Actually, right now there are quite a few games doing that. Shadowrun, PoE, Torment, Wasteland, etc etc.
Yeah. And most of them are great while operating with their relative shoelace budgets. Think about where those concepts and design goals could be taken with proper AA or even AAA budgets.
I don't think CP2077 will be a wannabe. If it has strong action elements - and it will - it will be one of the finest.
Sure. One of the finest of what's offered.
What's worrisome is that the design ideals these days are so entrenched that while it might have a cool setting, interesting story, nice visuals and audio, when ut comes to the core of what a game is, it won't be offering anything really... well, new or interesting and with those merits, it drowns in the grey mass of other similiar titles.
I'd prefer stats to simplify and boost player skills - as well as limit them.
If you haven't bought Pilot AV, good luck flying that AV, or even powering it on. If you haven't bought Climbing or Swimming, thats doable, but it's gonna suck.
I think skill choices and boosts will also change the gameplay. The ability to correctly place and detonate C6 in order to bypass an obstacle that someone without that skill would have to take another way around... yeah.
It all depends on to what degree that works. General idea usually seems to be "the less, the better". One could almost argue that RPG's in general are considered to be pretty damn boring games, 's why nobody really bothers to make them properly anymore.
But if you leave player skill out of the game, most people will feel disconnected. There is a reason Action RPGs are so popular and it's not some conspiracy of prejudice on the part of Devs.
Player skill is always prevalent in some manner. Elsewise it's not even a game anymore. RPG's in general are in an unfavorable position because what is expected of them nowadays is to deliver a genuine "genre-experience" of what ever features they offer; combat on the level of dedicated combat game, narrative on the level of a dedicated cinematic adventure game, etc, and on top of that the mechanical depth of a dedicated RPG and this one is usually the most expendaple part because hey, people don't like "number crunching" (which I find a somewhat odd argument because that's not really how RPG's should be approached for the optimal experience).
There's no conspiracy. There's just how things are. Normal action adventures offer what a lot of people like, but there's also that conventional RPG gameplay didn't really go through a dedicated evolution (in a manner of speaking - things just shifted away instead of being refined and improved), nobody's trying move that stuff forward, it simply got substituted with other form of gameplay. Who knows what people would think about a game that actually made an effort at trying to build upon the traditional and actually managed to raise it up a level.
Running up walls and firing into your enemy as you do so is exhilarating. Watching a skill-point determined cutscene of your character doing that is not.
Why should it matter? If the offered experience is not what one is looking for, they should move on to where their desires are catered to. You don't expect an RPG experience from a shoot'em up even if it had a hamfisted skilltree, why should an RPG be expected to deliver that experience for that audience either (at the expense of its own)?
While most players new to Dragon Age are quite happy with Inquisition many that have played since Origins are generally dissatisfied (to put it mildly).
Yeah. I've heard as much.