Right now, I'm fine with Knock Unconscious being a mainly situational tool that the player can use when they feel appropriate. RP-wise, if you get into a random fight with an innocent or someone you barely know, it can be nice to leave it at non-lethal without having to reload; and while players can go more ham with it, the game doesn't really sell it as something useful for every combat. (Compare, say, Deus Ex, where your ability to go the Ghost or Batman route is a pretty big part of the design and an explicitly encouraged playstyle.)
That said, nonetheless I think the KO mechanic is hurt by there being little reactivity to it at all. If it's a mechanic in the game, there's some expectation the player should be able to use it without leaving an encounter in a sort of unresolved anticlimax or without risking the game breaking in some unexpected ways. Right now, I think if you KO Arka or the two human Absolute cultists, they'll just remain in a permanent state of hostility; end-result, the goblin camp and tieflings can suddenly and unexpectedly all aggro on you, should they notice you again.
And those aren't entirely out there consequences for it, I guess? You told two Absolute people you came from the shipcrash, you left them alive, so they went back and told everyone -- blowing your chance of infiltration. Makes sense. As-is, though, they feel less like real consequences and more a quirk of the AI and of the aggro-mechanics. I think it'd be better if the player had some ability to be given a heads-up that this'll cause a problem, and potentially be given a chance to workaround it. (Meanwhile, given their other dialogue, it seems odd that everyone in the tiefling camp would immediately turn hostile for preventing Sazza's murder, although you could imagine it'd be much tougher to talk your way out of it if you've since helped the goblin escape.)
What I'm getting at, I don't think the KO mechanic needs to be a complete gamechanger, nor necessarily that every NPC needs to be able to react specifically to being KO'd and/or interrogated. But with the current implementation, the game needs to work well in the knowledge that, hey, this is something a player could do in any given encounter, and the game'll still need to be able to progress sensibly. And of course, it's pretty annoying if you take the time KOing someone, then have to go "Well, quest won't update if this person's alive, better attack them again." (The game wasn't, in my experience, too bad about the latter; I remember it happening with the goblin leaders, but you've been explicitly asked to 'kill them' there so it's fair enough.)
Last edited by Lavaeolus; 21/11/20 07:16 PM.
