The lodge ending is the only thing I didn't like in the game
You do all the missions and get money plus the best armor in the game and at the end old boy is all "ha! I used you to get what I want."
That's the way jobs work, chief
0
38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
I had trouble on the cyber zombie mission, died on every encounter until I knew to creep forward to just get in range of the decker each time. I don't think my character was very well planned in dragonfall the first time though.
How do y'all feel about the difficulty of the games? I played through them on normal because "hard" usually just means "bullshit and worse aim", but I was able to faceroll HK's combat a little too easily, will probably jack it up for the best run through.
The only time I actually factually died died was on my first go through of the lodge initiation mission, because fuck that mission. Though I never did do the rest of the lodge stuff, other than that one thing they asked you to do when raiding Aztech.
I found both of them pleasantly challenging without being over the top.
The rescue/escort/cybertrollguy mission was tedious simply because of how you have to creep forward, nuke the rigger, creep again, etc, and the cyber cult/kill the AI god one is a little more brutal than necessary, but pretty spot on other than that.
0
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
What I really want now that I think about it is a Shadowrun game done by the Wasteland 2 (and soon Wasteland 3) guys. Create and flesh out your own custom party, focus less on intraparty dynamics but more on the storyline and the runs and the clients and all that. And you can test out several builds at once instead of having to go through the entire game again.
Mostly I just want to be able to have an actually useful shaman on the main team without devoting my main character to it. Gobbet and Dietrich are super cool, don't get me wrong, but they're unoptimized as fuck and someone who's putting out an average of like 3 damage a round I just don't want to bring along on missions.
+1
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
What I really want now that I think about it is a Shadowrun game done by the Wasteland 2 (and soon Wasteland 3) guys. Create and flesh out your own custom party, focus less on intraparty dynamics but more on the storyline and the runs and the clients and all that. And you can test out several builds at once instead of having to go through the entire game again.
Mostly I just want to be able to have an actually useful shaman on the main team without devoting my main character to it. Gobbet and Dietrich are super cool, don't get me wrong, but they're unoptimized as fuck and someone who's putting out an average of like 3 damage a round I just don't want to bring along on missions.
I dunno, I think they work fine as pure support characters casting defensive spells, and you can optimize the PC to deal so much constant damage that throughput was never a huge struggle. Mages in Hong Kong, in particular, are just absolutely devastating. Dragon Lines OP.
0
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
What I really want now that I think about it is a Shadowrun game done by the Wasteland 2 (and soon Wasteland 3) guys. Create and flesh out your own custom party, focus less on intraparty dynamics but more on the storyline and the runs and the clients and all that. And you can test out several builds at once instead of having to go through the entire game again.
Mostly I just want to be able to have an actually useful shaman on the main team without devoting my main character to it. Gobbet and Dietrich are super cool, don't get me wrong, but they're unoptimized as fuck and someone who's putting out an average of like 3 damage a round I just don't want to bring along on missions.
I dunno, I think they work fine as pure support characters casting defensive spells, and you can optimize the PC to deal so much constant damage that throughput was never a huge struggle. Mages in Hong Kong, in particular, are just absolutely devastating. Dragon Lines OP.
But defensive spells seem so pointless when you could just kill them faster. I had heal and air barrier on my revolver shaman and still barely used them because like "well I don't need that extra bit of cover if I just shoot this guy with an angle on me dead." Hasting Duncan so he could pop pop twice a round was alright but I'd rather have izz just lobbing grenades instead, and Mark Target is generally better than Aim unless you're bouncing it with a leyline, because there's usually one priority target I'm focusing down at a time.
Oh my god, and Gobbet's flush. It only worked like 50% of the time even after channeled haste giving her an aim buff. Flush is one of the strongest abilities in the game and you don't want it being THAT unreliable.
Actually wait, did Gobbet have unbalancing strike like Dietrich had and I just totally missed it? That was actually a very useful ability (mark target + damage, coo), but even then Dietrich was so bad at landing it didn't feel good to use.
