The Excruciating Ecstasy of Jacking - Shadowrun Returns

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > The Excruciating Ecstasy of Jacking - Shadowrun Returns

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Kanfy posted:

shotguns are close-combat destroyers which need to be reloaded often and are inaccurate at longer ranges but can also hit multiple characters (including friendlies) if fired from far enough.

Having played all three games, shotguns supposed shortcomings never seemed to matter, and the ability to hit adjacent enemies at range is fantastic.

Kanfy posted:

The upside here is the fact that the Decker is the most important party member, something that remains true in all three games. Very nearly every mission from here to Hong Kong has something only a Decker can accomplish, so if you're not one yourself then you're going to have to bring one with you or accept that you'll miss out on things. This way we can pick whoever we feel like and still do nearly everything possible.

I loving hate the matrix in these games. I haven't played the tabletop game so I've no idea how it's handled there, but in this series it's just tedious and annoying. So I deliberately avoid having or using deckers whenever possible.

Kanfy posted:

1. Our sex: Male or Female
2. Our race: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Ork or Troll
3. Our primary murdering method: Pistols, Submachine Guns, Shotguns, Rifles or the ever-trendy Drones. Some of these are better than others, but they'll all do the job so just pick whatever seems coolest.
4. Our streetname: 2-12 characters. If you're like me and coming up with names is the single hardest part in an RPG, you can just skip this one if you want.

Female

Dwarf

Shotguns

Kanfy

# ¿ Apr 25, 2017 06:00

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 17:55

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Kanfy posted:

I was about 70% sure we'd end up with a troll after I mentioned how they make for the worst Decker.

I played all three games as a female troll, because my standard way of choosing a character is to go "what am I least likely to be able to be in other games?" Because variety is fun.

FoolyCharged posted:

I just wanted a hacker that hacked things by slamming their deck through the screen.
Also to try and live up to the flavor text's race description. Because, "Heavy prejudice against them has led people to think trolls have lowered intelligence, but in reality there is no proof to this" made me laugh so hard when it was immediately followed by that dismal int cap.

It's always a problem when they try to do racism/homophobia/etc. analogues in fantasy/sci-fi. You can't say it's blind prejudice when it's a hard fact as set down in the game rules.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2017 05:20

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

RickVoid posted:

I'm not going to test this, because I don't really want to replay what I've played up to all over again.

One thing that always annoys me with games like this where you have a whole lot of mutually exclusive options (ie. you can only spend your xp once so you have to prioritise pretty early or end up poo poo at everything) is that it would probably be fun to try out those other options, but there's no way I'm going to play through the entire game again to see them.

Stanfield posted:

So on board for this. I really love Hong Kong but I've never gotten around to playing Returns or Dragonfall.

DMS certainly has its issues, but aside from the ending being pretty weak I thought it was decent, and I think Dragonfall is actually the best of the three. There are some changes to game mechanics that might annoy you going from HK back to the earlier ones, but on the other hand they might annoy you going in the correct order too.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2017 10:24

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Kanfy posted:

Grenades are the single biggest reason to keep your people spread out whenever possible, at least until Hong Kong which introduces a hilarious countermeasure to them.

A loving annoying countermeasure that really takes the shine off the fun new grenade launcher you just got. Combine that with the AI being way too grenade-savvy to begin with and grenades themselves being consumables so you don't like to use them in case a better use comes up later, and it adds up to yet another game where they were apparently paranoid about grenades being overpowered and so decided to preemptively ruin them. :argh:

# ¿ Apr 26, 2017 14:33

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

UnwiseTrout posted:

I've always found the cyberware in all the games to be pretty effective, but I've always had a really hard time getting into playing any of the magical paths so that makes the decision really easy for me.

I briefly tried out magic in DMS and found it really underwhelming. I think HK was the first one I tried cyberware with and it was awesome. But the big problem with all of it as that whatever you choose (aside from guns) requires a major commitment before it becomes worthwhile and it's impossible to know ahead of time what's going to work well.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2017 08:12

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Psion posted:

On another note, it may be of interest to play the Dead Man's Switch campaign in the Dragonfall Director's Cut version of the game - you can do this, and it's much improved over the original version of the engine.

I tried to do this one time and, I have no idea what I was doing wrong, but it didn't work. At all. :shrug:

# ¿ Apr 28, 2017 09:54

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Aerdan posted:

Gotta copy the project.cpack.bytes from the original SRR's dead_man_switch directory to DF's, then copy the maps and scenes directories from SRR's dead_man_switch/data directory to DF's.

