Talent trees?

[Utukka]

I think most of us have had our fair-share of WoW-inspired, insipidly-shallow skill trees. If there's going to be a skill tree in this game, I want each class to have at least 100 talents to put one point in.

 

Path of Exile's kind of spoiled me (http://www.pathofexi...ive-skill-tree/) but not really - I'm not saying PE should be as ridiculously big as that, but I'm tired of the WOW-style "oh there's 7 to 15 passives to pick from!" - it's too narrow, there's not enough character building with a set-up like that. Especially when a majority of such nodes are worthless or don't impact your character enough.

 

Feats are probably more suited for this kind of game, but I really love the keystone idea PoE is developing, where you can significantly alter your character's performance by choosing a passive ability which makes some aspect of play difficult/tough, while making another aspect very powerful. Like, a keystone for PE blood-thirsty-rogue might be, "You cannot be healed by restorative spells. Your critical strikes leech 30% of their damage as life." Basically, a Feat with polarizing downside and upside.

 

POE is essentially just a passive skill tree and stat points combined into one. It just allows for customization in a different way than having 2 seperate systems(stat points per level and passive skill tree). You could achieve the same goal with 2 different systems or maybe even 3 if you split IAS faster cast etc into its own tree that would be less "logistical/connect the dots". You also kinda answered your own knock on WoW, the system itself of having 7-15 passives isn't the issue, it's the fact that 95% of them are worthless and also never EVER have a downside. Lack of creativity or design is the true fault, not the system itself.

[Larkaloke]

I'm not very fond of talent trees, so I would rather not see them. My problem with them is that often it doesn't seem to follow that you would need to know the previous talent to acquire the next one, and often there may be only one thing you actually want to use in a tree but have to take several other seemingly unrelated things to get to it.

 

I'd rather have something more akin to feat selection, some combination of ranks of skill and feats requiring a certain rank of skill, or perhaps something entirely different (since I'm sure there are many other possibilities out there).

[nikolokolus]

Prerequisites for certain feats/skills are fine sometimes, but I've never much cared for the way it was done in the Dragon Age games. The perk/feat chains made me feel railroaded into a particular build.

 

I'd like to see a system wherein the generalist, "jack of all trades, master of none" approach is nearly as viable for character building as the specialist, min-max path.

[Sacred_Path]

Trees are far too restricting; if they are class specific, they limit character building. If they're not class specific, they tend to offer a much smaller 'pool' of choices than traits/ perks. I really badly want to like Lionheart because I enjoy fiddling with that system so much.

[Ninjamestari]

Both feats and talent trees can lead to both an incredibly interesting game and a horrible disaster. Here is a situation where one system isn't inherently better than the other, it's the implementation that counts. Besides, you could easily do several kinds of mixes between the systems that might be interesting.

[Farbautisonn]

Id say "no".

 

Talent trees tend to "pideonhole" players into a certain playstyle and is too "WoW Esque" for me. It was also implemented in ME3 and well... that sucked hard.

 

Having a free choise of talents allows you to customize your toon to a much higher degree and gives you a feel of "personalization" (regardless of real empirical evidence to that fact).

 

I wouldnt even mind if there were talents that were more or less completely useless except in two or three critical situations where an underrated talent suddenly gives you an edge. Obscure knowledge about Religion, nobility, history suddenly pays of as your captor turns from foe to friend because you can relate to his family / church history. Or it could turn foe into hellbent enemy till death. Strange lore or books on architechture, jewlery, etc that you decided to hold on to "because the drawings look nice" or because you RP yourself as an arrogant fop with a passion for the "better things in life" or RP the druid turned wizard who has a fetish for all that is the urban.

 

IRL small things make a difference. In my most memorable pen and paper games, the smallest bat****e insane talents and perks I came up with could make a significant differnce... for bad or for worse. Small things can make or break a campain.

[Mils]

I'd prefer feats, it would fit much better in an IE style game and IWD2 had something similar.

[RaketenRichard]

Trees are far too restricting; if they are class specific, they limit character building. If they're not class specific, they tend to offer a much smaller 'pool' of choices than traits/ perks. I really badly want to like Lionheart because I enjoy fiddling with that system so much.

 

Classes are also pretty restrictive =)

[Shadenuat]

Talent tree is just a visualisation of skills and their prerequisites. You can take Power Attack, Improved Power Attack, Cleave, Greater Cleave and Epic Cleave and make it look like a talent tree.

[Sacred_Path]

Trees are far too restricting; if they are class specific, they limit character building. If they're not class specific, they tend to offer a much smaller 'pool' of choices than traits/ perks. I really badly want to like Lionheart because I enjoy fiddling with that system so much.

 

Classes are also pretty restrictive =)

 

Yes, but they unequivocally are in the game already XD

 

Besides, a good offering of traits, perks and skills softens up the limitations of the class system

[Jajo]

Talent tree is just a visualisation of skills and their prerequisites. You can take Power Attack, Improved Power Attack, Cleave, Greater Cleave and Epic Cleave and make it look like a talent tree.

 

Of course you can, but does it make sense to have ~30 talent "bushes" and "saplings" just so that you can say that tecnhincally you have talent trees?

