Why Every Big-Budget Game Now Has a Skill Tree

Open the pause menu of almost any big-budget action game released in the last decade and you’ll find the same screen: a constellation of nodes connected by lines, points to spend, a path that unlocks left to right or centre to edges. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing a Norse-mythology hack-and-slash, a samurai open-world game, or a superhero swinging simulator — the menu underneath is recognisably the same menu, borrowed wholesale from a genre none of those games actually are.

That genre is the role-playing game, and the specific object is the skill tree — a piece of tabletop-derived character-building furniture that has migrated so completely into action design that its absence now reads as an oversight rather than a choice.

The furniture came from Diablo

The skill tree as a visual object — nodes, branches, points, a build you commit to — is usually credited further back than it deserves. Tabletop RPGs gave games the idea of character advancement, but the tree-with-branches interface specifically comes from computer RPGs translating that idea into a UI, and the version everyone since has actually copied is Blizzard’s, refined across the Diablo series into something legible at a glance: three columns, a handful of tiers, a build you can screenshot and argue about on a forum. The loot loop in Diablo IV still runs on a direct descendant of that same tree, decades later, because the underlying object never needed fixing.

What changed is who started borrowing it. Once a skill tree became shorthand for “there is a progression system here, and it is legitimate,” action, stealth and even sports games without any RPG mechanics otherwise began installing one anyway, because the visual grammar alone signals depth to a player scanning a menu, whether or not the systems underneath actually need a tree to describe them.

The action game didn’t need the tree it borrowed

Here’s the part that makes the trend worth arguing about rather than just noting: most of these games had a perfectly good progression system before the tree arrived, and the tree got bolted on top of it rather than replacing anything. A character-action game like God of War (2018) already gates power through equipment, runes and the natural difficulty curve of tougher enemies — that’s Kratos getting stronger the old way, through better gear and practised combos. The skill tree added on top of that doesn’t unlock new verbs so much as unlock cheaper, faster, or wider versions of verbs you already had, which is a much smaller kind of choice dressed in the visual language of a much bigger one.

Compare that to a game where a skill tree actually is the verb-unlock mechanism — an immersive sim where a new skill genuinely opens a route through a level that didn’t exist before — and the difference is stark. Most big-budget action trees aren’t doing that work. They’re doing percentage work: eight per cent more damage, twelve per cent faster stamina regen, a slightly wider dodge window. It’s a spreadsheet wearing a constellation’s clothes, and the reason it persists anyway is that a spreadsheet alone tests badly in focus groups, while a glowing tree of unlockable nodes tests brilliantly, because it photographs like meaningful choice even in the sessions where it isn’t one.

Where the pressure actually comes from

The instinct to add one didn’t come from design, mostly — it came from the open-world map screen needing something to justify the size of the world it was selling. An open world with a hundred hours of content needs the player to feel they’re getting stronger across that hundred hours in a way that’s legible on a menu, because the alternative — the player simply getting better at the game through practice, with no numeric proof of it — doesn’t photograph well on a store page or a trailer. The hundred-hour open world is fundamentally a budgeting problem before it’s a design one, and a skill tree is one of the cheapest ways to paper over that many hours with the feeling of progress: cheaper to build than a hundred hours of genuinely differentiated content, and reliably legible to a player who’s only spent twenty minutes with the menu.

Ubisoft’s open-world template made this explicit rather than incidental — Assassin’s Creed Origins onward layered RPG stat gear and skill trees onto a series that had spent a decade working as a pure action-stealth game, precisely because the studio needed a mechanism to make a much larger map feel earned rather than merely large. It worked commercially, which is why every studio chasing the same open-world scale copied the same fix.

The superhero case study

Marvel’s Spider-Man makes the argument cleanly because the base movement is so obviously the star of the show. Swinging through the city on physics-driven webs is the reason the game exists, and it worked, by every account, before a single skill point was ever spent — the traversal loop is complete on its own terms, the way a good platformer’s jump is complete on its own terms. The skill tree layered over it unlocks combat finishers, gadget upgrades and gradual combo extensions, which are genuine additions to the moveset rather than pure percentage padding, and that’s worth distinguishing from the God of War case: here the tree does open new verbs, just verbs bolted onto a traversal system that was never short of things to do in the first place. The tree isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s additive to something that didn’t require the addition, which is a subtler failure mode than a tree that’s pure decoration, and a more common one across the genre than either extreme.

Ghost of Tsushima runs the same experiment with a straighter face. Its combat stances — Stone, Water, Wind, Moon — are elegant on their own: each one is a hard counter to a specific enemy archetype, which means the choice of stance in the moment is already the interesting decision, independent of any menu screen. The skill tree bolted on top mostly widens what each stance can already do, rather than introducing a fifth stance or a genuinely new combat verb, and a player who ignored the tree entirely and only learned the four stances would still be playing something close to the full game. That’s the tell again: when the tree is optional to the experience rather than structural to it, it’s there mainly because the genre expected one.

The publisher’s incentive behind the designer’s

It’s worth separating the design argument from the business one, because the two get conflated and the second is arguably stronger than the first. A skill tree generates a specific kind of marketing asset that a purely mechanical improvement to combat feel doesn’t: a screenshot, a trailer beat, a menu that can be shown in a pre-release demo to illustrate “hours of content” without spoiling any actual story. A publisher greenlighting a nine-figure budget wants line items that are demonstrably present in a build eighteen months out, and a skill tree with forty nodes is demonstrably present in a way that “the combat feels 15 per cent more responsive after a year of tuning” simply isn’t. That asymmetry in how progress gets reported upward, inside a studio, is at least as responsible for the tree’s ubiquity as any player-facing design argument for including one.

The one place it’s earned

It would be unfair to write this as a blanket complaint, because there is a version of the modern skill tree that earns its space precisely by refusing to be generic — where the branches are asymmetric enough that two players' builds produce visibly different playstyles rather than the same character with slightly bigger numbers. The test isn’t genre, it’s whether a screenshot of someone else’s build tells you anything about how they actually played. If every player’s endgame tree looks functionally identical because the “optimal” path is obvious and everyone takes it, the tree was never really a choice — it was a checklist with a UI, and checklists don’t need branches at all, just a linear unlock order that would have been more honest about what it was asking of the player.

The crafting menu’s cousin

This is the same reflex, wearing a different UI skin, as the one that put a crafting menu into games that never needed one. The crafting menu functions as a busywork tax in a lot of big-budget design — a system installed to fill the space between story beats rather than because gathering twelve wolf pelts made the game better — and the skill tree is doing the identical job for the time axis rather than the space axis. Where crafting fills the map with things to collect, the skill tree fills the campaign with things to unlock, and both exist substantially to make a large budget feel proportionally large on the way through it, rather than because either system was the best answer to a design problem the game actually had.

None of this means skill trees are a mistake wherever they appear. In an actual RPG, or in a game whose core loop is genuinely about build experimentation, the tree is load-bearing — the whole point of the genre is the divergent build, and removing the tree removes the game. The argument here is narrower and, I think, more useful: a skill tree bolted onto a game whose core loop was already complete before the tree arrived is decoration wearing the costume of a system, and the tell is always the same. Ask what verb the tree actually unlocks that the base combat didn’t already have. If the honest answer is “a slightly bigger number,” the tree is furniture wearing the costume of design — and the game underneath it was probably fine without it.