I copied the entire dead_man_switch folder and subfolders. Not that I'm looking for tech support, I'm not likely to go back to it again anyway.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2017 10:30

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

inscrutable horse posted:

There's stims, and then there's Jazz (and in Dragonfall, Cram). That +1 AP is enough to turn all my runners into hardened drug-fiends. The effect has worn off? No problem, just pop some more, everyone's loaded to the gills!

The others never seemed worthwhile to me, but I got a lot of use out of those +AP ones.

# ¿ May 2, 2017 04:22

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Psion posted:

When in doubt, it's an obvious backer portrait.

The only one that bothered me was Felicia Day, because it was so distracting. You're playing this game and suddenly "Wait, is that Felicia Day? WTF?"

# ¿ May 2, 2017 07:16

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

FoolyCharged posted:

On the bug talk, the only one I saw of note was hilarious and of a similar vein. Instead of a reload overriting all npc stats, it overwrote my character's info with that of a dead npc.

The only major issue I remember encountering was one mission in Hong Kong where some NPCs are supposed to give you a key to a safe, but there are about four things you have to do in the right sequence for it to work, and if you do it wrong then you're just left with no way to complete the objective or progress the game. I also missed a particular side quest because (again) I did some stuff in the "wrong" order, which resulted in the email offering the quest not showing up properly. And there's a bunch of little errors and inconsistencies in the text.

# ¿ May 8, 2017 14:26

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

mauman posted:

Personally, I was ok with the lack of saving since it forced you to accept non-perfect wins and prevented save-scumming.

I've never understood this perspective. If you don't want to save-scum, just don't. I don't save-scum, but I do appreciate being able to just stop playing at any time without losing any progress. Why do you need the game to force you to do something that you want to do anyway?

# ¿ May 9, 2017 09:29

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Kanfy posted:

Yes, yes! I just need another BLT to get through the day.

Dying for a sandwich? I know that feeling.

# ¿ May 10, 2017 06:57

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

The fact that there's no way of knowing which etiquettes will be useful is probably my least favourite thing about these games.

# ¿ May 11, 2017 09:44

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2017 06:05

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

[quote="GhostStalker" post="473197820"]I just wish you could go to turn based mode immediately instead of realtime, since I was rear end at avoiding patrolling ICs as well, even though it theoretically would be easier to do so in the latter. Usually wind up getting caught and having to either quickly kill off the patrollers before my alert went too high or just book it best I could.[quote]
And was I just being dumb or was there no way to use your abilities (like healing and reducing alarm) without going into turn-based? Also, those gate things with the puzzle mingame thing? I have no idea what you were supposed to do with those, I always ended up just shooting my way through them when using the matrix was unavoidable. I feel like I'm missing some fundamental information about how the matrix stuff works whenever I play these games.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2017 10:07

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Kanfy posted:

Dr Henry Holmes? Middle name "Howard", perhaps?

Kanfy posted:

Oh, I guess not. Looks like we've got nothing to worry about with this guy then.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2017 14:51

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2017 04:55

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

sebmojo posted:

I never finished this, got to the last few rooms and dropped it for dragon fall, so I'm looking forward to seeing what I missed.

If you got that far, not much.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2017 13:42

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

And this is where this game's plot goes completely to poo poo. The whole tone they've built up so far is abandoned and it transforms into a completely different and much worse story.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2017 05:39

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Ze Pollack posted:

Nah, this is a pretty standard shadowrun twist: "holy poo poo you have stumbled onto something HUGE, time to gather allies and figure out how to handle it"

Just 'cause it's common doesn't mean it's good.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2017 07:16

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Skypie posted:

I'd always been under the impression that the runner who takes wetwork jobs is kinda rare. Like, yeah, they'll kill people in self defense or who get in the way, but the person who will pick up an out right assassination isn't your "average" runner.

Can you really claim "self defence" when you only needed to defend yourself because you broke into a high security building and threatened the guards? At that point it's them claiming self defence, not you.

But really this applies to most RPGs. Sure, the goblins may be designated evil, but you still broke into their home, murdered them and took their stuff. It may say "good" on your character sheet, but if you apply real world standards to it then you're a psychopath.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2017 03:25

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

painedforever posted:

I've never had a high-strength guy, so grenades have not been my go-to weapon.

It's a constant disappointment to me that none of the games I like give me enough grenades to make them my primary weapon. I just want to be throwing grenades at everyone all the time, is that so much to ask?

Xander77 posted:

k.

