The Outer Worlds 2’s game director believes implementing 90+ perks with no respec option will lead to role-playing consequences.

“There’s a lot of times where you’ll see games where they allow infinite respec, and at that point I’m not really role-playing a character, because I’m jumping between — well my guy is a really great assassin that snipes from long range, and then oh, y’know, now I’m going to be a speech person, then respec again, and it’s like–” […]

“We want to respect people’s time and for me in a role-playing game this is respecting somebody’s time,” Adler argues. “Saying your choices matter, so take that seriously – and we’re going to respect that by making sure that we give you cool reactivity for those choices that you’re making. That’s respecting your time.

Nah, dawg, having an exit strategy for designer hubris and incompetence is respecting my time.

Imagine starting up Cyberpunk 2077 on launch day and wanting to role-play a knife-throwing guy… and then being stuck for 14 months (until patch 1.5) before the designers get around to fixing the problem of having included knife-throwing abilities with no way to retrieve the knives. As in, whatever you threw – which could have been a Legendary knife! – just evaporated into the ether. Or if you dedicated yourself to be a Tech-based weapon user only to find out the capstone ability that allows tech-based weapons to ignore enemy armor does nothing because enemies didn’t actually have an armor attribute. Or that crafting anything in general is an insane waste of time, assuming you didn’t want to just print infinite amounts of currency to purchase better-than-you-can-craft items.

Or how about in the original release Deus Ex: Human Revolution when you go down the hacking/sneaking route. Only… surprise! There are boss fights in which hacking/sneaking is useless. Very nice role-playing consequences there. Devs eventually fixed this two years later.

The Outer Worlds 2 will not be released in a balanced state; practically no game is, much less ones directed by apparent morons. Undoubtedly we will get the option for inane perks like +50% Explosive Damage without any information about how 99% of the endgame foes will have resistances to Explosive Damage or whatever. In the strictest (and dumbest) interpretation I suppose you could argue that “role-playing” an inept demolition man is still a meaningful choice. But is it really a meaningful choice when you have to trap players into making it? If players wanted a harder time, they could always increase the game difficulty or intentionally play poorly.

Which honestly gets to the heart of the matter: who are you doing this for? Not actual role-players, because guess what… they can (and should) just ignore the ability to respec even if it is available. Commitment is kind of their whole schtick, is it not? No, this reeks of old-school elitist game dev bullshit that was pulled from the garbage bin of history and proudly mounted over the fireplace.

But I’ll tell you, not every game is for every single person. Sometimes you have to pick a lane.” 

And yet out of all the available options, you picked the dumbass lane.

It’s funny, because normally I am one to admire a game developer sticking to their strong vision for a particular game. You would never get a Dark Souls or Death Stranding designed by a committee. But by specifically presenting the arguments he did, it is clear to me that “no respecs” is not actually a vision, it’s an absurdist pet peeve. Obsidian is going to give us “cool reactivity” for the choices we make? You mean like… what? If I choose the Bullets Cause Bleed perk my character will say “I’ll make them bleed”? Or my party members will openly worry that I will blow everyone up when I pick the Explosion Damage+ perk? You can’t see it, but I’m pressing X to Doubt.

[Fake Edit]

I just came across developer interviews on Flaws and Character Building. Flaws are bonus/penalty choices you get presented with after a specific criteria is met during gameplay. One example was Sungazer, where you after looking at the sun too many times, you can choose permanent vision damage (bloom and/or lens flair all the time), +100% ranged damage spread, but you can passively heal to 50% HP when outside in the daytime. The other is Foot-In-Mouth where if the game notices you quickly breezing through dialog options, you can opt to get a permanent +15% XP gain in exchange for only having a 15-second timer to make dialog options, after which everything is picked randomly.

While those are probably supposed to be “fun” and goofy examples, this is exactly the sort of shit I was talking about. Sungazer is obviously not something a ranged character would ever select, but suppose I was already committing to a melee build. OK… how often will I be outside? Does the healing work even in combat? How expensive/rare are healing items going to be? Will the final dungeon be, well, a dungeon? I doubt potentially ruining the visuals for the entire rest of the game will ever be worth it – and we can’t know how bad that’s going to be until we experience it! – but even if that portion was removed, I would still need more information before I could call that a meaningful choice.

“Life is full of meaningful choices with imperfect information.” Yeah, no, there’s a difference between imperfect information because the information is unknowable and when the devs know exactly how they planned the rest of the game to go. Letting players specialize in poison damage and then making all bosses immune to poison is called a Noob Trap.

The second video touches more directly on respecs and choices, and… it’s pretty bad. They do their best and everything sounds fine up until the last thirty seconds or so.

Yes, you can experiment and play with it a bit. And you may find something… ‘I try this out and I don’t really like it too much’ you know… you might load a save. You might want to do something different, you might try a different playthrough.

This was right after the other guy was suggesting that if you discover you like using Gadgets (instead of whatever you were doing previously), your now-wasted skill points are “part of your story, part of your experience that no one else had.” Oh, you mean like part of my bad experience that can be avoided by seeing other players warning me that X Skill is useless in the endgame or that Y Skill doesn’t work like it says it does in-game?

Ultimately, none of this is going to matter much, of course. There will be a respec mod out there on Day 1 and the mEaNiNgFuL cHoIcEs crowd will get what they want, those who can mod will get what we want, and everyone else just kind of gets fucked by asinine developers who feel like they know better than the ones who made Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Witcher 3.