Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition

Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition

Response Time
Mack Yuu 2016 年 10 月 15 日 下午 8:19
Review
Since comments only allow 1k characters, I'm just going to start up a thread here for people to post reviews and critique. Or at least, mine. Hope you don't mind, mod author.

Spoilers follow if you stumbled here, so tread carefully.

So, first thing I noticed is that I'm running an old rig, and even with HD textures off, this scenario *chugged* for me. Particularly during the Matrix/Meatspace combat with both going on at the same time, I was at about 8-10 FPS. Now, yeah, part of that is because I'm on a beater craptop from my college days, but I can still run a solid 90-95% of SR:HK without this kind of slowdown. As I'm just dipping my toe into the editor myself, I can't really give any recommendations on how to fix this.

The "detective work" in the hotel could use another run with a polishing edit. When looking at the crack in the wall, why is there an option to widen the hole if it's only going to cause more trouble in the long run? The main exit is perfectly useable for egress, but that isn't made clear, so I opened the crack wider. I mean, if that's your intent, fine, but it's...an odd choice, from a GM perspective.

Spotting the jackpoint on the second floor instantly locks the player into combat movement despite there being no threat. That was the first room I walked into on the second floor, so I kind of felt the need to jack in and get the party started, but that means I never explored your gorgeously-designed second floor. Maybe take a look at the triggers there and try to make jacking in an option when the player right clicks on the jackpoint rather than a zone-entry trigger (take a look at how HBS does the jack-in option triggers; I really like whatever they're doing). You can still have a conversation trigger there, but try not to put the player into combat mode.

The setting up defenses feels kind of meaningless. I had several turns in Matrix and Meatspace before they ever came into play, where I could move the characters around. If I wanted to, I could've set them in those locations manually over the course of several turns. Is there a reason for the placing characters moment that I just wasn't aware of?

Minor personal quibble: I hate columns. They say they provide half cover, but they kill LoS, making their tactical use nigh useless. When designing your rooms in the future, try not to use four columns in a 10x10 room. Just makes combat messy and kind of annoying. They've been that way since Dragonfall, and I just don't see them changing any time soon.

Also, there's a weird half cover that popped up for me in the doorway on the second floor of the hotel going out of the main room into the western hallway, facing east. Don't know if it's supposed to be there, but take a look at the cover overlay and make sure it's something you want there. I didn't particularly mind, because hey, free cover, but it felt a little weird.

I'm not sure how I feel about what you did for ley lines. Personally, I like them to just appear at their strength. I'm assuming it was a conscious decision to have a particle effect and only have the ley line strength show up when standing on it. Not what I would've gone with, but eh. I also couldn't figure out what the ley lines were doing for my mage protagonist; I did see on the heavy ley line in the last scene that it lowered some spell cooldowns, but the medium and light ley lines, no clue whatsoever.

I absolutely loved the Matrix color scheme you used, particularly in the second phase (Icarus, I think?). The purple/maroon color scheme felt super 80s/retro synthwave.

The first Matrix phase is...pretty confusing. You might want to get a playtester on that. I finally jacked out after getting traced (and fighting off the Trace IC) having done I think everything I could only to advance the story. Having a prompt to jack out when you have everything you need from phase 1 would be useful.

The Etiquette: Academic conversation option in the last scene ends your dialogue with the spider shaman (cool characters, btw). I think from the dialogue in the comments it looks like that's been a recurring issue, so, just putting it out there: it's still an issue. The game now progresses, but that's kinda it for the dialogue tree.

Overall, it's a good starting base. The story looks solid from my end, and as someone with little knowledge of the P&P Shadowrun, I'd heard of Icarus station, so I kind of know what's going on. Good work overall!
最后由 Mack Yuu 编辑于; 2016 年 10 月 15 日 下午 8:25
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正在显示第 1 - 8 条,共 8 条留言
wave.of.atla  [开发者] 2016 年 10 月 16 日 下午 6:08 
Thank you for the awesome and thoughtful review, K. Macku. All of your points are valid, and I will do my best to address them with in-game fixes.

First, I didn't realize that Steam limited comment length, so I will start a bug thread in case people want to leave longer bug reports.

The cause of the CPU drain is known, but the solution has been problematic. Essentially, I need to break the scene in half, and have a transition once the first part of the matrix is done. But my attempts to do that were clumsy. Then my old computer died in the middle of making this mod, and the new one doesn’t suffer so much during that part, so I dropped the ball on fixing the issue.

