Shadowrun Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut

[Excidium]

You can't hand a gun to another runner

It's for realism reasons : the gun is gene locked to a single user. That also explains why you never get to salvage anything out of slain opponents.

This is actually true for enemies -- in p&p SR you never 'loot' anything from enemies except key items / credsticks / consumables, since all weapons are gene-locked and cyberware is a huge hassle to cut out, carry, and take to a shadow doc to sell for a tiny fraction of its original price.

People grossly exaggerate that

 

[Zetor]

You can't hand a gun to another runner

It's for realism reasons : the gun is gene locked to a single user. That also explains why you never get to salvage anything out of slain opponents.

This is actually true for enemies -- in p&p SR you never 'loot' anything from enemies except key items / credsticks / consumables, since all weapons are gene-locked and cyberware is a huge hassle to cut out, carry, and take to a shadow doc to sell for a tiny fraction of its original price.

People grossly exagerate that

Yeah, if you're fighting low-end gangers, you can take their shitty weapons and sell them for a pittance (though hoarding multiple assault rifles in your backpack is not a good way to stay mobile during a run). But if you're up against any actual threat like LS / crime syndicates / megacorps, you can bet all of their valuable gear will be dna-locked.

 

[J_C]

You can't hand a gun to another runner

It's for realism reasons : the gun is gene locked to a single user. That also explains why you never get to salvage anything out of slain opponents.

This is actually true for enemies -- in p&p SR you never 'loot' anything from enemies except key items / credsticks / consumables, since all weapons are gene-locked and cyberware is a huge hassle to cut out, carry, and take to a shadow doc to sell for a tiny fraction of its original price.

People grossly exagerate that

Yeah, if you're fighting low-end gangers, you can take their shitty weapons and sell them for a pittance (though hoarding multiple assault rifles in your backpack is not a good way to stay mobile during a run). But if you're up against any actual threat like LS / crime syndicates / megacorps, you can bet all of their valuable gear will be dna-locked.

Even if this is the way it is, there is no reason for not being able to buy weapons and armor to your NPCs in the shops and give them to your party members. I tried to buy better shotgun and armor for my NPC, but I wasn't able to give it to her.

 

[Zetor]

Of course, but I said that myself in the same post:

However, you SHOULD be able to trade items between characters and have a persistent inventory, and this is pretty much a limitation of their own engine at this point*.

Maybe they'll address it in the next xpac / sequel (the way inventory works seems to be the #1 complaint overall), but I'm not too hopeful...

* I know that it's possible to work around it in a mod, but it takes a shitload of triggers for each item on each map. Yeah no.

 

[Excidium]

I've lost any hope of them fixing the game systems.

 

[Metro]

Base game is $3.75 and Dragonfall DLC is $6 on Steam now for the next... six hours from this post.

 

[Loriac]

This is simply a design flaw in SRR. One that is probably based on a tight budget, and a focus of that budget on more important (in the minds of the designers) things.
If you really think 2mil is a lot for a team that needs to pay normal developer wages, you have no clue about game development costs. It would be a high budget for a team where everyone works to make the project their dream come true (and then start making money when the project starts selling, if at all) and is happy living off a minimum wage until then. But this is certainly not the case for a team of 20 people or so.

When they put out the original kickstarter, it was a team of 10. They added 25(!) staff (permanent or contract) for the project when they got their $1.8m funding. I don't understand why people continue to try to defend the retardedly bad management on evidence from HBS. Even fairly inexperienced project managers should know that adding that many people to a team for a short term project rarely works well, and yet they went ahead and did it anyway.

Also, finally purchased Dragonfall now that its on sale on Steam - fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me - no way in hell I'm paying full price for their product just because they've put in the features it should have had originally.

 

[thesheeep]

This is simply a design flaw in SRR. One that is probably based on a tight budget, and a focus of that budget on more important (in the minds of the designers) things.
If you really think 2mil is a lot for a team that needs to pay normal developer wages, you have no clue about game development costs. It would be a high budget for a team where everyone works to make the project their dream come true (and then start making money when the project starts selling, if at all) and is happy living off a minimum wage until then. But this is certainly not the case for a team of 20 people or so.

When they put out the original kickstarter, it was a team of 10. They added 25(!) staff (permanent or contract) for the project when they got their $1.8m funding. I don't understand why people continue to try to defend the retardedly bad management on evidence from HBS. Even fairly inexperienced project managers should know that adding that many people to a team for a short term project rarely works well, and yet they went ahead and did it anyway.

I'm not defending their bad management.
But that fact just supports my argument. Some features had to be cut for budget reasons, not because of bad game design. That those budget reasons are based on screwed management is an entirely different topic.

 

[Loriac]

This is simply a design flaw in SRR. One that is probably based on a tight budget, and a focus of that budget on more important (in the minds of the designers) things.
If you really think 2mil is a lot for a team that needs to pay normal developer wages, you have no clue about game development costs. It would be a high budget for a team where everyone works to make the project their dream come true (and then start making money when the project starts selling, if at all) and is happy living off a minimum wage until then. But this is certainly not the case for a team of 20 people or so.

When they put out the original kickstarter, it was a team of 10. They added 25(!) staff (permanent or contract) for the project when they got their $1.8m funding. I don't understand why people continue to try to defend the retardedly bad management on evidence from HBS. Even fairly inexperienced project managers should know that adding that many people to a team for a short term project rarely works well, and yet they went ahead and did it anyway.

I'm not defending their bad management.
But that fact just supports my argument. Some features had to be cut for budget reasons, not because of bad game design. That those budget reasons are based on screwed management is an entirely different topic.