I'm agains deep and restrictive talent trees. Cherry picking from a big basket of talents (limited by prerequisites) offers much greater customization and that's what makes a single player game attractive to run again and again and again...

[BetrayTheWorld]

I'm actually in favor of a feat system rather than tree system. While it's true that you could arrange D&D feats into a tree with very loose branches, I've never seen such a tree made in an RPG. Rather, most RPGs who go the "tree" route basically pigeonhole players into choosing one of three branches to advance in at a time. If the tree had 20-50 branches, I'd be happy with it. And that is really the only way I'd support the tree idea.

 

I am, however, a big fan of feats/perks such as in D&D or FO games. As far as those go, the more, the better. I'd like to see so many options available that it makes the customization of the various "classes" incredible and diverse. You don't need a lot of "classes" if you can customize your character with lots of individual feat/perk choices.

Edited October 30, 2012 by BetrayTheWorld

[mokona]

I like talent trees. I'm not sure if talent trees are necessary in a game with eleven (11) specialized character classes. Talent trees are mostly a way to add some class-like structure to character abilities in an otherwise class-less game design.

[Ieo]

Also keep in mind that Sawyer is a particularly big proponent of interesting player choices--trees simply do not allow for this, being more restrictive in a linear sense per "specialization" and requiring developer valuation for traits/talents/whatever instead of player choice. No matter how one cuts it, trees require finite starting and ending points with non-overlapping paths.

 

Since Obsidian has already gone on record to say the classes (and there are so many of them) will allow for substantial flexibility, a tree-based implementation would seem to defeat that purpose. I just don't see it happening for PE, anyway...

[Shadenuat]

Of course you can, but does it make sense to have ~30 talent "bushes" and "saplings" just so that you can say that tecnhincally you have talent trees?

 

It is a way to let player know of the existence of feats and their prereqs. In Fallout, you would never know there is a Living Anatomy perk, unless you have Medicine 70. In NWN2, you would never be aware of Feint feat, unless you read Silent Blade prestige class description. Sure there are manuals, but it's a good taste to let player know what his options are and let him plan ahead inside the game. Skill Trees can be used just for that. There are other ways to do it (for example, a list of feats with avaible feats at the top and not avaible at bottom and being darker ot transparent), Skill Trees just one of them.

[Tamerlane]

I support Skill Shrubs.

[BetrayTheWorld]

It is a way to let player know of the existence of feats and their prereqs. In Fallout, you would never know there is a Living Anatomy perk, unless you have Medicine 70. In NWN2, you would never be aware of Feint feat, unless you read Silent Blade prestige class description. Sure there are manuals, but it's a good taste to let player know what his options are and let him plan ahead inside the game. Skill Trees can be used just for that. There are other ways to do it (for example, a list of feats with avaible feats at the top and not avaible at bottom and being darker ot transparent), Skill Trees just one of them.

 

I remember when games came with beefy manuals that were enjoyable to read, and had accurate mechanics that didn't change immediately upon release of the game(rendering the manual obsolete). Back then, during the super-long install times, I'd look forward to spending an hour or so perusing the game manual during loading, and I'd thoroughly read the manual during free time. Those were the days....

[PsychoBlonde]

I really would prefer some other kind of system if possible. I don't like being required to take a bunch of abilities that don't complement each other one bit in order to get the one I really want. If you think the top-tier ability is too powerful then make it cost more points or something. And if it's not more powerful, then why is it at the top of this friggin tree?

 

Granted, a pre-req system is not immune to this problem. Most of the requirements for, say, Whirlwind Attack are lousy feats, and the pre-reqs make whirlwind so expensive to get that it's by far not remotely worth the expenditure.

 

I'd much prefer a system where EVERYONE has a broad set of basic abilities from their class, and you gradually upgrade and modify these abilities as you go along until you get to select few unique whammies. This has the added benefit that you can have alternate uses for the general abilities (since you know people will have them) and further integrate the gameplay into the story and vice versa.

[rodolfo]

Please, no.

When I played 'dragon age of war' on my PS3 I just hated their new tree system.

TBH, I just played that game coz'I lost many hours playing Origins and I wanted to check if all those bad reviews were true.

I liked what they used in IWD2

[Urist_McDorf]

Star Wars Saga Edition has a great implementation of talent trees, essentially expanding the five base classes into tons of more narrow ones. I'd love to see something like that in PE.

[paasi]

I'm in favor of not implementing skill/talent trees. they make character creation into a linear and rigid system.

Something similiar to fallouts skill and feat system is closest to my heart. In other words:

a TON of different skills (at least 10 or so :D)

a TON of different perks

and a lot of gaming and experience available to gain them.

The people at obsidian want to make a game with a lot of pure exploration areas with plenty of content to make us immerse into the game as adventurers, so this kind of multitude of skills and perks adds flavor to the game allowing you to customize your adventurers in so many ways.

 

When you start off a rookie who doesn't know which end of his dagger goes into the bad guy, by exploring and getting side-tracked (my favorite thing in games ever since Morrowind) you develop into a fully fledged badass adventurer wielding mighty artefacts to hurl doom at any who would slight you.

[.Leif.]

I think nothing is wrong with the feat system. Sure there are some feat trees to some extent but most feats are available to all classes. Feat-Tree based skill levels are usually pretty shallow when it comes to diversification.