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Game News Shadowrun: Hong Kong Kickstarter Update #13: The Matrix Unlocked

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Tags: Harebrained Schemes; Shadowrun: Hong Kong

With the help of a shoutout from the insanely popular Exploding Kittens Kickstarter, the Shadowrun: Hong Kong Kickstarter campaign has shot up to 700,000 dollars of funding faster than anybody expected, thereby unlocking the Revamped Matrix, the last of the originally planned stretch goals. All that with three weeks of fundraising still left to go! The latest Kickstarter update has more details on what Harebrained Schemes are planning for the revamp:

Now that we’ve hit our funding goal for the Revamped Matrix, we thought you’d like to hear a bit more about what we’re planning. As we said, our goal is to evolve the gameplay along with the look & feel of the Matrix in Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Overall, we want the decker’s gameplay to feel like dangerous legwork, investigation, and hacking. One of the ways we hope to achieve this is with increased opportunities for risk & reward. The more chances you take outside the scope of achieving your core objectives, the more potential benefit to you… and the greater chance of being discovered. Combat will still be a factor, but it won’t be your entire Matrix experience.

To that end, we’ve created a list of new Intrusion Countermeasures (IC) that we plan to add to the game. The new IC is intended to expand Matrix gameplay beyond simple combat mechanics by adding new types of interactions. All have been designed on paper and reviewed by our engineers and artists. Once they’ve been proven out through prototyping and we’re confident in our ability to execute on them, we’ll share them in a future Backer Update.

As with DMS and DF, you’ll still break into a corporation's secure local systems during a run to gain access to a variety of tactical objectives but there will also be places in the story where you’ll travel through distinct areas of cyberspace to “sculpted systems” - distinct digital representations of their owners.

By revising the basic look and sound of the Matrix and creating small “set pieces” of sculpted systems, we hope to give you a better feeling of traveling through cyberspace (for illicit purposes, of course). Concept art for our updated Matrix environment, including an image of a sculpted system will appear in a future Backer Update.
"Sculpted systems", eh? Brings to mind the sensory stones from PS:T. This could be very cool.
 

set

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As much as I like the Matrix it's always been at odds with me -- only certain characters can access it. I usually don't build my character as a decker too, so I'm obligated to take a decker party character evne if I don't really want one.

It would be nice if they just made it so the whole party can access the matrix, with deckers being especially good in that area. Then they could actually devote a lot of content to the Matrix to make it interesting and sprawling. Plus it comes with a natural downside anyway, it disables characters in the real world.
 
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It would be nice if they just made it so the whole party can access the matrix, with deckers being especially good in that area. Then they could actually devote a lot of content to the Matrix to make it interesting and sprawling. Plus it comes with a natural downside anyway, it disables characters in the real world.

I get your reasoning, but, no. It might disable characters in meat space, but that adds a tactical layer imo. If the whole party went in, then they would all be vulnerable in meat space.

What would be kinda cool would be if you had two deckers in the party and they could go in together when tackling a huge corp's network.
 
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naossano

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IMO The main interest of the Matrix from a gameplay standpoint is that you have characters fighting in the Matrix while other character are fighting in the meatwolrd.
It is like alternate editing, bringing the TB combat to a new dimension.
If everyone would be in the Matrix in the same time, with nothing happening in the meat world, the whole concept would be useless, IMO.
 

tuluse

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Man, HBS updates are so run of the mill.

Well, I'm glad we got all the mechanical upgrade tiers. Looking forward to Hong Kong.
 

set

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IMO The main interest of the Matrix from a gameplay standpoint is that you have characters fighting in the Matrix while other character are fighting in the meatwolrd.
It is like alternate editing, bringing the TB combat to a new dimension.
If everyone would be in the Matrix in the same time, with nothing happening in the meat world, the whole concept would be useless, IMO.

It's not like I'm missing this point, it's just I don't see how you can justify spending a lot of resources making the Matrix varied and super interesting if only one character is going to be running around in it.

In Dragonfall the Matrix was really straight forward, even in the special missions.
 
