So Khajiit started playing Shadowrun Returns today. This one doesn’t care for the third person isometric perspective for an RPG but the game seems solid otherwise. Liking the skills and dialogue. Still have to get accustomed to the way things work (like for instance Khajiit’s character was fighting a “hellhound” alone and tried using a medthing to heal but this one couldn’t figure out how to make the character use it and she died).

I have Shadowrun Returns, but have not had a chance to play it yet!

Well poop

GOOD TASTE IN GAMES SER

But from an experienced player of the game, I will definitely recommend the DLCs Dragonfall and Hong Kong over the base game. Not to say that Vanilla!Shadowrun is bad (it’s pretty good actually) but those DLCs are on a whole different level man.

And remember.

Always geek the mage first, chummer!

Geek= kill, Khajiit presumes.

Shadow talk

Hey Khajiit was right! Geek=kill! The language used in these games is fun!

Khajiit likes how if you get cybernetic bodypart upgrades your magical potential suffers.

One of the things I really like about Shadowrun is that it has both magic and cybernetics. Usually you only get one in a setting. But SR balances things out by making so that you can only really go one route with a particular character. You can mage up, or cyber up. But not both. That would be too ridiculously uber.

Back in the pen and paper days, I did play a raven shaman with some cyber. Her backstory was that she was crippled in a run that went bad. The docs who saved her life (and restored her mobility) did so by giving her wired reflexes. Playing her was a challenge because her Magic stat took a hit from the cyber. She had to Initiate just to get her Magic back up to normal levels.

Khajiit agrees, that would be horribly OP to have both with no penalty. This one also thinks it makes good sense metaphysically if you see your character’s natural body as a vessel for storing arcane energy. You take away a body part and you make that vessel smaller, and thus, your pool of arcane energy.

Why are you guys talking about midichlorians?



So what archetype are you playing with, Cat? I prefer the Adept myself.

Khajiit is just experimenting right now. First character was Street Samurai. Second character was Rigger. This one liked having the drone around and his character could still do the bang bang stuff. May try an elf shaman or adept next.

So I started playing Shadowrun Returns today. Only took me about two years since I bought it. Null sheen chummer.

January is going to vote Dunky!

I know this is the weakest of the SR computer games. So I am trying to keep my expectations low. But it does have some headscratcher issues. The mouse is insanely over sensitive, and there does not seem to be any way to adjust it. At least not built into the menus. Maybe I can find something in the .ini files, if I can find those.

It is also really unintuitive. At character creation or when leveling up abilities, you buy the ability to use a power, like Killing Hands. But that does not give you the power. You have to go to a merchant and actually buy it from them too! And it looks like you can only have about 5 spells? I am guessing if you go over, you have to remove the excess? And just lose them forever? Unless you buy it again?

Likewise, the player's stash of items you can carry is ridiculously small. It is something like 5 or six items, and then you cannot have anything else? Thankfully weapons and spells are counted separately. But that is crazy.

It took me forever to figure out how to cast a spell. You select it from your inventory of stuff, then click on who you want to target. Which may include yourself. Or in the case of a Physical Adept, you cast it, then go to your weapon list, and pick it out of there. Weird system.

The mechanics of the game do not feel anything like Shadowrun at all. Though granted I have not played it beyond 2nd or 3rd Edition. It has all the same attributes: Body, Quickness, and so on. But the skills look completely different. And each is tied to an attribute, and cannot go above the attribute's value. So you are forced to raise both the attribute and the skill. Magic is apparently doable by anyone. You just have to put some points into Spellcasting and buy a spell. I did not see that coming. I played around with that just a little, and found there are only 4 totems to choose from for Shamans? Just 4? So January is not going to be a Raven Shaman after all. The Combat Pool and Hacking Pools are gone. The rolling six sided dice and having a target number seems to be gone. It looks like everything is just a straight percentage chance of success. But the allergies for metahumans seem to be gone, which is nice. I always thought that was annoying. Still, the nuts and bolts of playing it does not feel like playing Shadowrun at all.

