I didn't use the word realistic. I called it unsatisfying. Also, it's kind of tired to be like "oh you want rEaLiSm in your game about elf magic??". You know what people mean when they say that. Given the premises presented, nothing is contradictory enough to break suspension of disbelief. People use "realistic" as a shorthand. Sometimes people use "Verisimilitude" for this. Having NPCs react reasonably in some cases (eg: scripted encounters, some law breaking) and not in others is *jarring*. You see the NPCs standing around the tavern having a chat and you go, "That's a reasonable scene. I can imagine this." Then you explode one of them, and they all run around in a panic. Still pretty reasonable. Follows from the premises given. But then you run away and come back, and all of them are back to drinking and chatting. All of them except the one you exploded, who's still a bloody mess on the floor. For some people, such as myself, this is too much. It's too high a contrast, and it foregrounds the limits of the game too much to easily suspend disbelief. > I don’t know what to say. Are you trying to say it clashes with the design? Are you saying every game should have every feature and ‘StarCraft’ should have the nemesis system from the ‘shadow of’ games? I don’t get it. I don't feel like you tried very hard to "get it". The game has a stealth and murder system you're encouraged to use. I'd like for them to have gone a little further with it. The NPCs sometimes look for you if you fire from stealth, but it's janky. The rest of the game is generally pretty immersive-sim, but the wheels fall off if you play one of the main playstyles. Unsatisfying. I'm not a game developer and I expect you aren't either, so I don't know how complex it would be to make the responses to stealth more robust. Maybe add a "There's been a murder!" state to scenes. But they did a lot of other stuff to cover more niche scenarios, so it wouldn't be out of character.

But what would you have cut to inude that?

I'm not a product manager and certainly don't work at larian. I have no insight into the level of effort required with their tooling and skill sets. I don't know what they prototyped already. I can't answer that question meaningfully. You also didn't really engage with anything else I wrote.