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It's not like I'm missing this point, it's just I don't see how you can justify spending a lot of resources making the Matrix varied and super interesting if only one character is going to be running around in it.

In Dragonfall the Matrix was really straight forward, even in the special missions.

See my post above? 2 in the matrix, 2 in meat space. Problem solved.
 

Major_Blackhart

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Im looking forward to seeing what the ghoul character brings to the team. That might introduce some sort of moral dilemma about feeding the beast and such. Could be you have to choose between him and someone else or some such nonsense.
 

kazgar

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Feels like this happened quicker than expected, while the next goal at 1 million feels worth of the 300k gap, its going to take a while to ge there. The small 50k increments helped with the feedback loop and gave them plenty of feel good stories to help with rpg website newsposts and constant kickstarter updates. They're gonna have to go with more slightly boring "who is this person and what does he do" type posts which don't have the same oomph. Just seems like a, say, $800k or $850k goal would help a bit more right now.

(That being said, if they get to 950k by the end I reckon there's a good chance the high level expansion will still happen)
 

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Yeah the updates are a bit boring/tame. I wouldn't be surprised if it's hampering their income a bit ... but that may not be an issue to them.
 

Durante

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As much as I like the Matrix it's always been at odds with me -- only certain characters can access it. I usually don't build my character as a decker too, so I'm obligated to take a decker party character evne if I don't really want one.

It would be nice if they just made it so the whole party can access the matrix, with deckers being especially good in that area. Then they could actually devote a lot of content to the Matrix to make it interesting and sprawling. Plus it comes with a natural downside anyway, it disables characters in the real world.
Nah. The PnP Shadowrun setting is very much built on a distribution of responsibility across runners in a team, and one of the good things about SRR and Dragonfall is that they capture this really well.
 

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DMS had a mission where you could put two characters in the Matrix.
 

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Which mission?

http://guides.gamepressure.com/shadowrunreturns/guide.asp?ID=21897

598690325.jpg



Once you end the conversation, the real fun begins. You have two targets: protect Marie-Louise against attacks and hack into Matrix while controlling her and open the exit door.

[...] If you have Decker in your team, you could send him to the Matrix to help.
 
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Oh, yeah, I remember that. I never sent anyone else in, but very cool that they can do this, and hopefully they make more use of it.

Edit: Good memory, 'tron!
 

Prime Junta

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DF had a mission with two toons in the Matrix as well.

One of them was an AI though.
 

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Which mission?

http://guides.gamepressure.com/shadowrunreturns/guide.asp?ID=21897

598690325.jpg



Once you end the conversation, the real fun begins. You have two targets: protect Marie-Louise against attacks and hack into Matrix while controlling her and open the exit door.

[...] If you have Decker in your team, you could send him to the Matrix to help.

One of the best encounters in the game. Not that it says that much, most encounters where decidedly meh.
 

naossano

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It's not like I'm missing this point, it's just I don't see how you can justify spending a lot of resources making the Matrix varied and super interesting if only one character is going to be running around in it.

In Dragonfall the Matrix was really straight forward, even in the special missions.

See my post above? 2 in the matrix, 2 in meat space. Problem solved.

Naaah.
One in the Matrix, One in the Astral plan, one is protecting them in the meat world, while the last one is progressing into the meat world.
 

set

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One of the best encounters in the game. Not that it says that much, most encounters where decidedly meh.

I remember that one being the first semi-challenging encounter.

Yeah. Dragonfall even on the hardest difficulty I feel wasn't as challenging as that fight, but maybe I just had good group synergy. Overall Dragonfall was more difficult but I never actually encoutnered a fight that I felt required me to really stretch my team's resources to their limits. I recall that fight being pretty tight, since the enemies don't stop spawning.
 
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They really should add more encounters in the Matrix against corporate and freelancing deckers on steroids, naturally toting leet hacker-magjifik programs and commanding snazzy ESPs to give you an actual challenge. They should also throw in Matrix runs on the side like in good old Shadowrun for Genesis (which still kicks the shit out of these corridor-shootan tablet versions) because keeping Matrix activity strictly within the railroaded corporate runs is just plain lazy and degenerate.
 

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