codexer

No NPC should at any time be immune to death and the player character should be free to attack anyone, including companions. There should be consequences from killing people, or even letting companions die. The game world has to be responsive to the players actions; this is what it means to play a game.

The bad stuff was the poor path-finding and the poor AI (archers moving to shoot, even though they don't need to), the unresponsiveness due to the faux-turn based combat (you know when your character doesn't start to act until the next "cycle" in the turn-rotation). Generally the lack of a good implementation of AD&D. ToEE, albeit being d&d 3.x, was utterly amazing in comparison to the combat system of IE-games. And also how the games lacked non-combat skills. They were all slash and hack games; except for PS:T, which had plenty of stat-checks in dialogue. And a lack of choice and consequence; responsiveness in the game world. The good stuff was the beautiful level design, the richness of items (and descriptions) and characters. One of the things that made BG was the fact that you could walk up to the edge of a map and cross over to the next. There was no need to talk to some entitled bitch in a tavern to be able to travel to a rural keep; the game world was almost all there right from the start for you to explore. Nice~

Not to be buzzkiller but until this game has an option for turn based combat I will refrain from pledging. That said, I'm not total douche bag; I would be happy if the turn based mode was parallel with the RTwP-mode~

The poor encounter design of ToEE and the unbalanced combat of Arcanum are not really inherit to the turn based combat system of these games. They're consequences of rushed development. In PE they're trying to make something amazing and I think they should strive for that in the combat department as well. Obviously my subjective opinion but no game with RTwP has had amazing combat of the level seen in JA-series, KoTC and AoD and the potential ToEE had.

Its not like Arcanum is remarkable for its combat. And ToEE was kinda frustrating - awesome rules, underwhelming encounter design. The point wasn't that Arcanum had great combat, just that it had both an option for rt and tb. It's not relevant that arcanum had poor combat, neither is it that ps:t had it. I'm was simply pointing out that you can have more than one option in one game, and still make it great~

I just wish we could all be happy, that is, If the game had options for bothTB and RTwP, like Arcanum and ToEE did.