Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Director’s Cut Dev Diary #3: Combat

Harebrained Schemes has published the third of their planned four developer diaries for the Director’s Cut of Shadowrun: Dragonfall. This one covers the revamped combat mechanics, and describes the new critical hit system, the changes to how cover works, the new armor system, the improvements made to the enemies’ AI, and the added crew loadout customization functionalities. Here’s a couple of snippets from it:

In the Director’s Cut, shooting through medium and heavy cover now reduce your critical hit % to 0 – you’ll always either do 1.0x damage or 0.5x damage. Shooting through Light Cover, you’ll always do 1.0x damage, no more or less. This goes for the enemy’s attacks as well of course, so using cover will become much more important for all involved. If you’re caught out in the open, or you are flanked, the chance to take critical damage is going to increase drastically – you’ll always take 1.0x or greater damage. If you want to dispatch enemies quickly – and safely – you’ll want to flank them, and attack them from behind cover.

Due to this change, melee combat has more risk & reward than before. You’ll do critical damage much more often, since enemies are never in-cover from melee attacks, but you will want to be careful to not end your turn exposed to your foes. Of course, there are magical ways to add cover to an area, or protect yourself. In our internal testing we’ve found these changes to make the combat more tactical, fun, and dynamic. We’re looking forward to seeing what kind of combinations the community comes up with, too.

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So what we have done with Armor, is again create a much more (cause and effect) based behavior. 1 point of Armor will reduce any incoming damage by 1. Stacking more and more armor on will protect you more and more from damage – that’s it.

Of course, now you’ll have to deal with the enemy’s armor, which before was an invisible stat behind the scenes. You’d probably notice during gameplay of the original Returns or Dragonfall that your Crit % would be lower on some enemies, higher on others. This was due to their body & Armor. Now, you’ll see exactly how much Armor an enemy has, so you can react to your opposition more tactically. If you come up against an enemy with 8 Armor, and your firearm only puts out 10 damage, you’re going to be plinking away at their HP for a long time unless you have a backup plan.