Caltrops - Shadowrun Hong Kong

Forum Overview :: Shadowrun Hong Kong

by Mysterio 08/23/2015, 11:22pm PDT

1) Unpolished

Hong Kong is going to be compared to Dragonfall Director's Cut and it is worse. Buggier, shorter, shittier. I get that the Director's Cut was the result of a lot of work but expectations are the price of success. There is a mini expansion/2nd launch coming in a few months, wait for that instead of getting in now

2) Lazy/safe/unambitious

a) reuse

They keep reusing narratives:
BIG PLOT - someone disappeared, find out why
NPC PLOT - I have a dark secret, give me therapy to help me get over it and undergo character development
And all the narratives advance the same way:
BIG PLOT - do some runs while we dribble little turdlets of plot on you
NPC PLOT - click on me after every single run to help me climax, err develop as a character

hypothesis: devs cut corners on design bc they are getting pushed to annualize by Jordan Wiseman so he can really start to rape this thing

b) Racially Bland

Nothing feels hong kongy. yes there are AZN character portraits but they all speak perfect english and you never actually have to inhabit another cultural mindset. They didn't have to play it safe with deracinated SJWism, as AZNs are a model minority and don't really care if you stereotype them bc they know they are smarter than you. And there is a shitload of Hong Kong criminal underworld material to plagiarize.

hypothesis: writers think they are SJWs but are actually assimilationists who are afraid of genuine cultural difference/too lazy to inform themselves/too cynical to care about getting it right.

c)Abuse of writing

They don't take writing ludoseriously. The Is0bel loyalty mission is the only time that you actually have to pay attention to what you're reading in order to succeed.
Otherwise the writing just Tells instead of Shows. EX the Gobbet/Ambrose stories about their past runs, they are laundry lists of cool hijinks that you will never see/do ingame.

hypothesis: PnP writers are up their own asses and don't really think about how writing can mesh with mechanics

3) Thoughts on actual content of writing

They parodize themselves and it works well. EX they leaned really heavily on ''Shadowrunner as Obamaesque community organizer' in the past two games, but here they redeploy it really cynically in a number of situations. There is a slow burn on the self-satire, it has 0 gameplay ramifications and it may not get taken up again in the series but I appreciate that someone had the balls to critically reappraise their tone.

In general the writing is strongest as satire and weakest in the unadulterated David Gaider/Jennifer Hepler therapy sessions. This is why missions >>> hub interactions. Missions give a big canvas for burlesquing plagiarized material; hub interactions give free rein for stuffy queefathons.

However it is hard to draw a redline here, because as I said before they do ironize themselves. Some of the storylines that seem like the most po-faced and self serious get played more subversively than you'd expect from the outset.

4) Conclusions

In conclusion I really blame gaider and hamburger helper for everything. They write for people who claim to hate games but love writing. What they actually hate is challenge, because if they really did hate games but love writing they'd go read the infinite quantity of quality books that remind them every sentence of their intellectual and moral shortcomings. So Hepler/Gaider writing has to be both simplistic/safe and disconnected from the game's mechanics, and that describes Hong Kong's writing at its worst. Hepler/Gaider's writing is like Lysenko setting Soviet genetics back 40 years with completely false theories that have no relationship to how reality functions. And just like Lysenko they have a mass of cultish brainwashed leftists to harass anyone who thinks they are full of shit. Lysenko starved a country, Gaider/Hepler are misleading a generation of shutins into thinking that True Friendship is about endlessly expositing childhood traumas and being a hanky for everyone's snot.