The budget 'reason' being that they burned 2/3 of the cash they obtained on useless team members. This doesn't in fact support your argument, which was that $2m is not much money to develop a game. $2m should have been more than enough to develop the game, but wasn't because i. they appear to be clueless at project management; and ii. their game design philosophy appears to have been based on mobile platform development experience rather than PC development experience which meant they made stupid mistakes - and as any decent project manager knows, design mistakes become exponentially more costly the later on during development that they're identified/fixed. It was even pointed out to them that their approach to savegames wouldn't fly for PC gamers, and they ignored that feedback throughout the development for SR:R; it was only when they saw the impact on sales that idiotic designs like this have that they went back and tried to refit their game engine to handle saves (at far greater cost, both in development time, and usability when creating mods for the original game which meant that many potential modders probably walked away in disgust).

 

[Infinitron]

Your statement that the staff members they added were "useless" is entirely unsupported. What, you think they were standing around there doing nothing? You think that lovely 2D isometric art the Codex spooged all over came out of nowhere?

 

[Excidium]

I was unaware they had 25 people working on the game, that is p. ridiculous. What did that many people even do?

 

[Loriac]

Your statement that the staff members they added were "useless" is entirely unsupported.

Its supported by the (low) quality of the initial end-product they created relative to the budget spent.

I was unaware they had 25 people working on the game, that is p. ridiculous. What did that many people even do?

35, not 25. I linked to an interview in an earlier post where the lead guy stated they went from 10 people to 35. I too have no idea why this was necessary, except perhaps as some kind of 'mine is bigger than yours' ego boost.

 

[Infinitron]

What did that many people even do?

Evidently, develop and release two games plus an editor in less time than it's taken more experienced companies to develop one. But let's go ahead and accuse them of incompetent project management because we were expecting a low budget game to be a high budget game. Or because we're butthurt about saves.

 

[Excidium]

What did that many people even do?

Evidently, make two games plus an editor in less time than it's taken more experienced companies to develop one. But let's go ahead and accuse them of incompetence because we were expecting a low budget game to be a high budget game. Or because we're butthurt about saves.

No dude, that's way too big a team for the scale of the projects they were working on.

 

[Loriac]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/197132/QA_Learning_from_Shadowrun_Returns_Kickstarter_success.php

At the time of the Kickstarter campaign, the total studio headcount was only 10 people, which would have been fine for the much more modest Shadowrun game that the $400,000 represented, but nowhere near what the team needed to execute the expanded vision. Over the last year we have grown the studio to a total of 35 people, including full-time employees, interns and contractors.

Building a team is alchemy. You may convince yourself it’s a science, but it’s really magic. And having to scale a team to over three times its original size while under a very tight timeline and budget was a real high wire act which I would not recommend doing if you can avoid it. Mitch [Gitelman] and I have been running studios for decades and so we should have known better then to attempt it -- but with the quality and dedication of our team members and some luck we pulled it off.

 

[Infinitron]

What did that many people even do?

Evidently, make two games plus an editor in less time than it's taken more experienced companies to develop one. But let's go ahead and accuse them of incompetence because we were expecting a low budget game to be a high budget game. Or because we're butthurt about saves.

No dude, that's way too big a team for the scale of the projects they were working on.

Not relative to the time it took to release them. Again, all that pretty 2D art? Came from somewhere. A fully functional user-friendly editor? Came from somewhere.

 

[Excidium]

They must work 4 hours a day there or something

 

[thesheeep]

From a developer's perspective, I also cannot really agree that the end result is fine for 35 people.
Piranha Bytes are about that size (more like 20, at least according to their website) and they pull off a game like Risen/Gothic every 2-3 years, which is much more work than an isometric game. Yes, more than 3 times the work, and I'm not talking about stuff like voice acting that the publisher usually takes care of.

I can only imagine that it took them a very long time to get everyone on track, essentially producing nothing, or not much in that period.
Or they had to screw some decisions over many times for whatever reason.
But whatever it was, a team of 35 people should be capable of more than the initial SRR.

We will probably see when they do their next game. If they manage to pull off something that is "worthy" for 35 people, I would take that as proof that something went wrong during the production of SRR.

 

[Angthoron]

Could be that PB has a lot of people that can work cross-department, so once art team is done, they can move to, I dunno, level design or coding or writing.

SRR team on the other hand could have a lot of "specialists" that might have part-time employment and come in to just do their bits, which would account for the large team size.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

^Yup. It's on that Jordan quote.

Over the last year we have grown the studio to a total of 35 people, including full-time employees, interns and contractors.

 

[Angthoron]

^Yup. It's on that Jordan quote.

Over the last year we have grown the studio to a total of 35 people, including full-time employees, interns and contractors.

Derp. Didn't read.

But yeah, it's just two completely different ways of doing things.

 

[Excidium]

God knows what the hell all those people did :mistary:

 

[Infinitron]

Piranha Bytes are about that size (more like 20, at least according to their website)

I find this hard to believe

 

[Metro]

N-e-way, waiting on Humble Bundle.

 

[thesheeep]

Piranha Bytes are about that size (more like 20, at least according to their website)

I find this hard to believe

Yet it is true.
I had some lectures from some PB devs years ago (as a dev trainee, good times...) and they definitely were a medium sized studio back then.
And over the last years, this hasn't changed. They do not follow a grow-as-much-as-you-can philosophy. Instead, they have found their favored size to operate at and try to keep that, only replacing people that left.

But maybe it is a bit unfair to compare a team that works together since over a decade to one of the same size that has just formed. I guess the development of Gothic 1 vs SRR would be a more fair comparison. And that is too long ago, so I have no clue how that went.