To reply to some of your points
if you're looking for feedback, I could probably offer some. But I expect that a lot of the things I have to say might be somewhat impractical to implement. Shadowrun is an interesting world and a fun pen and paper game, but pen and paper games generally translate poorly to computer games. Just in the few hours that I've played, I can see a lot of things I'd have done very differently. But implementing a lot of them would require a reset of the entire world, which is a non-trivial thing to suggest.
In terms of the new player experience, however, I can suggest a few things right away that you might be able to make use of:
1) An awful lot of things have no help entry. Lock-picking, reputation, hacking, decking...I wasn't making a list, but during character creation it seemed like about every fourth thing I wanted help on had no entry, even when I was asking for help on items specifically listed on a help page as something that I could request help on. Additionally, there seems to be some confusion in the help entries regarding descriptors that have a hyphen and descriptors that are two words. Both conventions are used, but sometimes the format listed in one help entry (for example, type "purchase" and you get a list) isn't the form that's needed to actually get a help entry for that thing. Or in some cases there's apparently no entry at all.
2) Many things that do have a help entry, have useless help entries, and sometimes the information I'm actually looking for exist in help enties other than the ones I would naturally go looking for it. For example, "help strength" tells me that dwarves get a +2 strength bonus, but "help dwarf" doesn't list any dwarven racial bonuses. This is sloppy. "help intelligence" gives me a paragraph long philosophical dissertation on what is and isn't intelligence, but it gives me no actual game significance of the attribute whatsoever. If I type help intelligence, I probably want to know what effect the attribute has in the game, I'm not looking for a dictionary definition of the word. In fact, the vast majority of all help entries in the game have this kind of issue. Help is very often not helpful in the least.
3) Many things that a player would
obviously want to be able to do have no obvious help entries, and are totally unintuitive. For example, logging out. There's no entry for how to safely log out on the help menu. "Help logout" and "help logoff" have no entries. And if i simply go to sleep then disconnect, when I reconnect I have an "afk" prompt instead of the standard prompt, leaving me to guess that afk is a command I can use to make it go away. Or do characters always remain in the game world? If so, there should be some way to find out about that, but I don't see one. Do I need to log off in a hotel? I have no way to knowing. Logging off is just one example. I routinely ran into scenarios that apparently lacked help. At one point I cast control-action on some random human. Then tried to give him commands, but couldn't. The help entry for the spell contains no useful information. So I tried using sayto to issue commands. And the response I got contradicted the fact that my target was under my control. Too many aspects of the game are shrouded completely in mystery with no obvious way to find out how they work.
4) The character creation interface is klunky.
* I don't feel like I should need to type things like "bod +" six times if I want 6 bod. "bod 6" would be far preferable. And if I type bod 6, spend the rest of my points and want to change my bod to 5 to spend that extra point elsewhere, I really should be allowed to.
* There appears to be no way to undo anything. Accidentally press up arrow and enter (repeat in mushclient) too many times and you may have to delete and and start completely over. This is especially annoying at the skill stage where, for example, you start with one free karma in addition to your attribute and skill points. But the karma can only be spent to increase something by 1, which can create situations where if you'd spent the karma first you could raise a skill higher than if you spend a skillpoint first. This kind of juggling during initial character creation serves no purpose but to annoy first time players.
* The info descriptions for equipment and cyberware are generally useless. If I type "info chipjack" it's probably because I want to know what the thing is and what it does, not merely how much essence it consumes, which I can see on the list anyway.
* Which body positions armor fits to is not entirely intuitive. There are a few pairs of items that from their descriptions seem like they should both be wearable together, but they are not. It would be nice if "slot" information was available for item
* During character creation it should be possible to sell items back for full value. It's an unreasonable nuisance to have to pay a resellers fee just to figure out what does and doesn't work.
5) There are many obvious shorthands that are missing. If I'm in a vehicle and type "dashboard" it's probably reasonable to assume that I want to look at the dashboard of the vehicle I'm sitting in. I shouldn't need to type out all of "vehicle eurocar dashboard". I should be able to type "hold deck" rather than have to specify precisely the model of cyberdeck I have.
