Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Interview @ DHGF

Die Hard Game Fan interivews Mike McCain the Project Lead of Shadowrun Dragonfall.

Diehard GameFAN: Will players be able to port their characters from “Dead Man’s Switch” over to Dragonfall or with this require an entire new protagonist?

Mike McCain: Dragonfall’s story is completely independent of the story told in “Dead Man’s Switch”. As such, you’ll create a new main character when you begin the Dragonfall campaign.

Diehard GameFAN: Approximately how long will it take to complete Dragonfall‘s core storyline and how many options/side quests will it contain?

Mike McCain: Our early playtests suggest that the campaign is actually longer than anticipated. We initially set out to create an experience somewhere in the 8-10 hours range. It currently looks like even a bare-minimum playthrough would take more than 10 hours, and I think you can count on at least 12 to 15 hours if you’re exploring and doing more of the game’s side content. We’re also trying to tune this campaign to a slightly more challenging difficulty level than “Dead Man’s Switch”, so that may factor in as well.

Diehard GameFAN: What does Harebrained Studios have planned next? I know you have Golem Arcana in the works. How is that proceeding? Anything else in the pipeline?

Mike McCain: Golem Arcana is in full production! The Golem team recently brought on a dedicated UI artist who’s been making some really exciting progress on the design of the app component of the game. I see the design team rapidly prototyping Golem gameplay nearly every day in the conference room. Right now, there’s a big push to meet physical manufacturing deadlines to ensure that everything is ready to ship the game on time later this year. You can learn more about Golem Arcana at the official website.

More information.

I'm really looking forward to Dragonfall. My main complaints with DMS was that it was to short and too linear. This sounds like it will at least address the linearity issue. In a recent podcast interview with Mitch from HBS, he said he thinks Dragonfall will actually end up being longer than DMS and that the runs tend to have a lot more ways that the player can approach them… Sounds like they've really been listening to player feedback.

Ultimately, I hope to see Shadowrun Returns have many future expansions released, as the Shadowrun universe seems to have such a rich lore (There's so many different things going on in the various cities of the world) and I'd love to see a few more of the cities get their own expansion, and perhaps they will eventually implement the astral space in a way similar to what they did with the matrix…

I definitely agree. The Shadowrun settings allows pretty much everything you can think of. As does the ruleset, though it doesn't matter for the Shadowrun Returns game (as they changed it almost completely).

I still remember that time (in P&P) when my non-cyberware-non-adept martial arts guy was fighting 40 ninjas on a train through the UCAS to protect a girl almost everyone on the planet seemed to be after. What other setting could let you say something like "There are motherf*cking ninjas on the motherf*cking train!" and in the next scene being fighting against some spirits in an old ruin?
Ah, good times…

The first campaign was enjoyable. I liked the story, but didnt finish it due to the lack of real save game -feature. IIRC it should be fixed with this release.

Originally Posted by zakhal
The first campaign was enjoyable. I liked the story, but didnt finish it due to the lack of real save game -feature. IIRC it should be fixed with this release.

I think better save game functionality was going to be sorted in a patch, so you don't need the DLC for that. I haven't played it in a while though so I don't know if that patch has been released.

Patch 1.2 (which includes the save anytime feature) will be released together with the Dragonfall expansion, so on February 27th.

Patch 1.2 Beta is currently live on Steam.

Thanks for clarifying, Morandir.

I read the title as Shadowrun: Dragonball.

*sigh*

I'm looking forward to this one. Yes it was linear and relatively short but story telling and character dialogues were top notch in the main game. It gave me the same taste that I felt from PsT.