[von_lohengramm]

> Why even have classes at all at this point?

Perhaps this is the actual lesson? Instead of artificial opportunity cost in the form of exclusive choices, why not provide opportunity cost in the form of time/money/etc investment?

You're a Sword & Board fighter in need of stealing the MacGuffin. Instead of magically undoing the choices that got you here, you go out and practice Stealth until you're able to heist the famed MacGuffin.

Admittedly, this system does actually provide less immersion, meaningful choices, etc., but IMO this can be mitigated almost completely by making skilling up much harder. If you still want to promote class/archetype-based characters, then just make your character's class reduce the amount of XP needed to level up certain skills. While you're at it, make having high skills also reduce the XP cost of similar skills. Someone who's really good with two-handed weapons will probably pick up one-handed weapons much quicker than someone who's never even touched a weapon.

And if this isn't enough opportunity cost for truly meaningful choices, then limiting the availability of XP (in certain sections of the game?) is also an option.

[imetatroll]

This is what skyrim tries to do.

[gnulinux]

But Skyrim is extraordinarily trivial and any spec/build/config can slap the game no problem. So it hardly works in favor of Skyrim.

[imetatroll]

I think that the real takeaway is that creating a game that uses these systems is very hard to create. In other words it is "trivial" because anything complex would be hard to program and make consistent and most importantly fun.