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Shadowrun Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition

Jason Liang

Arcane
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Oct 26, 2014
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Crait
Wow that must be a patched change, since I tried the same thing before and didn't get that.
 

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
One annoyance:
I got a better assault rifle for Duncan near the end. It has a tracer round ability to 'mark targets', with its higher damage, it's a no-brainer to replace his default rifle. Big mistake. He lost his Beanbag shot as well as Mercy Kill shot for the entire mission it was equipped. VERY annoying.
 

InD_ImaginE

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Pathfinder: Wrath
One annoyance:
I got a better assault rifle for Duncan near the end. It has a tracer round ability to 'mark targets', with its higher damage, it's a no-brainer to replace his default rifle. Big mistake. He lost his Beanbag shot as well as Mercy Kill shot for the entire mission it was equipped. VERY annoying.
Why would you even replace it. Duncan should have enough weapon slot?
 

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
One annoyance:
I got a better assault rifle for Duncan near the end. It has a tracer round ability to 'mark targets', with its higher damage, it's a no-brainer to replace his default rifle. Big mistake. He lost his Beanbag shot as well as Mercy Kill shot for the entire mission it was equipped. VERY annoying.
Why would you even replace it. Duncan should have enough weapon slot?

I gave him the laser rifle and the shock baton upgrade.
 

Jason Liang

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Oct 26, 2014
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Crait
Replacing companion equipment was patched in after the initial release; I'm not surprised if there are oversights since it was not an originally planned feature. In fact, there is/ was an absurd duping bug caused by replacing equipment.

HK is at best 80% complete, you just have to accept that and get over it.
 
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Iznaliu

Arbiter
Joined
Apr 28, 2016
Messages
3,686
HK has thousands of oversights like this, it's insane.

It was probably due to it being rushed for release or something; other stuff that I've seen (like unfinished missions) corroborate this theory.
 

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
Wow that must be a patched change, since I tried the same thing before and didn't get that.

Yep they added recognition of non-lethal takedowns at some point. Somebody tried to do a non-lethal playthrough with them: https://web.archive.org/web/2016062...orums/discussion/45956/the-pacifist-challenge

Problem is, in some cases, it doesn't matter.
Like subduing a deputy chief in a police station should've lead to an interrogation, but all it does is leave the guy flopping on the floor like a fish out of the water. Big fucking deal.

Found another fucking bug.
I assigned the wrong drone to Racter, so I decided to swap drone with my Rigger.
Whenever Racter activates that drone for control, my rigger's AP gets decreased by 1. :lol:
 
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SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Found another fucking bug.
I assigned the wrong drone to Racter, so I decided to swap drone with my Rigger.
Whenever Racter activates that drone for control, my rigger's AP gets decreased by 1. :lol:
This kind of bug is very informative about how non-robust and backwards the inventory system is. Objects own the reference to their owners, really? At least pass it in function arguments.

What happens if your rigger was already at zero AP, does it carry to the next turn as in the combat debuffs?
 

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
Racter cannot control the drone if my Rigger is at zero AP. I suspect if the drone is destroyed the dump shock would go to my rigger as well.
 

Cross

Arcane
Joined
Oct 14, 2017
Messages
2,983
The fact that these games manage to be so buggy despite being incredibly restrictive and narrow in scope (you can't even do something as basic as exchange items with a party member while on a mission) doesn't exactly inspire trust in Harebrained's future games. I almost abandoned Dragonfall before finishing it because I kept having to restart missions due to game breaking glitches, like being stuck in the combat state after all enemies were defeated while not being able to exit the area or otherwise continue.
 

Iznaliu

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The fact that these games manage to be so buggy despite being incredibly restrictive and narrow in scope (you can't even do something as basic as exchange items with a party member while on a mission) doesn't exactly inspire trust in Harebrained's future games. I almost abandoned Dragonfall before finishing it because I kept having to restart missions due to game breaking glitches, like being stuck in the combat state after all enemies were defeated while not being able to exit the area or otherwise continue.

I think part of that might be due to the fact that the games were originally designed for mobile platforms, and therefore extra testing and bugfixing had to be done for those platforms as well as the design limitations that ensued.
 

