I don’t mind “git gud” conceptually, since I enjoyed the soulsborne games.
The problem with this game is that skill is constantly at odds with stats, and it’s not just in lock picking either. In a game like Dark Souls, stats improve to make you more efficient at the skill-based element of the game, but if you’re skilled enough, you don’t need them to improve. You can defeat enemies as an unarmored wastrel with ease if you’ve got the raw skill at the game. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, you essentially can’t rely on pure skill or knowing the flow of combat/lock picking/etc. You have to grind through the stat portion just to bring them up to parity with your own physical skill. This is why the game feels so frustrating; you’re not “getting good”, you’re slogging through being hampered by poor stats until that penalty goes away through leveling. The RPG mechanic fights with you instead of rewarding you for playing well.
I think the part that drove me to put the game down until some of the issues get resolved is that you can perform a stealth takedown flawlessly and still fail because the stats said so. And because of the current save feature, you need to be judicious with your saves. But because random failures that are totally the fault of poor stats, you’ll need to save and reload on a fairly regular basis unless you want to replay the same portions of the game over and over and over again. This, in turn, is made even more frustrating by the fact that the game takes an agonizing time to load, so you end up wasting half of your allotted play time watching load screens. If you play on console like I do, optimizing for performance isn’t exactly an option either. I’m an adult with a life; I have precious little time to play games. I need to get the most bang for my buck, so these arbitrary time sucks in the game are really disappointing.
I do like the game and the heart that’s in it has endeared me to it. But these aren’t just minor flaws; they’re major issues that need to be addressed. I want this company to succeed and make more products in the future, not get killed because nobody trusts them to make a game that isn’t hideously broken.
Side note: people who are saying this lock picking system is realistic are full of it. Real picks don’t break. The lag from poor optimization on consoles combined with the wonky thumbstick sensitivity makes lock picking a chore instead of a fun part of the game. I’m not picking it up again until they fix it in the next patch.