Unless this game is seeking to be a poverty simulator, you don't design theft to be a necessity. You design it to be a perk. A means to make money beyond the norm - but the norm itself needs to be adequate to play the game with.
Sure, you can also go with "pacifist" playthrough, without killing any sentient beings, and whine about "poor design". Because when you only kill mindless monsters, you clearly won't have enough XP to finish the game. Hell, wait, even with enough XP, you couldn't do it, because many bosses in this game are sentient beings, and you need to kill them to progress further. Why they didn't give you the option to just avoid fighting with them by talking?! When it is obvious that "unless this game is seeking to be a psycho mass murderer simulator, you don't design slaughtering humans and other sentient beings to be a necessity"
I'm sorry, life is brutal. Sometimes you need to kill, or be killed. And sometimes you need to decide, if getting your desired skillbok is worth stealing from some innocent people. Tough choices, this is what good RPGs are about.
No, a more accurate comparison to my point would be to not provide players with enough XP to keep pace with the content *unless they murder every single character they meet, including non-hostile townsfolk*. Unless your game is built around the entire theme of evil and murder, that's a poor design that needs fixing.
And that is why I said:
"Remove all items that can be "stolen" from the maps and let everyone rely on the current random loot system for whatever remains. Are you satisfied with the level of character progression that is possible at that point? If not, you have a problem that needs fixing. Unless this game is seeking to be a poverty simulator, you don't design theft to be a necessity. You design it to be a perk. A means to make money beyond the norm - but the norm itself needs to be adequate to play the game with."This is an old, common argument that was brought up many times in alpha/beta, and the "good RPG" argument doesn't fly. Because it's tied to another old, common argument - that the NPCs are dumb as a doornail and stealing is way too easy to get away with. You can't play the "real life" or "simulation" card in this discussion because these NPCs should be smart enough to realize that ever since the Source Hunters came to town, everything that wasn't bolted to a surface went missing. And nobody raises an eyebrow when you show up with the stolen merchandise and start selling it to a vendor.. even the same vendor you stole it from! No hits to your reputation, nobody investigating you, nobody following you around as you "browse" their shops. It is literally free money laying around everywhere.
The problem is there are players who want to try and "role-play" good characters (even though there are no rewards for doing so) and not steal everything, but the pricing of items seems to be balanced around the idea that you can and will steal. And all that combined is completely fail as far as "what good RPGs are about".
I don't have a problem with stealing being lucrative, but the risks need to match the rewards, and that is currently not the case as there's plenty to gain and literally nothing to risk that can't be fixed with a save-game reload. At the same time, the game needs to be properly balanced for everyone else.
