No, it is bad for them. Because you are not taking your backers seriously, and you lose a enormous amount of good will for doing that. “Banner Saga” sold like hot cakes, but the second game was a fiasco because they thought they didn’t need to engage with their audience.
Not every developer needs to design by committee, community or focus group.
That’s false. Games are designed by committee because you are making a specific type of cRPG, with specific type of features, for a specific type of player. Players are ultimately the reason why developers made games. Without players there is no reason to make games, unless you want to work for free. When you decide that players preferences are not important because you decided to put developers on a pedestal, you are turning the world on its head.
I find it refreshing that they do their own thing. Having a strong vision and not altering it to a huge extent due to community feedback is a rare approach these days.
Right, but in order to do “their own thing” they need to do other things well. Their visions need to be accompanied by either solid combat system, or decent C&C, or good writing, or good atmosphere, etc. and these features can be discussed and analyzed. They need to be arrogant or lazy to ignore feedback regarding these features.
A task must indeed have a difficulty level of some type. The problem is that in the real world, an attempt to complete a task typically does not result in either a total success and total failure.
Of course it does. You could argue that not all your results are equally efficient, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are either successful in your task or not. If your task is to sell X units of Y, you are successful if you achieve that number, and fail otherwise. But you can sell way more than what is necessary and in this case you are more efficient.
This is why it's rarely possible to determine a single sufficient level of skill for succeeding at a task, because people can do things with great ease, they can manage after considerable effort or with the help of appropriate aids and resources, they can come up with a solution that is suboptimal but partially does the job and so forth.
A character system with stats and skills is an abstract model of people’s abilities and talents. Complaining that is idealized it is pointless because all models are idealized. Now, considering your other criticisms, I’m sure that you either have or can conceive systems to account for these variables. People can do things with great ease if they are talented, e.g., you have 9 points in INT, but need only 5; they can manage a task with effort if they have only what is enough, you have 5 points in INT and you need 5 points to achieve the desired result; they can succeed with the help of appropriate aids and resources, this can be interpreted as using a consumable to improve your stats momentarily, etc. I don’t understand what you mean by “a solution that is suboptimal but partially does the job” because you either do the job or you don’t. You can say that someone can do the job in a less efficient manner, and we have ways to support this in cRPGs, e.g., a critical hit is more efficient than a normal hit, but both are successful in damaging the target. In fact, you can even consider other elements that can affect your success, e.g., people can succeed because they got lucky, and you can consider luck a stat such as in FO.
For this reason, PnP RPGs tend to have task resolution that breaks down to grades of success, along the lines of perfect success, partial success, success with a cost, minor failure, critical failure and such. Regrettably, this is something that CRPGs do infrequently and inconsistently at best, because generally speaking such degrees of success would have to be scripted individually, which starts to increase the complexity of a game exponentially.
Your talk about degrees of success is confusing, but there is a simple reason why most developers don’t invest in fail-and-go scenarios. First, it takes a lot of resources to implement these different scenarios. It’s not just a matter of adding different levels of bonus or XP as it is the case with critical hits. You need to implement a specific outcome for each check. Second, cRPG players have being spoiled by decades of developers hand holding and fluffy skill checks. If you waste your time investing in these less than optimal results, they will feel personally insulted and reload until they “get it right”. AoD, for instance, has tons of these fail-and-go scenarios, but players simply ignored all that because they can’t accepted they can’t beat certain checks.
In comparison, the Numenera system is a step closer to what PnP RPGs can accomplish, since it can differentiate between situations in which you succeed easily and situations in which you manage after using up resources.
I think it is a lazy way to approach the problem, with robust resource management or not. First, it does make sense to improve some of your abilities with consumables, e.g., your concentration, but the idea that you can improve your charisma or intelligence with items is just silly. Second, it doesn’t prevent the frustration that it is intended to solve, and the frustration is this: “I have X points, but the game asks for XY”. It has nothing to do with degrees of success, it is about ego. If you fix the possibility of abusing the system, players will frustrated by failing in skill checks. Instead of discussing the wonders of Numenera system, we should be discussing players’ prejudices and why most cRPG developers don’t take character systems seriously.
And you think "hey, we are inXile, makers of Wasteland 2, we are making yet another isometric cRPG" isn't nostalgia enough? Shadowrun isn't nostalgia?
That’s not how things worked. “Hey guys, is Brian Fargo. Do you remember me? I made
Wasteland,
the father of Fallout. Gives your money so that we can make a
Fallout-clone new Wasteland. With Obsidian it was the same thing. “Hey guys, we want to make new cRPGs that play like
BG2-clone IE games. Give us your money”. These things are there.
I'm not even going to talk about le evil SJWs since I don't care about that topic.
You don’t. You just wonder why the game world feels so castrated, sanitized and mediocre.
but to imply "Torment" was the sole reason ToN was funded is ridiculous.
I said that it was the only reason why the kickstarter was so successful. If they pitched for a new narrative-cRPG it would got funded with much less money, anticipation and promotion. And probably we wouldn't even discussing the game right now. It would be InXile's Tyranny.
