Sounds cool but PoEs also had all the skill checks and it didn't make games that impressive.
Yeah, but why? POE had a totally different design philosophy. For skill checks to matter, you need to bake them into the quests so that they give you different ways of accomplishing your objectives. and ideally also different outcomes.
The current Obsidian rank and file are capable of doing this. Deadfire is way, way better about including meaningful skill checks than POE was, including arguably the best stealth system I've seen in an isometric RPG. But, at the end of the day, it was still a Josh Sawyer game, and Sawyer believes that role playing is about character expression. That's how you get so many dialogue options and disposition checks that don't really do anything. There's rarely much payoff because for Sawyer it's not about the payoff, it's about having options. I don't know how he arrived at this dumbass philosophy, but I think he bears an enormous amount of blame.
Just look at Tyranny, which also gave you tons of dialogue options that let you say the effectively the same thing in a slightly different way. Yet when Tunon puts you on trial at the end, you get some payoff: a spy has been watching you all along and you need to account for your actions. I know Tyranny's skill checks suck because they're too low and the game doesn't force you to specialize, but that's a different problem.
Anyway, I doubt any of this will be an issue for TOW because Tim and Leonard have a different approach. When they give you the choice to antagonize someone, there's a very good chance that person will immediately try to kill you. These are the speech/stealth/slay guys. They're not going to make a Josh Sawyer game.
