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Shadowrun Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition

Silva

Arcane
Joined
Jul 17, 2005
Messages
4,778
Location
Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
It's pretty fucking awful as an adventure game given all the noncombat parts are even more braindead than the combat parts.
Yeah, this. Emphasis mine. Braindead is the keyword.

Don't get me wrong bros, I'm an old Shadowrun fan here. I grew up with the 16 bit games and both were amazing for their time. The snes one had this dark and adult theme of industrial espionage, slangs, chop shops, you name it, with semi-realistic (and all dirty and grimy) graphics that were super original back then. And the music? My god it was ridiculously good. And the talk system? Ok, it gets boring fast but at least it had cojones to inovate. Then came the Genesis one and, OMG! it's to this day one of the greatest open-ended games ever made.

You see, those two games pushed the boundaries of their respective consoles and genres in their age. Then 20 or so years later - TWENTY OR SO YEARS LATER !!! - a dev comes and raise almost 2 million bucks for a new Shadowrun game, and the most it manages to create is a mobile-like tactics game that is braindead out of combat and masks this fact with walls of texts from some broken wanabee author!?

Put yourself in my position bros. If that's not reason to rage, I don't know what is.
 

Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,823
Linear isnt bad.
And most rpgs are shallow, including the old shadowrun games.

Stop being lazy and make an actual argument people can get behind.

As for the coding part, who gives a shit, you dont need to be a wizard with a computer to make a half decent rpg. Vogel did fine and im pretty sure most of his assets came straight from ms paint.
 

Silva

Arcane
Joined
Jul 17, 2005
Messages
4,778
Location
Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Arguments? Bro, any half brained being can see this is a glorified rpgmaker game with mobile tactics and bioware light "I can't code so I'll fill this with walls of texts" (and gay romances) shit. But if you can't see this, lemme help you:

This game couldn't depict an alive city if its life depended on it. Its hubs are embarrassingly small with half a dozen static sign-posts, I mean people, waiting for the player to be fed walls of text and pointless mini-quests ("Duh, do you want to donate for our charity DUH"). The game progress like a side-scroller, linear and thin like my dick. Screens fading out for new screens to fade in, like fake stage backgrounds. When the old games already had sprawling, continuous and persistent city maps that remained open and could explore until endgame.

And it's openness ? Or better speaking the lack of it? Dude, in Genesis SR you could ignore the plot entirely and live the life of a runner just doing dynamically generated missions, making new contacts, getting stuff and improving yourself etc. No walls of text hiding the lack of gameplay here, bro.

In fact, I never felt like a runner in this series, you know looking for gigs, negotiating the pay, hitting contacts to scoop the target etc like the old games did. All I felt was following the boring pet-story the devs kept feeding me.

And don't lemme start on the Matrix. It's a bad joke. Period.

The newest rpgs the devs ever played must have been Baldurs Gate 1 and some shitty browser MMO, because that's what this game is. They never met Black Isle or Troika. That's the only explanation I can come for the turd that this game is. That or they were malicious from the beginning ("let's give the them a Biowarian Shadowrun! Mwa ha ha ha!") but I prefer to think they are good souls.

Now it's my time to ask: Say one (1, uno, einz, ichi) aspect this game excels at. Just one. Where this game is as an example to be followed and replicated. Like Genesis SR sandboxing. Or Fallout C&C. Or Jagged tactics, etc. Say it. I'm waiting.
 
Last edited:

almondblight

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
2,549
Then came the Genesis one and, OMG! it's to this day one of the greatest open-ended games ever made.

The Genesis game is one of those games that looks great on paper, but has a horrible execution. Doing random side missions to earn money while investigating the main plot? That sounds great, until you realize the missions are insanely repetitive. During the first couple hours of the game, your missions will go like this:

* Mission: walk to location A, get text that says you got a package, walk to location B, get text saying it got dropped off.

* Mission: walk to location C, get text that says you're escorting a person, walk to location F, get text saying they got dropped off.

* Mission: walk to location B, get text that says you got a package, walk to location G, get text saying it got dropped off.

* Mission: walk to location E, get text that says you're escorting a person, walk to location A, get text saying they got dropped off.

* Mission: walk to abandoned building, press A until ghouls are dead, walk back and get paid.

* Mission: walk to location C, get text that says you got a package, walk to location F, get text saying it got dropped off.

* Mission: walk to location G, get text that says you're escorting a person, walk to location E, get text saying they got dropped off.

* Mission: walk to location B, get text that says you got a package, walk to location C, get text saying it got dropped off.

* Mission: walk to location D, get text that says you're escorting a person, walk to location A, get text saying they got dropped off.

* Mission: walk to abandoned building, press A until ghouls are dead, walk back and get paid.

