Every single problem I've run into that I think is worth noting

[slow3586]

-It takes 5 minutes to get stealth to 100 by hiding next to an enemy
-It takes 3 minutes to get stealth to 100 by hiding in a slave cage
-Assassination and stealth are the only worthwhile skills in the game
-You can kill armies of enemies by simply assassinating them
-There's no point to kill armies of enemies
-You can abuse stealth and assassination to get top tier equipment
-There's no point in getting top tier equipment
-You can kill endgame bosses by simply assassinating them
-There's no point to kill endgame bosses
-You can't steal a cup from a barrel because everyone has a sixth sense
-There's no point to get companions
-There's no point to make a base
-There's no point to research anything
-There's no point to make a base until you have all the research
-There's no point to make a base when you already have all the research
-It is too easy to get hundreds of thousands of cats
-There's no point to get hundreds of thousands of cats
-There's nothing to buy when you have too much cash
-The shops have nothing worth buying
-The shops don't have enough items in stock
-Mercenaries are worthless
-There are not enough travel gear shops
-There are not enough farm shops
-There are not enough mechanical shops
-You can get to 100 armor crafting by making thousands of bandanas
-Bandanas are the only thing worth crafting for profit
-You can get to 100 weapon crafting by making thousands of iron sticks
-There's no point to craft weapons
-Large fields give less than small fields but cost more
-Same scripted bandit attacks every time
-No reasonable way to level up fighting skills
-There's no point to level up fighting skills
-There's nothing stopping you from running into ashlands 5 minutes into the game with 100 stealth and getting
enough gear to set you for the rest of the game
-There's no point to play the game once you do that
-You can't pet bonedogs

[Hatsune_Neko]

kinda hard to stop any and all forms of cheesing the game.
it's up to the player to not abuse what is not possible to be changed.

[slow3586]

kinda hard to stop any and all forms of cheesing the game.
it's up to the player to not abuse what is not possible to be changed.

Would it really be that hard to simply put some light sources in ashlands to stop the player from just sneaking around and grabbing everything? I'm 100% sure this could be stopped if the devs wanted to. I just don't understand why things like making a base is so complicated by lack of basic resources at shops, thousands of research options and same scripted bandit attacks while nobody ever cared if you cheese the game at all, like the game really wants you to do it. It's hard to tell what is cheese and what was intended.

[Hatsune_Neko]

you do not need to cheese the game at all
i play normally and have no such issues.
but i also do not look for ways to cheat the game mechanics.

and there has been adjustments to try and make stealing harder, but there are limitations to the game. but you can easily bypass them if you look to actively break the mechanics of the game. in instances like this is called self restraint.

[slow3586]

you do not need to cheese the game at all
i play normally and have no such issues.
but i also do not look for ways to cheat the game mechanics.

and there has been adjustments to try and make stealing harder, but there are limitations to the game. but you can easily bypass them if you look to actively break the mechanics of the game. in instances like this is called self restraint.

I'd love to know what "playing the game normally" means. I find it obvious that anyone would have trouble explaining where the boundaries of normal gameplay end. If pulling enemies to towns to protect yourself is normal, is it okay to go to an endgame town and pull endgame enemies there? Is crafting thousands of bandanas normal gameplay? I don't think it's my fault that crafting top tier equipment is simply not worth the trouble. If I go to the thief tower, get my assassination skill to 20 with the dummy and then knock down every person I see on my path, am I really breaking the game? Is it my fault that nobles and faction leaders go to sleep in an unprotected public place with no lighting where anyone can go and just take their stuff off of them? Is it normal to spend hours building a base and economy and an army to raid a location for loot just to realize that you could've just walked in there without anyone stopping you by pressing a single button?
I'm tired of the game leaving me feeling like a dumbass after I realize that any amount of effort I put into learning the mechanics is negated by the fact that there is not enough effort on the part of the game to make me feel like I achieved something that required hard work and not that I was just dumb enough to immediately understand how easily the game could be cheated.

[Hatsune_Neko]

all i can say is then, don't cheat the mechanics of the game.
yes i know it's good to find them and report them, but there is also a lot that simply cannot be fixed to the point the player can no longer cheat the game.

[Full Frontal Yeti]

kinda hard to stop any and all forms of cheesing the game.
it's up to the player to not abuse what is not possible to be changed.

Would it really be that hard to simply put some light sources in ashlands to stop the player from just sneaking around and grabbing everything? I'm 100% sure this could be stopped if the devs wanted to. I just don't understand why things like making a base is so complicated by lack of basic resources at shops, thousands of research options and same scripted bandit attacks while nobody ever cared if you cheese the game at all, like the game really wants you to do it. It's hard to tell what is cheese and what was intended.

Here is a novel POV to take to it all.
It is exactly as it intended to be, it is 100% the players' choice if they want a harder more challenging game, or if they want a more one trick pony OP win button to smash on experience.

I would point out that it is actually more effort and work for the devs to institute a change in the engine that prevented
" the player from just sneaking around and grabbing everything." Than it is to just not do that as the player.
Right? i mean it cost them work time and effort to make that change, all the while all the player has to do, is not do something.
So if you don't do something, then the game is more challenge for you. And not doing a thing sounds like less effort than having to do anything.

