One customer's feedback

[ksagan]

Not sure where  else to put something like this--"I like your product a lot, and I know you value feedback, so here's mine". Obviously, this is a forum, so if people wanna argue, you're welcome to, but I'm just gonna put this all out there in case the devs wanna read it, not interested in debating.

General context: I played on hard, made mostly goody-two-shoes and/or radically anti-capitalist decisions (gave monarch to zora, took 100% of the dimethyl. didn't kill the chairman tho.)

• too much loot; sometimes in weird places
  • I'll buy that byzantines are all strapped, but would there really be a bin with a pistol and ammo sitting next to a park bench, free for the taking?
  • I prefer to only pick up loot that is not marked as "stealing", even when there's no possible way to get caught, and it didn't take me long to feel rich. Something like this should make a difference; I should be struggling a tiny bit, financially.
• not enough challenging encounters; combat never felt hard after I got a feel for it (basically, by the end of the power plant), with the sole exception of the final boss
• companion active abilities hard enough to keep track of--making so many perks revolve around refreshing them faster only made it worse
  • was there a visual indicator of them recharging? Should be more attention-getting, maybe with a pulse when they're ready. Apologies if it does and I just didn't notice--but that's an important data note in and of itself.
• Skill investment didn't feel meaningful enough
  • I get that leveling groups of stats prevents weird characters who are skilled in persuasion but incapable of lying (although frankly I just described myself so I'm not sure I agree it's a valid goal), but once I eschewed melee, it was too easy to be a jack of every other trade and a master of a fair number as well.
    • Maybe the actual problem was not that specializing didn't *work*, but rather that it simply felt too inefficient.
  • Where I put my stats, and my specialized (i.e. after 50) skill points, felt less important than which companions I had with me--particularly in conversations, and especially once I had the perk that doubled their impact.
• Too much lockpicking; made lockpick skill feel indispensable (even if money was plentiful enough that this feeling was an illusion)
• could have used something like rubicon from P:T, something very optional and grindy to just play the combat system.
  • I do enjoy being able to bypass combat encounters, feels more elegant. However, I do  *also* enjoy the combat, and a low-detail, low-effort optional dungeon would make it easier to have my cake and eat it too.
• would have liked diminishing returns past lvl 30; maybe no more perks, but continued skill increases?
• Something needs to be changed about consumables.
  • too much trash to sift through, and simultaneously too hard to keep in stock of your favorites; I ended up not using any except the basic healing until the end of the game.
    • Having about a dozen different effects, and THEN multiplying by several different brands having different durations for each effect, resulted in too much clutter, and made it hard to keep a steady supply of your preferred varieties in your inhaler. I get that the plethora of brands was important for tone, but it might have been overkill.  Maybe reducing it to just 2 different brands (durations) for each item would have been enough to make this aspect of the game more accessible, but as it was...I really wanted this to be part of my gameplay, the same way orange mentats and psychojet were part of my F4 gameplay, but it just didn't fall into place until the final sequence, when I was no longer concerned with stock management.
  • it didn't help that consumables with different durations and the same effect didn't look similar, or that stores stocked very small amounts of consumables, or that consumables were really expensive to buy. I think the high buy/sell price ratio makes sense for weapons and armor, but I think it kinda hurt the game when applied to consumables. And yes, I did mention elsewhere that I felt rich, but not rich enough to throw money away; consumable prices seemed hig
    • Part of the problem might have been the low combat difficulty; I might have been more pressed to hunt down consumables in stores and spend money on them if I hadn't been coasting through the combat--but I don't want all the additional effects of supernova/survival difficulty, I just want harder combat.
• FINAL COMPLAINT: I did not even realize until I was making this post that I NEVER FOUND ONE OF THE COMPANIONS. I had to google where they even were. So, apparently, the priest in Edgewater was supposed to join me after I gave him the book? I don't know if it was a bug or if I accidentally blew through a dialog exchange that told  him no, but...consider it a data point that somebody who wanted every companion possible, did not get one of them, in spite of completing the necessary quest.

 

[uuuhhii]

yes stealing make even early game too easy

only stole companion room accessories and some quest item

there is a small icon next to companion hp bar indicate their ability in cooldown

the interface are too busy sometime to keep track of things