Muzman on 21/9/2010 at 03:44
Quote Posted by Kolya
A distinction between skilled and unskilled players is being made via the difficulty levels. If a newbie thinks he has to play on Impossible and then things get tight, who's to blame?
And the player never has to grasp that auto-repair units made the repair skill unnecessary. If my gun breaks and I want to repair it then upgrading/using my repair skill is a natural connection to be made. In fact you'd have to have pre-existing knowledge of the game to say instead:
Oh I'll just wait until I find some magic tool that fixes my gun instead of using my repair skill.True, but doesn't that make changing it as redundant as leaving it? On Hard difficulty at least (Impossible should speak for itself, I agree. But Easy/Medium/Hard in the gaming lexicon has been mangled to meaninglessness worse than Mild, Medium and Hot labelling on supermarket curry jars. And then there's Gamer's Dunning-Kruger to contend with).
RocketMan on 21/9/2010 at 05:03
One perspective is that the game could have shipped with no tools at all. The fact that they decided to create tools that duplicate skills, to me, indicates that they wanted to offer the player a way out in the event he decides to invest in other skills. However there's a limit. Whereas one must make a decision whether or not to invest in a skill, there is usually (if not always) very little decision or thought involved when you come across a tool by chance. You see the tool, pick it up and use it because it's free. This works perfectly well when you're at a technical disadvantage due to streamlining your character too much (into psi for example and nothing else) but when there are too many tools, such streamlining no longer incurs a penalty because you don't feel inhibited by your neglect of skills like repair and modify. You should feel inhibited by a lack of tools in the same way that you are inhibited by a lack of cyber modules. Both are currency or sorts....tools are just like gift certificates...very specialized currency.
With regards to the arguement that you can simply choose to invest in skills even if you have tools as well, yeah you can but this kind of thinking does not belong in the game in the first place. System shock is all about immersion. Immersion requires that you put yourself at the mercy of the game and let it tell you how to feel. If you step outside yourself....outside of the game and say, "hey I've got these tools but I don't think I'll use them because I haven't tried learning repair/modify in a while and that would be cool" then you have effectively broken the immersion in the game and instead you're engineering the gameplay as you see fit. If you like to do that by all means go ahead but it's not the natural way to play, it's not the way newbies will play and personally I wouldn't want to play that way. I'd be disappointed in myself for breaking the game by making these sort of illogical decisions during what is supposed to be an instinct driven and spontaneous experience. Therefore, I see these redundancies called "tools" as balancing features themselves that, in limited numbers, make the game fun for more varied styles of play but since I intend to fall victim to my own impulses during the game (to survive in a hostile environment), I don't think an abundance of tools is anything more than an overcorrection.