Let's imagine that tomorrow we get solid scientific evidence that The Bell Curve, or any of a 1000 others "hey, maybe there's a racial component to intelligence, eh? Just asking questions here, nothin' bigoted about asking questions" studies actually has a point. Major, minor, whatever, there's a quantifiable and inherent difference.

Does that mean that racism becomes the word of the day? I mean, that's what the people publhsing these studies want, obviously, but the people who are currently anti-racist.

Well, compare it to physical strength differences in men and women. It's undeniably true that, on average, men are stronger than women. You don't get people saying "there's no evidence that men are any stronger than women" and being taken seriously. On average, humans are smarter than trolls. That's a fact. But just as it's true in the real world that some women are much, much stronger than the vast majority of men, it could equally be true that some trolls are much, much smarter than the majority of humans. And so in both cases discrimination on the basis of those averages is dumb and bad. But you can't say "there's no evidence that trolls are dumber than anyone else" right next to the place where it says trolls get -2 to intelligence and have the lowest cap of any race. Discrimination against trolls on the basis that "they're all idiots" would be wrong, and you don't need to pretend that their stat penalties don't exist to get to that conclusion.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2017 08:12

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Xander77 posted:

"Except for the writing, dialog, characters, your actions influencing the gameworld and character actions, relatively nuanced settings and worldbuilding, and roleplaying opportunities, Alpha Protocol was really mediocre".

Alpha Protocol may have done some impressive and commendable things, but it is just not fun to play. Sorry, but that actually does matter.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 13:56

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Is chi casting actually a viable option in any of these games? I initially tried it in SR/DMS and switched to guns half way through because it was clearly worthless. Did they fix that in later games?

# ¿ Oct 18, 2017 04:14

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

painedforever posted:

"Vegan" cheese?

I've eaten it. When you first try it it's not terrible, but I ended up throwing most of it out because it's distinctive not-quite-cheesiness becomes a bit hard to take.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2017 08:56

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

mauman posted:

Here's a strange one I recently discovered.

There is a branch of vegetarianism that allows the eating of seafood. So Krill would still count as being vegetarian under that definition.

This doesn't personally make a lick of sense to me, but whatever.

It's specific name is Pescetarian or pesco-vegetarian.

Even weirder, there are people who don't eat meat except for fish and chicken.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2017 04:55

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Pseudohog posted:

I was expecting a fairly low key storyline, tangling with the megacorps a few times along the way, I'm just a bit disapointed they felt the need to escalate it into an apocalypse scenario so quickly!

That's my biggest problem with these games. They start out telling you you're some worthless nobody who can never make a real difference but then it turns out you're actually the person who ends up saving the world. It's like, they had this opportunity to do something fairly unique with their games but then decided to just do what everyone else does anyway.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2017 04:14

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

painedforever posted:

I expect it bothers someone who knows Shadowrun as a place where we just need to survive, and get through another day while balancing the books and dodging the corporations, but me? I've been saving the world for other people since back when it wasn't fashionable.

I haven't played any Shadowrun other than this series, I just felt that the saving the world part of the plot came out of nowhere and was incongruous with the rest of the game. You go from some nobody just trying to track down whoever killed your friend to the most powerful people in the world suddenly asking for your help.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2017 02:37

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Kanfy posted:

Another lovely consequence of the constant combat mode is that after single every battle, Amazon has to manually deactivate her drones and wait a turn so that she can catch up with the rest of the team.

Is leaving her back at the entrance and just sending the drones ahead an option?

# ¿ Nov 18, 2017 02:50

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

It's been ages since I played it the first time, but I'm pretty sure I just killed Jessica as quickly as possible because that just feels like the obvious thing to do to me. Always try to take out the boss as quickly as possible, because there's just a chance that it ends the fight right away.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2017 04:06

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

painedforever posted:

And credit where credit is due, you don't feel like putting your fist through the screen because, frankly, you should have seen it coming.

Also it's the end of the game so you've no longer got any reason to care about the reward.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2017 05:58

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 17:55

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

painedforever posted:

Well... kinda-sorta maybe? How'd you feel about the ending to Neverwinter Nights 2 (prior to MotB)? That was "Rocks fall, everyone dies" which was so not cool, and pissed me off no end.

I haven't played it, so I can't answer that one. But I think the difference there would be that that wasn't a satisfying end to the story? Whereas in this case it's a perfectly fitting end to the story. If it happened half way through the game that you'd been led to believe you were getting some valuable resource (cash or otherwise) and then you didn't it would feel like a ripoff, but as it happens right at the end it's not you the player getting anything anyway. You're not going to be able to use it either way.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2017 07:28

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > The Excruciating Ecstasy of Jacking - Shadowrun Returns