I am playing January, so I am going Physical Adept. I had to give her about an extra 100 karma with the console after character creation to get her to the point where she is not useless, and able to actually do physical adept stuff, like hit people and make them fall down. I have read that the Physical Adepts are really nerfed in this game. Those people who said that are right! She has not gotten too far yet. I did meet a merchant who had some more clothes to sell. They all looked terrible, so I stayed with what I started with for now. I was able to buy a machete however.

Which is another thing that really annoyed me. You don't get any items or spells or abilities at character creation. Then the game immediately throws you into combat. This is fine if you plan to play a character who is a gun-bunny, as it gives you a submachine gun and a pistol. Not so fine if you want to play a physical adept or a magician. I cannot even imagine playing this game as a decker.

In the real Shadowrun, part of the character creation, and in creating your own archetype, is choosing how much money have to start with for starting gear. So you can start out with at least a sword, or assault rifle, or body armor, or array of spells, or whatever your character needs to do what they do. This felt like a kick in the teeth.

Still, the world-building in the game is top-notch. This is the world of 2050-2060 that I played in back in the old pen and paper days. They have the slang down, the artwork for characters looks just like from all the rulebooks, the factions I know and hate are all there: Universal Brotherhood, Lone Star, Halloweeners, etc... They get an A+ review from me for that.

And the mod support, is not good. It is a Unity engine game, and that goes with the territory sadly. I found some mods. Installing them and getting them to work is a crapshoot. Even simple things like adding new character portraits is difficult. The best way is to replace an existing portrait with your custom one, and give it the original picture's name. Otherwise you literally have to break out a hex editor to change the code in our picture. Great move guys. Ever hear of games like Neverwinter Nights that were made 20 years ago, that have using a custom portrait built into the game?

So the setting is fun. The fights are ok, all turn-based, isometric stuff. It looks a lot like the new X-Com games, or Wasteland 2. The game itself is really poorly made though.

I have played a lot more SR today. This game goes really fast, as it is almost completely linear. So far I have only come across one truly optional sidequest.

There is no manual, which makes trying to figure out how things work difficult. There is some in-game Help however. In the main hud there is a question mark you can click on, which will take you through a series of topics that explains most things at least somewhat.

I tried out a hired Rigger in one run. I did not like it much. Again, it took a lot for me to figure out how to use his drones. As it turns out a Rigger's drones appear in his list of weapons. You bring each one up, and click on a command to active them. That turns them on as characters. Otherwise they just follow the Rigger around. For each drone he has a active, a Rigger loses 1 Action Point. Action Points are scarce in this game, so it basically means a Rigger either uses their drones, or their meat body.

I also had a chance to run the matrix. You need a datajack and a deck to do so. The first time you have to, if your character does not have a jack and deck there is an NPC who can do the run, and bring you along as a spectator. But you still control his character as if it was you.

It was fun! That surprised me, as the matrix side of things never did anything for me in the pen and paper rpg. That was always something best left for NPCs, since it is so divorced from everything happening in the real world. When the decker is doing things, the rest of the players just sit there twiddling their thumbs. And when the rest of the players are getting into gunfights, the decker is there twiddling their thumbs.

But I liked it here. It works just like the regular combat in the game. The graphics are just a little different is all. As a decker you have a limited number of programs you can use, based on the quality of your deck. It is a lot like playing a mage, who has a limited number of spells they can have in their spellbook. They have to buy programs just like a mage has to buy spells too, btw. There are standard programs to attack and do damage with, healing, defense, and the like. There are also ESPs - Expert System Programs. They work exactly like summoned spirits, except they are AIs in the matrix. The decker summons them and controls them. They are a good touch, as otherwise you get outnumbered really fast. As in the pnp game, your opponents are various forms of IC. I also learned by accident that in addition to your programs, a decker in the matrix also has a standard attack they can always use that has no cooldown timer. You just click on your target, and you shoot out a ball of energy that does damage. Each time uses 1 Action Point. So if you have a Killer program (that does like 100 damage and costs 1 AP) but a one turn cooldown between uses, you can lead with the Killer, the spam the generic attack for the rest of your action points that turn.

