How do you ensure a player's character-building choices feel worthwhile in an RPG, whether they dumped all their points into lockpicking or went heavy on persuasion? Josh Sawyer, seasoned RPG designer and studio design director at Obsidian, says that—like weapon tuning—it's a vibes-based art, but great documentation and a good dataset certainly don't hurt.
In a recent YouTube video, Sawyer said it's important to make skill selections matter as soon as possible. If something's going to be part of gameplay, he said, it should be present and visible almost immediately. To illustrate, Sawyer called out Good Springs, the starting town in Fallout: New Vegas, which Obsidian designed so that every skill a player might tag as a specialty during character creation had a potential use case during the introductory quests and initial exploration.