What if the whole design plan was: the player's choice. here is a path of easy cheesy if that's what you get in for go for it.
And over here is a path of more challenge, feel free to take that one if that's more interesting for you.

After all as a SINGLE PLAYER game, no one else needs to give a rat's what you do with it. you can't cheat anyone out of anything when you are doing something alone and only for yourself.

Also there is another important POV this game MIGHT be offering you that may not be obvious to most.
For a Role Player, as in the character of the character, not what skills do they have.
From that POV a charater may not be the kind of person that would steal from anyone ever. So if you're playing a character and not just you playing game system to maximize all the little mechanical numbers for best effort/reward ration you can get. then choose a personality POV that is just not going to be stealing from anyone.

After all as an RPer, its kinda annoying when being good or bad is irrelevant to the game.
Here, as i find is very real, the chocie to be good is the chocie to take harder thankless path in life over the easy sleazy one.

A game may very well be exactly what it wanted to be. If it is not to your taste, this may be less that the game has issues, and more that it is not the kind of game for you personally.

[Vandala]

Here is a novel POV to take to it all.
It is exactly as it intended to be, it is 100% the players' choice if they want a harder more challenging game, or if they want a more one trick pony OP win button to smash on experience.

I would point out that it is actually more effort and work for the devs to institute a change in the engine that prevented
" the player from just sneaking around and grabbing everything." Than it is to just not do that as the player.
Right? i mean it cost them work time and effort to make that change, all the while all the player has to do, is not do something.
So if you don't do something, then the game is more challenge for you. And not doing a thing sounds like less effort than having to do anything.

What if the whole design plan was: the player's choice. here is a path of easy cheesy if that's what you get in for go for it.
And over here is a path of more challenge, feel free to take that one if that's more interesting for you.

After all as a SINGLE PLAYER game, no one else needs to give a rat's what you do with it. you can't cheat anyone out of anything when you are doing something alone and only for yourself.

Also there is another important POV this game MIGHT be offering you that may not be obvious to most.
For a Role Player, as in the character of the character, not what skills do they have.
From that POV a charater may not be the kind of person that would steal from anyone ever. So if you're playing a character and not just you playing game system to maximize all the little mechanical numbers for best effort/reward ration you can get. then choose a personality POV that is just not going to be stealing from anyone.

After all as an RPer, its kinda annoying when being good or bad is irrelevant to the game.
Here, as i find is very real, the chocie to be good is the chocie to take harder thankless path in life over the easy sleazy one.

A game may very well be exactly what it wanted to be. If it is not to your taste, this may be less that the game has issues, and more that it is not the kind of game for you personally.

This game is absolutely not what it intended/wanted to be, it has a lot of dropped features and way too many exploits, bugs and other problems even at release. The game has been in development for 15 years or so, you know that's a bad sign for game development right?

It does not matter that it is more effort for the devs to fix a problem then for the player to ignore it, you know its the devs literal job to fix this kind of stuff right? Exploits need to be fixed, not hand waved away and pretending they don't exist or matter or are "working as intended".

At least in principle, right now there isn't much chance of it getting fixed as Hatsune_Neko had already informed slow3586, but please don't defend crap game design/exploits and pretend its "working as intended", you are coming off as rather fanboyish and very condescending.

[dragonalumni]

Almost everything in the OP post is wrong. But basically it comes down to, "I found a way to cheese the game, I cheesed the game, so everything else became "useless" and it made it too easy and now I feel like a sad puppy". Maybe you could/should restrain yourself.

(Most people agree that assassination/sneak is the weaker part of the game and unbalanced, I would advise trying another play style)

[Full Frontal Yeti]

The game has been in development for 15 years or so, you know that's a bad sign for game development right?

Actually that would just be an assumption.
Rationally speaking,
number of labor hours it will take to produce / number of labor hours available per year = number of calendar years this is going to take.

So how many years it takes is not exactly the best an assumption basis for lower quality poor production value.

Had piles of money/dev resources and a big team of quality talent that has already been there and done that copy/pasta working?
OR
Was Joe Blow with an idea and basically just their own elbow grease to throw at it?

Rational says to expect the Joe Blow to take a while longer on that one. And the extra time length is not a particularly good evidence of issues/troubles/BS.


Also having done time in dev land.
NO DEV PROJECT EVER delivers 100% exactly what it started out wanting/imaging it could be.
Development ONLY ever begins when we are saying
"I think we can do this."

If we were just doing what we all already know how to do that is not a development project to discover anything.

If we "know" we can because duh we done this already and got dozens of examples of it to be found.

Is not at all the same situaiotn as, we 'think" we can.

We only get the exact specific new thing when we think we can and we try to and we discover that in fact yes we can do that.
meanwhile tons and tons of the best chit the world has ever produced came out of "i think we can."
Where the answer turned out to be, no we can't do that, but here is what we found out we can do.


This new model of the lay audience seeing into the dev space. This is the cause of the lay audience headaches of having to learn that all dev projects do work this way.

We think we can, is not the same as, we're just gonna do that already done before thing we do already know we know how to do.

If we could be the fly on the wall back in time, we'd see that not one game in the last 30 years ever delivered all the stuff the devs were thinking they might do at the start of it.

So any game we see like that now. Situation 100% normal.