Shadowrun Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition

Why? the man used to be good at his job.

 

Well, the key word is "used to".

 

The problem is consistency. If you don't blatantly tell me when there is a skill check or not - I am forced to decide based on my response nodes.. which is a really slippery slope for many games.

• Essentially without the explicit skill check stated, any node with some kind of response that could fit a skill check (which is completely subjective based on the reader) could or could not lead to an unintended outcome.
  • *Solve this issue by cleverly informing the bad guy about something he overlooked that was found through side content in the game and played into my stats*
  • Was that because I had a corporate / shadow runner background trait.. or because I'm intelligent.. or cunning?
• The flip side is writing your dialogue so glaringly obvious about what skill check is happening so that the player realizes they are no longer pushing the narrative as a player but in fact allowing their character to do something that could change the story that the writing begins to suffer to make it -clear- a skill check is going on.
  • *Starts Punching Things To Show The Bad Guy you Mean Business*
  • Clearly tied to my strength or unarmed skill.. but did the writing suffer to make that obvious

In a perfect world we could have a game that uses skill checks all the time for both positive and unintended negative consequences - with a huge web of CnC that branches out so that no game is the same. Then hide the traits completely and just have the player go in -knowing- their stats will play heavily into the outcome of the game.

*sigh* I wish...

 

Nah. http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...to-the-new-thread.75947/page-929#post-2949709

 

Let me paraphrase.
"Players are too stupid to tell, we need to inform them about how much work we did in the most blatant way possible". "Everything should be obvious and clearly seen on the first playthrough".

If that isnt the road to bioware, i dont know what is.

 

If you can't pass the check then you can't see it on the first playthrough.

They do help when it comes to character building for future playthroughs though.

 

Just got 2 Prosperity Tower. Made it to Lab level (after doing the other 2 floors). Is there no way to bluff the guards into thinking I'm Omega level? Or is this where the final combat gauntlet begins?

 

In systems where the stats checked increase throughout the game, such as SR:HK or PoE's skills, it's useful to know when your skills are being checked or if you can't hit an option because of a low skill check, as it influences the decision on what to improve at level up. I'd be perfectly happy with a blank option with only the skill checked noted, though.

 

Well, despite the tone of that guy, POE should be praised for having the option to turn off visible check and some other stuff. Even if i think they should have gone much further (like removing instant travel), i was pleasantly surprised with the so many option they provide. If they can do it, there is no reason the AAA dev/publishers cannot find a way to optionnally remove all those hand-holding features that cause all more experienced player to leave their games. (that and the bad writting and lack of C n C)


One of the problems of those abominations is causes some player to no longer pay attention to dialogs. You just click on the option with highlited skill and you know that you will skip dialog, get extra XP and succeed the encounter. Beside that, you are less likely to fail a dialog if you know that you fail the requirement or worse, the option if greyed out. Dialogs are much more immersive if you know that you can fail it and have to pay more attention to dialogs. So i am not only agains't visible check, but also hard counter. I prefer having 10% of success if i am under the requirement, than automatic success/faillure depending of the requirement. You are in front of a person that you are trying to convince, not a macguffin holder that you try to feed number into. That person can be sometimes unreliable, especially when he/she on eadge or threatened. You shouldn't know beforehand what willl be his/her reaction before even saying something. There are quite some games that were really successfull on that, like Fallout or Arcanum, by making you believe that you have someone in front of you, someone that may or may not react always the same way to answer you. It felt much much much much more alive that Skillchecktrue=yes and Skillcheckfalse=no. It doesn't feel like a person, but like a glaring highlight of intended paths. There is no point in improving the lipsing and movement and whatever, if you aren't able to maintain the simulation in dialogs that we used to have decades ago...

Also, the fact player wouldn't notice should be adressed on itself, maybe with a tutorial, to show that action has consequence, that you aren't just following a moronic quest marker. Another way to check, if there is no ingame option, is to start the game with different characters. I spent quite a few hours with Arcanum, just to see how it would happen with different characters and i was impressed enough to put my game in my "TO PLAY BEFORE DYING" list, despite a clunky combat system, (at least how i currently see it).

 

Opened the conversation in the editor.





... and the opening fire option first doesn't provide you with acting first opportunity.

I'm almost certain that this is the way that I will proceed - Attribute check name only, without a number.

 

Finished. Clocked 37 hrs.