Later in the game you start getting the good stuff that makes Shadowrun what it is supposed to be. But still cyberware is really pared down from what you see in the pen and paper game. A fully chromed razorboy in the pen and paper game is a titan striding the earth. Not here. It is really pretty optional.

I had some time to experiment with npc mages. I also took a lightning bolt spell for Jan. It works perfectly for her character idea of course. If you have spells there is a big button down at the lower right, next to your inventory button that has your grenades and medpacks. You click on that and it shows you your spells. There is no mana point cost. Most have a cooldown, so you cannot spam them again and again. Each has an action point cost to cast. So that limits how much you can cast. However, there is a Powerbolt spell (that really Jan ought to buy, now that I think of it). This does not work like a regular spell. Instead it shows up on your weapon bar, and you shoot it like a normal gun. Except it does not have any ammo and costs 1 AP each use.

Jan has some Physical Adept spells that she uses on a regular basis. One improves her running speed. This matters because she needs to get up to melee range, and there are usually some pretty big open spaces to cross to get there. Another gives her magical armor. I split her points between melee weapons and unarmed abilities to compare them. The melee weapons are definitely the way to go. Don't bother with an unarmed physical adept. It would probably be smarter for a phys ad to use a gun for a ranged weapon. That is because you only have on spellbook, and you have to put both your adept spells, and your regular spells in that. If you don't go with spells, you have all that slots for your chi magic (physical adept spells).

Back to the campaign. The story is good. It goes though nice twists and turns that has you meeting people and forming alliances. You go on some runs for them, and they later tag along on some of your runs. But most are only temporary at best. Only one - Coyote - seems to be around a lot. I really liked her. I wish you could have recruited all these npcs for every run, like you can with the companions in every other game. But instead when you do a run that requires more than just yourself, you have to hire a team of runners. There is a big pool of npcs to choose from. But they are the ones you got to know in all those quests. There also can be a steep learning curve in what they can do. You can look at their stats before you hire them. But since I don't know this game very well yet, I often don't know what I am looking at.

I have found it is best to have at least one mage, with a healing spell, a standard, single-target ranged attack, an AOE damage spell, and maybe a buff spell. There is a haste spell that gives a character more Action Points that is really useful. There are also Armor spells, and ones to give bonuses to hit. Plus there are summoning spells and foci. I have not really done much with the summoning. When the bad guys summon something, I just geek the mage, as it takes care of the spirit as well.

But back to recruiting generic shadowrunners for runs. You have to pay them up front with your own money. This becomes a massive sink in your resources. The game does not give you enough money to equip yourself, and continually hire runners for every job. The last one I did was with just one other person, because it was all I could afford. I found what looks like a money cheat, so I am going to try that before my next run.

I wish this game would let you do like Pillars of Eternity does, and allow you to create a custom team of Shadowrunners whom you could hire. That way you could always get exactly what you want each run. Sadly, you cannot change the loadouts of any of the npc runners you hare. At least not that I can tell. Although better would be some standard NPC companions who leveled up you, and whose inventories you controlled, like very other crpg on the planet.



Jan's first team of hired Shadowrunners

Jan's lightning bolt spell

An example of going into overwatch mode. With action points remaining, click on the arc symbol to the right of your gun and ammo type. You will shoot whatever moves into the yellow arc

Bugs

Here come the bug spirits

An example of the matrix, with two team deckers, and their ESPs in white, with the IC in red

These funky magic circles on the floor are ley lines. If your mage stands on them, you get bonuses to hit, damage, and so on.

Neat pics! Sounds like you may be enjoying it a little more maybe?

