Just finished normal campaign again and about to start the extended part, but I decided to post about things I noticed now.
I did something obvious this time, created charismatic Elven mage, because everything else is pretty much covered by NPC's. I paid a lot more attention to text than in my previous playthrough.
This was and still is my favourite game in the series, but I think people complaining about the amount of text in this game may have point, but for me, I think user interface can definitely cause some issues too.
Text is on your right, I felt some neck strain when I really tried to focus to text. What makes this worse, is that very little of the conversation, what most the text in game is, can be read without user input, be that clicking next or choosing dialogue option. What makes it even worse is colour palette. User interface colour palette looks nice, harmonic but in practice yellow is pretty hard to cone cells of an eye. I can't know how everyone has calibrated their displays, nor size and resolution people use but I think combined factor is an issue. I noticed that after few hours of play I had moved my chair bit, about an inch, to the right.
That said, it looked like perhaps Harebrained didn't had time to edit. There are some descriptions like 'Gaichu finally turns towards you, his expression unreadable' and they work but there are really lot of them 'Gaichu wraps his arms around his torso looking away'. And it's like when I write these now in Codex, they don't look like there are much of text at all, but with GUI where there's less room for text available at one for player at once, than any modern cellphone, it can get tedious. Then there are few conversations where there are a lot of these and I think those may have used some editing, Kindly Cheng comes to mind, though I also liked some of that stuff and it added to character which add to the atmosphere of game. So I really liked the approach though implementation might have been a bit better. I found news reports posted in Shadowlands outright jarring.
Funny thing is that HK GUI actually allows text scrolling and I could swear there were places where there wasn't that much reserved space for player input buttons and that space was used for text output.
Another problem is actually sort of positive. Last time I played this I paid lot of attention to Rachter and Is0bel and Duncan conversations, though I got impression that Gaichu is well written character too, but I really didn't paid that much attention to every character. For other NPC's perhaps Ambrose. But tease is there or for me it is at least, because I found Gaichu very well written character. I still liked how Is0bel was written and could also appreciate work put to Gobbet a bit more too.
Another issue if that if player actually runs after every conversation, there's very little indication if there is new dialogue available or not. Say if NPC bubbles were white blue, when they have new dialogue, white after you have exhausted their (current) dialogue tree that were still left yellow quest marker dialogue bubbles consistent with other yellow quest markers. I just noticed during this playthrough that it actually has a consequence how many times main character converses with Crafty (Mage shop owner). She sends second email if after some runs or sleep, mc goes through exactly the same dialogue options with her, as previous time. During my first PL I just thought character dialogue was bugged, as well some of Is0bels dialogue.
One thing that comes to mind is that I liked a lot a way Harebrained used cutscenes in HK. Perhaps it could have been used a bit more. I think much of issues come from that even though HK was designed for PC, engine was still something that started with mobile / tablets in mind and designing GUI's with that much of scalability can be one really tough bitch.
Overall, HK remains my favourite mostly because Dragonfall, while very good game, still had sort of something quite familiar in it. HK was more like really about world that goes on and doesn't really give a fuck, world that doesn't need you and I really appreciate that Harebrained decided to something different and I really hope I get to see more of Shadowrun from them after they are done with their Battletech game.