Now, this is a problem as old as PnP itself: how do you build encounters that will both provide challenge to highly specialized builds and not immediately crush the jack-of-all-trades. If you scale combat to give the combat-monster PC a proper fight, you risk wiping all non-combat builds in short order. If you make the fight easy enough that anyone with a decent combat skill can get through, the full on murder machines will kill everything in seconds.
Reading that CDPR is actively building around 4 "approaches" (fast solo, strong solo, engineer, hacker) to all encounters has me worried what will happen if you build a character that does not fully commit to one of these approaches. I have personally run into this issue in games before, especially in the Deus Ex series, where for instance I have taken a couple of levels of hacking to allow some basic info gathering, but where every computer you meet after the mid-point of the game is beyond my hacking skill, leaving the points i put there completely wasted. Similarly, DR:HR had mandatory boss fights throughout the game, which were either annoyingly difficult if you specced for sneaking/hacking, or completely trivial if you had specced your character purely for combat.
I hope that Cyberpunk 2077 will make sure that even basic levels of a skill remains useful throughout the game. Seeing some of the gameplay related to hacking in the early game, I am hopeful that this could be the case. Here we have seen that a basic level of hacking will allow you to get some intel on enemy position, with a higher level giving a combat advantage and a high level allowing you to more or less avoid combat. I hope this will be mirrored with the engineering skill, so that you can always find some basic things to do that will at least give you a leg up, even if it wont let you resolve the encounter entirely. Perhaps something like getting more "direct" access to a network giving you an advantage when hacking or being able to do some basic sabotage to make something go boom at the start of a fight.
Reading that CDPR is actively building around 4 "approaches" (fast solo, strong solo, engineer, hacker) to all encounters has me worried what will happen if you build a character that does not fully commit to one of these approaches. I have personally run into this issue in games before, especially in the Deus Ex series, where for instance I have taken a couple of levels of hacking to allow some basic info gathering, but where every computer you meet after the mid-point of the game is beyond my hacking skill, leaving the points i put there completely wasted. Similarly, DR:HR had mandatory boss fights throughout the game, which were either annoyingly difficult if you specced for sneaking/hacking, or completely trivial if you had specced your character purely for combat.
I hope that Cyberpunk 2077 will make sure that even basic levels of a skill remains useful throughout the game. Seeing some of the gameplay related to hacking in the early game, I am hopeful that this could be the case. Here we have seen that a basic level of hacking will allow you to get some intel on enemy position, with a higher level giving a combat advantage and a high level allowing you to more or less avoid combat. I hope this will be mirrored with the engineering skill, so that you can always find some basic things to do that will at least give you a leg up, even if it wont let you resolve the encounter entirely. Perhaps something like getting more "direct" access to a network giving you an advantage when hacking or being able to do some basic sabotage to make something go boom at the start of a fight.
