My impression is so far, that the game is too much hit or miss.
Either you succeed without problems or you fail totaly (most of the time, there is admittedly a "bad" solution to the bandits).
You can play a diplomat or a fighter, but something in between seems almost impossible, at least in the demo.
If I raise combat skills, I cannot raise social skills much and will fail the checks. If I raise social skills I will suck at combat.
And at least my Praetorians have not encountered any easy fights yet during their missions, as both bandit camp and outpost will have you vastly outnumbered. So I am supposed to play a diplomat here?
I think this is more a demo issue. The two other cities and most minor locations are cut off to you, so there's no way to raise skills once you're done with all the encounters in the area. It's only at the very end that you start to reach situations where you can think about developing secondary skills. On the one hand, it encourages min/maxing early on, as well as "grinding" encounters to get skill points. On the other hand, that's the trade-off you make when you do away with scaling and want to make an open game world meaningful, unless you want an "easy city, medium city, hard city" setup, or to end up maxing out in one location and then facing no challenge elsewhere in the game.
Comparisons to Fallout and "don't go to the Glow at level 1" or "don't fight the Raiders immediately after Shady Sands" are very apt, but we just can't see that because the demo is only a small part of the full game. And, I can attest that once you do boost up some of your secondary skills and spread things out, you start to see options pop up left and right. It's just hiding them from characters who have no skill that's throwing people off.
Why is a Preator then described as a kind of diplomatic fighter when early game revolves completely around diplomacy?
So I understand that you wanted combat to be dangerous and the game to be challenging, with bad choices leading to bad consequences. That's great, really!
However, I still think that you should provide the player with some sort of learning curve, not a learning wall, especially in terms of combat. And if the only way to do a mandatory mission is either to exclusively raise the right set of skills or impossible combat, something went wrong (probably just in my understanding of the options I have at hand, though, so please tell me if I missed something)-
I can't speak for every situation, but generally you aren't locked out of anything unless you just make bad decisions while building your character. Just like tagging Outdoorsman in Fallout and getting it to 100 ASAP, you can do dumb things. And while it's true in the demo, in the full game, my guess is there are no "mandatory" quests, because you can always go somewhere else. The fact is, there is no "idiot proof" path through the game. You cannot be a drooling simpleton with no skills and end up winning - your end will be a grave, and rightly so.
I do agree the early combat could be a little bit easier - but the unfortunate consequence is that you end up with a game where players go to combat for every situation and treat it as the default option, and that's definitely not what's intended. Balancing that curve would be exceptionally difficult given the variation in potential character builds. Fact is, if you pick Mercenary, keep your Strength, Dex and Constitution high, and put points into weapon skills and/or blocking, you will be able to finish that initial fight without too much trouble. And really, with shit equipment and little experience (it's made clear your character is only hired on for intimidation purposes, not because he/she's a great fighter), what do you expect to do against a seasoned assassin?
For the record - I died as a Praetor because I failed a skill check and ended up having to quell a peasant uprising by hand. Failure happens, but at least it happens both for combat and non-combat characters, and the early game Praetor path is definitely not exclusively diplomacy-focused. You can definitely be a fighter-diplomat, but that's the kind of thing that happens later in the game once you can actually survive and start accomplishing tasks. I mean, if you're a musician, do you practice guitar for a month and then move on to drums, and expect to be great at both? I think it's totally reasonable to expect players to have to specialize early on to get ahead.
troll
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