Game News Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter Update #67: Dragonfall announced, save-anywhere enabled, DRM removed

[thesheeep]

A save system is not trivial to write at all.
Their mistake was fucking it up in the first place (whoever had the idea that their save system was a good idea to begin with...), so they had to create a new one from scratch. At least that is my guess.

 

[InspectorRumpole]

The women in the pic are pure Roguey-service. That sniper has a permanent spot in my party.

Heh, i thought it was a male Elf at first.

 

[Rake]

Heh, i thought it was a male...

The best kind of female for Roguey's taste.

 

[Roguey]

Do they plan to male adepts not shit outside of katana/stride?

They already improved them in a patch.

• Physical Adepts: Chi abilities have been changed to provide passive benefits. They can be “activated” as before to get the full benefit.
• Physical Adepts now should be able to use Roundhouse Kick and Disarm while Killing Hands is active.

They need to give hackers more things to do in combat but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Do they plan to male adepts not shit outside of katana/stride?

They already improved them in a patch.

• Physical Adepts: Chi abilities have been changed to provide passive benefits. They can be “activated” as before to get the full benefit.
• Physical Adepts now should be able to use Roundhouse Kick and Disarm while Killing Hands is active.

They need to give hackers more things to do in combat but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Oh... nice. But I guess i will wait for berlin to replay.

 

[Morality Games]

Tags: Harebrained Schemes; Shadowrun Returns; Shadowrun: Dragonfall

Although the Shadowrun Returns "Berlin DLC" was promised all the way back during the game's Kickstarter campaign, in this day and age, every new product needs an important-looking press release and a catchy brand name. As such, in their latest Kickstarter update, Harebrained Schemes have officially announced it as Shadowrun: Dragonfall. In addition to being a brand new campaign that takes place in - you guessed it - the Free City of Berlin, it seems the DLC will improve on many of the original campaign's shortcomings, most notably its restrictive checkpoint-based save system. Check out its Mass Effect-ish grimdark logo:

​

BERLIN. The Flux-State: a stable anarchy enforced by an ever-shifting coalition of megacorps, political factions, and savvy power players. A place where almost anything goes and the right connections can be the difference between success and starvation. Dangerous jobs abound and there’s no better place to earn a quick payday - provided you live long enough to spend it. For you and your team of battle-scarred runners, it’s just another day in the Free City of Berlin.

But a new threat is rising, one that could mean untold chaos and devastation. The only clue: whispers of the DRAGONFALL, a long-forgotten event from the earliest days of the Awakened world. As you find yourself drawn into a maze of veiled dangers and strange machinations, you will come face-to-face with a grim spectre of the past… and alter the course of Berlin’s future.

SHADOWRUN: DRAGONFALL FEATURES

• Experience a New Full-Length Campaign: Return to the “Tech meets Magic” future of Shadowrun as you and your team of runners get drawn into a treacherous conspiracy. Operating out of an offbeat central hub neighborhood, you’ll choose which missions to accept and how you’ll approach them while navigating the dark underbelly of “the Flux”.

• An Exciting New Locale: Shadowrun: Dragonfall transports runners to the Free City of Berlin, a thrilling Shadowrun setting full of gorgeous new hi-res environments, a diverse new cast of characters, and a new soundtrack by the composer of the original Sega Genesis Shadowrun game, Sam Powell.

• Command Your Team: Lead a small team of shadowrunners, each with their own outlook and backstory. Each member of your team is designed to play an interesting role during missions and has a unique set of skills, abilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

• New Weapons, Cyberware, Enemies & More: Try your hand at the long-range sniper rifle, devastating grenade launcher, or stun-inducing taser. Chrome yourself out in the latest cyberware and take on deadly new enemies - including new magical creatures like gargoyles and fire drakes. Dragonfall brings a host of new items, characters, portraits, and improvements to the Shadowrun Returns experience.

• Save Anywhere: You can save your progress at any time during the game. This functionality will also be added to the original Shadowrun Returns “Dead Man’s Switch” campaign.

• New Game Editor Features: A wide range of enhancements to the game editor for community content creators - including a scripting system to better control lighting, tracking mission objectives in the main game UI, placing exploding barrels, and allowing players to input keypad passwords and custom text strings in conversations. In addition, content creators will be able to use all of the new Berlin environment art, items and characters in their own stories along with assets from the original Shadowrun Returns campaign.

