOW.
Before its too late.

 

It might be because I had disabled Steam Cloud thing. Who knows.

Good thing this game's "achievements" are for playing the game normally.

 

After 45 hours, I finished it. Man, I really took my time when I'm playing a game.

I liked the past two games but I think that overall they were better.

- I didn't really dig the overly flowerful writing. As far as I remember the past two games had a lot more street style dialogues.

- Couldn't immerse myself in the story

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.... there wasn't such thing

The game unfolded like thist:

PLOT - Filler - Filler - Filler - Filler - Filler - Filler - Filler - Filler - Filler - PLOT

The whole time I wasn't doing almost anything to make myself part of the story. Just completing filler missions and waiting for Kindly Cheng to give information about the plot.

- The whole feel and atmosphere feels... off.

- Racter was a great character but as he was part of the team in almost every mission, towards the game he got kind of annoying with his "I want to see how this drone/machine/demon works", "This is magnificent, I want to see it how it works", "Yeah, let's do this slightly wrongful thing, because I want to see how it works".

- Is it me or all the combat encounters feel uninspired?

- Boss Fight

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Five switches that I have to turn off so I can make the boss vulnerable.......
He was dead at the end of the second round.
... and of course - THIS IS NOT EVEN MY FINAL FORM!

- On to the peaceful dialogue problem solving - I have the feeling that if the requirements were hidden and there was no [Charisma: 6] text, they would be a lot more interesting. Now it's more like "Oh, here is the Green option, let's click it and solve this problem".

- The new Matrix was so-so. There was no need of that memorization game. However why towards the end of the game...

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Why The Prosperity Tower was one big Matrix map? And it wasn't even that interesting, I mean c'mon... four tunnels at the end and I have to walk in each of them, fighting almost the same type of encounters...

- The dialogue. I like reading, I really do but listening after every mission how much Raymond Black means to Wu gets kind of tiring. Okay, yes he means a lot, okay yeah I get it, okay, okay, yeeesh he means a lot, I know Wu, yeah okay....

- And everytime he was called Gun Show sounded so awkward. Like listening to someone trying to stick a nickname to someone else but no one calls him like that, and no one has such plans.

- The graphics and art style are top notch.

Will play the next campaign. 6/10

 

Ok so that game is starting to git gud. I made the mistake of doing the museum and deck-con as my first two runs (BO-RING).

The Elder one and Racter's were great.


Q: I haven't done any "sleeping" at all and just been sticking to doing runs. Should I be doing that at all?

 

Yes. You should be sleeping at least 5 times.

Reasons for this will become apparent later.