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About this mod
Reverts the game's attribute check system (dialogue challenges, locked doors, access points, tech checks, strength checks, etc.) back to the pre-2.0 rules. It's finally here. No compromises.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
- Donations
Pre-2.0 Skill Checks
We all know what happened when version 2.0 of the game dropped. Large chunks of the game's mechanics were retooled to fit a new vision. There were plusses and minuses to the overhaul, but the change I personally despised the most was the one made to how skill checks work.
Before: Skill checks were principally handcrafted—tailored to be easier in the areas of the game and story progression that are typically visited earlier, and more difficult in those visited later. Crucially, all skill checks were static, meaning you could look up a quest guide, read about any possible skill challenges, and trust that the info would be useful. Or you could make note of the skill challenge for later, grind some levels to work up the required skill, and trust that your effort would be rewarded.
After: Skill checks were now made to be dictated by the player's level. That's it. The higher the player's level got, the higher the skill requirement that the game would spit out at them. This tended to make it almost impossible, and certainly extremely frustrating, to chase down a tough skill challenge by grinding out the required attribute. Above all, this system was thoroughly immersion-annihilating. After all, what possible sense does it make that a tough door should grow even tougher just because you personally happened to get stronger? CDPR sacrificed everything, immersion in particular, on the altar of a scaled experience.
This mod will return the skill checks system to its pre-2.0 roots.
- The first thing this means is that skill checks will no longer scale with the player's level. No more dialogue checks, doors etc. that grow tougher as you try to grind towards meeting their requirements.
- But most crucially of all, what replaces 2.0's scaling system are the original, launch day numbers that CDPR set for all of those checks. Numbers which had remained unchanged for almost three years, until the day patch 2.0 arrived. Most wiki guides out there still reference the classic, pre-2.0 numbers for skill checks—a fact which obviously made those guides worthless for the 2.0+ phase of the game.
Much time was spent going back and forth between the 1.01, 1.63 and 2.13 versions of the game, to ensure the original skill check values were being reproduced correctly. If you remember playing the game years ago, and have identified something wonky about the game's skill checks today, or think you remember some doors being easier to open than they are now, this is the sort of thing this mod corrects.
About Phantom Liberty:
Phantom Liberty support can be turned on in the Mod Settings menu. This is off by default, as Phantom Liberty was released after the 2.0 overhaul, and thus it never received the pre-2.0 static skill check treatment that the base game started life with.
When turning on Phantom Liberty support, one can tweak the "difficulty" value of the DLC's skill checks. The default difficulty value for Phantom Liberty has been set at 20. While this number is arbitrary, it is slightly higher than Pacifica's average difficulty level, which is around 16, and there's an argument to be made for presuming the player will head directly to Dogtown after the events in Pacifica.
Be assured that turning on the pre-2.0 skill check system for Phantom Liberty WILL NOT result in every skill check in the DLC being the same value.
Even though Phantom Liberty was not designed with static skill challenges in mind, don't worry—the game has you covered. It uses a combination of two different scales when calculating skill check values, and the "difficulty value" is the only one of those two scales that requires a mod to define it. Every skill check maintains its own spot on the second scale, ensuring at least some variety. In any event, the option remains open to simply allow the game to scale Phantom Liberty's skill checks to the player's level like normal.
To provide a better idea of the scope of the difficulty value system, and help find a number that may work for you, here are rough averages of the difficulty values tied to the pre-2.0 base game's various areas:
- Watson: Around 4, some higher
- Westbrook: Around 12, some higher
- Pacifica: Around 16, some higher
- Badlands: Around 16, some higher
- Santo Domingo: Around 20, some higher
- Heywood: Around 27, some higher
- City Center: Around 31, some higher
Requirements:
- Redscript
- TweakXL
- Codeware
- Mod Settings
Compatibility:
What happens if I install this mod alongside Attribute Checks De-Scaled?
The primary purpose of Attribute Checks De-Scaled is to force skill checks to be fixed values that don't scale with the player's progression, which this mod also achieves, since that's part of how the game worked prior to 2.0. That being said, there are no conflicts between this mod and Attribute Checks De-Scaled, but the actual behavior goes like this:
Assuming this mod hasn't been disabled in the Mod Settings menu, the pre-2.0 skill check values this mod provides will take priority over the fixed values in Attribute Checks De-Scaled. The exception to this is Phantom Liberty—if you are busy with Phantom Liberty and this mod has not been enabled for that content, then the fixed values in Attribute Checks De-Scaled should take over, meaning all skill checks will resolve to either 4, 9, 15 or 20, since those are the hardcoded values chosen for Attribute Checks De-Scaled. If support for Phantom Liberty has been enabled in this mod's settings, then the pre-2.0 skill check rules resurrected by this mod will take priority in Dogtown as well.
In case it wasn't clear: The functionality of Attribute Checks De-Scaled is overwritten by this mod, so while the two mods don't directly conflict, there is no point in having both mods installed.
What happens if I install this mod alongside Clear Skill Checks?
No conflict—the two mods operate on different things.
What happens if I install this mod alongside Convo Skill Check Scaling?
I have made sure that the two mods don't conflict. If Convo Skill Check Scaling is installed, this mod will defer to it for skill checks inside dialogue. Obviously this has no bearing on the other, non-dialogue skill checks in the game.
(Having said that, the pre-2.0 dialogue skill checks, in their untampered state, are perfectly fine, in my humble opinion. Many are low, but they still require investment in an attribute that you may be completely uninterested in touching—your reward for a token sampling of an attribute is that you can show off a modicum of skill when a fluff dialogue challenge appears, which gives some flavor to individual playthroughs. And there are already plenty of double-digit checks set aside for the most meaningful and relevant points of conversation, which I feel would be diluted if that balance were to be trifled with.)
Other notes:
- CDPR eventually added a mechanism whereby the game would remember skill check values after the player has physically scrutinized a device. This obviously doesn't change the fact that the game is still scaling those values to the level the player was when the challenge was discovered, but it does at least slightly address the issue. This mod will not interfere with that mechanism. What this means is that if you scrutinized a locked door before installing this mod, take another look at the door with the mod installed (observing the change to the required skill level), and then turn this mod off in the Mod Settings menu and take another look, the door's difficulty will revert back to the locked value the game assigned to it before the mod was installed, rather than recalculating a new value based on the player's current level. Yes, it's extremely unlikely anyone will want to return to the post-2.0 system, but it was worth mentioning.
- There is now a companion mod: Pre-2.0 Access Point Scaling. If you ever wondered why a pre-2.0 Access Point might require 12 Intelligence to hack, but then the actual hacking minigame was super easy, it's because a mod was required to force the hacking minigames to use the pre-2.0 rules. That's what this new mod does.
Personal note: Other than randomized content that's open to being save-scummed, there's almost nothing I dislike more in an RPG experience than gameplay mechanics which fundamentally result in the player being punished for growing in power. Cyberpunk 2077 originally sidestepped this all-too-common snafu. Had the game launched with the attribute scaling system in place by default—where everything you do causes the entire world to magically keep pace with you, demolishing your gains as quickly as you achieve them—I may never have stuck with it. Such a system is a manifestly un-fun foundational corruption.
I personally am very happy to be fully rid of the most conspicuous and frustrating drawback of the 2.0 overhaul, and particularly to have the real CDPR numbers back, because content created by the developers fair and square will always carry an important legitimizing factor unique to it. It is so very nice to know that I am still playing CDPR's game by the exact rules they devised, without having to put up with their most hopelessly harebrained misstep. /rant off