Shadowrun: Dragonfall will be released January 2014 for Windows, OSX, and Linux and will be free to Backers. You’ll get the same number of Steam keys you received for the original game via our Backer website and details about how you’ll get your DRM-free version will come in a future update. Dragonfall will launch at $14.99 and we’ll also release the Shadowrun Campaign Pack on the same day. The campaign pack contains the original game and the Dragonfall expansion in one package for only $24.99. We think it’s a great way to get new players into Shadowrun.​

But that's not all! In a previous update, HBS also announced that they had reached an agreement with Microsoft to allow the game to be released DRM-free, finally burying the DRM drama from earlier this year. So it should show up on GOG sometime soon. Now, let's hope they make the game hard enough to justify that new save system. Who knows, Shadowrun Returns may yet have what it takes to be a contender in 2014, the Year of RPG Incline.

HBS' rightful place is on the side of good. Even if that sleight of hand from the first KickStarter was necessary to get another Shadowrun game made, it was a tough pill to swallow for someone who pledged to the concept of a DRM-free Shadowrun cRPG. At least that error has been corrected.

 

[Zombra]

The Dead Man's Switch campaign didn't exactly leave me hungry for more, but it was a fun way to pass a few evenings. Looking forward to ... what's it called? Dragonfall? Pretty bad name, but the plot teaser looks good.

 

[Delbaeth]

DRM-free release would be nice. I am still cautious, because it wouldn't be the first time they said that. Wait & See.

 

[gromit]

not too sure about the save anywhere feature, as I enjoy taking my lack of self-control out on gromit for some undiscernable reason

(...) not trivial to write at all. Their mistake was fucking it up in the first place (whoever had the idea that their save system was a good idea to begin with...)

I don't think they ever thought it was a good idea. I think it's just what wouldn't fuck up their engine, which pretty much only runs an RPG by the sheer power of coincidence. This isn't some "rail on Unity" thing -- it can be a great tool, especially if you're willing to build upon it.

But for all the excellence of Harebrained's tile editor, there's probably better systems for dialog and variables in fucking RPGMaker, where you don't have to make two or three entirely different versions of an NPC, and shuffle them on and off screen like a fucking sock-puppet show, just to change a few lines of dialog.

Hello? Tokens? Flag- and state- checkers, that include or exclude lines and blocks? ANYTHING in the god-damned engine you don't have to essentially write (and/or copy-paste) yourself, each time, other than combat? This "keep it loose, you can do anything, anywhere if you have to write everything each time" philosophy seems to be crazily prevalent in the gaming industry.

HB would have saved themselves a lot of time, and everyone else a lot of grief, had they focused a little more on directly supporting more "common RPG" things, in a friendly way. As it stands, it's like... eh, colorforms that can run script, and it's amazing they were able to deliver the game they did. Amazing in the same way as watching a man move a 600 lb rock with his bare hands, instead of setting up a lever.

Anthony Davis has rightly applauded Obsidian for pushing on systematized, content-minded, creator-friendly tools. In this day and age, a proper programmer's job is to write each piece of code like he never wants to have to write it ever again, and come as close as humanly possible to success. Hard-coding is lame, dirty, and expensive in the long-term (not just in money terms.)

I would kill a man for the tools in Onyx to end up as Unity plug-ins, and get sold for a song. It would do wonders for indies: the choice is still often between "do it all by hand," "so generic you need to do things by hand anyway," and "friendly and streamlined yet completely rigid unless you do it all by hand anyway."

I doubt it will happen, given they sell $50 pieces of content relying on the edge such tools can bring them... though with F2P (shudder) and kickstarter, "boxed gaming" is eeking closer to the kind of service-based software industry where people could get comfortable sharing tools. It's better for providers, in such conditions, to (freely or cheaply) share "internal product" with one another, so they can better deliver the part the paying parties are actually interested in.

Engines like Unity where you can make that process -- and its economics -- piecemeal are probably very intriguing to many parties. If I were, say, id software -- whose last few engines were only really notable for their improvements to tools and workflow -- I'd have ~10-25% of my team writing case-specific plugins for the thing right now, on the assumption that I've sold the last million-dollar engine license I ever will.

 

[Metro]

So is the save system being implemented into vanilla even if you don't buy the expansion?

