It wasn't just balance. There was no resource in the game other than time, so as long you could find a spot to hide every 7 seconds (or however long it was), you could just wait for the cooldowns and then go along your merry way. Which means that stealth was also "pretty bad". I would say no human being likes running between conveniently placed hiding spots and waiting for a cool down either.
Because AP was closest to completion.
Too bad Sega didn't have the money to spare, but it gave us a Josh-led New Vegas so things worked out for the best.I guess some people play degenerately like that, but I never would.
AP handled conversations better because they weren't win/loss and used reputation as an indirect reaction system. The only thing HR had going for it in its favor were the highly detailed facial animations and that's superficial.
What about the lovely feedback and information on the underlying systems?
I don't understand what you mean, unless you're referring to how highlighting the option gives the full sentence in most cases.
HR has the thing that scans the person and as you talk to them gives you more accurate information to what personality type they are.
And AP has dossiers you can buy/find that tell you what a character is like.
The personality doesn't change, but yes, npcs sometimes react differently to the same questions/arguments, but all ways they can react in are beliavable. Having said that, dividing all possible npcs into three personality types is overly simplistic and arcady. As Roguey said, AP handled it better, because there was no 'wrong' outcome - if you failed to convince an NPC, you were put in a different situation, that usually wasn't better or worse than if you had succeeded.
I think the scanner thing is more elegant, and gives more player agency.
It responds to what you do in a conversation rather than just pay money -> get info.
It has really good systems but doesn't take advantage of them with content. I'm only talking about systems here.
They only made content for binary results, but there is no reason they couldn't have done content for a gradient of results (other than time, money, and creativity).
That's not different from what happens in AP; you can still choose to go against or for what you learn from the dossiers, and npcs react accordingly. You may want to go against because you want to rile up the npc, for example.
Learning the information of a dossier basically requires no player agency. Either you read the thing or you don't. The scanner thing means there is *gameplay* in learning what the dossier would say. It's interactive and thus has player agency.
That's the whole idea of systemizing something. You create an abstraction which can then be manipulated. People don't have HP as depicted in games either, it's an abstraction.
