Do I hate it immensely? Why yes I do.

Started the game, got as far as the first time to enter matrix.
After a bit quit in disgust. Not sure if I'm going back.

Yeah it's like they wanted mini-games so they stole pac-man and simon and... dunno... whatever that high-speed pattern recognition thing is. It is all a waste of time as far as I'm concerned. It certainly does *not* feel like you are battling computer defenses. It feels more like you are playing some vid game on an Atari game system from the 70s.

However, you can just plow through everything and battle the defenses the old-fashioned way. So you really don't need to quit.

Might do it that way... but then not with my decker/gunner character. So I'd still need to restart.

I actually like it but at first I hated it too. Takes some getting used to going from the old endless time matrix to the new one where you actually need to do something.
While neither the old nor the new one feels all that much like hacking, the new one have some added gameplay which imo is pretty fun.

I had the same reaction as six-, didn't like it at first, now I do.

Decking in Shadowrun Returns was essentially the same as combat in meatspace - it didn't add anything, and the lack of variety wasn't good.

The new decking system is a completely different playstyle to meatspace, so it helps stop the combat system getting repetative, even if it's not as developed as the combat system. And as stealth games go, it's not bad - there's not a lot of waiting around, there's no randomness in whether you get spotted or not, and failure isn't *that* frustrating because the price for failure isn't too high.

And if you really hate it, you can just ignore it and blaze through the old-fashioned way.

Oh well.. I'll get back to it eventually when I cool off.
For now, reinstalled NWN and doing a bit of that, also need to finish Dragon Age Inquisition one of these days.

Mostly it was the change from turn based to a real time maze run/rhythm/whatever the symbol thing is game.
I liked shadowrun because I could take my time, if it was a real time game I likely wouldn't have played it to begin with.

Yes I'm definitely one of those that hate the new Matrix with a passion. Sure it looks nicer, but the whole mechanics of it are not only crap, they don't make any sense. Especially when some scenes have you fighting matrix objects outright, while those stupid roving watchers go about their business - it's totally stupid.

However, there's not that many of them and like others have said, you can always battle through them the old-fashioned way. Personally I prefer to run, and if I get caught and it's not an area I need to hack a node in, then I just run to another exit instead.

Those crappy Simon things got better once I realised the crappy Simon game is only there to give you more time to do the crappy memory game - so now I just do a couple of them until I get to 60 seconds and then go NEXT, though I can generally figure out the crappy memory game within 10 seconds.

If they really bother you, you can always load the HK campaign in the editor and change the values for the matrix things - might need to save as source first. You can set the time they display and the time allocated initially. If you really want to go nuts you can disable them altogether, though that's a little bit more effort since you need to do that for every matrix node (the others are more or less global, based on difficulty of level/node). Then just "export" the campaign over the top of the old one.

It's brutally bad. There's not too much point to it either, just get the Wuxing data and you also need it for the Prosperity Tower. Prosperity Tower fortunately has passcodes for that final mission, pretty easy ones that I don't mind writing out here if you need them (or you can find elsewhere).

You probably don't actually need the Wuxing data either, just gives you an alternate entry into Prosperity Tower. If you're willing to fight through I don't think that matters either.

The paydata barely pays anything, it's maybe 2k nuyen or something if you get all of it. And I'm probably overestimating it.

I wonder if anything else will be added to this game. I enjoyed it but Dragonfall was probably better and I thought HK may even have been a little short.

Well Dragonfall (at least the DC version) has a few more missions in total than HK, so it's definitely shorter on that count.

Also the missions felt shorter in HK for some reason. This could be an illusion though, possibly caused by two things:

1) The fact that DC still split up the levels a lot more than HK - e.g. Aztechnology is split into 3 separate maps/scenes, whereas levels of similar length tend to load in one scene/map in HK.

2) Possibly a bigger factor, missions in HK may appear shorter because there's so much crap going on in the "hub" of HK. DF had detailed conversations, but they didn't drag on like some kind of soap opera... I don't mind vendors being a bit chattier than "what gun you want?", but I think they've gone too far the other way in HK. This is the first game ever (and I've played a lot of RPGs/adventure games) where I wanted to just skip conversations and/or tell them to shut the F up.

Haha, it does give flavor though. You don't HAVE to talk to them after all, it's completely optional.