That's not a hyperbole. You have one uninteresting fetch quest with randomized locations that you do over and over again - and which consists of nothing other than walking from one point to another, one escort quest which is the exact same thing but someone is following you, and one ghoul extermination quest that randomly comes up. Combat consists of holding down the attack button until something dies, and pretty much nothing else (at east for a non-magic user; I never tried a mage). Each quest takes about a minute, and you're going to be doing them over and over again for hours.

Eventually after a few hours of this you get a couple more quests to spending hours grinding over and over again - one where you go to a single room full of enemies and hold down attack until everyone dies, and one where you go into a corporate office to steal something (I gave up at this point).

The game has good ideas, and like I said, it looks good on paper. But the actual gameplay is grinding the same shallow quests over an over again - quests where you do nothing except walk from one point to another, or hold down attack until all enemies are dead.
 

Jason Liang

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2014
Messages
8,335
Location
Crait
Have you even seen a speedrun of Genesis Shadowrun? There's no need to grind runs in that game; that part's just for fun.

That being said, you realize that those cartridge games made like a bajillion dollars while PC games of that era were barely selling over 1000 copies right? Even a lesser known title like the Shadowrun Genesis cart sold hundreds of thousands of cartridges, mostly at full retail.
 

Sykar

Arcane
Joined
Dec 2, 2014
Messages
11,297
Location
Turn right after Alpha Centauri
It's pretty fucking awful as an adventure game given all the noncombat parts are even more braindead than the combat parts.
Yeah, this. Emphasis mine. Braindead is the keyword.

Don't get me wrong bros, I'm an old Shadowrun fan here. I grew up with the 16 bit games and both were amazing for their time. The snes one had this dark and adult theme of industrial espionage, slangs, chop shops, you name it, with semi-realistic (and all dirty and grimy) graphics that were super original back then. And the music? My god it was ridiculously good. And the talk system? Ok, it gets boring fast but at least it had cojones to inovate. Then came the Genesis one and, OMG! it's to this day one of the greatest open-ended games ever made.

You see, those two games pushed the boundaries of their respective consoles and genres in their age. Then 20 or so years later - TWENTY OR SO YEARS LATER !!! - a dev comes and raise almost 2 million bucks for a new Shadowrun game, and the most it manages to create is a mobile-like tactics game that is braindead out of combat and masks this fact with walls of texts from some broken wanabee author!?

Put yourself in my position bros. If that's not reason to rage, I don't know what is.

Both Shadowrun games on Sega and SNES had terrible combat, outright garbage. Compared to them the new Shadowrun seems like a stroke of genius. The "open world" of the Genesis game masked a pretty shallow and brief main plot where you are looking for your brother. Zero personality there and the randomized side missions to earn cash get repetetive fast and offer 0 reactivity.
SNES had the problem that it broke the rules so hard it is not even funny. Never have I seen a character so chromed up, such a pro decker and a top shaman to boot all in one neat package without a worry for the usual side effects cyberware would have on your essence. And again the combat was garbage. Both would have worked better with turn based combat. At least the Matrix was nice in the Sega version. Matrix system in SNES game was outright terrible. Log in, go to node, press attack, rinse and repeat.
Were those two games fun? Sure. Are they better than the newer ones? Objectively speaking? No.
 

Cross

Arcane
Joined
Oct 14, 2017
Messages
2,983
Both the Snes and Genesis Shadowrun games were clunky experiences with bad combat systems, but they made infiltration, investigation and runner management a prominent part of the game, something that's completely absent from the Harebrained games. In that respect, they scratch a Shadowrun itch that the Harebrained games really don't.
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,879
Have you even seen a speedrun of Genesis Shadowrun? There's no need to grind runs in that game; that part's just for fun.

That being said, you realize that those cartridge games made like a bajillion dollars while PC games of that era were barely selling over 1000 copies right? Even a lesser known title like the Shadowrun Genesis cart sold hundreds of thousands of cartridges, mostly at full retail.
So now sale numbers decide quality? Are you sure you didnt want to go to Reddit instead of rpgcodex?
 

Sykar

Arcane
Joined
Dec 2, 2014
Messages
11,297
Location
Turn right after Alpha Centauri
Both the Snes and Genesis Shadowrun games were clunky experiences with bad combat systems, but they made infiltration, investigation and runner management a prominent part of the game, something that's completely absent from the Harebrained games. In that respect, they scratch a Shadowrun itch that the Harebrained games really don't.

