Eight long rolling weeks; SRR: Dragonfall

Welcome to Rolling play game month(s) in which we spend eight weeks playing roles with the grenade that is the computer. Please enjoy your stay as we jack into steam for another exciting romp through fictional worlds with large, elaborate dialogue trees that don't do anything to actually influence conclusions and whatever else we like to pretend makes for roleplaying.

Choices matter. They matter because you make a choice, and then, that's what you did. Deep. Deep like the rolling pin games, on the computer.

Dragonfall is the follow up to Shadowrun Returns, which contained the campaign "Deadman's Switch" or some variation on that string of letters. A lot of people seemed pretty down on DMS, but I thought it was a pretty effective tutorial, which I've said about 75 times or something in the last year. Dragonfall inversely is meant to be more of a standalone adventure more suited to experienced players.

On a basic level this is a RPG with squad based tactical combat set in a cyberpunk world. Dragonfall (as a game) comes off as a fair bit more toward the dystopian than DMS, but not really to the point it feels like the setting isn't being used - more like the setting has more depth to it than the usual RPG nonsense, and different parts of the world feel different. Which is a good thing.

I don't, and I know I've said this, feel much of anything special toward Shadowrun. As earlier RPG systems go, I never really played anything other than D&D. I don't even like D&D though, the only systems I have much of a soft spot for are the White wolf nonsense which is endearing in its completely ridiculous nature and BattleTech which just has the best world-building coupled with a legacy of endless failure. Shadowrun is just "there" for me, it is built out of disparate cyberpunk parts but doesn't really hum with its own energy. So while I think these games are cool, I'm not saying that out of nostalgia.

I kinda like or dislike this game on its own merits, even disregarding it as a sequel, since I barely remember DMS other than how good the story hook was.




Basic stuff about the game likely mirrors a lot of what I said about SRR itself, original campaign or whatever. The engine is quite solid for the purposes of playing a turn-based, X-comish slash RPG, with high resolution pixel art that never looks bad and decent audio assets. The music is a sombre, ambient affair that could benefit from a couple more tracks but isn't grating or especially catchy. The UI, which I've read is improved in Dragonfall, feels nearly the same to me? I played SRR almost or a full year ago, so you'll pardon if I don't really remember cosmetic differences.

I'm not super impressed with the UI in Dragonfall, as certain elements can feel really vague or out of place. Ammo expenditure is expressed via a graphical representation of the firearm slowly depleting, which looks nice but doesn't really tell me how many bullets I have total, at least not at a glance. Elements like healing your party after combat don't work well either, in fact, even figuring out if they're wounded or not is a bit clunky. There's also some weird clicking issue with objects in the world, which is hard to explain but things seem to fade in and out of being clickable. The game seems to trade the UI for looking better, and while the UI isn't terrible by any stretch of the imagination...

The inventory management isn't good, honestly, there's a lot about this game that was implied to me was fixed in DF over DMS that just ... Isn't polished and wasn't fixed. Most of these systems aren't necessary to interact with too much on normal, but I can't imagine trying to play the game on higher difficulty levels. There is probably modding or changing settings, but the opaque elements of the out of the box gameplay just doesn't gel with me at all.

As for your squad and inventory... I'm not exactly certain what the development team was going for. It is a squad based game, and you have a set squad - you can hire other runners but I don't know why you would - so you'd think you could equip them properly, but instead loadouts are a huge hassle and the game does a bunch of stupid, insipid shit. You 'loan' people who are working for you gear, and I don't really understand this at all. The game emphasizes how tight knit a shadowrunning crew is, how important your ... We'll get into that ... But then feels detached from gearing your crew members. It just felt like something of an unnecessary hassle to me, even though it feels intended to actually cut down on the hassle. Their loadouts are set and paid for 'by them', but that kinda disrupting the mood of the rest of the game.

You're in it together. Except when it comes to picking out your firearms. Then you're on your own? Sort of?