Also, is there anything you can do to mod Spirit hit %s? Like does more spirit control make them better at hitting? I summoned a Level IV water ele when my summoning/control was at 4/4 (after gear) in the plastic faced man mission and it had like a 30% chance to hit at best point blank, which seemed super low. If you can't improve that then it's even more silly that you have to keep paying for the privilege to summon spirits.
0
BRIAN BLESSEDMaybe you aren't SPEAKING LOUDLY ENOUGHHHRegistered Userregular
Man, the Ka Feis were amazing to follow. The whole schisms between family really struck a chord with me because it had this very Chinese bent to it that I really, strongly identified with.
Everyone has expectations and assumptions that the elder son and the younger son will follow in the footsteps of the parents, and sometimes it gets emotionally tough in a traditionally conservative household - to deal with the reality, that sometimes placing the needs of the family before your own is the only way for the family to survive.
Man, the Ka Feis were amazing to follow. The whole schisms between family really struck a chord with me because it had this very Chinese bent to it that I really, strongly identified with.
Everyone has expectations and assumptions that the elder son and the younger son will follow in the footsteps of the parents, and sometimes it gets emotionally tough in a traditionally conservative household - to deal with the reality, that sometimes placing the needs of the family before your own is the only way for the family to survive.
There was an article I read a while back - somebody probably linked it in this very thread, although I can't remember when it was - that talked a lot about the level of "local color" that the writers had invested in HK as a setting. IIRC the person who wrote it actually was from Hong Kong, or maybe their parents were. But it sounded like the dev/writing team really did their homework.
The only thing I can specifically remember them talking about was how they found the news discussion threads on Shadowlands hilarious. Apparently there is this very Chinese-Internet way of discussing news, where everyone knows state-censored public statements are either absurdly whitewashed or bald-faced lies, and you have to know how to read between the lines to actually understand what's going on. The author said that they nailed it.
It was an interesting read, since a lot of times when dealing with settings like this (especially in east Asia) many western writers have a tendency to default to stereotypes and traditional media tropes, and a more typical response from the locals is, "Yeah, it's not really like this at all." It tied in to one of the things I really liked about Gaichu as a character. It would be easy to have lazily written a cyberpunk zombie samurai as something straight out of a bad anime, but instead they grounded him strongly into a very nationalistic, Shinto-Confucian, pre-WWII Japanese militarized world that it seems like you hardly ever see in media depictions.
+13
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Gaichu could have gone so wrong - he could have been the most 90s collection of tough guy cliches - and instead he's one of the warmest and most humane characters in the series.
That was a great article. I don't remember a whole lot of specifics but one that struck me was that apparently they got a perfect soundalike for the MTR announcer voice. That's a level of detail and research that would be invisible to 99.9 percent of the game's audience but they did it anyway.
How do y'all feel about the difficulty of the games? I played through them on normal because "hard" usually just means "bullshit and worse aim", but I was able to faceroll HK's combat a little too easily, will probably jack it up for the next run through.
The only time I actually factually died died was on my first go through of the lodge initiation mission, because fuck that mission. Though I never did do the rest of the lodge stuff, other than that one thing they asked you to do when raiding Aztech.
In Dragonfall I didn't realize there were difficulty settings. In HK I put it on Hard but wished it were a little bit harder. I am someone who wants to have to reload key boss fights like 3-5 times because I failed the first few times .
Gaichu could have gone so wrong - he could have been the most 90s collection of tough guy cliches - and instead he's one of the warmest and most humane characters in the series.
That was a great article. I don't remember a whole lot of specifics but one that struck me was that apparently they got a perfect soundalike for the MTR announcer voice. That's a level of detail and research that would be invisible to 99.9 percent of the game's audience but they did it anyway.
Yeahhh I really need to replay this game with the director's cut, not just to see the epilogue, but to actually meet Gaichu instead of murdering him because I met him on the very last mission I completed...(normally I would recruit all possible NPCs in a game, but I was so fond of my team as it was that it would have felt unnatural to add someone--who they didn't want--at the very end of the game just because he was recruitable).
How do y'all feel about the difficulty of the games? I played through them on normal because "hard" usually just means "bullshit and worse aim", but I was able to faceroll HK's combat a little too easily, will probably jack it up for the next run through.
