We know lifepath choice affects the first 20-30 minutes of the game, and posterior choices you can pick in dialogues and stuff (like knowing the street lingo with the street kid vs knowing the corp procedures of the corpo). But Ign interviewed one of the CDP guys yesterday and basically confirmed that in addition each one will have exclusive sidequests, I think the idea is that each will solve his eventually solve his ‘personal quest’. For example the Nomad will return to the Badlands at some point and will join his old gang again, having some Mad Max adventures there.
The character progression works like this, from what I understood:
-5 basic stats: body, reflexes, int, cool, tech.
-There are skills that depend on a parent stat. They level up as you do stuff (using rifles, hacking stuff, etc) like in a Elder Scroll game.
-I think there won’t be a lot of them, just 2-3 per stat.
-However their value is soft-capped by the parent stat, you have to increase reflexes to 4 if you want to increase firearms skill (I’m making up the name) from 3 to 4.
-Now, each skill have a big perk tree. 20 perks or so per skill.
Kotaku says
When you get the chance to level up, you’ll be given an attribute point and a perk point. Later levels will sometimes give you multiple points of each, and you can spend these in any fashion you want.
And there’s a lot of perks. For the Cool attribute, you’ve got a Stealth Page and a Cold Blood page. There’s 26 different Stealth perks and 19 Cool Blood perks to choose from, and most of those have multiple levels.
The same goes for other attributes. Technical Ability — or TECH — has Crafting (19 perks) and Engineering (22). Reflexes has separate branches for each of the main weapons: Blades (23), Rifles (20) and Handguns (19).
So potentially around 130 perks?
-The perks can be passive or active (a new ingame ability, like wall jump or takedowns from above or whatever).
again from kotaku:
I was playing an assassin-type, so I focused on the Cool skills. All the choices there were pretty good: Improving critical chance by 15 percent; a global 15 percent/25 percent damage bump to human and mechanical enemies; 30 percent faster move speed while sneaking; unlocking aerial takedowns; unlocking the ability to throw knives; or just getting more movement speed generally after a takedown.
And that’s just the Stealth perk line. Want to be a better hacker instead? Then you can unlock the ability to breakdown turrets. Increase your Breach Protocol buffer. Get better hacking programs. Or maybe you just want faster aim time. Better headshot damage with handguns. Health regen during combat. Double the carrying capacity.
In addition, there the body modifications you can buy. I read there are 11 body categories (brain, eyes, arms, etc) including things like nervous or immune system (!), and in some of them there were several slots to install cyberware
Finally, there are mods for items you can install:
-Weapon mods (and weapons have color rarity, the color appears like a point in the minimap so you know there is ‘blue’ around)
-Armor mods
-Vehicle mods
Item crafting supposedly exists too, but it seems it wasn’t still accessible/was disabled for the demo.
