almondblight
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2004
- Messages
- 2,549
Hong Kong was a huge decline from Dragonfall in almost all areas. I'll repost what I said before:
SR:HK is a pretty steep decline from DF: DC. Probably the biggest problem was the mission design - there just weren't any missions as good as Dragonfall’s, and there were barely any challenging fights. Dragonfall also had a decent amount of non-combat gameplay. For instance, in a single mission in DF you have a choose your own adventure type element where you're sneaking up on an employee (with skillchecks as well), then you have an office where you have to guess the password for the computer by looking at hints on the guys personal devices, then you have a dialogue with the cleaning person you have to successfully navigate to not get the alarm raised (which is more complicated than the usual "Etiquette Cleaning: Is that a model 450F broom? Awesome! You won't call security, right?" stuff you get in HK).
In HK, you're mostly just clicking on every hotspot to trigger the next event (kind of like SRR). The only exceptions to this I can think of are the broken PDA in the bonus campaign and the knapsack puzzle in the museum mission (there's also a guess the password puzzle in the museum mission, but it requires that you Google it). You also get the feeling that they were trying to do more complex things, but didn’t have the time to do them correctly. You’re left with silly stuff like walking up to a cook who doesn’t know you at all and telling them they should poison their guest for being demanding (they readily agree), or walking up to another cook that doesn’t know you at all and telling them they should help you break into the apartment of their guest because the guest is demanding (different mission; they also readily agree).
The combat was a cakewalk 98% of the time. Part of this might stem from the lack of a Very Hard difficulty mode, but it's also because less attention was paid to encounter design in general. For instance, Dragonfall used turrets well in a number of missions. I don't think they showed up in HK at all, except that you could use them yourself in one part of the bonus campaign. The only two encounters I thought were decent were the one in the lobby during the fengshui mission (if you shoot your way in and don't try to sneak through the lobby) and the final fight in the bonus campaign. Dragonfall had a number of challenging encounters, so the lack of them in HK was pretty disappointing.
The backer content is also terrible. You have a lot of runners looking like comic-con attendees, and of course they all have to be super nice people. Shadowlands in Dragonfall seemed like an online forum for shadowrunners, and in HK it seemed like Reddit.
A lot of little touches were missing. There seemed to be a lot fewer checks than in Dragonfall. Definitely more racial checks (I don't remember any in HK), but also skill checks. They barely used e-mail, whereas it was used quite well in Dragonfall (people in the hub contacting you about updates, people from previous runs contacting you to catch up, etc.). They also did away with the claim payment system from Dragonfall (not a big thing, but it was a nice touch).
As for the writing - as others have said, the quantity isn’t an issue so much as the text dump nature of it. Dragonfall had some pretty text heavy sequences (like the team meetings or the conversation with Vauclair), but I always enjoyed it. SRHK is bad because it has really boring walls of text, and there’s little interaction from your character (other than selecting one of three different variations of “go on” every few paragraphs).
