31pt Talent Trees

They look superficially like vanilla talent trees, but they are far more interesting.

Almost without exception, the talents we cut were the ones everyone took or the ones nobody took. There will still be very attractive talents that probably everyone takes, but there are also definitely choices where you can only take A or B and want both. Typically you might see a useful (but not necessarily dps-enhancing) ability in your own tree, but also a really attractive one in another tree.

This is a good thing. It won't surprise me to see a knee jerk reaction from some players that we're removing their favorite talents and "dumbing down the trees." However, I'd challenge them that there can't be that many players out there that play Arcane because of Mind Mastery or Arms warrior because of Strength of Arms. Yet, if you skip either of those talents, you're just making your character less effective.

A Cataclysm goal is to remove lame or boring talents. Yet we don't want to replace all of those with procs or game-changers. Really the only solution is to have smaller trees where nearly every remaining talent is a big deal.

Q u o t e:
Hopefully this works out well, as someone pointed out "Shadowform at level 10!!!!!!!!.

We really wanted to do this, but the more we thought about it, what does a level 10 Shadowform do? Spam Shadow Word: Pain? We'll probably give Shadow priests Mind Flay at level 10 and let them get Shadowform shortly after that.

Q u o t e:
Currently DKs and warriors have very attractive 21 point talents in their sub-spec tree for PVP (Pillar of frost / deathwish) and these abilities were reachable using lvl 85 talent spreads. Will we still have access to these dynamic sub-spec talents or is the flavor of these builds getting toasted?

You typically won't get active abilities from a second tree. The most you can get in a second tree is 10 points, and usually the active abilities are deeper than this. We think it makes the distinction between say a Frost and Unholy DK more pronounced when all of their talented active abilities are different rather than being able to cherry pick the best from each tree. It does end up killing any chance for a build that goes halfway down two trees, but usually we would consider such builds failures because it meant the bottom of "your" tree wasn't good enough. These were most popular in PvP when players felt compelled to get "must have" PvP survival talents in multiple trees, and those are the kind of talents we want dead anyway.

With these changes though, the talent trees are going to be even more rebuilt than we were already planning with Cataclysm. Talents are moving all over the trees and every tree has new talents as well. We'll give you a chance to see the trees soon (tm).

Q u o t e:
Hopefully you actually mean this and Divine Storm will actually be a big deal and not some unimaginative baseline warrior ability.

Divine Storm is a big deal because Retribution paladins get it at level 10. You'll get a new bottom o' the tree talent.

Q u o t e:
Looking forward to the new trees. I have to admit, this is a really good idea from my imagination on this one. Becoming an "enhancement" shaman or "elemental" shaman right away rather than "shaman who does 2% more damage with primal strike" or "shaman who does 2% more damage with lightning bolt" will be really nice for new players and rerollers/altaholics alike.

So now my cagey comments about how Enhancement gets dual-wield right away and Elemental never gets it make more sense. :)

It's a design flaw that rogues and locks are so dependent on Prep and Soul Link respectively. Those talents are currently holding the classes back. Now we can't balance around the assumption that you have those talents so your classes need to function without them. Maybe it means lowering base cooldowns....

Q u o t e:
Isn't it a little late to be starting to work on something this Major? Will this push the release date back for Cata while the Dev team works to redesign the whole tree top to bottom, and make it balanced again? Also will we have to worry about the knee jerking hotfixes we had at the start of WoTLK when it comes to balancing classes for PvP / broken PvE abilities (Not broken as in not work, but broken as in over powered EG Lifebloom back in the day)

I don't think we've announced a release date, and in any case it's not my place to say, but our philosophy has always been to ship games when they're ready. We weren't comfortable shipping Cataclysm with the talent tree model we had.

Q u o t e:
One thing that has me concerned is the feral tree. A lot of our talents are all over the place because of the nature of the tree requiring bear and cat talents to be more or less seperate, yet there are a few both specs share. Not to mention the whole pvp build.

What about talents such as omen of clarity in the restoration tree that nearly every spec of druid takes because of it's usefulness? Will that be there? removed or baseline?

Will bear and cat be mashed together again like it was in TBC? that would make the spec far too overpowered given the nature of the good damage feral do in cat form and their role at being a viable tank.

Edit: Also will we still have access to dual spec this way?

Feral is a challenge. We still want to have a cat-centric, bear-centric or hybrid build. It has always been one of the more challenging trees to work on.