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
Finished extended campaign. It was okay. Fights got more challenging. But sometimes they forgot what 'Escape' means.
I managed to reach the exit but couldn't interact. Then I checked my mission log and saw 'Defeat the security forces.' :hahano:
Whatever. Dragonfall encounters feel better. HK is way easier and has lower pay per mission.
 

the_shadow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 30, 2011
Messages
1,179
I'm playing the Extended Campaign with a character who made 'the deal' with Qian Ya, and the luck you receive actually factors into a few minor encounters in the game. Certain security locked doors open without having to be hacked, and you can randomly fiddle with a computer at the Tiger's Den and tell the onlooker about your 14 years good luck after successfully get it working.

Edit: The lights also go out during the last mission to provide you with additional time before guards alert security, and Krait backs down once you tell her about the deal with Qian Ya. It's nice that they took this into account.
 
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Lacrymas

Arcane
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Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
I loved the end fight of the Extraction mission, I chose to fight the two megacorp forces together and it was pretty intense. I did get the other shadowrunner to fight by my side, though, but she was mostly useless, only distracting a single enemy. I ended the fight with almost no consumables left on all my guys, 1 of my drones destroyed, the other at critical HP and had to use 3 trauma kits during the fight to revive. The only fight I wished I had a more versatile party to handle every situation as it popped up. The earth spirits Gobbet summoned were instrumental for the AP drain they do every attack. Pretty cool all in all, it shows the combat has some potential with a few tweaks here and there. The fight also raises some plot questions, how are you SO good you kill entire platoons of specially trained soldiers and mercenaries? I know you defeated a Yama King, but still, I think everyone would either be out for your head or you having offers for incredibly risky and high-paying jobs, in the tens of thousands of nuyen. Every special ops division in the world would want you. You are just unbelievably good and basically a tactical genius.
 
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DeepOcean

Arcane
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Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
The fight also raises some plot questions, how are you SO good you kill entire platoons of specially trained soldiers and mercenaries? I know you defeated a Yama King, but still, I think everyone would either be out for your head or you having offers for incredibly risky and high-paying jobs, in the tens of thousands of nuyen. Every special ops division in the world would want you. You are just unbelievably good and basically a tactical genius.
Video gamey logic, any game designer that is worthy his title won't make fights that are imbalanced to the point of being impossible to win.On this scenario, the game designer wanted to give the option to the player to fight both mercenary groups as while restricting this option would make some logic as it would be suicide based on the setting, it was a fun option and a crime to not allow the player to do it and if you allowed the player to do it, it is better that the fight is balanced on such a way that it is a possible to handle this fight or otherwise it was better to not trick the player giving him an option that he truly doesn't have.

On the PnP, there were situations, where you had escape to save your own ass and deal with failure, failure was real, unless you did some crazy power gaming like making a vampire toxic shaman or other crazy shit like that, there was a real possibility of dying when things got too hot so a good DM would make things tense for you as you don't really know if you will win on the end of the day. A good DM would know how to deal with failed runs and incorporate that on the PnP campaign.

This kind of flexibility is really lacking on a computer game, at least on a traditional designed RPG game. In part because most players would just reload instead of dealing with a failure and in part because you would need to deal with the possibility of the player failing and the game continuing after that, what would be another can of worms.

So, the end result is that you will command a group of bad asses that can defeat everything and never have to deal with failure and from a story point of view, it is better to pretend this isn't the case and you aren't a Demon slayer super badass that even Cthulhu spirits fear you or the story would become truly boring as all possible antagonists would look weak and all tension is gone.

The only solution for this on a computer game is not to have a traditional linear structure, a DM can amend his story at will to deal with failure and failed runs could even lead to pretty interesting scenarios, not so much on a PC game because of time and resources strain. The only way to make failure an acceptable end result on a computer game would be to make a XCOM style campaign with an iron man campaign option, where the missions on themselves wouldn't be so critical that they can't be failed and the characters that go on those missions aren't irreplaceable so they can't die, this would make sense on a world like shadowrun.

