Pre-2.0 Skill Checks

Pre-2. 0 Skill Checks

We all know what happened when version 2. 0 of the game dropped.  Large chunks of the game's mechanics were retooled to fit a new vision.  There were plusses and minuses to the overhaul, but the change I personally despised the most was the one made to how skill checks work.

Before: Skill checks were principally handcrafted—tailored to be easier in the areas of the game and story progression that are typically visited earlier, and more difficult in those visited later.  Crucially, all skill checks were static, meaning you could look up a quest guide, read about any possible skill challenges, and trust that the info would be useful.  Or you could make note of the skill challenge for later, grind some levels to work up the required skill, and trust that your effort would be rewarded.

After: Skill checks were now made to be dictated by the player's level.  That's it.  The higher the player's level got, the higher the skill requirement that the game would spit out at them.  This tended to make it almost impossible, and certainly extremely frustrating, to chase down a tough skill challenge by grinding out the required attribute.  Above all, this system was thoroughly immersion-annihilating.  After all, what possible sense does it make that a tough door should grow even tougher just because you personally happened to get stronger?  CDPR sacrificed everything, immersion in particular, on the altar of a scaled experience.

• []The first thing this means is that skill checks will no longer scale with the player's level.  No more dialogue checks, doors etc. that grow tougher as you try to grind towards meeting their requirements.

  []But most crucially of all, what replaces 2. 0's scaling system are the original, launch day numbers that CDPR set for all of those checks.  Numbers which had remained unchanged for almost three years, until the day patch 2. 0 arrived.  Most wiki guides out there still reference the classi