Likewise, we're not sure what we'll do with Omen yet. The obvious choices are leave it Resto only, put it high enough for everyone to subspec or make it a trained ability.

Dual-spec will work pretty much like it does today. You can have 2 Feral builds or 1 Feral, 1 Resto build or whatever you'd like.

Q u o t e:
how often would we get talent points after this change? Maybe one per 3 levels?

About one every other level, but there are some exceptions. We are trying to alternate new abilities and talent points where possible. You will have 41 talent points at 85.

Q u o t e:
One question that comes to mind when dissecting all of this is: will such a massive re-tool of all the talent trees be required for the next expansion (5.0)? With 51pt talents, and many more talent points, adding the additional 5 talent points (originally announced for 4.0) gave the user a few more customization options and we were already busy blogging about exciting hybrid builds where you can pick up fun talents in multiple trees.

The new model theoretically buys us several more expansions of not having to mess with the overarching talent tree design. In a broader sense though, one of the challenges of working on World of Warcraft is adding new content without making the game totally inaccessible to new players, or even returning players for that matter.

I have used this example several times, but we have one very senior designer at Blizzard who isn't working on WoW but obviously knows the game very well and has been very active in PvP and raiding at various points in time. He took a short break from the game (I suspect to play Modern Warfare 2) and when he came back, we had messed around with his class's talent trees and reset his talent points, so he felt like he couldn't jump back into the game again without spending 45 minutes researching what the community thought a good build would be. We're hoping with simpler (but still deep!) talent trees, players like him will feel more comfortable picking their own talents. He might eventually go poke around in theorycrafting forums to min / max his build, but he won't have the moment of being completely overwhelmed when looking at a blank talent tree.

I didn't count just now, but as a back of the envelope calculation, 10 classes x 3 trees x 30 talents per tree is 900 talents. ("It's over 900!") It's probably a little less than that to be fair, but honestly does WoW really need 900 talents to be fun? I'm the designer ultimately in charge of class design, and I still couldn't sit down and list out 900 talents from memory. That doesn't strike me as depth. That strikes me as us having been afraid to prune the mediocre content in order to let the best content shine.

Q u o t e:
You're really post happy today aren't you?

We've been dying to share the new model. We knew there would be a lot of questions and some concern. So far, the response has been surprisingly positive though.

Q u o t e:
How many "signature abilities", in general, will be granted at the point of specialiaztion (level 10)? One or two? I'd really like to see a Protection warrior ding 10 and get Shield Slam and Devastate for example, where other specs might simply get Sunder Armor from the trainer.

One. Protection warriors get Shield Slam (and Arms and Fury lose it). Devastate is still an attractive talent deep in the tree, but it doesn't say "Prot warrior" the way Shield Slam does.

Q u o t e:
It's pretty rare for people to actually spec into healing/tanking talents for low-level dungeons anyway. Most of the time you just have a ret paladin in a few pieces of drastically under-level intellect gear healing your deadmines run.

We expect a lot of players to use Dungeon Finder while leveling up. The feature works great for that, and we're spending some effort to update the older dungeons to not be so overspawned and in some cases to even fit into the zone quest content better.

Likewise, we're making an effort to let tank and healing specs be more effective when soloing. DPS specs will still probably be more efficient leveling, but if you just love the Resto shaman tree, you should be able to quest and run some dungeons without even having a dual-spec. It won't be spectacular, but it will be a huge improvement from today.

Tanks and healers will get basic abilities before level 15 (when Dungeon Finder is available) to do their jobs, but it's also true that the lower level content is more forgiving of your talent spec.

Q u o t e:
That actually brings up another, broader question: How are you going to clearly differentiate healer from tank from DPS specs of a given hybrid sufficiently that a Resto can't nuke worth anything and a balance/elemental/shadow absolutely cannot meaningfully heal? Is it going to be a "hybrid abilities are extremely poor baseline but get huge bonuses for choosing that spec", or having the most important spells of each role as talent abilities, or what?

It depends on the class. In some cases, the caster gets 200% crits etc. as a passive bonus for picking their tree. In other cases, they have talents inaccessible to the healer.

Q u o t e:
I'm concerned about the 10 points that a shadow priest has to subspec into... Holy, and Disc.

How much will those top two tiers of either tree be of use by Shadow?

You don't have to spend those 10 points in another tree, though we are trying to make it tempting to do so. You might also want to spend 3 points in another tree, or even 3 in one and 7 in another. For some classes, there will be options to subspec in either other tree.

