If AoD outright asked you to rise the skill the moment you fail it eg. "You've failed this persuasion check. Do you want to spend X points to raise your skill enough to pass it? Y/N?" the game wouldn't become more shallow. It would just remove some tedious reloading.
Some of the decisions involving skill checks requires thinking from the players. So it’s not binary as you put it. Besides, many fail-and-go scenarios are also cool. So this “you fail, you die” criticism doesn’t hold in all cases. I think that this “You should some points here” would be cool, but it would be even better after a complete overall of the SP reward system. Otherwise, players will just spend all their points in one skill. I have the suspicion if the game would warn you that you can “deposit” your SPs for a rainy day, the hoarding of SPs would feel better.
Fallout has tons of things that reward metagaming, but if you fail every skill check you can still beat the game. i.e, the ol' "FUCKING CASUALS" debate. VD made a Fallout game for grognards, not really anything wrong with that per se. We just learned that the "casuals" crowd includes lots of people who like to pretend they are hardcore.
There are two differences. First, FOs are combat centric games and skill checks are fluffy for the most part. They add flavor, but you mostly just explore and kill things. In AoD skill/stat checks are taken seriously, as they should. Second, AoD provides more choices than FO -> more choices represent more chances of failure -> more chances of failure represents
negativity bias. This negativity is a fair price to pay for many different and believable scenarios.
No they don't have this problem, because in most of them skill-checks are complimentary to the combat-centered gameplay, which makes them manageable. You may miss on some optional reward or fail some quest but it's hardly a reason to reload just to get some better results. In AoD gameplay for non-combat centric characters skill-checks are the core gameplay which makes hoarding and save-scumming a bit of an issue.
Yes, but this mean that the skill/stat checks are very few in number and not taken seriously, which means that the character building is fluffy to a certain point. I think you should acknowledge either that stats and skills determine the choices you can make, or they don’t. If they don’t, make a linear game with pure combat, or make an action game and label it as a cRPG.
What does me being able to "predict skill checks" have to do with anything? Just FYI I didn't have that much of a problem with AoD after I understood that diplomat=persuasion+streetwise and loremaster is diplomat+lore+crafting. I just didn't find it to be interesting. Can we now go back to the original point?
What is interesting is the ton of choices these skill checks provide, besides the boring usual quest design of “kill things for me” and “deliver this”. You have to put this things in consideration when you make this criticisms.
So you went with a combat-oriented character for your first playthrough, liked the combat (I assume) and the ability to avoid it occasionally, and therefore liked the game. No surprises here.
I had a different experience. I'm a sucker for non-combat approaches, so I was overhyped for the fully non-combat playthrough. And ended up utterly underwhelmed and with no desire to come back to the game. Sue me.
But that is a very reductive and simplistic criticism, doesn’t it? In my “combat oriented” playtrough as you called, I did a bunch of crazy things. I invaded Antida’s palace, steal a jewel, got undercover, threat people, hide in the shadows, cut people’s throats, visit an ancient tower, destroyed a robot, etc. In my non-combat playtrough, I manipulated Teron behind the curtains, coned a woman to take her jewels, fooled a religious figure, visited an ancient temple, fixed a machine, opened a portal to another dimension, etc, etc. So I don’t know what kind of your non-combat playtrough was, but this series of events is more richer and interesting from a quest design point of view than most cRPGs offers. And that is without mentioned that the other playtroughs were different too.
In “Quest for Glory” you have death scenarios, but you are always given enough clues in advance to avoid them if you don't act dumb. You have vastly different playstyles for the three (four) main classes, but you can also hybridize a bit with auxiliary skills.
You have this in AoD. That’s what I have being trying to tell, but you are just ignoring the information.
I remember that in W7. Time limits (or turn count limits) are an annoying mechanic. Pointless realism. I think it's fine to let you wander around until they feel like doing the main quest (or choosing between alternate mainline quests) to advance the plot. That's player agency / freedom.
Depends how you do it. This doesn’t fit in a sandbox type of game with hundreds of quests, but can be implemented in other games. The thing is, is an important mechanic, so the whole game must be designed taking this in consideration.
Makes me remember the old days where skyway, kingkomrade, Drog and Cleve posted more.
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