 

[Lhynn]

snip

If the game has a save anywhere feature, encounters will be designed with that in mind, not the same thing to design something for someone to be able to get it right in the first try that for someone that has meta-knowledge of whats going to happen in the next turn. This i find bothersome.

If they allow a save anywhere before each fight but not during it... then i dont mind.

 

[Roguey]

So is the save system being implemented into vanilla even if you don't buy the expansion?

Yah in a patch. The expansion is just new content.

 

[Tigranes]

How is the tablet version coming along? I get berlin free i think but i dont know if id play it sitting down, maybe as a mobile distraction.

 

[gromit]

If the game has a save anywhere feature, encounters will be designed with that in mind, not the same thing to design something for someone to be able to get it right in the first try that for someone that has meta-knowledge of whats going to happen in the next turn.

Yeah, that grand, time-honored tradition of quarter-munchers not requiring you to know anything beforehand to not get clobbered by easily-avoidable insta-deaths. Or that grand, time-honored tradition of RPGs not arbitrarily introducing and removing support and content for valid tactics and abilities depending on whether or not they could be arsed to.

That being beside the point -- you're making a huge assumption as to how it affects the design. If anything, "Save Anywhere" -- if they really balanced around that -- would allow them to make each single encounter more difficult, instead of being afraid of "punishing" unwitting players.

In case you didn't noticed, a single encounter is really all there ever was, before you were whisked away back to the safety of the hub. No slogs. You also may have failed to notice that each encounter was dead fucking easy, anyway.

The only time I ever reloaded is when I had to stop playing, which was rarely at a checkpoint.

That being beside the point, there comes a time in life when you can no longer shout "just five more minutes, mom," even if that five minutes is the last thing standing between you and the "pleasure" of replaying 55 minutes of script-happy deterministic encounter that you just played, like, three hours ago, and don't recall dying during.

Are you that fucking selfish, that you demand a game be made easier for you, so that you don't feel justified in quasi-cheating... and all the people with shit to do, looking to fill (just under) an hour, be damned?

And they meant to sell this thing on fucking tablets without save-anywhere. Well, I supposed in that case, the devices are at least "less likely" to murder your game-state on its way in or out of a sleep state. Meanwhile, in PC land, every few years there's some asshole game that can't even find the renderer again if you dare alt-tab.

 

[Lhynn]

all the people with shit to do, looking to fill (just under) an hour, be damned?

Yes.

Anyway, there are alternatives, like save & exit, or X saves per encounter. A game that encourages save scuming is not hard, its repetitive, clunky and shitty. A game where you can live with your losses and move on, where theres an actual penalty to failing and where you can plan a strategy based on how the field is, instead of just based on the fore-knowledge that mook A is going to attack soldier 3 in the next round so you are better off healing or going into defense mode, thats what i want to play.

PS: People that talk to me about self control when they spend their day procrastinating is fucking riich btw.

 

[gromit]

PS: People that talk to me about self control when they spend their day procrastinating is fucking riich btw.

Where are you getting this? The part where I don't want to be punished for quitting out of a game when it's go-time? That's more or less the opposite of procrastination.

If it's about "shit to do, looking to fill just under an hour" -- what the fuck do you want from me? To sit around in a lobby for an hour? Hang out at the restaurant munching on breadsticks until my date? Hassle people over things that take time, during that time which they are taking?

Yes, there's theoretically "always something to do" in this world -- but you'd better not pull that line on me, while arguing in favor of games setting you back an hour if you lose (or sometimes even if you don't lose, sure, why not?)

We obviously lead very different lives, if you can't neatly fit "having shit to do" and "it not being time for shit yet" together. Fine. But the major difference between us, seemingly, is that I don't want to nearly ruin videogames for you.

You'd at least have circumstantial evidence that I wanted to, if the SRR OC were, in any way, shape, or form, more difficult or consequence-heavy than the smooth-sailing jaunt between disconnected pocket-worlds that it is.

A game where you can live with your losses and move on, where theres an actual penalty to failing and where you can plan a strategy based on how the field is, instead of just based on the fore-knowledge that mook A is going to attack soldier 3 in the next round so you are better off healing or going into defense mode, thats what i want to play.

Yeah, me too.

One of my favorite playthroughs, of any game -- a buddy and I, slowly sneaking in Silent Storm's Allies campaign on his way home from night shift. Half of the fun was letting the "how's Nessie going to get out of this one?" cook for a few days at a time. Pen-and-paper, CivIV by e-mail, day-long games of DEFCON, and old LucasArts stumpers are the only other times I've had that sense of tension and anticipation.