Q u o t e:
Mine too. I read Felgaurd at 10 and went OMG I DIDNT EVEN THINK OF THAT. It might be a little TOO powerful though, and getting felgaurd is part of what makes you feel like you're really advancing in power as a demonology warlock, so I'm not sure that will be how that goes down. But it'll be sooner than 50!!!

It probably won't be Felguard. It's a little odd to spring that on a warlock that doesn't even have a Voidwalker yet.

Q u o t e:
I ask this because paladins were once (said by Blizz if I remember correctly) a class with very easy and forgiving mechanics so that newbies could get to know the game.
Ret, specifically, was accounted as a defensive hybrid and recently it was hinted and accepted that Blizz also thought the spec should have a more offensive orientation to really work.

Basically, what I would like to know is: Where you wan't to bring and what is the current desgin intent for Retribution paladins?

I'm personally not a fan of "You need some easy classes," nor do I think defensive hybrids work. Ret paladins should feel like Arms warriors who trade off some of their mobility for healing and defenses, and do more Holy damage instead of bleed damage.

Q u o t e:
What will a Holy Priest's signature ability be? Lightwell? I hope not.

We think healers will expect to get an actual heal (or some kind of defensive ability) as their signature spell, but we also want something that's actually useful at level 10. Lightwell, Circle of Healing and even Spirit of Redemption are very signature Holy abilities, but none are very useful when soloing gnolls in Elwynn.

Q u o t e:
No, it meant there could be meaningful major decisions and choice. If your goal is that every player gets the 31 point talent with no exceptions, there's no point in it even existing as a talent as opposed to a passive that every player of a given spec gets at level 70 or whenever without even clicking on it.

I understand that sentiment, but the reality is when players skip the bottom talent of their tree, they consider that a bad thing and usually blame the talent for not being good enough. We usually step in to try and fix that problem so that the bottom of the tree is attractive.

Q u o t e:
Can we expect that things like Deflection (Protection Warrior) will move into the Protection tree? (This might be a bad example as the talent might simply disappear.

Deflection is gone. Protection has one passive talent, which is Toughness. They get Vitality as a passive for choosing Protection at level 10. The other talents are a mix of threat and defensive abilities, but none are as passive as Deflection. There are (hopefully) attractive talents in the first two tiers of Arms and Fury. The other tank trees will be similar but not identical (Feral as always will be the least similar).

Q u o t e:
What about when you up the level cap without adding talents (like Cataclysm)? You're balancing the talents around only having 41 points to throw around. What about when you up the cap to say 90 and add 1-2 more talent points?

We're a long way away from having to worry about that, but an exciting part of 5.0 could be the potential to get an active ability from another tree.

Q u o t e:
A few More Questions:

1. How will this work for DKs who start at level 55? To they just select a tree as soon as they log in the 1st time?

When they get their first talent point for completing a quest.

Q u o t e:
2. How big are the new trees? Today's trees have ~75-80 total points that can be spent in them. A lot of these talents fall into the mandatory/useless/PVP only category that were said to be removed. If we are spending 31 points in a tree how many total points will be in them roughly?

They have 38-42 or so points in them. You could spend all 41 points in one tree, though often you'll want a 5/5/31 or a 0/7/34 build instead. Every talent is 1, 2 or 3 talent points. Earlier levels have about 8 points on them (typically a 2, 2, 3) and deeper levels have about 5 points on them (typically a 1, 2, 3).

Q u o t e:
3. How much flexibility will there be? Current raid builds are usually something like 51/15/0 with 5 points to add wherever, either on additional raid utility or possibly PvP talents. Do you expect the new serious raiding or PVP specs to be exactly the same now or with 1-2 free points to spend? or will having a lot less mandatory talents actually help with build flexibility?

We want flexibility. That is very important to us. We want you to choose between one cool utility talent and another one. It is hardest to deliver that for raid-focused players because as the groups get larger it is easier for you to specialize and there is less need for you to be a jack-of-all-trades. DPS specs in particular will often choose to skip over anything that enhances their survivability and just say that's the healer's job.

Q u o t e:
4. Can we get a sneak peek at which other abilities are becoming base line? Moonkin Form, Tree of Life, Hammer of Righteousness, Bestial Wrath?

We're not ready to announce them all yet, but I will give you a hint that you're 0 for 4 with the ones you mentioned. :)

Q u o t e:
Except for Real ID forums, amirite or amirite?