Regarding the crack in the wall, it’s not a bad exit point if you don’t rig the noodle machine. Widen the crack, jam the door shut, take everybody down the stairs. Most of the KE on that side are squishy compared to the front room. Of course, not rigging the noodle machine means KE shows up several rounds sooner. Usually, I only did this when I was testing the “It Was a Slaughter” karma reward. The effects of boarding it up vs widening it are pretty obtuse, I’ll see if there’s a way to clarify.

I really only used the turn mode at the jack-in point so that you could position Ice Queen behind the computer for cover. I kind of hate how HK has the convo option and then the PC stands around like an idiot while the decker sits in whatever random spot they were in. Defensive positions sprang up from this, but the following encounter was also much more difficult when I first scripted it. KE showed up at two opposing points each time they triggered and so having people on both “wings” helped contain them before they reached the decker. But it was way too hard. I actually nerfed the encounter several times and removed the decker as priority target (but made the Judas fight a bit stronger). Anyway, I probably should have cut the positioning after that, but it just seems insane to have the PCs standing around like that.

Changing the columns visibility is actually rather easy. Easier than redesigning the rooms, even.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to have leylines be particle effects until a spellcaster was standing on them. Just a quirk of using the old leyline FX in HK engine. Once I rebuilt the props to work in HK and saw how they looked, I seriously considered just using Dragon Lines, but those also look strange on all the old props. Probably should just give in and use them. The smaller ones have a modest improvement in Spellcasting to-hit, for what it’s worth.

It took me too long to make the mod, so all my playtesters were busy with other projects by the time I was done. I think there was supposed to be a waypoint when it was time to exit Mercury, but had trouble with the waypoints and forgot about it.

When I ported from DF to HK it broke all the Academic conditions (replaced them with Cyberware Affinity) and I apparently missed that. Wonder what happened to the rest of that convo.

Thanks again for the time you took writing this up! It really means a lot.
☠ Deathcall 2016 年 11 月 20 日 上午 11:54 
I just finished playing the mission myself and here are my thoughts:

1. Importing a character makes the initial hub a bit pointless. The area is big enough and I was surprised by the amount of depth on the street doc npc, but the rest of the vendors are rather plain and don't have much dialogue to them. I checked the "old game console" and fiddled with the settings but I'm not quite sure how it's supposed to work or what it changes. Not sure if the vehicle option is cosmetic or not.

2. The party seems interesting but we don't really get much background on them and the dialogues are limited. Didn't really feel like the dialogue choices I took mattered much.

3. Setting up the defenses on the first floor was also a bit confusing. I mean, why is this even optional? Widening the wall gap for a second exit would only make sense if the enemies could block the main exit but when you think about it that's unlikely because you can jam lock the door leading to that wing of the building so you'd be cut off... Hard to explain perhaps. It just doesn't feel like it matters a whole lot.

4. The first matrix portion I found interesting, actually reloaded to do it stealth mode. I liked doing the detective work. The second bit was a bit too combat heavy, not that it was specially difficult, but it did feel like a bit of a slough near the end. The Judas IC does do a lot of real damage, I think it dumped my guy in one shot.

5. The combat in meatspace I found kind of easy, though I did import a really high level character (I set the difficulty for my karma level at the hub console, not sure how it affected things). Frankly, switching back and forth from left to right wasn't that difficult and it was rare to have more than one side active at a time. Exiting the building was extremely easy as well, I just had to face two guys and a drone (I chose to widen the gap but lock the door, not jam it).

6. I liked the "debriefing" at the docks, though I wish I had had the opportunity to play the getaways, at least my own character's. I got a bug talkin with the shaman when I tried to use my academics etiquette, it immediately finished the dialogue.

7. The combat scene is extremely easy and not thoroughly explained. Who were those guys and how did they find us? Who betrayed the team? What happeneded to Queen? I had to kill her, is there a way to save her?

8. It ends when things start getting interesting!

Overall I enjoyed the mission. There's potential in there. I was a bit disappointed by the abrupt ending, was under the impression that it would be a bit longer than this. Still, what IS in the mission is very playable. It could be better with a few additions and changes. Right now it seems more like a slice of something bigger. I just couldn't get enough of it to get a good taste.

Kudos for the effort, will definetely be looking for your next work.
wave.of.atla  [开发者] 2016 年 11 月 20 日 下午 4:39 
@Cmrd. Deathcall: Excellent review, thanks! I think your points are all pretty fair. The dialogue choices in the Hotel do have reputation variables attached to them, but it's apparently a very rare condition to need it, and I don't actually give any clue it's happening.

The combat curve is not really smooth right now. It's very difficult for a fresh PC at 0 scale, and pretty easy for a 200+ karma character with 5 scale. It probably needs a few more scale gradiants on the high end. Nightmare mode allows enemies to spawn in the Hotel even when there are 4 enemies still alive.