The only time I actually factually died died was on my first go through of the lodge initiation mission, because fuck that mission. Though I never did do the rest of the lodge stuff, other than that one thing they asked you to do when raiding Aztech.
In Dragonfall I didn't realize there were difficulty settings. In HK I put it on Hard but wished it were a little bit harder. I am someone who wants to have to reload key boss fights like 3-5 times because I failed the first few times .
Gaichu could have gone so wrong - he could have been the most 90s collection of tough guy cliches - and instead he's one of the warmest and most humane characters in the series.
That was a great article. I don't remember a whole lot of specifics but one that struck me was that apparently they got a perfect soundalike for the MTR announcer voice. That's a level of detail and research that would be invisible to 99.9 percent of the game's audience but they did it anyway.
Yeahhh I really need to replay this game with the director's cut, not just to see the epilogue, but to actually meet Gaichu instead of murdering him because I met him on the very last mission I completed...(normally I would recruit all possible NPCs in a game, but I was so fond of my team as it was that it would have felt unnatural to add someone--who they didn't want--at the very end of the game just because he was recruitable).
Doing Gaichu's mission first, or nearly first, is one of the more "efficient" ways to play the game simply because builds that take a bit of karma to really blossom, for example, can get through that mission with near zero or actually zero combat.
Man, the Ka Feis were amazing to follow. The whole schisms between family really struck a chord with me because it had this very Chinese bent to it that I really, strongly identified with.
Everyone has expectations and assumptions that the elder son and the younger son will follow in the footsteps of the parents, and sometimes it gets emotionally tough in a traditionally conservative household - to deal with the reality, that sometimes placing the needs of the family before your own is the only way for the family to survive.
There was an article I read a while back - somebody probably linked it in this very thread, although I can't remember when it was - that talked a lot about the level of "local color" that the writers had invested in HK as a setting. IIRC the person who wrote it actually was from Hong Kong, or maybe their parents were. But it sounded like the dev/writing team really did their homework.
The only thing I can specifically remember them talking about was how they found the news discussion threads on Shadowlands hilarious. Apparently there is this very Chinese-Internet way of discussing news, where everyone knows state-censored public statements are either absurdly whitewashed or bald-faced lies, and you have to know how to read between the lines to actually understand what's going on. The author said that they nailed it.
It was an interesting read, since a lot of times when dealing with settings like this (especially in east Asia) many western writers have a tendency to default to stereotypes and traditional media tropes, and a more typical response from the locals is, "Yeah, it's not really like this at all." It tied in to one of the things I really liked about Gaichu as a character. It would be easy to have lazily written a cyberpunk zombie samurai as something straight out of a bad anime, but instead they grounded him strongly into a very nationalistic, Shinto-Confucian, pre-WWII Japanese militarized world that it seems like you hardly ever see in media depictions.
I don't remember if it was that article or another one but at least one person of Hong Kongese descent mentioned that being able to call Kindly Cheng "Auntie" as an honorific is suuuuuuuuuuuuuper Hong Kong and a really authentic touch.
How do y'all feel about the difficulty of the games? I played through them on normal because "hard" usually just means "bullshit and worse aim", but I was able to faceroll HK's combat a little too easily, will probably jack it up for the next run through.
The only time I actually factually died died was on my first go through of the lodge initiation mission, because fuck that mission. Though I never did do the rest of the lodge stuff, other than that one thing they asked you to do when raiding Aztech.
In Dragonfall I didn't realize there were difficulty settings. In HK I put it on Hard but wished it were a little bit harder. I am someone who wants to have to reload key boss fights like 3-5 times because I failed the first few times .
Gaichu could have gone so wrong - he could have been the most 90s collection of tough guy cliches - and instead he's one of the warmest and most humane characters in the series.
That was a great article. I don't remember a whole lot of specifics but one that struck me was that apparently they got a perfect soundalike for the MTR announcer voice. That's a level of detail and research that would be invisible to 99.9 percent of the game's audience but they did it anyway.
