TTG said:
I obviously haven't spent enough time with Deus Ex yet, but the general point you make here I completely disagree with. This design philosophy is why so many games that rely on customization render all that hard work meaningless. The general rule of thumb seems to be that the player should always be prepared for whatever is around the next corner, no matter what choices he's made. Why? Because it's no fun to punish the player or the casual gamer will be upset or any other motive you'd like. The thing is though, if you're perpetually piling more stuff on the plate, while all that's ever required is what was there when you sat down to eat, those upgrades come off as superficial and gimmicky... which they are.
How that's related(or not) to this case I don't really know, since hacking skills were the first thing I upgraded and I'm still very early in the game. From what I've seen though, it's all very fixable. It's no monumental feat, it's just a few points actually and you come by those often enough.
There are several situations in the game where you need
a skill in order to proceed. I can think of one offhand where you either need Hacking
or the Social Enhancer to complete a sidequest. I don't have a problem with that.
I have a problem with the fact that Hacking is the
only skill that is
always an option, and it's also the
only skill for which you ever run up against a situation where there are
no other skills that will work as a substitute/alternative.
And on top of that, Hacking gives you more experience than any single thing in the game save
maaaaaaaybe the main quest, and that in almost all cases it's second only to Cloaking in terms of being able to completely trivialize an otherwise-challenging portion of the game. Like, I'm almost surprised that the game's bosses don't have a security terminal glued to their forehead that you can use to instantly shut them down.
DXHR has a major case of degenerate strategy, and you can pin that almost entirely on Hacking. That's my problem with it. It doesn't "ruin the game", but the line where it passes from "less than ideal" to "genuine problem" is when it becomes the only way to complete a significant fraction of the game's content, in a way that isn't really seen in any other skill in the game.