I am getting more into it, now that I am finally figuring out how it works. A lot of it is pure Shadowrun nostalgia of course. The rules are all different. But it is definitely the same world. The game is still poorly made however. It is from something like 2014 I think? But it looks like something from 2000.

Glad you and Jan enjoying Shadowrun. It sounds like lots of action.

Ok, adding custom portraits.

Here is a page about the various ways you can add portraits.

Portraits must be 212 x 278, and in the PNG format.

Place them in the Shadowrun\Shadowrun_Data\StreamingAssets\ContentPacks\Seattle\Art\Portraits folder.

The simplest way is to replace an existing portrait with your custom one, using the original portraits exact name. But you might see NPC runners appearing with the same portrait. I did trying this with January.

Today I found Personalized Player Portraits. In spite of the porn star pictures it unfortunately uses, it does work, though it can be tricky in implementing because the file paths are confusing.

First create your custom portrait as above. Instead of using an existing portrait's name, give it a name following the standard convention the game uses: For example, for elf females:

pc_elffemale_20
through
pc_elffemale_50

You don't want to use lower number than 20 because, reasons...

Now the tricky part. You want to go to your Shadowrun\Shadowrun_Data\StreamingAssets\ContentPacks\Seattle\Data\Portraits folder. Not the same folder you put your pictures in!

Find the seattle.pl.bytes and move it somewhere else or rename it something like seattle.pl.bytes.backup. Then copy the new seattle.pl.bytes file over from the mod.

Now you will have a ton of new picture options opened up for every race and gender. Basically those #20 - #50s. If you didn't provide pictures for each one it is no big deal. You will just see a gray image for those portrait options in character creation.


I have tested this on Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, or Hong Kong. So yay!

I beat Shadowrun Returns like an ork stepchild. The final battle was a good one. It was exciting, but not so insanely difficult that you have to cheat just to survive it. The game went very quickly. Except for one truly optional side-quest, the game is entirely linear. It is basically talk a bit to npcs, do a run, check with the vendors for new gear, repeat.

I liked the npcs, their lives, and their stories. Coyote was my favorite. I wound up bringing her along for almost all my runs. I wish I could have brought some of the others, like Paco and Armitage. The music was great, exactly what I expect for Shadowrun. The portrait artwork was excellent. It is clean, and with just the right amount of stylistic flair that you can see they are not meant to be picture perfect representations, without going too far and becoming caricatures.

The story itself was good. It starts out pretty standard, seamy underworld affair. You are hired by an old chummer who has been murdered. He had a dead man switch that automatically triggered a lawyer to contact you when he died. Said lawyer has a fat stack of nuyen for you, once you bring in his killer. That sends you down a wormhole of the Seattle underground, investigating a serial killer, an organ legger, and deeper into the Universal Brotherhood, and Inspect Spirits. Some old Shadowrun luminaries like Harlequin even appear at the end.

The Bugs in this seem different from what I recall. Back in the pen and paper days I remember Bugs coming in Flesh Form and True Form. They had extra armor against ballistic weapons, which made shooting them really difficult. They only had their normal armor against melee attacks, but you used your Willpower to hit, not your normal weapon skill. It took an unshakable will to defeat a spirit. But either way, normal weapons could kill them. But here all the Bugs are a combination of both forms. They start out with meat bodies completely vulnerable to guns. When you kill one, its True Form spirit rises from the body however. And it cannot be harmed with anything, including spells. At the end of the game they come along with Aegis, a magical bug-killing virus fired by a shotgun. That is all that can kill the True Forms.

It could be this stuff came along after I stopped playing. I was not around for Bug City, which is alluded to at the end of the game. Or maybe I am just not remembering correctly. Still, I do recall doing the Queen Euphoria adventure that our team got special armor piercing, discarding sabot ammo to use against the bugs. It wasn't anything magical. Just the top end milspec gear, and it worked on Bugs.