Yeahhh I really need to replay this game with the director's cut, not just to see the epilogue, but to actually meet Gaichu instead of murdering him because I met him on the very last mission I completed...(normally I would recruit all possible NPCs in a game, but I was so fond of my team as it was that it would have felt unnatural to add someone--who they didn't want--at the very end of the game just because he was recruitable).
Doing Gaichu's mission first, or nearly first, is one of the more "efficient" ways to play the game simply because builds that take a bit of karma to really blossom, for example, can get through that mission with near zero or actually zero combat.
I just did the missions in order of which seemed most interesting (and I was right--the Gaichu mission was one of the least interesting, to me). I did not think the game's level of challenge was such that an 'efficient' mission route was necessary.
I wanna talk about something, and I'm hoping you folks might humor me.
I picked up the editor a while back. After getting back up to speed by spending a week building a bunch of dopey stuff... I've been building an actual thing I'm beginning to become proud of.
Scintillating, I know.
This brings me to the something I want to talk about:
I've always hated itemization systems where the player just moves through the "tiers". You buy a suit of armor for $X, and it provides Y defense. A little later, you spend 2($X), and get 1.5(Y) defense. Even later, you spend 3($X)... You get it. I'm sure you're all familiar with these systems. You're options are to sink your money into incremental improvements, or hamstring yourself to eventually get the "final" suit of armor and finally get off the treadmill.
Worse yet, you really like how armor A looks, but armor B is demonstrably better.
I both hate the treadmill and love looking fly.
Let me offer up one system I've been working on:
In my... Game (it feels weird to call it that, but I'm trying to really do something different from the core SR:R gameplay) you get access to a personal workshop. You can use this workshop to craft new gear, upgrade existing gear, and repair/rebuild "broken/ruined" equipment you find while on jobs (aka "loot system"). The only part that applies to this context is the upgrade part.
The premise is that you buy the suit of armor you think looks cool. You take it back to your workshop, and apply upgrades to it to increase it's defense, stat bonuses, and abilities. Tailoring it to suit your play style and your character. Each suit can take up to three upgrades, such as "Armor Patches" (defense +3), "Reflex Actuators" (+2 quickness), "Strength Servos" (+2 strength), "Blur Projector" (+1 Dodge), etc. You can stack any upgrade you want, building a suit of armor that is almost actually bulletproof, or a tech suit that just buffs the hell out of you.
This applies to weapons, too. There's a few base weapons in each category, you buy/find those, then upgrade them to suit. The upgrades are funded by some cash, and consumable resources you find on jobs (Scrap for physical items, Crystalized Mana for magic items).
Right now I've just built enough to prove it can be done. Building the full system will be rather time consuming, so I'm looking for some feedback before I delve too deep.
Does this sound like fun gameplay? Would you rather pick the items you want and upgrade them to increase your power, or buy just buy ever increasingly powerful items?
Anon the Felon on
+16
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
That's sort of how Destiny handles things, and I think it works very well.
I always preferred and like how Earthdawn handled gear - as you became more powerful, your magic items did. You unlocked its power by learning more about its history and attuning yourself (which was built into the lore) to the item - making it more powerful as your legend (xp/level) grew.
It could then make sense in and out of game for a character to keep a family heirloom vs dropping a sword into the trash pile during the first dungeon when you came across that first +1 weapon.
Well, double darn. I again ran into the limitations of the engine/toolset. The incredible work that's needed to do only moderately complex actions is both literally ridiculous, and arduously monotonous.
So, now I'm building a MUD.
That said. I did make a half dozen maps of various size and complexity. A lot of hours went into making them pretty pretty.
Is anyone actually interested in trying some stuff? I've got a boat you can walk in and on (similar design to the exterior of the base in HK), a player base in an open grove with a Mad Max junk wall and selectable out buildings... There's a couple small/medium city areas, mostly with a few interiors done.
Anyone feel like some maps would help you get started? My ambitions were too great, but someone just trying to tell a scene or a small story could do great work with the toolset.
These all would come with some really complex triggers, so you can see how to move a car prop down the road and trigger events by using invisible actors and discrete paths.
Any recommendations on class choice for hong kong? i was gonna run a combat decker this time given the revamped matrix, however your party seems to cover all slots but mage, which i last ran in DMS.
