Shadowrun Returns, aka, when a game is made by graphic artists...

[GabeZhul]

I'm having trouble understanding why the cyberware is so important. I honestly forgot about it once I got my advanced eye and the sub-dermal armor because most of the upgrades were not worth sacrificing a perfectly useful limb.

Isn't that kind of my point? The source-books and catalogs are practically teeming with clever, inspired and fun cyberware you can use to make your character unique and create innovative combinations with them, and here instead you get only a handful of different pieces that only give you weaksauce bonuses. The only somewhat useful combination I have seen this far would have been two alpha legs, which can add up to a pretty good 20+ karma worth of bonuses, but the rest is mostly useless and boring.

 

[Vern5]

I'm having trouble understanding why the cyberware is so important. I honestly forgot about it once I got my advanced eye and the sub-dermal armor because most of the upgrades were not worth sacrificing a perfectly useful limb.

Isn't that kind of my point? The source-books and catalogs are practically teeming with clever, inspired and fun cyberware you can use to make your character unique and create innovative combinations with them, and here instead you get only a handful of different pieces that only give you weaksauce bonuses. The only somewhat useful combination I have seen this far would have been two alpha legs, which can add up to a pretty good 20+ karma worth of bonuses, but the rest is mostly useless and boring.

So why is this important? Obviously the dev team couldn't fill the game with every last piece of equipment from the Shadowrun P&P. There was neither the time nor resources for such a thing. At any rate, the Cyberware is just fancy gear equivalent to permanent magical armor in a similar crpg.

 

[Schadrach]

Ah, yeah, I completely forgot about that... I honestly don't know how decking and the matrix should work in motion, taken that my only hands-on experience with a Shadowrun session was watching my cousin and his friends play when I was a kid, and they had a house-rule for abstracting the entire hacking thing down to a single skill-check (as I have learned later, hacking in Shadowrun is pretty much a several hour long session within the session where the other characters can only sit around and watch while the decker goes on his own side-adventure), but I am pretty sure it was not supposed to look like this.

The matrix in SR is pretty much a series of arenas where you have to fight a random assortment of ICUs before you can move to the next, and you have to do the entire thing, moving and data-accessing included, in the turn based system while on the outside people will probably try to bash your head in (which also baffled me, since I thought there were different time-scales when it came to hacking and it was generally over in seconds in "real time"). Also, it was counter-intuitive to try and play as a decker in this game since you don't even get to hack into the matrix until about halfway through the main storyline, so sinking karma and money into that skillset would gimp you for the majority of the game.

The decking thing I can at least explain, and it wasn't too bad off on the timescales. In Shadowrun P&P, you have a thing called initiative that is a roll + a fixed number based on your stats (specifically it's the sum of two or your stats [typically this is between ~4 and ~15]). Everyone acts in order from high to low initiative, and if your initiative is > 10, then you subtract 10 from it and act again when initiative order gets down to it. For meat space initiatives, that "roll" is 1d6 (or higher with certain powers/cyberware, but 4d6 is effectively the cap). For the matrix, AR initiative is the same as meat space and on the other extreme full VR hot sim initiative starts with the rolled portion at 4d6 and can potentially be higher. So initiatives over 20 are fairly rare in meat space without heavy use of either adept powers or cyberware, while initiatives over 30 are semi-common in hot sim VR for a starting character (typically mid 20 to mid 30s depending on the roll).

What often happens however, is either thoroughly securing an area and letting the decker do their work or having the decker do some preliminary work before anyone moves in in meat space, which leads to effectively giving your groups decker a "side mission" to set things up or clean up afterward.

As for items and their use, what killed me was that you couldn't heal, either by magic or by health-packs, outside of battle. It just boggles the mind how they could skim over such an obvious thing...

Not true. Magical healing at the very least could be done out of combat, although the UI was pretty shit about pointing that out -- I figured it out by *accident*. You do it from the screen that shows the characters equipped spells.

Never tried to use medkits outside of combat, so no idea on those.