How to Edit Your Save Files for Shadowrun Dragonfall - Director's Cut
One of the other issues that we wanted to fix with AI was the composition of the enemy groups. It seemed to be a pretty random assortment of enemies in Shadowrun Returns; we wanted to go back to a more scripted approach that creates neat combinations.
Shadowrun Dragonfall Save Editor
The first step was to develop a set of metrics for determining how well the enemy groups are performing. Each group was assigned a priority based on their chance to survive and complete the mission. This information could then be used to plan out a suitable strategy. In Shadowrun Returns, the main priority was survival. This meant that for most of the encounters, players would be forced to fight with a bare minimum of actions to survive. This made for some very difficult fights. We wanted to change that.In Shadowrun Dragonfall, the primary concern for all of our encounters is to complete the mission. This means that we want to push players into situations that make it very difficult for them to complete their mission, but do so in a way that rewards that effort with rewards. We also want to make sure that the skill calls are intuitive and required skills are clear. Since we want to reward players for doing difficult tasks, we also want to ensure that there are many ways to complete those tasks.
To complete the mission, each group is given a certain number of actions. The actions that each group has are generated from the designer's preconditions and gives each group very different tactics. In Shadowrun Returns, the system was all about how many and how few actions players had to work with. This meant that if you timed your tactical maneuvers right, you could make some groups pretty tough to beat.