I get to play this kind of game when my "on the ropes, having fun" game states aren't impossible for the engine to retain due to poor technical planning.

Since they do vanish, I "get to" replay most of a heavily-scripted battle, starting over from "fresh from the hub"-level resources, with the exact knowledge of what happens, when (a major content problem in an RPG or any systems-based game.)

And that only sucks more when the whole game is too easy to begin with, despite having award-winning, not-at-all artificially-difficulty-inflating features such as "can't remember jack shit the second it's off screen" and "will fucking tell you when it's time to stop playing."

I get forced to do what you were just complaining about people doing, instead of the thing I want to do which is the thing you say you want me to be doing.

I'll stop short of saying you claim that repetition comes from not being forced to repeat things.

 

[Jaesun]

Save anywhere.... removed????



Fucking whining popamole fags.

 

[Lhynn]

I am glad ive gotten to know you better gromit however your playing habits have no weight when it comes to whats actually better from a design standpoint. Forcing the player to play your game in a healthy way can sometimes be a good thing, as long as it is not taken to the extreme.
Saving midfight should be either banned or limited, to force the player to plan ahead instead of just going with the flow and reloading if things go south. This has the double function of rewarding good thinking and making the battles feel more important and relevant. This works best in TBS games where a broad view of the development of the whole combat is important to determine where its heading, loading a game kills that

 

[gromit]

So PLAN AHEAD and DON'T ARBITRARILY LOAD. You can do that. God willing, the game will reward that effort. I like it okay, but SRR is simply not that game. Having a checkpoint system is no guarantee of difficult, thoughtful encounters.

Conversely, I can't duck out fifteen minutes ahead of schedule -- ITS schedule -- I repeat, the schedule that a fucking video-game is attempting to set for a human being -- did you read that, good now read it twice -- without getting shafted in the system you're proposing.

And/or unshafted, if I liked the danger I was in -- the lack of a game state resets the stakes and removes consequences in that case. There's an entire facet of the chess world, revolving around setting the board back up in a position where someone was on the verge of being utterly fucked, and trying to do better from there.

Here's some intuitive, yet completely speculative conjecture of my own, boiled down into a neat package...
I propose that all requiring all players, to proceed, pass a challenge in one interrupted go:

1. Encourages a designer to make the baseline difficulty easier, so all players can pass it in one uninterrupted go.
2. Encourages "degenerate gameplay" by making reliable cheese favorable in comparison to experimenting with a change of tactics.
3. Completely overlooks the fact that games -- love them as I do -- should be interrupt-able.

I will sincerely happily accept any actual response to those* including the obvious answer to #2. Which is my answer to you, re: savegames, unless you make one hell of an argument for a checkpoint system having a positive effect on actual (not perceived, or artificial) difficulty.

Yes, not loading every time you skin your knee makes a game harder. No shit. You keep saying it as if I don't know that. I even made a decent case for the thing you like doing the exact opposite of the result you want.

I'm very willing to have this discussion, but you really have to actually start engaging in it.

*Actually, no; if you can disagree with #3 with a straight face, then there's really no point.

 

[Infinitron]

Save anywhere.... removed????

wat

 

[Xi]

Save anywhere.... removed????

wat

He must have a sore head after falling down, or something.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Save anywhere.... removed????

wat

Joined: May 14, 2004

 

[Roguey]

Save anywhere.... removed????



Fucking whining popamole fags.

Oh no, now we'll be able to get levels that take more than 10-40 minutes to complete that aren't on a tight rail and possibly more demanding combat. Whatever shall we do?

Dead Man's Switch, it is the popamole. Triple-A content and goals on a single A budget.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Save anywhere.... removed????



Fucking whining popamole fags.

Are all the moderators like you?

 

[Lhynn]

Snip

This is not a matter of personal preference, it is, infact, a matter of encounter design and how hard encounters can be made irrelevant with the ability to load games on a turn per turn basis, or how relatively easy encounters can be made impossible if you refuse to load, because of a lucky critical or dodge.

No fight should last over an hour anyway but the toughest ones anyway and with an option to break save&exit or 1-save per fight it should be enough even to the most casual of players.

If you fuck up and lose with save states, then you lose nothing, you have unlimited tries, you also dont learn from your mistakes, because you.dont.need.to.