Let's please keep this thread focused on the new talent changes and these forums focused on class design. There are plenty of opportunities to respond to RealID in other forums.

Q u o t e:
Final ret talent is more likely to be "Adds 2% additional stats to your blessing of kings"

No, it will be Repentance.

Or maybe Lacerate (the Survival hunter one).

(No it won't.)

Q u o t e:
A bit unclear here too. From what I understood, the very reasoning for Mastery either doesn't exist or is greatly diminished under the most current talent model.

Mastery still exists, but the design is a little cleaner.

Before:
Arms got some passive damage per talent point.
Arms got some passive armor pen per talent point.
Arms got a chance to proc a swing per talent point, which is enhanced by mastery rating on gear.

Now:
Arms gets whatever it needs as passives at level 10.
Arms gets a chance to proc a swing at level 78(ish), which is enhanced by mastery rating on gear.

Mastery now means "proc a swing" for Arms and that's all it means, which is easier to understand.

Q u o t e:
Naturally, the 31-point Shadow Dance is totally inaccessible to Rogues speccing other trees. But what about Shadowstep? Is that a tree-specific, unpointed talent that is totally inaccessible to all other specs?

Inaccessible. Shadowstep is essentially no longer a talent. There is nowhere to buy it. You don't get any passive bonuses for picking your second tree. Essentially you choose at level 10 whether to be an Assassination, Combat or Subtlety rogue, and while you can change your mind later, that determines what special ability and what passives you get.

Q u o t e:
I want to clarify; When you say that a class has to get 31 POINTS in a spec, does that mean they are also required to get the "ultimate" talent, or just the bare minimum from other talents?

You don't have to get the 31 point talent if you don't want to. Considering it's one talent point, it will be a good idea to do so nearly all of the time.

Q u o t e:
Will players be able to access all of the 'whatever it needs' stats so that they can still theorycraft to their heart's content?

We want to unveil the entire enchilada in the next beta build or so. Everyone here worked really hard to get the whole package to a relatively playable and polished state. In essence we're not announcing a future plan -- we're telling you how the game works today. It's all done.

It's hard to offer timelines for when we will do a new beta push, but we're talking days or a few weeks, not months. All of the passives will be visible then.

All of those passives are subject to change though. Since there is so little in e.g. the Fire tree to boost damage now, we need to make sure Fire mages still do the kind of dps we want them to do. Despite our best intentions, it's also very likely players will point out bad talents or awkward points in the trees that will still need to be massaged before Cataclysm goes live.

Q u o t e:
we haven't gotten a chance to see much of the warlock trees, any info you could provide?

Warlocks are hard. :)

With a mage, you can keep Frost from throwing a lot of Fireballs just by making Frost do Frost damage. The warlocks don't have schools like that, and they have some shared spells, so it's tricky to get them to use the spells we want them to use sometimes. None of the cool talents, the ones that change up what you're doing, such as Molten Core or Backdraft, are going away.

Q u o t e:
Will you still need a multiple of five talents in a tree to unlock a new tier, or will you need less?

Five to advance to the next tier. We experimented with other numbers, but 5 is just a really simple number upon which to do math.

Q u o t e:
Won't it be a little weird to have such a large jump in power at level 10, though?

Level 10 can handle it. Besides, getting "+20% to your Fire damage!" is like +20 damage at level 10.

Q u o t e:
When the talents that effect specific abilities (increase damage, lower mana cost, lower cast time) get removed, will they be baked into teh base abilities or rolled into prime spec bonuses at level 10

It depends. Improved Mortal Strike for example is gone and that's just the way Mortal Strike hits now (we added the damage and cooldown into MS). Improved Lava Lash is still around because it plays off of Searing Flames.

Q u o t e:
So Ghostcrawler, did you just say that the final talent of Retribution (the Paladin's offensive tree so to speak), ends with us getting Repentance - an ability that isn't even deal damage and is still overlooked by other forms of crowd control in raids (Sap, Sheep, etc)?

It was a bad joke. My sarcasm doesn't appear to translate well always.

Q u o t e:
What sort of "chaff" might you be culling out of the DK trees? A lot of talents there were designed reasonably well, I'd have a hard time seeing which ones would stay and which ones would go. The latest publicly available trees look pretty solid and I can only see a few talents that would be outright removed.