Any recommendations on class choice for hong kong? i was gonna run a combat decker this time given the revamped matrix, however your party seems to cover all slots but mage, which i last ran in DMS.
The decker squaddie isn't extremely well optimized for speed, and there are a couple of time limit hacks that are brutal with her. I ran a decker/swords/chi combo and I was able to handle the tougher hacks and missions where you don't have your full team on-hand.
i was thinking pistol decker with enough rigging for a med bot. i ran a troll phys ad with a katana in dragonfall and once enough karma went in it was a complete beast.
i was thinking pistol decker with enough rigging for a med bot. i ran a troll phys ad with a katana in dragonfall and once enough karma went in it was a complete beast.
Swords are even better in Hong Kong because they actually have a significant amount of support, item-wise. There's a machete in a loyalty mission* that strips armor and causes bleeding damage, and a lot of others you can buy.
* be sure you're cranking your melee, or you won't get the option to get this thing.
0
38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
edited December 2016
Mage is good times in Hong Kong because bouncing exploding spells is the most op thing in the game. Monofilament whip is pretty close or better.
If you leave Isabel as your decker get ready to become good friends with save scumming
I remember there's some taser sword that stuns people real early on. I always run with a rifle person though, another person to shoot dudes is always good.
If you leave Isabel as your decker get ready to become good friends with save scumming
Why? She was more than capable of pretty much everything on normal difficulty, at least. Like I think I had to save scum once towards the end of the game but that was because I fucked up, not her.
+2
38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
edited December 2016
Yeah that end part is brutal. Isobel is not as optimized as a player can get for it.
38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
Maybe I just suck at the decking. I lost every stealth part 10 times, ended up spending a good 2-3 hours on that one segment because I kept running out of time.
When I brought my PC decker there I one shot it.
If you want to use swords, you're better off being an Adept
Samurai melee I'd be hard pressed to not use hand razors or monofilament whip
You can be a Decker and an Adept. My HK character was a sword adept decker, and she ruled.
There's one floor in the penultimate mission where you have to trigger an alarm, then run to a room, then pull a tough hack, all within a very tight time constraint while guards flood into the floor. I wanted my main PC to stay on point to ginsu the guards, but Is0bel couldn't do it, no matter how many times I save scummed. Then I switched off and had Izzy grenade the guards while my PC did the hack, and it went off without a hitch. Between her stumpy little legs taking too long to get to the terminal and not being fully optimized for hacking speed, Is0bel just was not the decker for that job.
Maybe I just suck at the decking. I lost every stealth part 10 times, ended up spending a good 2-3 hours on that one segment because I kept running out of time.
When I brought my PC decker there I one shot it.
It's worth mentioning that the decking/cyberspace parts are pretty different in Dragonfall and Hong Kong. HK has a minigame aspect, and they are generally shorter.
Posts
That's the way jobs work, chief
Also in DMS I didn't go shotguns so...
I found both of them pleasantly challenging without being over the top.
The rescue/escort/cybertrollguy mission was tedious simply because of how you have to creep forward, nuke the rigger, creep again, etc, and the cyber cult/kill the AI god one is a little more brutal than necessary, but pretty spot on other than that.
Mostly I just want to be able to have an actually useful shaman on the main team without devoting my main character to it. Gobbet and Dietrich are super cool, don't get me wrong, but they're unoptimized as fuck and someone who's putting out an average of like 3 damage a round I just don't want to bring along on missions.
I dunno, I think they work fine as pure support characters casting defensive spells, and you can optimize the PC to deal so much constant damage that throughput was never a huge struggle. Mages in Hong Kong, in particular, are just absolutely devastating. Dragon Lines OP.
But defensive spells seem so pointless when you could just kill them faster. I had heal and air barrier on my revolver shaman and still barely used them because like "well I don't need that extra bit of cover if I just shoot this guy with an angle on me dead." Hasting Duncan so he could pop pop twice a round was alright but I'd rather have izz just lobbing grenades instead, and Mark Target is generally better than Aim unless you're bouncing it with a leyline, because there's usually one priority target I'm focusing down at a time.
