Vault Dweller said:
But it's not. If you can easily play the game without them, they don't matter.
Does investing into skills make the game easier?
If so, skills matter.
Vault Dweller said:
Rolling makes the game ridiculously easy. So does Quen. So do bombs. So do daggers (at least, they do require a skill).
What do you mean by "ridiculously easy" anyway?
To me "ridiculously easy" means I can play the game essentially on autopilot, but from what I remember of my TW2 playthrough on hard, I wouldn´t characterize combat as such, even when using the roll-like-mad approach.
Vault Dweller said:
Investing into skills merely makes you an overpowered tank.
So the skills do matter after all.
Vault Dweller said:
It's as fun as maxing your skills in an editor and playing any RPG.
Ah, the fun card.
The thing is, if you choose not to invest into skills, you tailor your gameplay towards being more dependent on player´s reflexes and awareness of surroundings, as well as on resource management.
Investing into skills makes you less dependent on the above.
Granted, ideally in an action RPG players should need to take good advantage of all of the above to succeed (as happens to be G2:NotR´s case imo), at least on higher difficulty settings, but in The Witcher 2 investing into skills making players "overpowered tanks" is still not a matter of skill system as a whole, just few badly balanced ones. In Fallout: New Vegas you take Boone, in Arcanum you invest into Harm, in The Witcher 2 you boost Quen.
Speaking of being an overpowered tank, I think The Witcher 2 maintains difficulty on a proper level throughout its first chapter and I don´t think you become really overpowered till its end, they just fucked it up from chapter 2 onwards, because the skill income in later chapters wasn´t, maybe bar few exceptions, well countered with encounter design.
However, there are plenty of cRPGs which become easy once you develop your character(s) a bit and RPGs which maintain somewhat steady upwards difficulty curve are actually pretty rare.
The latest example I can think of would be BG2 with Sword Coast Stratagems and Ascension.
Vault Dweller said:
For instance? Rolling vs "standing your ground"? Self-imposed restrictions to increase difficulty, like not using Quen or not rolling or not upgrading your weapons are pretty lame, if you ask me.
I agree, but again, majority of cRPGs have this problem.
I´m going to play the fun card as well and say that, generally speaking, while self-restrictions don´t make a game´s system itself balanced any better, if they make the game more fun, why not go for´em?
My personal experience with TW2 was that, without restricting myself from skill investments, the game provided good challenge in its first half and while its second half was disappointing in this regard, I can´t say I minded all the ass kicking all that much
.
At any rate, I more-or-less agree with the gist of what you´re saying, but I think you´re exaggerating some of the points.