Hiring runners was not really a well developed thing. In the SNES version you had an invisible timer and when that ran out the runner would leave in the middle of combat even. There is one runner who betrays you but since they do not gain any advancements by the time you get to that point you can easily kill him anyway. Several runners were outright garbage to boot. That hidden runner, what was her name was also pretty underwhelming for the price she demanded.
Sega version was not that great either, iirc runners stayed permanently after hiring and since you could develop them there was little reason to change them later.
 

almondblight

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
2,549
Have you even seen a speedrun of Genesis Shadowrun? There's no need to grind runs in that game; that part's just for fun.

I mean, that's the game. Of course speedrunners use exploits and avoid most of the gameplay; they also end up with a game that's 45 minutes long. Acting like what they do is normal is idiotic - are you going to watch an Ocarina of Time speedrun and complain that the game is only 15 minutes long?
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Jan 12, 2004
Messages
11,538
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Black Goat Woods !@#*%&^
Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Now it's my time to ask: Say one (1, uno, einz, ichi) aspect this game excels at. Just one. Where this game is as an example to be followed and replicated. Like Genesis SR sandboxing. Or Fallout C&C. Or Jagged tactics, etc. Say it. I'm waiting.
Atmosphere. Art. Character building. Party building. Tight plot structure. "Tactics light". Story. Branching conversations. Skill checks. Characterization. Multiple resolutions.
 

Jimmious

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Joined
May 18, 2015
Messages
5,132
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I guess Silva expected a much more tactical approach to the SR universe, something closer to JA2 for example. With resource management, roster management, proper tactical combat etc.
It's true that in that aspect the new SR games offer close to nothing. But Zombra's points are indeed their strong ones
 

Silva

Arcane
Joined
Jul 17, 2005
Messages
4,778
Location
Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Jimmious , I expected living the life of a shadowrunner. Taking what the Genesis game did and going from there. An open sprawling city with ample opportunities for the kind of black ops that characterize the title, and the coding in place to allow me to revel in it dynamically. I want to call a Mr. Johnson for a gig. Negotiating the pay. Refusing if I wish. Or sealing the deal and then hit the street to get hire runners, gear, implants, fetishes etc. I want to negotiate pay and duration with other runners. I want to visit WeaponsWorld for a smartgun but get ambushed in the corner by the Halloweeners that I busted in my last run. I want lots of available Mr Johsons, contacts, factions. I want lone star sniffing my trail and the yakuza offering me a body-guarding gig. I want to watch Maria Mercurial show in the Cage, and enter for free because he trog at the door is a fella yak. Or just wake up in my coffin hotel and hitting a random matrix system just for fun and paydata. All this happening dynamically, chaotically around the city. Not by script. Dynamically. Oh and I didn't even hit the game "story". I want to ignore it completely if I so wish.

And the most important: I want the actual full fledged Corp infiltration be tense and dynamical and badass, like the Genesis did it only better. What my legwork says to me about the target? Do I need magical backup? Matrix overwatch? How is physical security? And when I'm in I want to have a proper stealth system in place, integrating physical, matrix and astral details. I want to be able to fucking FAIL on a mission and having to extract in shambles or risk death, maybe letting a fellow behind. I want my rep in the streets be hit for it and then being forced to rebuild from scratch. And I want the corp I hit start looking for me for retribution or something.

That's what I want. Not jobs that are actually little scripted stories where the only possible outcome is win the way the authors wanted. I don't even need a good combat system - make it action based like Genesis one damnit - but I damn sure want a good infiltration system.

*Edit: And no, nothing Zombra says is top notch. Atmosphere is worst than the Snes one. The only Art that's really top notch are the portraits (unless you like this Unity-like assets that are pretty and shiny), party building is joke. And wut is "Plot structure?" Man, if I want that I would be reading books or watching some Latin soap opera, not playing games. I play a game to PLAY. PLAAAAAAAAAAAY. Plot is what I see when I look back as a result of my playing.

Am I asking much ?
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
Patron
Joined
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Messages
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Black Goat Woods !@#*%&^
Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I expected a very specific game that I made up in my head, that bears no resemblance to either what was advertised or the very games from the past that I hold up as examples! I confuse deviations from my fantasies as "failures" instead of things that are simply different from what I think I want. You cut my sandwiches into squares! I wanted triangles!!
 

Silva

Arcane
Joined
Jul 17, 2005
Messages
4,778
Location
Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
I expected a very specific game that I made up in my head, that bears no resemblance to either what was advertised or the very games from the past that I hold up as examples! I confuse deviations from my fantasies as "failures" instead of things that are simply different from what I think I want. You cut my sandwiches into squares! I wanted triangles!!
Sega Genesis Shadowrun already makes half of what I described. The tabletop game makes 80%. Is it only fair to hope that the very authors who worked on the latter could at least replicate some of it.

Instead they did 0% .
 

undecaf

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 4, 2010
Messages
3,517
Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
The Harebrained Shadowruns sure could've done with more openness and dynamics that come from it.
 

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