![]() In many ways, Dragonfall is the campaign the game should’ve shipped with from the start. The expansion plays much like its predecessor-isometric camera, no voiced dialogue, plenty of reading, and lots of systems. Unfortunately neither campaign has taken advantage of that potential to its fullest. I still feel like Shadowrun Returns built a solid foundation these stats have the potential for plenty of depth and experimentation. There are even fewer mandatory decking sessions in this campaign, and no real reason to play as a decker yourself when you’ll almost always have Blitz in your party. The computer hacking portion of the game, dubbed decking, is also neutered. Because of course she did! That’s how Eiger would react were she a real person.īut that’s still rare to come across in games, and Shadowrun does it better than almost anyone. I was amazed the first time I complimented Eiger (you know-trying to be the “nice” guy) and she called me out on my insincerity. The inane little details of these fictional lives imbue characters with life. High-concept genre pulp, sure, but it’s great high-concept genre pulp. The dialogue here isn’t just good, it’s fantastic. He’s the shaman version of Henry Rollins, if Henry Rollins was a fugitive wanted for corporate espionage. The perfect place to plan illegal operations.Īnd then there’s Dietrich, the ex-punk rocker (though it’s debatable whether you can ever truly leave the punk behind, even with age). It’s safe, warm, and all your friends live here with you. Blitz is a decker (read: Matrix-like computer hacker) who I rescued from a sticky situation only to plunge him into a global crisis. Eiger is a distrustful orc who keeps her friends close and her gun closer. I ran with the same crew for the majority of the expansion. Blowing up the building also kills hundreds, many of them potentially innocent despite the woman’s assertion that “they’re all guilty.” Guilty of what? She won’t even tell you. Blowing up the building comes with a big payday, and your crew needs the money. This is real cyberpunk: Dubious deals made in the shadows, with only personal ethics to guide your hand. Maybe you did it for money, maybe for honor, but the story was the story.ĭragonfall is as morally gray as a slab of Berlin concrete. You were going to keep your hands clean and save the world. Which brings us back to the exploding building. It’s not a lot of choice, and at the end of the day the result is the same, but I was amazed how much a little “illusion of choice” made Dragonfall feel more like a traditional RPG and less like a set of linear hallways than Shadowrun Returns. There’s even a lengthy four or five mission subsection that allows you to take on missions in any order and skip missions you feel are unethical. The story is drip-fed to you throughout, and multiple side missions and nonessential characters make Berlin feel more like a bustling metropolis compared with last year’s linear Seattle setting.ĭragonfall‘s Berlin is certainly grungy enough to be a city. To its credit, Dragonfall is also paced and plotted far better than the original campaign-whereas I complained that “Dead Man’s Switch” felt rather slapdash, losing plot strands at random and wrapping up in a blur, I found Dragonfall much more intriguing.
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