Oh my god, and Gobbet's flush. It only worked like 50% of the time even after channeled haste giving her an aim buff. Flush is one of the strongest abilities in the game and you don't want it being THAT unreliable.
Actually wait, did Gobbet have unbalancing strike like Dietrich had and I just totally missed it? That was actually a very useful ability (mark target + damage, coo), but even then Dietrich was so bad at landing it didn't feel good to use.
Also, is there anything you can do to mod Spirit hit %s? Like does more spirit control make them better at hitting? I summoned a Level IV water ele when my summoning/control was at 4/4 (after gear) in the plastic faced man mission and it had like a 30% chance to hit at best point blank, which seemed super low. If you can't improve that then it's even more silly that you have to keep paying for the privilege to summon spirits.
Everyone has expectations and assumptions that the elder son and the younger son will follow in the footsteps of the parents, and sometimes it gets emotionally tough in a traditionally conservative household - to deal with the reality, that sometimes placing the needs of the family before your own is the only way for the family to survive.
There was an article I read a while back - somebody probably linked it in this very thread, although I can't remember when it was - that talked a lot about the level of "local color" that the writers had invested in HK as a setting. IIRC the person who wrote it actually was from Hong Kong, or maybe their parents were. But it sounded like the dev/writing team really did their homework.
The only thing I can specifically remember them talking about was how they found the news discussion threads on Shadowlands hilarious. Apparently there is this very Chinese-Internet way of discussing news, where everyone knows state-censored public statements are either absurdly whitewashed or bald-faced lies, and you have to know how to read between the lines to actually understand what's going on. The author said that they nailed it.
It was an interesting read, since a lot of times when dealing with settings like this (especially in east Asia) many western writers have a tendency to default to stereotypes and traditional media tropes, and a more typical response from the locals is, "Yeah, it's not really like this at all." It tied in to one of the things I really liked about Gaichu as a character. It would be easy to have lazily written a cyberpunk zombie samurai as something straight out of a bad anime, but instead they grounded him strongly into a very nationalistic, Shinto-Confucian, pre-WWII Japanese militarized world that it seems like you hardly ever see in media depictions.
That was a great article. I don't remember a whole lot of specifics but one that struck me was that apparently they got a perfect soundalike for the MTR announcer voice. That's a level of detail and research that would be invisible to 99.9 percent of the game's audience but they did it anyway.
In Dragonfall I didn't realize there were difficulty settings. In HK I put it on Hard but wished it were a little bit harder. I am someone who wants to have to reload key boss fights like 3-5 times because I failed the first few times .
Yeahhh I really need to replay this game with the director's cut, not just to see the epilogue, but to actually meet Gaichu instead of murdering him because I met him on the very last mission I completed...(normally I would recruit all possible NPCs in a game, but I was so fond of my team as it was that it would have felt unnatural to add someone--who they didn't want--at the very end of the game just because he was recruitable).
Doing Gaichu's mission first, or nearly first, is one of the more "efficient" ways to play the game simply because builds that take a bit of karma to really blossom, for example, can get through that mission with near zero or actually zero combat.
White FC: 0819 3350 1787
I don't remember if it was that article or another one but at least one person of Hong Kongese descent mentioned that being able to call Kindly Cheng "Auntie" as an honorific is suuuuuuuuuuuuuper Hong Kong and a really authentic touch.
I just did the missions in order of which seemed most interesting (and I was right--the Gaichu mission was one of the least interesting, to me). I did not think the game's level of challenge was such that an 'efficient' mission route was necessary.
I picked up the editor a while back. After getting back up to speed by spending a week building a bunch of dopey stuff... I've been building an actual thing I'm beginning to become proud of.
Scintillating, I know.
This brings me to the something I want to talk about:
I've always hated itemization systems where the player just moves through the "tiers". You buy a suit of armor for $X, and it provides Y defense. A little later, you spend 2($X), and get 1.5(Y) defense. Even later, you spend 3($X)... You get it. I'm sure you're all familiar with these systems. You're options are to sink your money into incremental improvements, or hamstring yourself to eventually get the "final" suit of armor and finally get off the treadmill.
