The fundamental issue remains, though, which is - LBU is supposed to be "get good at what you use", but it becomes "use what to get good at". I'm not sure you can even get rid of that while having an LBU, so maybe it's a weakness that any LBU game just has to roll with.
With "use what to get good at", did you mean those problems where, like, in Skyrim, you can abuse smithing an iron dagger to increase smithing skill all the way to 100, etc etc? If so, didn't this update pretty much aimed to avoid that problem completely? Because, once again:
- We’re well aware of the possible exploits and want to reassure you that skill use will be a somewhat limited resource (no respawning enemies, silly things like greeting every NPC to increase your speech skills, spamming activities to max skills in 30 min, using faster weapons to level up skills faster, etc). Instead of counting how many times you did something, we’ll assign a certain value (let’s call it learning points) to each activity (attacking, killing, fixing, sneaking, convincing, lying, etc). So killing a tough enemy or repairing a reactor will net you more points than killing a weakling or fixing a toaster. Basically, it will work the same way as XP but go directly toward raising a skill that did all the work.
I, too, initially worried that the fundamental problems with LBU will be carried over to CS, but with this update, I think "get good at what you use" will at least be intact because players can't go around abusing trivial activities to max their skills. Fingers crossed they accomplish their goal with this design.
No, not quite - I mean something even more basic. When you walk into a conversation in a game like AOD/CS, what you really want is to be gripped by the severity of the situation. You want to think, given my limited set of skills and resources, how can I make it through this situation?
Can I even make it through this situation?
In AOD, the problem wasn't just that skills gating required you to hoard SPs and stuff. The problem was that the experience of saying, "eh I'll go up and talk to this guy, see what the checks are, then reload and spend some SPs" - or the experience of saying "OK let's see what the game brings, oh god, I'm dead! I guess I reload and, spend some SPs on Streetwise" - was really detrimental to what was otherwise AOD's unparalleled achievement: to put a real sense of danger, consequences and impossibilities into dialogue-driven situations.
With CS, design changes including a switch to party means, as we know, we are much less likely to encounter such harsh thresholds. In other words, we're more likely to have a couple of options that our party is actually capable of using to solve the situation, and it's not going to be such a stark "got Persuasion? no? reload". So that's good. But what I don't want is to go up to a set piece in CS and have the experience of, "well, I could shoot my way in or sneak in, but do I want my character to be good at shooting or sneaking?" That again really dilutes what is Iron Tower's signature strength.
As I say, I don't think this is some fundamental problem. To a degree, this just comes hand in hand with playing a video game, and I'm happy as a player to say to myself "with this game, I'll just make my choices and see what my character ends up as, instead of planning what he/she is at the beginning." I think that will be a cool experience. I simply predict that many players who will otherwise enjoy CS get into a thoroughly unenjoyable meta-calculation. (Again, I'm not even sure if VD can address that, or whether it's VD's task to address.)