The nuts and bolts of the game itself still feels cheap and behind the times to be honest. It is definitely not a AAA game. It feels like something from the late 90s, early 00s. The modding is extremely difficult and scarce. These aren't the worst things in the world for a game. I still love playing Neverwinter Nights 1 and Kotor after all. It just seemed like a specific lack of effort on the part of the developers, where the art, music, and world-building was given a ton of tender loving care.

Next up I am going to try Dragonfall. This time I think I will do it with Hecate. I already made character portraits for her. She seems ideal for the Shadowrun world. I can easily picture her with wired reflexes and smartgun link. I think I will make her a Sniper/Decker, that way I won't have to use a npc for matrix runs. Maybe I will eventually circle back to doing Shadowrun Returns with her as well.

I started playing Dragonfall today. Like SR Returns, it starts you out right in the action, but only with a tiny bit of gear. This time I went with Hecate. Apparently since I put some starting points in the Decking skill the game gave me a cyberdeck and a datajack, in addition to a rifle (I also took Ranged Combat and Rifles). So the game has a decent algorithm that assigns your starting gear based on what skills you took in character creation.

Know how in Shadowrun Returns I was wishing you did not have to hire runners all the time, but instead had a stable pool of regular companions. This game has that. So far I have not once been offered a chance to hire runners for a run. Instead it is always a group of companions whom you start with. Unfortunately, they aren't the best at what they do. They do level up after a fashion. I am a couple of runs in now and the game gave me a prompt to assign new abilities to them. Basically each character has two new abilities to choose from, and you pick one. So that is something.

The hud is a little bit different in this game. It shows more stuff on the screen, so there is less cycling through things or going though nested links to get to your stuff. It works better.

I got further along in Dragonfall today. I learned that the big bad seems to be a dragon, hence the title. Duh! I also did my first run where I was able to recruit runners outside of the 'standard' companions. One of them - Lucky Strike - was exactly what I have been hoping for. She's a classic street samurai: cyberware, assault rifle, katana. She even has a few spells (which is a big no no for classic Shadowrun, but I'm not going to quibble, since she can shoot and carve up the bad guys). I expect to take her for every run.

I beat Dragonfall like a red-haired dwarf stepchild. While many people say it is better than Returns, I did not feel that way. It had some improvements, like a permanent team of companions. But honestly, those companions are not very good. The ones you hire were better. So what was the point?

I also did not much like the AI villain they included. It did not really serve the plot in any way, except to pad out the story by a few more missions. Something like an AI in Shadowrun should be the Big Bad in its own right. Like in the Renraku Arcology Shutdown. Here it was pretty much just a warmup boss fight on your way to the final showdowns.

So next up is Hong Kong, the final SR game. Though I have to admit I am getting a little fatigued with the franchise by now. So I might switch to something else instead.

I tried Hong Kong, but did not get too far. It seems to have more improvements in the game mechanics, including an ability to actually share items between the members of your team. But I could not stand the person they set up to be the main quest giver in the game. I wanted to kill her the moment I met her. The only thing stopping me was that the game would not let me.

So I gave up, and have moved on to something else. Maybe I will come back to it in six months or a year, and I will enjoy it more.

Agreed. Finally got Steam up and running a few weeks ago after a several-year absence (and forgetting of passwords), and thought I'd give these a go as I'd bought them back in like 2014 and never played them.

Shadowrun Returns...I loved! Great story, great atmosphere, LOVE LOVE LOVE the soundtrack. Very linear and simplistic, but sometimes all you want is the story, and it delivered for me.

Dragonfall I'm about 10 hours into sp far, and it's....fine. Enjoyable even. But it just isn't grabbing me like the first one. Not sure how much more I've got to do in it, I've heard it's a bit longer than the first so maybe it's just taking it's time warming up, so it's possible a grand finale storywise might alter my mind.

If I have any energy left when I get to that point, I might move on to Hong Kong, we'll see.