... extremely vague clues.

[Droolguy]

So I just got a side mission through a middleman sending me to a dead drop briefcase...

The clues it gave me are age 27, lives in a specific building, and has a shoe size of 8.

How am I supposed to solve that?

AFAIK there is no reliable way to get mass shoe sizes, nor age, for the entire population of a building.

[Crinkles]

A births register would be nice - birth certificates are already a thing, so it'd make sense.

[Isabelle]

Originally posted by Droolguy:

So I just got a side mission through a middleman sending me to a dead drop briefcase...

The clues it gave me are age 27, lives in a specific building, and has a shoe size of 8.

How am I supposed to solve that?

AFAIK there is no reliable way to get mass shoe sizes, nor age, for the entire population of a building.

when its a job where my only identifiers are ones that MANY people will share for certain, i just close the case and take another. as far as im concerned thats a failure to generate a case that makes sense

[Droolguy]

So far I am going door to door inspecting the person that answers and I am already at >3 people in 3 floors, of 5. That's assuming the person who answers the door is the person I am looking for, which is not guarenteed as only one person in an apartment will ever answer with multiple people.

Then I am going to go back and break into every single apartment and look for IDs.

Crossing my fingers that one is 27.

[Isabelle]

Originally posted by Droolguy:

So far I am going door to door inspecting the person that answers and I am already at >3 people in 3 floors, of 5. That's assuming the person who answers the door is the person I am looking for, which is not guarenteed as only one person in an apartment will ever answer with multiple people.

Then I am going to go back and break into every single apartment and look for IDs.

Crossing my fingers that one is 27.

might not be worth the time investment...

[Loz]

^ same. I've had a couple I've just closed because there was no way to solve them. I have one now where I'm looking for a person with a specific age and salary at a location, but there's like 5 businesses there, only 3 or 4 have the pictures up for me to look at and that last one has no way for me to know who works there, so I can't look them up on the PC. None of the people's files match... Little trick I found for the employee look up things was to enter a space then change the letter after to find people by going through the alphabet looking at last name initials. I'll try it when I get home on this case.

[Nick]

These cases are possible it's just tedious. You have to knock and investigate every single room in the apartment complex, make a list of the people living there who fit the vague description, and investigate them further to try and find a match to your clues. It is possible, just potentially time consuming. That being said, I had a totally bonkers case generated where I had a target with only the details on their hair, and their partner's job. No address. That one I could not solve

[Isabelle]

Originally posted by Nick:

These cases are possible it's just tedious. You have to knock and investigate every single room in the apartment complex, make a list of the people living there who fit the vague description, and investigate them further to try and find a match to your clues. It is possible, just potentially time consuming. That being said, I had a totally bonkers case generated where I had a target with only the details on their hair, and their partner's job. No address. That one I could not solve

i mean, at that point, it isnt even detective work. it's just "compile an extremely long list of civs until the game tells you that you got the right one"

[Droolguy]

I am getting ready to drop the case after breaking into four separate apartments, which contained five suspects (one apartment had two people that fit the description) all "young adult" all with an estimated shoe size in the correct range of +/- around 8, none of the suspects were both size 8 and 27.

Closest was size 8 and 26, that felt like the computer trolling me.

[Loz]

Are the given descriptions sometimes rough estimates? I assumed they were always spot on when giving numbers, like Salary cR15400

[KDR_11k]

Originally posted by Loz:

^ same. I've had a couple I've just closed because there was no way to solve them. I have one now where I'm looking for a person with a specific age and salary at a location, but there's like 5 businesses there, only 3 or 4 have the pictures up for me to look at and that last one has no way for me to know who works there, so I can't look them up on the PC. None of the people's files match... Little trick I found for the employee look up things was to enter a space then change the letter after to find people by going through the alphabet looking at last name initials. I'll try it when I get home on this case.

Sometimes the emplyoee files are hidden in a drawer next to a cruncher. Those businesses are annoying to search.

[Loz]

Originally posted by KDR_11k:

Originally posted by Loz:

^ same. I've had a couple I've just closed because there was no way to solve them. I have one now where I'm looking for a person with a specific age and salary at a location, but there's like 5 businesses there, only 3 or 4 have the pictures up for me to look at and that last one has no way for me to know who works there, so I can't look them up on the PC. None of the people's files match... Little trick I found for the employee look up things was to enter a space then change the letter after to find people by going through the alphabet looking at last name initials. I'll try it when I get home on this case.

Sometimes the emplyoee files are hidden in a drawer next to a cruncher. Those businesses are annoying to search.

Yeah, that's where I always check but there was literally nothing in the drawers , the building is pretty odd, so there COULD be another hidden business somewhere on the plot, but I can't find it ..

[Hemlet]

Originally posted by Droolguy:

The clues it gave me are age 27, lives in a specific building, and has a shoe size of 8.

TL;DR at the bottom of this post.

Well they live in a specific building, so at the very least that narrows it down a LITTLE bit. If you have or find the Dove+ Sync Disk, that has an upgrade tree that lets you know someone's height, age, and shoe size just by looking at them OR a picture of them. You'd be able to just flip through the tenant records in the security office until you had a match.

