I've sunk a fair few hours into this UGC now, getting to the quest to confront Soka. I've lost motivation to push on farther, so I figured I'd post my thoughts, in hopes they can make future releases better.

I encountered a lot of great ideas and terrible ones, interesting features and awful bugs. I'll start with the positive.


-This game has wildly ambitious features, like adapting the Sega Genesis decking conceits, non-combat skills, or the excellent personal menu that includes the ability to call fixers or taxis.

-A lot of the dialogue is pretty damned funny. The protagonist's snarky demeanor works well with the more relaxed nature of the game as opposed to stuff like Dead Man's Switch, although typos and the like detract a bit.

-I was pleasantly surprised when NPCs actually commented on my redoing the same runs and changed up their dialogue.

-Obviously, the goal here is to make a more open-world Shadowrun experience where you overcome adversity and do your own things. I really appreciate the permadeath option, even if it's not something I felt the game was bugtested enough to use, and it signals the intent for this to be a hardcore survival challenge as much as anything. The Notoriety and Heat aspects also really added to this.


Okay, now for problems. Most of what I praised comes down to, 'this has potential', rather than, 'this was fun.' I didn't have a lot of fun playing SRU, for a variety of reasons.

-Combat is too predictable, and the environments are underdeveloped. Tons of things that look like they should offer cover don't, or they offer cover from the same side they block line-of-sight from, and similar. Actually using tactical movement is kind of a nightmare.

-The lack of proper randomization in the repeatable runs makes them painfully samey. Compounding this are the long load times, which you have to go through very often. I found myself actively searching for strategies to take repeatable runs I could manage without an area-transition, because those were becoming more than half of my run-time.

-So, so, so many bugs. I watched a taxi drive straight through Club Penumbra (which admittedly was pretty funny), the entire quest with the shaman lady was a buggy nightmare I literally couldn't complete, I couldn't pick up the golden statue in the story mission where you break into Mitsuhama MHQ because I said no to picking it up the first time (to reposition) so I had to load a hard save I made before the run (which I'd made just in case the quest bugged), just... so many bugs.

-Broken features. This module implements its own stealth system rather than restoring the stealth mechanics of SRR, which are actually pretty good on their own (see the Stealth Mechanics module for instance), but actually puts the spells/abilities/weapons related to the vanilla stealth system into the game anyway. Nothing infuriated me more - no, not even the multiple showstopper bugs I ran into - in this UGC than casting Silence on my Shaman, having him enter a room, and setting off a scripted stealth check anyway (and failing it) because the UGC is obsessed with overwriting all vanilla gameplay elements with custom ones based on the Genesis game.

-The decking. I can't stress enough how bad the decking is, gameplay-wise. It's so godawfully repetitive, it's just a chore. The obsession with replacing vanilla systems was taken to such an extreme here that there are subprograms like Masking, Spoof, and so on, rather than making these ACTIONS THE PLAYERS CAN TAKE IN THE GAME WORLD. Rather than invisible die rolls, it would have been so much more engaging to let the player actually sneak around in the Matrix, and give them programs to do so (like something to create cover, or a shadow cloud, etc.,), perhaps even using the vanilla stealth mechanics I mentioned. Hong Kong does this better, and I understand the UGC is being ported to SRHK, but the current setup is a nightmare. The nodes are also all disconnected and disjoined in a way that feels pretty inorganic; I get that they were entirely discrete entities in the Genesis game, but they don't need to be in SRR, and not funneling the player along these tiny static bridges could open up tactical movement. But at least, at the very least, the UGC needs interesting battles in the Matrix.

I've run down my major issues, but most of it stems from the UGC trying to reinvent the wheel instead of integrating its new ideas into SRR's existing framework smoothly, paired off with trying to cleave to the Genesis game's conventions where it doesn't make sense. Having a big hub-world to walk around looks nice, but I'd vastly prefer the game take place in the protagonist's apartment, with them simply calling fixers and lining up jobs (in dynamically randomized environments rather than static environments with randomized objectives), and preferably fast or no load times between them (Transition rather than area-load, basically), rather than slogging through long load times to walk around the neighborhood over and over.

Alright, that's enough of a rant out of me. I realize a lot of this has been brought up in one way or another on the forum already, and the developers probably have the wind taken out of their sails plenty by now, but I want to stress that I love the idea of this UGC - I just want to see it reach its potential, and I see so much wasted effort it saddens me. I honestly think that if SRU had focused on a minimalist design like the one I just suggested, with the same effort put in as right now, it would likely be complete and very well-polished, and eminently replayable.

Have a good one.