It definitely has more baggage than Dragonfall. I wasn't a fan of having every vendor have their own backstory, to the point that after every run they reveal more of it piecemeal. It made making the rounds a chore after every run, especially since many aren't very interesting, though the payoff is quite nice for some of them

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

the orc family resolution, learning more about Karen

This definitely had some missions with cool complications but I still wish they made the environment more interactive, e.g. Rodia in W2. Finding out that an alternative path just leads to the same fucking destination is pretty disillusioning.

The soundtrack is outstanding; Racter carries the compas; the game still looks nice but I'm ready for the new engine next time.

Pet peeve: the abundance of grammatical errors, though some are pretty humorous:

one of my buddies defended that line, claiming it synergizes with the verb "floods"
there was even one in a transition screen!

anyway, gonna go play Stasis then give the Director's Cut version of Dragonfall a go.
3/4 or

 

One way to hide the check but tip to the player that hus skills matter is to actually hide the skill check from the player dialog option and show something like "Decking 3 required, skill check failed." on the NPC reaction, if you don't have enough to pass the check, your skill check will backfire, to make selecting those skill check responses not something 100% safe would be something like "ironic" consequences where a failure was actually something good or a success was actually a bad thing. That barter skill check on Dean Domino on Dead Money is an example of this.

 

What a shocker.

 

A successful strength check may scare the guard and make him call the guard and failed one will result in him not taking you seriously. It's interesting concept.

The way that I'm going to implement the Etiquettes is make them give you bonuses to different checks. For example in a conversation with corp exec, a dialogue option with [Charisma Check] is going to be successful on Charisma > 4 or Charisma > 3 and Corporate Etiquette.

 

deterministic system > RNG

 

Etiquettes are weird because sometimes they imply your character has the knowledge (he was a ganger and knows the streets for example) or that he just knows enough to simulate having knowledge (your character wasn't a ganger but know a few, limited knowledge, just enough to pretend having it). Etiquettes would be far better if you could only select one at the start of the game and you could use charisma (the social intelligence, the ability of lying with conviction) to pretend having the others.

So, if you infiltrated on a mission desguised as a security guard but you had the security etiquette, it would be a walk in the park to fit on your role because you were a security guard but if you tried the same thing only having charisma to back you up, you would fool people sometimes but other times pretending to have knowledge would result on hilarious situations like you don't having the Academic etiquete, were just bullshitting and some NPC demanded you to do a lecture where half of the company personnel would be present.

 

deterministic system > RNG

 

Yeah, this is also the conclusion that I came to. I will have to brainstorm the etiquettes a little more.

Unfortunately the editor doesn't give you such option.

 

deterministic system > RNG

 

Well, you have to write the "Get help from a companion" dialogue option manually. The engine uses tags (keywords) given to each actor to make checks and other functionalities.

For example you can give a companion "Sexy Lady" tag and in the above case with the door guard, there can be a dialogue option that will only be shown if a team member has the tag "Sexy Lady".

In the Hong Kong case, Is0bel has the tag.. emm "Is0bel" and each "jack in" checks if you have a team member with that tag.

Which in turn means that if you have a generic decker (not Is0bel) with you, the game won't give you that action. I think, it would be better if all deckers have the tag "decker" and the game checks that.

I don't know if I make sense

Sorry, I can't understand what you mean.

 

deterministic system > RNG

 

Cool Idea..

I think Etiquette's only work if the Campaign really integrates them. The most common issue is people feel cheated for picking one and it didn't help.. But even with an equal amount of them throughout the game.. they still feel kinda lame. There is never an option to pick how you do a mission or plan a mission to favor your Etiquette.

What if a Mission had 3 Routes.. One required Corporate / Security Background and one Required more street smarts from Shadow Runner and Gang Member.. We never really got those. As it stands.. it's kind of a crap shoot on what kind of missions you get and if your Etiquette will do diddly squat. I love your idea of just having them fudge numbers in your favor instead of being a make or break for charismatic solutions.

You could do this by assigning the First picked Etiquette to a Variable and use that as their "Background" choice then all future Etiquette checks are "I'm pretending to be ____"
It would be annoying as fuck to deal with it in conversations and you would need to explain it to the player upfront so they know the gravity of their choices.

But anything is possible.

Essentially you have 2 checks happening - One is the "does player have x background etiquette" (checked against the variable) and the other would be the default Etiquette checks where maybe you throw in some extra logic that pulls in charisma or based on the story about whether they succeed or not.

 

one solution would be to give chars with the fitting etiquette an automatic success, while others could test their charisma against a random attribute check. 1d20+attr >= predefined dc.

 

Such option are not hard to implement. The engine can also check team member attributes.

Or a featured a startup dialogue where the character can select his background and the etiquetes to be for "pretending" or "additional knowledge".