I swear at one point SkillSys was the norm for a lot of Fe8 hacks- even rebalances.
Nowadays, I feel like there’s hardly any new completed hacks out there (as in released within the last twelve months) that do so.
Or is it just me, and there are- but I keep missing all of them.
the meta has become the anti meta
Don’t worry when I finish my main project in 30 years you’ll get skills.
When skills first came out there was a drastic amount of skill bloat and eventually it got stale.
I guess since it became the norm, hack developers wanted to stand out by not including them.
Gimme a sec, Ill drop my hack soon i swear.
True!
That could explain it, yeah.
… though wouldn’t that mean they’d start to come out again to try and stand out…?
Maybe, but Skillsystems can be finnicky to manage.
Skill systems from the start was meant to be a foundation to build your own skills off of, and as such, there was no attempt to balance the default skills. Skill systems also heavily took skills from Fates and Awakening, a game where the norm was player units having six skills and generics having one or two. Many people who used skill systems tried to replicate how Fates and Awakening skill systems worked in in their FEGBA hacks.
Trying to keep some balance while giving every player unit six skills from an intentionally unbalanced skill list was hard enough, but the real annoyance was enemy generic skills. Even Fates showed a lot of restraint when putting skills on generics, only having one or two on specific generics on harder difficulties. And unlike FEGBA, Fates had the UI to easily check skills at a moment’s notice. Playing in a FEGBA environment where generics consistently have skills makes you feel as if you’re in an information deficit, always one or two math problems away from fully understanding how the units will interact with each other. It got to a point where well respected members of the community would disparaged skill systems in it’s entirety, tired of losing units because they forgot Elbow Room existed. As you would expect, it hampered the desire of a lot of people to use skill systems.
That being said, some hacks do use skill system for its intended purposes. Cerulean Coast by Rivian has unique, high impact skills that use SkillSystems without using the default skill system skills. And, while not SkillSystems™, and majority of LT games currently have a skill system.
That… actually makes a lot of sense.
(Skill sys being intentionally unbalanced because itnwas supposed to be a foundation to build your own off of, that is).
The rest of it too also sounds about right as well.
Or at least, I can definitely see why people would think that.
As just an observer and enjoyer of rom hacks for 10+ years it definitely got annoying keeping up with all the skills and I really do think it hurts balance in a completed hack. It’s fun if it’s a short hack for replay value but it became a pain.
There’s only a small handful of longer hacks that make use of Skillsystems well.
Sun God’s Wrath is one of those hacks. God I love it so much…
True and same! It’s def in my top 2. Giving different units the steal ability is so unique and the characters are great!
Skills make my smooth brain hurt.
You don’t even need Skill System to let someone steal.
I guess you could call the change…
a skill issue. 
im a big fan of skillsys personally but it got a bad rep for a while because enemy skills in gba are pretty annoying without a quick way to check them, especially proc skills that pushed the game more toward rng. hack developers are always getting smarter about how to make their units feel unique so skills lost their luster as a “crutch” per se
Yeee
If Skils are a crutch for hacks, then most end up like Gunther (in Revelations anyways): Good at the start, but tend to go bad later on.
(I know it’s an oblique simile but work with me here).