Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Preview @ Kotaku

Kotaku has a new preview of the soon to be released Expansion Shadowrun: Dragonfall.

My visit to Berlin has only lasted for a handful of hours so far, but I'm already pondering moving in completely. Sure, an evil being from the early days of magic's re-emergence has set its sights on my group of happy murder chummers, but there's plenty to distract me from that fact. Plus, Mitch Gitelman has assured me that past the point where my demo ended the capmpaign really opens up, allowing my team and I to take on jobs as we see fit. Not sure I am ready for the responsibility.

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More information.

Sounds great. However I am wondering if the other big flaws of the game were sorted out. The balancing/skill progress/difficulty was quite bad in the initial game, and it was much too "static" and linear and felt more like an graphical adventure with tucked on combat than an RPG.

Well. We'll see in a couple of days!

Kordanor said:

Sounds great. However I am wondering if the other big flaws of the game were sorted out. The balancing/skill progress/difficulty was quite bad in the initial game, and it was much too "static" and linear and felt more like an graphical adventure with tucked on combat than an RPG.

Well. We'll see in a couple of days!

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In regards to skills, the problem I had with Dead Man's Switch is that they doled out Karma like it was fruit cake on Christmas day. Your character got so much of it so quickly you really never had to think about how to spend it; it was only a question of which skill to max out first.. However, I did find it refreshing that you only received the Karma for completing missions / advancing the story, rather than in the typical RPG where you receive exp for killing things. SRR is one of the few RPGs where your character can wisely intimidate / bluff their way past guards without regretting the loss of exp or loot you'd get from simply killing them.

Since they're making Dragonfall less linear, I'm hoping they'll handle the difficulty in the right way: Make the higher paying jobs more difficult and let us decide when we're ready for them. I think that's the way they'll go simply because enemy scaling would be a lot of work.

I'm really excited to see what they have in store for us though. Love that the companions aren't going to be generic hirelings this time.

True, too many skill points. But on the other hand they were somewhat needed to "correct" your character when you bet on the wrong horse. Some fighting skills were far superior to others, some skills were entirely useless, and some only could be used once or twice in the game - and when you learnt it when the moment where you could have used it already passed, you learnt it for nothing. In addition the first game gave you a hard time to estimate how much will still come. And so you never knew when to invest into items and so forth...

Pretty excited about this DLC.

Although I have some doubts about the nonlinear aspects. I have fiddled around with the editor a bit and played a few fan made modules. The editor is not really made for hub based mission progression, at least in my (amateur) opinion and most mods don't even try to pull off hubs in general. The solution they use could come across as very clunky.

Glad to see though, that they acknowledge some main aspects of the criticism and try to improve them. For me having a fleshed-out party in a party based RPG is more important than non linearity and judging from the preview they deliver in that regard.

You can argue that the skill progression is broken, but I don't think I have played a modern RPG with a system where I was fully satisfied. Anyway, it is not something that is very important to me in a RPG; strange, I know

I hope this turns out for the best and is successful, I would really like to see more DLC for this one.

Dragonfall is less interesting. Lot more interesting are the MODs that had time to ripen since DMS release.

I also hope that with the new campaign you can actually use your group members for dialogues.
I think it's kinda stupid if you have group members with great diplomatic skills but your dumb warrior main character has to do all the talking. Something I already hated in NWN2.

mercy said:

Dragonfall is less interesting. Lot more interesting are the MODs that had time to ripen since DMS release.

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Useless post, unless you care to elaborate why.

@kordanor: usually the case with Main char centered games. Nwn2 SoZ corrected that.