Imagine that you have something like Long War Shadowrun Edition but with alot more RPG elements and less strategy game stuff, the game offers you alot of randomly generated missions with different winning conditions and instead of dealing with an alien invasion, you deal with Lone Star that is a looming force that after each successful shadowrun becomes more and more interested in you. You have safehouses to deal with and corporations that really want some payback, if you fuck up things too much, your notoriety goes higher and higher after each fuck up until your face goes on the TV and you start getting on an unwinnable situation after retribution gets too much powerful, failure on this case wouldn't be a hard state but allow you to come back from it.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
Yeah, I get that it's video game logic, but the game has so far acknowledged how much of a badass team we are while also not putting us in incredible or unbelievable situations, with the possible exception of Cthulhu spirits. That's why it pops out so much to me, the only other situation like that was choosing to fight the 2 mercenary groups in the original HK campaign, but it was acknowledged how potentially suicide-y it was. Now nobody batted an eye when I decided to take on 2 platoons of megacorp soldiers. This is why getting too epic is a bad idea, it's either going to be spun around with "welp, it's a video game" or played straight in the plot, but losing all tension in the process due to how overpowered you are. Dealing with Qian Ya was already stretching it, but it was made clear you don't actually kill her, just send her back to her eldritch dimension. Not to mention that the escalation happened too fast, you were only going against police officers or mercenaries by that point, the last mission popped out twitchy servitors and suddenly taking the gore up to 11. Sure, the dreams and nightmares were there from the beginning, but they didn't have any gameplay or mission-based ramifications, so it was pretty jarring.

It was also not clear if the misery in the Walled City was simply due to the people living there and their hopelessness, they perpetuating their own cycle of poverty. I liked that, it gave some dimension and mythopoeia to the misery and the relationship between the megacorps and the Walled City, it literally being caused by a Yama King and "bad qi" is lame and one-dimensional. It should be the other way around, the concentrated bad living conditions should've attracted Qian Ya, grief and hopelessness given physical form. It could've been great, attracting attention to the effects of poverty and hunger, while using the Shadowrun universe to frame it and using it to its full potential. Having the completed thing in front of you makes this so obvious, I don't know how they didn't think to do that.
 
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Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
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May 29, 2010
Messages
35,653
The fight also raises some plot questions, how are you SO good you kill entire platoons of specially trained soldiers and mercenaries? I know you defeated a Yama King, but still, I think everyone would either be out for your head or you having offers for incredibly risky and high-paying jobs, in the tens of thousands of nuyen. Every special ops division in the world would want you. You are just unbelievably good and basically a tactical genius.

It wasn't you versus two groups, it was a threeway skirmish. Additionally, no survivors left to tell the tale except one or two who aren't talking.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
The fight also raises some plot questions, how are you SO good you kill entire platoons of specially trained soldiers and mercenaries? I know you defeated a Yama King, but still, I think everyone would either be out for your head or you having offers for incredibly risky and high-paying jobs, in the tens of thousands of nuyen. Every special ops division in the world would want you. You are just unbelievably good and basically a tactical genius.

It wasn't you versus two groups, it was a threeway skirmish. Additionally, no survivors left to tell the tale except one or two who aren't talking.
This, it would make sense that both groups would see each other as much bigger threats than some cocky shadowrunner and you would be able to pick off targets from both sides as they are fighting and on the shadowrun world nobody would just trust you if you said you killed two entire mercenary groups and probably, those that survived wouldn't just be saying how awesome you were.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
Yeah, I guess it makes sense, I didn't think about that because they never attacked each other, only my team. You were also in a very disadvantaged position, literally being in the center of a mass shoot-out, you don't have possibilities to sneakily pick off targets, it's an all-out deathmatch. And at least one person would know what happened - Kindly Cheng, she constantly monitors you. Inspectors Lam and Qui would potentially know as well, because they say they are constantly monitoring you, too. The megacorps would also be suspicious, how come no soldier survived? Either they all somehow killed each other or there was a third party involved, which is a more likely scenario.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
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I didn't think about that because they never attacked each other, only my team.
I felt like I only won because they spent so much time attacking each other. :)
 

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