I didn't like the setting as much though. HK as it's presented was kind of boring to me. I enjoyed the settings more in DF as well as DMS. I also didn't like Kindly Cheng or Bao as much as the previous fixers.

Well, it's another step in the formula, let's see what they have planned next. I like the series enough to keep sticking with it, unless they really screw up badly. But even if I don't like HK as much as DF I still think it's a good game and am happy with my purchase.

I'm pretty much the same - liked DF's setting more than HK, though I did think Kindly was kind of funny. It's also pretty funny if you "disrespect" Bao. :) It's more the other characters that weren't as interesting, though some of the other runners were pretty neat (especially Racter and Gaichu).

I agree you don't have to talk to them - so on subsequent runs I just ignored them for the most part. Which is probably the first time I've ever ignored optional conversation in a game - normally no matter how many times I've played it, I'll always read/listen to all convos.

They should definitely do something about the mission/paydata rewards though. Sure in DF you ended up with stupid amounts of cash by the end, but I'd rather that than the pathetic amounts we get here - especially since there's so much juicy cyberware to buy. Either that or they could have increased the amount you get when you sell items back to shops. Guess we could always increase these via the editor...

Oh and I'm definitely happy with my purchase. I'm also impressed with what they've done with the graphics - it's only really noticeable when you go back to play DF (which is still good - but you notice the difference).

I'm eagerly awaiting to see if the upcoming HK mini-campaign will improve the HK experience somewhat. At the least there will be more missions, which is always a good thing. Hopefully by then they'll add a "Very Hard" mode and possibly (hopefully) fix the damn matrix!

Yeah.. ok. Went back.

So I just run and dodge past the matrix thingies, then save,
click randomly at the squiggly things until hitting the right one,
reload if fail.

Damn this sucks so much.
But I guess I'm continuing.

--
BTW. Gave up on Alpha Protocol for much the same reason.

I don't like the stealth part, mostly because I'm really bad at the kind of things.

But the mini-games to crack the doors are fine and make the Matrix a bit more different than meatspace fight, IMHO.

Good god who the hell thought this was a good idea. I was playing Shadowrun to get AWAY from crap like this.

Is there a mod to remove it? Particularly the god awful minigame?

If you really desperately want to remove this you should be able to mod the game yourself to remove it easily enough - though it does require some effort.

Minigame removal:

The easiest way to remove the mini-games is to load the HK campaign in the editor, save it as source somewhere, edit the files in the "bip" directory, re-load the campaign in the editor from the edited source, then export the campaign (overwriting the original). You might want to backup the campaign just in case before you do this though.

To edit the bips, you can just open the txt files in the "data/bip" directory in any text editor, and change the "force value:" to something really low (see if 0 works, if not try 1). Just do that for all files in that directory and save and export the campaign as described above.

Then when in-game you can just push the "force" button to insta-hack the blocker IC with no (or very minimal) penalty.


Watcher editing:

You can either remove the watchers altogether by editing each file in the "data/scene" directory and removing all references to "watcher IC", or you can edit all the watcher IC characters to slow them down or weaken them.

I won't go into the first option since it's likely more tedious, but for the second option locate all the "ic_lv?_watcher.ch_sht.txt" files (where ? == level number, generally 1-6). Then for each of these change whatever attributes you want, e.g.:

- move_speed - how fast they move, lower numbers slow them down.
- vision_cone_angle: reduce to narrow their vision cone
- vision_cone_distance: reduce vision range - default is 4 I think, not sure if you can set it to 0 (that might mean unlimited!), but I'd think that setting it to 1 would make things MUCH easier.
- vision_peripheral_distance: as above but for peripheral viewing. Same rules as above roughly.
- ap: reduce this to slow down how far they move during turn-based mode.
hp: reduce this to make them easier to take out.

If you want to effectively eliminate them as a threat, setting all view_distance values to 1, vision_cone_angle to 10 (or something like that) and move_speed to 1 should ensure they're slow and short-sighted. Then if you also set them to ap 1 and hp 1, you'll be able to instantly kill them in one shot (just in case they do find you somehow anyway).


Note I haven't bothered doing any of this myself - I do think the new matrix is crap and kind of annoying, but so far I've been able to beat it easily on hard so I haven't bothered doing these mods. I'm pretty sure they'll work though.