Do we really need skill system?

[Guest 4ward]

i would have liked a skill that would have allowed my weapon to grow/progress with my character. Being a wizard and having the planar sphere as the stronghold in BG2 i liked it that my apprentices gave me a personalized weapon. It was cool and would have been even cooler to be able to make the weapon better with time, like making the initially +1 dagger a boomerang +4 dagger with additional damaging effects. As it was in BG2 though, you would throw your katana +1 out of the window once you got the celestial fury katana.

[Shevek]

There are not enough skills for this to work. They need more skills than one party can max for it to make sense (like 3x what they have now). They also need to reverse this ridiculous decision of connecting skills and talents - its just silly to do that.

[Captain Shrek]

The problem with the skill system is that it is too shallow. There are very few skills and that seems to be the usual "cut content to justify balance" motto of Bethesda. 

 

The problem in IWD2 was that there were a lot of skills which were useless due to their use not being implemented in the game. The solution should have been to add content to jsutify taking them and not removing those skills. 

[jediwolf]

Quick answer:

 

Yes we do.

[CatatonicMan]

The problem with the skill system is that it is too shallow. There are very few skills and that seems to be the usual "cut content to justify balance" motto of Bethesda. 

 

The problem in IWD2 was that there were a lot of skills which were useless due to their use not being implemented in the game. The solution should have been to add content to jsutify taking them and not removing those skills. 

 

Working within limits is an unfortunate necessity with game design. Adding content to fill out a large skill lineup would take a lot of time and resources. Making all the skills equally useful would take even more time and resources. I'd rather have OE focus on doing a few things really well than to do a bunch of things rather poorly.

 

Besides which, very few CRPGs are open/varied enough to really make use of an expansive skill system. Oddly, that's the kind of thing that I could see implemented in Bethesda's games, assuming they weren't entirely awful at that kind of thing.

[Captain Shrek]

 

The problem with the skill system is that it is too shallow. There are very few skills and that seems to be the usual "cut content to justify balance" motto of Bethesda. 

 

The problem in IWD2 was that there were a lot of skills which were useless due to their use not being implemented in the game. The solution should have been to add content to jsutify taking them and not removing those skills. 

 

Working within limits is an unfortunate necessity with game design. Adding content to fill out a large skill lineup would take a lot of time and resources. Making all the skills equally useful would take even more time and resources. I'd rather have OE focus on doing a few things really well than to do a bunch of things rather poorly.

 

Besides which, very few CRPGs are open/varied enough to really make use of an expansive skill system. Oddly, that's the kind of thing that I could see implemented in Bethesda's games, assuming they weren't entirely awful at that kind of thing.

 

 

 

Indeed. I am not even asking for a level of detail equivalent to that of core D&D with its 20+ skills. But there are games out there made before PoE that had more than 6 (5?) skills which could in principle make things interesting.  Just play the Conan modules for NWN2 to see what I mean. 

 

Now granted that OE has had to make the assets from scratch, but then OE is not an indie developer either. 

[nipsen]

..so I suppose in general you could say that it's probably ok to have fewer skills - if they are all meaningful and have some sort of synergy with the character build, and they are used in different situations fairly often. And that having 20+ skills is probably not all that great if the skills are very specific and very rarely used, become mechanically boring, etc.

 

[insert rant about early PoE build making the most sense so far here]

[Kjaamor]

I always preferred the IE implementation of 2nd Edition because, amongst other things, I always thought that the skills and feats largely contributed to an illusion of choice rather than actual choice. The feats appeared horribly imbalanced to the point where each class only ever had a few they would pick from, and the skill system inevitably felt like a choice you made at character creation and then an arbitrary piece of scrolling and clicking in each level thereafter.

 

Personally, if they could do something close to 2nd Edition where diversity was handled by spell/weapon choice and something akin to multiclassing, I would be happier.

 

Realistically, since that view looks pretty unpopular around here, I would at least ask that character background and character level defines skill more than talents do, and if they could remove around 90% of the current talents from the game, that'd be awesome, too, since most of them will never be selected by anyone and they're little more than clutter at present.