kofeiiniturpa;n10948400 said:It's all purely theoretical and making a general point. I'm not expecting them to implement all the 100 or so skills.
You'll have to be a bit more specific here. What do you mean with "all those mechanics"? What mechanics specifically? The two skills that were used as examples are just two skills and were just examples.
They have to do that with all of the skills, why should these (suggested as smaller ones) be the ones breaking the camels back? And more over, if the application of the skill is practical, rather than vocal, it's already a different situation.
Oh no, that's not the case. Little bits of dialog is not enough and it depends greatly on the skill at hand. In fact, dialog could well be on a lesser note here. Teaching, for example, might be a 'blank' dialog check that says nothing, but implies action: [Teach the kid to tie a noose 67%], or it could be straight applied to a situation where someone is trying to accomplish something (i.e. the kid is trying to make a card trick, you point there at the cards and the default action is to [Teach trick 80%].
That's not a reason to say "Ok, just skip it, there's plenty enough with the obvious stuff like locks pick and terminals to hack." There's plenty of stuff that will take a lot of time and effort, and plenty of it more than this stuff whilst being of lesser impact on the game. It doesn't need to be a piece of cake to implement this stuff, and the customer shouldn't feel "pity" for the developer in the same manner a mom would try to restrain a demanding dad over the kids household chores.
I mean, I am asking for some stuff (theoretical stuff, nothing really specific here), but not that much. The opposition usually is about "I don't need that" or "a lot of people probably wouldn't need that"; which I think is a tad faulty logic.
I'm not asking for anything that I wouldn't think fits with the core, though. Not as per our current knowledge of the game. I don't think I'm talking about stuff that would feel "outrageous" or "totally off the mark".
Okay, sure, theoretically I see your point. One or two extra skills wouldn't be too difficult by any means. Just depends on how fleshed out you want them to be. If you only use a skill twice in the entire game, would they then need to add additional abilities for it, and how would skill progression work?
If it requires skill points to pick skills, how do you communicate to the player ahead of time they've essentially picked a skill they will only a couple times? What if they feel resentment for being "tricked"?
Its not the fact that they take time that inherently makes including them a bad idea, it's more that said time (And money) cannot then be spent on making a "bigger" element of the game better, or making another element of the game that will appeal to more people.
If 95% of players are not going to use a feature, that's not necessarily reason not to implement it, but there's also a good argument to be made for spending that time on something else. That's the only point I'm really making.
The Total War games actually had a recent controversy surrounding streamlining their games with the latest Saga title. Basically, they removed two army stances (Forced march, which gave additional movement points on the campaign map, and Ambush, which is probably self explanatory) because very, very few people used them. Something like less than 5%. Maybe even less than 2%. I don't remember the exact figure.
Personally, I was against removing the mechanics because they were present in previous games (thus it was actually a video game mechanic that was taken away from us) and I actually used them quite frequently, but 2077 is a new game with no other video game predecessors.
So, the general idea here is that everything takes time and money to make, and that time and money can either be spent on several additional smaller ideas, or polishing bigger ideas and developing new ideas that more people are more likely to use.
I'm not against having these smaller mechanics, elements, and choices by any means, so don't get me wrong there. I love the idea, and in a perfect world, I'd love to have dozens of extra options like that. I'm just saying I don't think it's feasible or realistic to ask that of CDPR, or really any non-indie developer. Deadlines and budgets come into play.