Looking at Unholy, talents like Impurity, Desolation, Wandering Plague, Crypt Fever (but not Ebon Plaguebringer) and Rage of Rivendare (sad about the lore hit there) are gone.

Q u o t e:
In previous expansions, more choices were given to the players in terms of how they built their characters. Players were freely given the choice to spend points however they want.

While that is true, they were also given ample opportunities to make mistakes, what we call "traps." A forum-savy player may know which are the dumb talents nobody takes or which are the mandatory ones that might at first glance seem too bland to take. But why have "choices" that are just there for new players or people who just want to swim against the stream just to be different? We'd rather have actual legitimate choices, which we feel like we can offer by having a stable of fewer good talents.

To use one of the infamous GC analogies, the best restaurants are not necessarily those with a lot of entrees on the menu. The best restaurants probably have very few choices, but you know that anything you order will be great. They don't bother cooking it if they know it will suck. That's a real choice as opposed to the diner with fish on the menu that everyone, ever the waitress, whispers under their breath that you should never, ever order.

Q u o t e:
What happens to the previous tank mastery Vengeance?

You get it at level 10 for choosing a tanking tree. It already scaled with your health and incoming damage, so there isn't really a need for it to scale with talent points spent (especially since nearly 100% of tanks spend the most points in a tanking tree).

Q u o t e:
I like that analogy. Almost as much as the "DPS is like sprinting, healing is like playing darts" one. I feel like you've used it before and I just can't remember when, though.

I have said that the best cooks don't always eat the most food (arguing that the most talented players don't always make great designers) and said that class forums are "not a deli" for ordering up what changes you want to your class. I seem to have a restaurant analogy fetish.

Q u o t e:
So, with Arms as an example, does that mean they'll get their full "5% damage, 15% armor pen" passives with their first talent point at level 10? Or will it scale up with level instead of points?

Since they are already percentages, they already scale. The Arms one for the moment is Two-Handed Weapon Spec (+10% damage with two-Handed weapons) and Anger Management (free rage). They aren't always existing talents though. I would not focus too much on the old masteries, except for the third one that scales with gear. That one is still around.

Vengeance for tanks is still around and dps get damage and healers get healing and that sort of thing but the system has changed quite a bit overall (and partially as a result of community feedback).

Q u o t e:
Take Arms for example. When you first choose Arms, you get an active ability, a passive ability like Anger Management, and a passive bonus that increases your 2h damage by 10%. This replaces the bonuses like increased damage and ArP that you would have got by putting points into that tree.

Your Mastery won't come into affect until 75-78, and that will increase with Mastery Rating. How many points you spend in a tree do not affect that anymore.

Exactly.

Q u o t e:
Are hunters' pet talents going to change or stay the same?

Stay the same, modulo whatever polish and iteration we'd want to do on the talents anyway.

Q u o t e:
Also, are you going to keep with your vision of allowing the DK to have a 2 hander frost build that is at least competitive with this talent shift? I'd like to not say goodbye to my favorite DK tree completely but I'd imagine things like ToT and MotFW fall into your "probably going to get dropped" bucket. I'd guess one way to keep the functionality in game is to make one active when you're wielding 1 handers and the other when you're swinging a two hander?

We are keeping 2H and 1H versions of Frost and Fury. Those talents change your playstyle in pretty significant ways so we think they qualify as interesting.

Q u o t e:
Okay... more succinctly, this is my problem:

What will that mastery bonus BE when you purchase it from the class trainer?

In my case, I'll be Feral... but when I buy the ability from the class trainer, will it say "Mastery: Feral" in green and "Mastery: Restoration" and "Mastery: Balance" will be red (as if they were abilities I could not train)?

That Mastery: Feral bonus will say something like "Increases your Bleed Damage by X%" and that number goes up whenever I get more Mastery-stats on my gear... right?

I don't like not understanding stuff... this is too murky for me at the moment... my OCD is causing my physical pain...

You probably won't see the Resto and Balance mastery on your trainer when you're Feral. In fact, they probably won't even be on your trainer. You'll just get a "toast" when you hit level 78 that says "Feral Mastery Unlocked: Improved Bleed Damage." Then any mastery on gear (which only shows up around level 78 or so) will improve your bleed damage.

Q u o t e:
A big reason my first character ever got to 70(TBC) was because of the "carrot-on-a-stick" syndrome of RPGs. I knew that each level I had another talent point to look forward to and every other level meant some sort of new spell (or rank). Every level gave something at the end.

