S
Sacred_Path
Guest
Because the more choice you provide, the harder it becomes to take everything into account when balancing your game.
I'd have thought that was pretty obvious.
If you want perfect balance - you pretty much have to mirror everything. That's extremely boring - at least to me.
Or, you can narrow down the amount of choices. Which would have been a good thing for Fallout.
Almost infinite number of ways to build completely crappy characters? I'm the one using hyperbole?
Ok, so if you choose bad perks - then you can have a LOT of characters with minor adjustments using those perks - so that would end up being a lot of ways to build the same crappy character.
You can choose bad perks, you can choose perks that do nothing for your build, and you can choose perks that are simply vastly underpowered compared to others at the same level. You can also spend your skill points in a wildly inefficient manner, or on underpowered skills (like gambling).
All I can say is that I've never had trouble making strong characters in Fallout - and it doesn't take much time with the system to realise what's good and what's bad.
Eh, that doesn't make it better. I never said that it's hard to build strong, or even overpowered characters in Fallout. As for weak choices - it's not my job to cut through the crap in a system, it's the designer's job to lay bare the meaty (=useful) bits of their character development system, so I can pick and choose among them. Lack of clarity here is bad design.
Again, overpowered and underpowered characters exist in a LOT of RPGs with a sufficient amount of development aspects and options. Especially older games - where casual gamers weren't a big concern. Some people get upset when they make characters that suck - and some people enjoy the challenge of figuring out the ins and outs of the system. I'm very much part of the latter group.
Like you already said, and as I said, in a lot of possible crappy Fallout builds, you don't really have to know the "ins and outs" of the system to recognize them as crappy; well, maybe you need to have played for an hour. All these potential crappy choices sit there, looking at me like turds. I can't help that feeling.
And yes, a lot of RPGs have balance issues, or are even outright killed for me because of holes in the balance. In a lot of games I play/ have played I even restrict myself with (sometimes arbitrary) guidelines as to what not to do. But it's infinitely better if such measures don't have to be taken at all.
Why don't you give me just a single example of a great RPG system with what you consider acceptable balance between character builds?
The fewer choices you have, the fewer things that can be screwed up (by you). One of my favorites as far as character building goes is Wizardry 8, FWIW. "But Lords are just weaker Valkyries!", yes, I can hear you loud and clear
You should probably have chosen not to comment at all - as your bias is pretty clear. Bias combined with ignorance is not very useful when it comes to informed opinions.
Welp, I assume I'm mostly right about the point I made. "Perfect" balance would be the death of a lot of what drives MMO's. Of course it could then simply shift the focus more towards cooperative play, but that's just theoretical anyway.