Worse yet, you really like how armor A looks, but armor B is demonstrably better.
I both hate the treadmill and love looking fly.
Let me offer up one system I've been working on:
In my... Game (it feels weird to call it that, but I'm trying to really do something different from the core SR:R gameplay) you get access to a personal workshop. You can use this workshop to craft new gear, upgrade existing gear, and repair/rebuild "broken/ruined" equipment you find while on jobs (aka "loot system"). The only part that applies to this context is the upgrade part.
The premise is that you buy the suit of armor you think looks cool. You take it back to your workshop, and apply upgrades to it to increase it's defense, stat bonuses, and abilities. Tailoring it to suit your play style and your character. Each suit can take up to three upgrades, such as "Armor Patches" (defense +3), "Reflex Actuators" (+2 quickness), "Strength Servos" (+2 strength), "Blur Projector" (+1 Dodge), etc. You can stack any upgrade you want, building a suit of armor that is almost actually bulletproof, or a tech suit that just buffs the hell out of you.
This applies to weapons, too. There's a few base weapons in each category, you buy/find those, then upgrade them to suit. The upgrades are funded by some cash, and consumable resources you find on jobs (Scrap for physical items, Crystalized Mana for magic items).
Right now I've just built enough to prove it can be done. Building the full system will be rather time consuming, so I'm looking for some feedback before I delve too deep.
Does this sound like fun gameplay? Would you rather pick the items you want and upgrade them to increase your power, or buy just buy ever increasingly powerful items?
It could then make sense in and out of game for a character to keep a family heirloom vs dropping a sword into the trash pile during the first dungeon when you came across that first +1 weapon.
So, now I'm building a MUD.
That said. I did make a half dozen maps of various size and complexity. A lot of hours went into making them pretty pretty.
Is anyone actually interested in trying some stuff? I've got a boat you can walk in and on (similar design to the exterior of the base in HK), a player base in an open grove with a Mad Max junk wall and selectable out buildings... There's a couple small/medium city areas, mostly with a few interiors done.
Anyone feel like some maps would help you get started? My ambitions were too great, but someone just trying to tell a scene or a small story could do great work with the toolset.
These all would come with some really complex triggers, so you can see how to move a car prop down the road and trigger events by using invisible actors and discrete paths.
Just let me know!
And be careful with cash.
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
The decker squaddie isn't extremely well optimized for speed, and there are a couple of time limit hacks that are brutal with her. I ran a decker/swords/chi combo and I was able to handle the tougher hacks and missions where you don't have your full team on-hand.
Swords are even better in Hong Kong because they actually have a significant amount of support, item-wise. There's a machete in a loyalty mission* that strips armor and causes bleeding damage, and a lot of others you can buy.
* be sure you're cranking your melee, or you won't get the option to get this thing.
If you leave Isabel as your decker get ready to become good friends with save scumming
we're moving towards melee decker it seems!
monofilament whips remind me of cyber city oedo 808 aka the greatest of all anime.
Samurai melee I'd be hard pressed to not use hand razors or monofilament whip
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Why? She was more than capable of pretty much everything on normal difficulty, at least. Like I think I had to save scum once towards the end of the game but that was because I fucked up, not her.
just realized that between Glory and Eiger, DF had more heavy hitters on the roster than HK (which they make up, generally, in utility)
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When I brought my PC decker there I one shot it.
You can be a Decker and an Adept. My HK character was a sword adept decker, and she ruled.
There's one floor in the penultimate mission where you have to trigger an alarm, then run to a room, then pull a tough hack, all within a very tight time constraint while guards flood into the floor. I wanted my main PC to stay on point to ginsu the guards, but Is0bel couldn't do it, no matter how many times I save scummed. Then I switched off and had Izzy grenade the guards while my PC did the hack, and it went off without a hitch. Between her stumpy little legs taking too long to get to the terminal and not being fully optimized for hacking speed, Is0bel just was not the decker for that job.
It's worth mentioning that the decking/cyberspace parts are pretty different in Dragonfall and Hong Kong. HK has a minigame aspect, and they are generally shorter.