With the new talent overhaul, are you at all concerned that some of this is going away and affecting new players' "carrots?" There is the high potential that there will be levels where a character gets nothing except his/her 2-str, 3-sta, and 1-spr.

It's a fair concern, but leveling is also a whole lot faster back when many of us leveled our first character. The whole experience, in Cataclysm, feels a little more polished too since you know when you are getting new abilities and talent points. Instead of the sad surprise when you trek all the way back to civilization to find your trainer has nothing new for you, you can plan around it.

Q u o t e:
Yet, you designed the awe-inspiring Frostfire Bolt spell specifically to do this. Forcing us to take 31 pts in one tree before putting points into another completely kills the FFB spec. It also would seem to make FFB a completely useless spell. Any chance that we'll see some changes to it?

I wouldn't say that worked out so well though, certainly not enough to make it a model for talent tree design for other classes.

We still have a soft spot for Frostfire Bolt though, and at the moment there is a talent in Frost that lets you be the FFB mage.

Q u o t e:
Typhoon, Swiftmend, Avenger's Shield, and...er...Tame Exotic Pet? =|

Um... at least one is right. :)

Q u o t e:
so that means a leveling boomkin wont gain the eclipse mechanic till 75-78? as that's their 3rd mastery

We'll probably give them the "balance bar" for picking Balance at level 10, then at level 78 you get the ability to affect the bonus damage from the bar by increasing your mastery stat.

Q u o t e:
So what passive bonuses did you have in mind to make up for this HUGE loss in damage? I mean, in many AoE situations, Wandering Plague alone accounts for 15-20% of my overall damage, which is also being buffed by Impurity, and being further buffed by Desolation and being even further buffed by Rage of Rivendare. Take all that away, and basically you have a glorified version of Consecrate, rather than a dumbed down version of Seed of Corruption.

I just don't see how any kind of passive bonus you can implement can make up for that loss.

We could add a passive bonus that says "You do +50% melee weapon damage and +25% Frost and Shadow damage." Why make you buy essentially that same bonus in 12 separate talents when you are almost certainly going to do it anyway (unless you're a very misinformed player)? The passive bonuses don't carry a lot of risk. Other talent specs can't go fishing for them and we don't have to worry that you skipped over them.

Q u o t e:
We can't even get an answer as to whether our pets will scale to our stats for equal gear scaling with other classes... this simple question has been asked and ignored for far too long.

The plan is for your pets to scale 100% with your stats. In fact, group buffs don't even work on pets any longer so that they don't double dip from those buffs.

If you look at the warlock trees, there are tons of talents that buff Corruption and add range and crit damage and whatever. A couple of those per tree are okay but clearly we need to remove a lot of them and that means adding new talents, which unfortunately is slow.

Q u o t e:
How will mastery scale with pets? I could see it working with hunter pets, but what about locks?

We can make the pet damage scale with mastery even if they aren't getting the same benefit you are (because in many cases that won't make sense).

Q u o t e:
Yeah, that sums up a lot of it, down to no active abilities obtainable in secondary trees, never different spell sets (not the likes of today one resto druid going for IS over wild growth in 2v2 pvp). Someone on mmo-champion commented "Wow... so talent specs are gone? Just pick a tree and watch it fill? That is a horrible, horrible idea." I know a lot of pure pve raiders would object to that description because plus or minus several points is flexibility to them, but the system has less *major* flexibility than now.

WoW shipped with trees roughly the size the ones Cataclysm will be and I don't recall a lot of players at the time thinking that there weren't enough choices.

In terms of pure numbers, the new trees offer fewer maximum number of combinations than the old ones. But many of the old combinations were not viable ones anyway. The new design is fewer meaningful choices rather than having lots of trivial (or even bad) choices.

Q u o t e:
Isn't the concept of depth in a video game an illusion that comes from constant thought that your choices could be wrong?

If your choices just boil down to personal preference, then its not really that deep. Its just customization based on your favourite thing and you'll probably only take one look at each tree, decide on your favourite choices at each tier in the tree, and that's the end of it.

Game design theory generally holds that interesting decisions have no simple right or wrong answer. If you're playing a game and there are two identical doors and behind one is a dragon that will eat you and behind the other is treasure, then there is a wrong answer... and even worse, you have no information about which door to choose. That's a decision, but not an interesting decision. Better would be if there was a clue about the right door. Even better would be that each door has a different monster AND different treasure AND you have a hint about what is behind each door. That's an interesting decision.