Choice permanence

[Swiftstylus]

@CaiusMartius

I emphatically disagree with your second paragraph. It IS, the developers game. No ‘ands’, ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ about it. It’s their creation. They can damn well do whatever they want with it. YOUR choice as a consumer is to buy it or not. You can also certainly express what you like and dislike about it and vote by spending, or not spending, money on the game. As a filmmaker, I, for one, really wish we’d see a return to the creators sticking to their visions (falling flat or soaring high). Because that vision is going to be unique.

This just shows your lack of knowledge of how the system works. To make a game, any game, you need to get investors to give you the money. No money, no new game. If investors see that players want a game to go in this direction, and it’s going the opposite, they will certainly take their money and leave and game will be no more. Consumers won’t pay for the game and investors will lose their return from their investment. The difference in a game and a film is the role of the consumer. A consumer plays an active role for a game, while a passive role for a movie. A movie is a story that a consumer just enjoys and it is on the storyteller and creator to make it good. A game has an active component to it and should only be compared in a very loose sense, because if you want a game that will grow and live to become something more, then you’re going to have to accept the will and wishes of those that use said game.

It is their game (all 36~ of them), but it is my choice to buy it and if they don’t have enough of a consumer base, the game won’t survive. As such, my opinion of how the game should work overall (not the design or balance simply the choice available to me as a player) are far more important than the developers. Keep in mind that this isn’t an indie game someone is working on solo for a specific vision and to tell a story, but a full company trying to strike out and make itself.

@CaiusMartius

As to having more skill points to build it the way you want it, all I can say is the intent by the game developers on how the game is supposed to feel, flow and play might not fit whatever you may want in this regard. They may not want certain things to happen. One bigger things I’ve noticed, except for a few outliers, the game isn’t supposed to be ‘fast.’ The combat isn’t supposed to be step in and 2 seconds later everything is dead and you move on. Yes, of course there are outliers that some of the higher end gamers are discovering, and it’s usually those very same outliers that get the hardest nerfs. That should tell you something about how the devs intend the game to feel. So perhaps, when you structure your critiques it might be best to also keep this in mind.

I never said more skill points in this discussion. I said I would like to see damage nodes moved to the passive tree. I would like to see more ‘X effect but Y negative effect’ options, and I said I wanted to see skills have more diversity within their classes (something that no one would complain about, who doesn’t want more options???)

By having more of the ‘X effect but Y negative effect’ we’ll have more choices with actual weight, rather than this pseudo choice that lends to the “best build is this one” issue where we’ll simply see choosing these specific nodes makes the builds best and everyone chooses that build with no true diversity. Skill trees should focus on changing the core mechanics of the skills while the actual damage is gain from your passives. It feels like this is the intent, but it doesn’t seem like they fully dove in on this decision and instead did a half damage half mechanics idea. Whether this is due to not having enough ideas on how to change mechanics of a skill, time to implement such ideas without going over budget, or simply capability is unknown to me.