Without Dove+ then what I'd do is:
-Go through the tenant records for the building and pin everyone, so I know exactly who lives in which apartment numbers. Put string between people who live in the same apartment.

-Work my way from the top of the building down because A) the people who live higher up have nicer things to steal and more valuable items tucked away and B) top level apartments sometimes have their own security systems installed and I don't want to be dealing with that later if it turns out it IS one of the people living higher up.

-DO NOT UNPIN PEOPLE WHO DON'T MATCH, instead cross them out so I can keep better track of them and which floor I've been on so I don't accidentally start double checking rooms when I inevitably have to bail out of the building for a bit to fence stolen loot or wait out a security alarm.

-In each apartment look around for any files I can find (birth certificates, passcodes, employment contracts, wallets, work rotas, anything at all). Even if the people in question don't match then by the end of this case I'll have a tremendous amount of information to pull from for future murders and side jobs.

-Shoe size is the biggest pain in the ass to verify in this case, with the most direct way being to use the fingerprint scanner to scan someone's feet after they've been subdued.

TL;DR: This is a case you work on while waiting for another murder to get called in. The reward isn't the pay for the job, the rewards is the metric buttload of money, syncdisks, and information you'll walk away with from all that breaking and entering.

[Psyringe]

Part of the reason why I'm enjoying this game, is that it _can_ generate cases that are tough to crack. That's a welcome change from the excessive handholding that lots of other games do.

I see an attitude of "every case should be solvable with a reasonable amount of effort" in some of the replies here. I understand that mindset, but for this game, I do not agree. I find the detective work very immersive _because_ the game doesn't only give you easy cases. Real detective work involves a lot of legwork too, a lot of dead ends, and some cases a real detective might not be able to solve. I'm finding it extremely enjoyable that Shadows of Doubt includes those elements instead of trying to "protect" the player from them.

Case in point, I just did a job where the only available info was the age of the person I needed to arrest, the job of their partner, and the building their partner worked in. There were 12 offices in that building, so I had to get access to them (by breaking in or by bribing employees), find out who the accountant was and where they lived, and then I had to visit these accountants at their homes and check the age of their partners (via their birth certificates). It took a while to solve that case, but it felt rewarding when I completed it.

[Isabelle]

Originally posted by Psyringe:

Part of the reason why I'm enjoying this game, is that it _can_ generate cases that are tough to crack. That's a welcome change from the excessive handholding that lots of other games do.

I see an attitude of "every case should be solvable with a reasonable amount of effort" in some of the replies here. I understand that mindset, but for this game, I do not agree. I find the detective work very immersive _because_ the game doesn't only give you easy cases. Real detective work involves a lot of legwork too, a lot of dead ends, and some cases a real detective might not be able to solve. I'm finding it extremely enjoyable that Shadows of Doubt includes those elements instead of trying to "protect" the player from them.

Case in point, I just did a job where the only available info was the age of the person I needed to arrest, the job of their partner, and the building their partner worked in. There were 12 offices in that building, so I had to get access to them (by breaking in or by bribing employees), find out who the accountant was and where they lived, and then I had to visit these accountants at their homes and check the age of their partners (via their birth certificates). It took a while to solve that case, but it felt rewarding when I completed it.

the difference is that when you get a dead end case in this game, its information that you are expected to action on- from an immersion perspective, it's ridiculous that the client simultaneously has no idea who the target is yet when you find his info it magically fills in and both you and the client are like "yep, thats the guy"

how can you tell? if the given base instructions aren't of a variety that CONFIRM an identity when found, then it's purely up to the video game to tell you when you got it right, when isnt detective work at all.

for example (this is an actual case i got)

take a photo of this man:

Build: average

Lives in: Whittleton Terrace (or whatever i dont know)

Shoe size: 8


You're telling me that this man put a job up, where he has no information on who his target is other than his BUILD AND SHOE SIZE AND BUILDING? so... how the hell is the client supposed to know when you have the right guy?

when you just run down an exhaustive list of 50 people until the game inevitably fills in the "unknown citizen" portrait, there's quite literally no detective work. It's trial and error.

[Isabelle]

Originally posted by Psyringe:

Part of the reason why I'm enjoying this game, is that it _can_ generate cases that are tough to crack. That's a welcome change from the excessive handholding that lots of other games do.

I see an attitude of "every case should be solvable with a reasonable amount of effort" in some of the replies here. I understand that mindset, but for this game, I do not agree. I find the detective work very immersive _because_ the game doesn't only give you easy cases. Real detective work involves a lot of legwork too, a lot of dead ends, and some cases a real detective might not be able to solve. I'm finding it extremely enjoyable that Shadows of Doubt includes those elements instead of trying to "protect" the player from them.

Case in point, I just did a job where the only available info was the age of the person I needed to arrest, the job of their partner, and the building their partner worked in. There were 12 offices in that building, so I had to get access to them (by breaking in or by bribing employees), find out who the accountant was and where they lived, and then I had to visit these accountants at their homes and check the age of their partners (via their birth certificates). It took a while to solve that case, but it felt rewarding when I completed it.

oh and: when several people match the description exactly, the client would have no way of knowing who their own target is. It's just illogical from a realism standpoint and not fun gameplay wise