I always get this sort of like, weird moment in roleplaying games that "hit the town too early". You know what I mean? I remember FF8 did it, and maybe the Witcher 2 did it too. The plot can use a little more railroading as you get a handle on the totality of what you're playing, and Dragonfall does this as well. I don't know, maybe I was expecting more, but I honestly just cracked open a walkthrough because I honestly don't find the world of Shadowrun so enticing it can just hand me off to a bunch of random NPCs and tell me to go wild. Dragonfall is supposed to be that much better than Dead Man's Switch, but instead I just found the opening of this game just really annoying. Not saying that lasted long, but it's kinda weird to drop you into a town before you really have any money or the value of money.

I guess it's a minor spoiler, but you start the game on a run, and your leader dies, of course making you the leader...? Because reasons? As openings go, I found this kind of annoying, since it seems to be making eyes at you about her death when you had basically zero time to become attached. The writing just feels incredibly lazy as introductions go. But I guess it's that old chestnut; when you can do anything (and you can do nearly anything in Shadowrun) you can't think of anything, so you just go with a nearly identical campaign hook and progression as DMS.

I wouldn't even mention it, mind you, if people didn't harp on and on about how much better the writing is. It's such an indolent bit of grade school writing, and yet I'm told this is a huge step up from the general miasma of game writing? No. It isn't. The weird thing is both of these problems would have been really helped by just giving you a bit of railroaded introduction, a mission or two in here, to bond you to the characters and the settings.

The campaign's story, on the other hand, does slowly draw you in and certainly has interesting elements that relate to the parallel themes of the game. But that initial story hook just comes off as cheap and almost relentlessly brought up, and it rears its ugly head in the late game with such audacity it made my stomach turn. I do not care about a character who is in the game for 12 seconds. The fact the writing is so incredibly fixated on her shows, for me, a fundamental disconnect.

Basically: The writing could be good - and often is very good -  but it trips up in this, and instead just flatly isn't very exciting. Also rather than setting you on the case, the game uses a story hook of needing to build up a certain amount of money to get information from a broker. So the first act is story, and then the second act ... Is just nonsense and generic missions while plot device the character hems and haws in the background. For me, it's really frustrating, but I've read opinions that this is what people "expected" from Shadowrun. That this is "how Shadowrun is played" so I ... I guess so? The missions thing didn't gel for me, since I think you basically need to do nearly all of them, and there's no timeline or progression or penalties. So it's just a linear game with disconnected missions in the middle.

So I guess, as I'll say over and over, I'm not the target audience. But in the second act you get the occasional "we need to avenge blah blah" but it sort of rolls that to the side, then it comes back even harder, which makes it really jarring.

One feature I want to rave about is the rewind save feature. Basically, the game incrementally saves, and if you want to roll it back a bit, you can do so with a lot of finesse. It's nothing more than just making a lot of saves, but they're organized in a solid way that gives you the power to rewind when and if you need to, but without bloating the load screen with a giant pile of text. I started doing one of the character's personal quest missions and found it utterly tedious. A quick rewind later and all was forgotten. It works very effectively, and really stands out as something I wish was in every game forever. It's great.

One of the things I swear wasn't as big of a matter in DMS as opposed to DF here is sometimes combat is against wave after wave of enemies, many of whom don't move and just stand in other rooms waiting for you to show up. In combat movement is tedious, to say the least, and moving up to prepare for an engagement can be something of an exercise in meticulous choremaking. The combat in general is not well balanced and in a lot of ways just not all that fun to deal with. You really need to not only find cover but also enough cover to protect your entire squad but far enough apart you can't get chain grenaded. I don't remember if the DMS campaign had the stun grenades, but DF does, and they are just so awful.

Also I don't know if it's a product of my stats - I'm a ranged character with points in quickness, but I did push Charisma up to try to open up more dialogue options - but nearly every encounter in the game is an ambush. Even when you see the enemy clearly, it's an ambush, because they get first "combat move". It's really bad. A lot of the game's transitions aren't good. Going into combat, going into decking... I just wasn't impressed. There's no formation command that I could find, so more than a few times I would open a door, be thrust into combat, and the enemy would wisely lob a grenade at my bumbling idiots who are all clumped up. I don't appear to have any choice in this matter, and it strikes me as ridiculous.

