^_^ Glad you all liked my summary!
As always, +1 for
The caveat I have is if Larian is willing to put in a customizable difficulty slider, then most of these mechanics can be safely ignored and most people can have a fun experience.
I love the difficulty options in...certain other games.
I'll be surprised if Larian puts in setting where we can turn off their house rules because having that would make their beloved metrics much hard to gather / use. Just think about it, if you can remove options, how do you gather data about that the player is doing? Let use the example of having an option of disabling jump to disengage, now your data set is split in half. Each option you allow a player to disable, you split that data up more and now start having combo so 2 options that can be disabled, you have 4 data sets, 3 options, 8 data sets, etc.
I kind of wish they were not trying to automatically gather data, there a book called "The Tyranny of Metrics" which explains the pitfalls of this. Data analysis is hard. I have seen examples from Larian's data analysis like that the Bless spell is not used by players because they find it "boring". I am worried that they are looking at their data to just support whatever they want to do.