6) Many location descriptions contain text that implies things that appear not to exist. For example, the description of the jail holding cell clearly mentions a fan. But there's no fan you can interact with. It's one thing to provide scenery, but it's another it tell me that there are things in game that I waste time trying to interact with. The convention appears to be that most locations have a big, long useless but "flavorful" scenic descriptions. Which starts to get annoying that I'm skipping over so much descriptive fluff when there's such a terrible, recurring lack of information that would actually be useful.
7) The layout, difficulty and rewards of the early couple missions and early gameplay in general are very discouraging.
* I've been given a mission to retreive a file from Feathers 'n Leathers, but I have no password for the site. I'm told that without a password I will try to automatically hack in when I connect. And I do. Yet, despite having 6 computer skill, 6 electronics, 6 intelligence and almost every software as high a level as I was able to buy, after nearly a dozen connect attempts I've failed every single time. My best guess is that it's because I'm using an allegiance sigma cyberdeck. But if so...if the #2 "trainer" mission is uncompletable with max possible attributes, skills and software...simply assuming that a new character will start with enough money to buy one of the more expensive decks and designing the early missions to require it...that thoroughly reeks of lousy game design.
* My Johnson directed me to the Software Emporium if I wanted to upgrade my software. The mission description implies that it's easy to get there. I was not able to find my way there on foot after ten minutes of real time. Yes, I checked the map. Repeatedly. The map as shown by the map command bears only a casual resemblance to the map as is traversible in the game.
* When I finally gave up trying to find it and simply took a taxi, it turned out that there was no software available for me to purchase of any level higher than was available during character dreation. Meaning the trip was wasted anyway. And strangely, the taxi deposited me in a place that was apparently off-limits for taxis. I was dropped off, went in, went back outside, asked for a taxi and was told taxis couldn't go there, requiring me to wander around randomly for a while trying to find a spot taxis could go.
* Eventually I gave up and just drove around in a motorcycle somebody left running, killing random people. In high heels. With a gun equipped. And no motorcycle skill. Yet I had no difficulty riding around, and there were apparently no skill checks required for driving. Which leads me to wonder why bother investing skillpoints in vehicle skills.
* When all was said and done, by the time I finally was ready to delete and recreate my character, I had spent about three hours in game. And in all that time I had earned under a thousand nguyen, and 7% killing towards a single point of karma. And given that I need 7 karma to raise pretty much anything I care about, that suggests to me that any kind of standard rpg-style gradual progression of character power is totally out of the question. The character I made is pretty much the character I'm going to be stuck with for the foreseeable future, with minimal potential for growth. That's more or less standard shadowrun, but it's awfully discouraging.
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Overall the game has a distinctly unfinished feel. It feels like a flavor, text and map conversion of some other game. For a game that's been around for ten years, it has an awful lot of rough edges. Skills that are purchaseable at great expense that only later does a player find out that they're not fully implemented. Cyberware with obvious potential uses that apparently are for "RP purposes only." And all the previously mentioned issues of incomplete help and awkward character design. I realize I've only been playing for a few hours, maybe it gets better...but if you've been working on this for ten years, honestly I'd expect it to be more refined than this.
22 separate language skills and 29 build & repair skills, but how many skills that the average player is likely to find useful? Why are there 11 vehicle skills and 11 vehicle build & repair skills when so far as I can tell, vehicles are terribly implemented, don't seem to servce much purpose, and rigging is not well implemented? Is water travel so important to gameplay that it's justifiable to have eight separate skills for: sailboats, motorboats, ships, submarines and B&R skills for each of them...when apparently a single computer skill is all that's relevant for decking?
I realize that you're constrained by the fact that you're trying to be faithful to an existing pen and paper game, but like I mentioned before, sometimes that doesn't work very well. The overall feel here is that you simply copied lists of things from the source material and never quite got around to checking to see how relevant the items on those lists were to the game. The fact that roughly a third of all the cyberware I bought turned out to be for "RP purposes only" corroborates that.
There are more things I could point out, but honestly I don't really expect you to act on any of this. If the game has been around for ten years, it's unlikely that me after a couple of hours will be able to suggest anything that hasn't already been said by somebody. A change of media usually benefits from careful adaptation. There are several
tvtrops entries on this subject. For whatever reason, that was not done here. And to do it now would require throwing out a lot of what's been in use for all these years, probably a complete wipe and restart, and the serious displeasure of the existing player base. Again, I don't expect any of that to happen. I'm simply sharing my views as a prospective new player.
But you might consider at least implementing the help and character creation suggestions from earlier in this post.