Like seriously, we're in a hot zone, fighting room to room. The group behind me is ... clumped into a sloppy mess. I open a door, and the enemy moves first, throwing a stun grenade at them. I don't know which system I'm interacting with wrong here, but the game really can't leave something like that as the baseline without expressing a warning to me on how to avoid it. A simple message like "Quickness roll too low! Enemy gets initiative!" or explaining how to, assuming you, change format would be hugely helpful.

And if you can't at all, well...
 
Besides that, I just hate decking, and the matrix. I remember it being sort of mild in DMS, but in DF you are over and over again forced to endure. The music is shit-tier awful, the visuals are garbage and the entire thing basically takes the game's core combat with zero real difference and smears neonfuture shit on it. It's not good, or interesting, and it just makes me not want to play the game at all. I'm going to straight up admit that doing the decking stuff, with its obnoxious battlefield switching and horrendous gameplay, is what takes this game from "above average" to "mediocre" for me.

This isn't really much of a shock ... A lot of 90s era RPG design had forced in elements to meet a certain concept of the setting, but it's just baffling. It's just combat inside combat, except the real world combat is either on a very short deadline, or actually straight up broken. In fact the scripting broke on several enemies in the one fight, with five of them standing stock still and untouchable until I walked a character in front of them. I mean I'm in the room, but they just stand there and I can't shoot them until I'm in the room in front of them. The tension actually farts down your leg when you realize things like that. You can just have the hacker sit there doing everything, because the enemy is literally never coming no matter how many turns go by, because they're essentially little bitmaps drawn on he screen with a note IOU some enemies scribbled crudely on the back.

I mean, it's fair to say I'm probably not the target audience. I've always thought of gaming in such violent worlds as power fantasies, and to me the way Dragonfall tries to force in irritating loopy skill checks and random pacifist options honestly doesn't work for me. I want to go in, and shoot people, and the game's obsession with making each mission rather unfocused is annoying to me. I feel like it would be better to divide up missions based on what kind of skills the player's team has - and therefore, wants to use - rather than the weirdly chopped up gameplay. The game almost seems to delight in under-explaining missions and jobs beforehand, constantly trying to throw curveballs at you. The game's set up forces you to do every mission whether you want to or not, so for all its delusions of choice you have no choices at all. I don't really feel like I'm outsmarting the system, I feel like there's one to three skillchecks I should be prepared for, and that's the entire puzzle.

But I really, really just hate the decking. A lot.

If you're into that, then this game is for you! This is something a bit different, and I can't fault it for that - it's not my cup of tea, and the rest of the presentation is good. Except the decking, and the inventory systems could use some work. If you're not so much like me, then this game is worse for the exertion they put into it. Some of the missions are good, but they spent a lot of effort and failed at things like enemy scripts failing to fire when you walk into a room behind them and just really sloppy stuff that worsens the experience. There's only so much development time, and if you're looking for polished core systems, forget it. They didn't have time for that. It doesn't look or feel like any indie title, but every once and a while, you're reminded it is.

Anyway, Dragonfall is ... Okay? I think, like I said, I'm not the target audience. I enjoy conversations and storytelling in RPGs, but the setting here is so assumed yet open ended it doesn't get its hooks in me, and the constant drivel about your dead friend mixed with the unfocused skill checks is just irritating. Part of it is that people hyped up DF as so much better than DMS, but I honestly just found it more unfocused and less satisfying. I actually cheated and added cash to skip the second forced decking mission, because it was so irritating to fight with that dumb system again. It's nice that the game allows you to do that, though.

Basically, before picking up Dragonfall, I was inclined towards buying SRR: Hong Kong, but frankly I have zero interest for now. I can only do so many forced decking sections, and the game's combat just gets so tedious. It's like playing X-Com, except every single segment is in a tiny shoebox and you have almost no control over your squad's abilities. I don't really care for the party set up, the inventory management is bad and the writing is so mediocre in parts it drags a lot of it down.

But I did finish the game, I guess? The ending isn't bad, and if the game had dropped the whole stupid dead leader angle I think it would have worked a lot better. The core mystery, the core premise, is really quite good. But it wraps it up in garbage and a hokey generic avenger plot that just puts me to sleep.