Sounds like my main grivances are still present, namely the metagaming, mechanical straitjacket and misguided topdown simulationist design decisions. Which is probably what some people enjoy, but it’s not for me.
I can see that. Fwiw, I don't think there is that much of a mechanical straitjacket (you also can't build a non combat character in pathfinder*), but it is also true that this is not a game for jack of all trades. Metagaming is for sure pretty rampant though, making decisions based on your characters beliefs is not really something there is much room for in such a cutthroat world.
*Of course ITS games have no where near that level of build depth either
Unrelated:
What is actually the argument for helping Braxton? He's an asshole who sets you up to probably die (twice!), the first time by sending two other of his employees to die.
Maybe I should expand re: mechanical straitjacket. AoD gave me the feeling that if I wanted to play a certain path, my build was made for me ahead of time. The prime reason for this is the demands of the different skill checks making you save up skill points to progress, you couldn't build a character and live with the consequences, rather, the game demanded such-and-such from you and that was just how it was. VD's defense of difficulty didn't really hold true for me for anything but the combat, because I didn't find it especially difficult to save up points and just focus on meeting the skill thresholds the game demanded from me. In fact doing that is pretty much a no brainer.
There was a short period of "learning the system", but after that, I felt like no matter which playthrough I started, I wasn't choosing how to go through a path, rather, I was choosing among (a lot of, to the game's credit) paths and that path completely dictated my character sheet. This is less true for combat builds, though.
It's my old "classic Deus Ex v neo-Deus Ex"-gripe. In the classic Deus Ex, you didn't go "this is gonna be a stealth playthrough" before you started the game (at least, you didn't have to). Rather you chose, found and upgraded tools playing the game, and then at each obstacle you went "which tool is best for this job" or maybe you ran into an object demanding a tool and if you had it, it made the path easier, but if you didn't, it was harder. Modern Deus Ex-likes rather tell you "here's the stealth tree, the combat tree and the talking tree (just as an example) - pick one and play the whole game like this, or we penalize you through either a morality system or by you being completely unequipped for this and this." This is particularly evident in Arcane.
In the RPG version of this, approaching things in different ways should ideally result in different consequences, making you live with the results of not having access to this tool at that time, or simply having different outcomes from different approaches. AoD for me felt less like that and more like selecting from a long list of trains to hop onto - but once on that train, you never stray from the path (again, talking about skills here, not choices in general).
It's not that Deus Ex allowed you to do everything and be good at everything - rather the opposite - it's just that you always had some amount of choice of how to approach each obstacle in your path. For AoD, I felt like most of the skill-related choices were made when I click play.
Rather than learning my character as I went along, learning the character while roleplaying it, I felt constrained from the outset. Extremely limited in my options. Hence the straitjacket comment.
I can see why some would prefer AoD's route - chiefly for simulationist reasons - but I never cared much for simulationism. Ironically I think most attempts at achieving such often end up making the man behind the curtain obvious to the player. It's also kind of odd to have teleports-through-cutscenes and story beats and such things - which I approve of - because it makes for a better, smoother game, and then argue with the opposite logic when you design your skill system.
Essentially, the same game that has no problem teleporting you from place to place out of convenience has no problem arguing this:
Unfortunately, it's true. If you keep shooting people in the face, you won't be able to become good at talking. Not sure how to fix it, maybe add a Skyrim difficulty mode?
(On a side note, I still don't understand how that discussion is in anyway related to difficulty, it seems more like a defensive argument than anything. It's also obviously false - there are people who are shit at almost everything and savant diplomats who are also accomplished hunters.)