Vehicle is 98% cosmetic, mostly a joke from the old Pen&Paper game (players would spend a million nuyen on chrome and gear for their char, but then all show up to the meet with Dodge Scoots, the cheapest vehicle in the game). There's a couple opposed rep points to the van, but...

Regarding the Docks, so, the Hard Corps agents at the end were sent by the Shady Old Man - even if you give him a copy of the data he doesn't want anyone else to have it. There's a difficult to reach dialogue option where your PC can switch sides and fight with the attackers against your crew. (If your rep is high enough, you can talk them into walking away without a fight.) I need to make that option much easier to reach, because it's a fun choice - and if you play with a starting character rather than importing, it can be the only way to survive.

As to how they found you and who betrayed the team, tune in next time, j/k, they tortured and killed the Johnson for the info. Unless you betray them at the end, then it's you.

Ice Queen switches sides if she is dumped by the Judas IC (it's a psychotropic IC that reprograms the decker to betray when they get an activation code). Did she get dumped in your playthru or is this a bug and your main got dumped?

Thanks again for taking the time to review!
☠ Deathcall 2016 年 11 月 21 日 上午 9:46 
Ah I see, there's so much content that I missed. It's got good replayability value then.

It's as you said, Ice Queen got dumped by the IC. I hadn't made that connection.

Now I see how you tried to imprint a bit of that P&P mentality into this mission, now a few things make a bit more sense.
Silverain 2017 年 5 月 12 日 下午 3:52 
Very nice though most the previous comments mirror my own thoughts, one last thing I would of liked would of been a second party debrief after the final chat with the Johnson, from the group composition I had a feeling that the team was breaking apart under the tension and either way we were about to lose Kay O so I was curious to see if the team would go their seperate ways.

From what I've read here I'm extremely glad I did the Decking with my main rather than risk losing Ice Queen.
wave.of.atla  [开发者] 2017 年 5 月 13 日 下午 8:14 
@DoominaBottle, it's really great to hear that people are curious and interested in the crew and what the future holds for them!

There's a conversation branch where you actually talk about what happens after the mission, but it's in the betrayal option that no one ever sees because it's so convoluted to reach. Once I'm done with the other mod I'm working on, I'll have to rework the convo with Shady to make it easier.

Thanks so much for playing and leaving a comment.
yan_ex8 2018 年 1 月 6 日 下午 8:13 
Just fineshed a playthrough. Generally speaking i think this was pretty good. I did not feel like playing a mod, it indeed scratched the same itch as the HBS campaigns did. Won't repeat it, but I can relate to most of the feedback provided on the previous comments, specially that frame-rate drop. For me, I had already killed the Judas IC and was heading to the escape, when things got so bad my computer restarted and I had to start from a previous save, around 30 minutes earlier.

I played with a DMS Vox Populi endgame character so it was all a little easy, even with the scaling. Since I did not know what nightmare mode was, I left it off. Also, since my character was also a decker, I jacked in with both PC and Ice Queen, the other two ending up being more than enough to handle the troops on meat space.

Regarding story and writing, I think this is where it shines. The characters clicked really well with me, with personalities and backstories exposed just enough to not feel forced. Kay O telling me I'm not her friend and therefore won't miss me was very interesting if we take into account how characters in RPGs tend to treat anyone they do a single mission with as BFFs. Felt like a real person there. Still, I found some odd stuff with the shady old man. I refused his proposal in the initial hub (although I haggled a bit first), but the hidden phone to call him was still there. I called and lied that we did not get the data and the attack happened anyway. I understand some things were left open on purpose, but is there a path that exposes every loose end? Also, sorry if I'm a bit ignorant on the game's system, but how does the rep thing work for the dialog options to appear?

Anyway, by reading the thread I also see how many variables and options you put into this small campaign and this is very nice. Keep up the good work!

El_Poco 2020 年 5 月 28 日 上午 11:11 
First of all, I don't know why but very early I had a feeling that this UGC was made by a hardcore SR fan. Some UGC feel like they could have been written by someone who mostly know Shadowrun from the video games but this one had strong PnP Shadowrun vibe.

It's a pretty "classic" run template, but it's done well. The characters are interesting (which does leave you wanting for more, since you don't have that many opportunities to interact with them), and the scripting is good: the first part of the Matrix run has a nice "puzzle" approach, the combats are nothing special but they do set the pressure correctly.

So all in all it's a nice run that leaves you waiting for more. Thanks for your hard work!
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