If Project Eternity was turn-based...?

[The Guilty Party]

Turn based is nice for some games, but for this subgenre, I feel like you would end up with too many tedious battles where you're just doing 'move closer, attack, next, move closer, attack' until everything's dead. The complex battles would be cool, but maybe not worth the tradeoff.

[Addon]

As for me I don't have any preferences. It depends on the game. In Drakensang, if I'm not mistaken, we were able to check 'Auto pause' option. It was just like turn based.

[Grimlorn]

Turn based combat is superior to RTwP. Some of the challenge in RTwP comes from moving your characters and getting them to do what you want in real time. Also pathfinding. I wouldn't call this good difficulty though. You can also have a character move out of range and effectively kite mobs if your character gets low on HP while the other characters attack it. In turn based combat you can't do this so it's much better.

 

Also, you guys should check out Knights of the Chalice if you want to play a good DnD turn based game. Great encounter design. You can turn off random battles in options so no trash mobs. Every fight you're working towards completing a quest of some sorts. No filler.

Edited October 25, 2012 by Grimlorn

[Slaunyeh]

I went with "Yay!" because I like turn-based games (*sigh* alas poor Fallout, I knew him well), though I'm really perfectly happy with PE being a classic non-turnbased game.

[Uomoz]

Fight 30 gibberlings with your 6 men party in turn-based combat. 2 Hours to clear the room. Yay.

 

Look at this RTwP awesomeness:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CABMVtIPRE

Edited October 25, 2012 by Uomoz

[Nomine Vacans]

Infinity Engin goodness. Real time with pause. Nuff said.

[ogrezilla]

Rtwp or nothing. It is the best way to control the field tactically.

 

This is wrong. Period. By having the real time element you are, by definition, incorporating an element of "twitch" gameplay. You can call that tactical if you want to, thinking on your feet etc, but it is far different from having the absolute tactical field control which is only possible in pure turn based. I'm fine with PE having RTWP, but don't try to say it's somehow more tactical than turn based...

the pause function and autopause features gives pretty much just as tactical of an experience to RTwP as turn based. Its different, but its not any less tactical. Though as you say, its not any more tactical either. Its different.

Edited October 25, 2012 by ogrezilla

[Jarmo]

I'd have prefered turn bassed.

I liked ToEE and Fallout systems better than those in BG, IWD and whatever.

 

But no big deal either way. NWN and NWN2 were just fine already, so I'm good.

[Jarmo]

Fight 30 gibberlings with your 6 men party in turn-based combat. 2 Hours to clear the room. Yay.

 

Give me ToEE and a warrior with Glaive, Great Cleave and combat reflexes

and I'll look your stuttering pause every second gameplay, and raise 10 minutes worth of extatic symphony of destruction.

[Nerei]

Personally I like turn based games like ToEE or Civilization also for that matter to take a fairly different example of turn based games. However they can also be somewhat limiting mechanics.

For one as has already been brought up fighting a sufficiently large number of enemies (or in civilizations case moving 100 units after which the ai does the same) really can slow the game down.

Sure it can be fun even if executing each turn takes 30 or more minutes but if we take Uomoz example with 30 gibberlings I might just end up getting a cup of coffee while the AI takes it's turn (I regularly do that in civilization). So while I love turn based games and I have no problems wasting alot of time executing a turn, I would say that real time with auto-pause is fine.

Without autopause though it would become a bit too much starcraft for my taste

[Amentep]

Fight 30 gibberlings with your 6 men party in turn-based combat. 2 Hours to clear the room. Yay.

 

I'd argue that's poor design though; POOL OF RADIANCE: THE RUINS OF MYTH-DRANOR (or whatever) had that problem. I stopped playing it because....everthing...mo....ved.....so......sl........o............w

 

There's no real reason for TB combat to be slow, as far as I know, other than not thinking through how to implement it.

[Churchwarden]

Real-time w/ pause is a great system. It can be turn-based or not and thus accommodates both sides of the split vote in this poll.

[AGX-17]

Fight 30 gibberlings with your 6 men party in turn-based combat. 2 Hours to clear the room. Yay.

 

For the record, most TB games don't present situations like that.

 

Wait, what am I saying? I'm a Super Robot Wars fan (late game scenarios there can take 2-3 hours to complete,) I'm deluding myself. You're right. These situations do arise and can take forever. For the record, though, most TB games, in my experience, have ways of speeding things up (Fallout and Fallout 2 allowed you to increase all animation speeds dramatically, for example.)

 

I don't have a problem with RTwP (most recently I completed DA:O multiple times and actually enjoyed it a few of those times,) but I just have an inborn preference for TB.

Edited October 25, 2012 by AGX-17

[Taletotell]

I could see turn based working in a lot of formats. Like chess. Honestly I like a lot of old turn based games, but for this engine it is a waste of resources. I could see maybe telling all my characters what to do and letting them all go at once, then next turn do it again. I would lose interest. I don't need another pool of radiance. It was nice, but BG was incredible.

[Freshock]

I think turn-based would make the battles boring after a while..Even though I love the Heroes of Might and Magic/King's Bounty series I get bored of it after a while. I find real time with pause more interesting and fun. I feel like I can do something different each battle and always improve my tactics, I don't get the same feeling with turn based games...Just me though. Would still support PE if they went for turn based of course.

[HereticSaint]

I would prefer turn based. They already have their idea of how they are going to create combat and implement it though so I'm sure they'll make it work in a way that isn't incredibly irritating or frustrating.

[Uomoz]

HoMM use at best 6v6 units (maybe a little more?), that's why it works so damn good in that game. IE-scale battles can be quite huge when low level mobs are involved. Coming back to "easy" areas in BG was totally awesome, Xvart village ANYONE?

[Hormalakh]

With pause, you can make the game turn-based anyway. I actually like real-time with pause more than any other mechanism.

[ArcaneBoozery]

Like most things in life, both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. I've played a bunch of games with both systems (BG1&2, P:T, NWN with RTwP, and ToEE, FO1&2, Arcanum, FFVII with TB). In general, TB allows for more precision and somewhat more tactics (as in specifying what every party member will do precisely, something not really practical with RTwP). However, RTwP allows the player to specify tactics to a large degree as well, so TB's advantage is not huge. The flip side is that pretty much every RPG I've ever played had a lot of trash fights, or trash phases during important fights, and TB is terrible during those. Waiting for each trash enemy and each party member to move and animate while the fight is already decided is annoying as hell and takes forever. For these reasons, I personally prefer RTwP, as I feel like it gives me almost as much tactical depth as TB but without the overhead.

[Uomoz]

There is no "trash fight". There are easier fights and harder fights. Fighting is not some filler content in PE and its ancestors (well in PST MAYBE IT WAS, but I enjoyed combat there as well), it's not supposed to be a chore or uninteresting. Fighting every fight in IE games was awesome from my point of view, each enemy interesting and contextualized, from the gibberling swarms to the colorful mages battles.

[Grimlorn]

Fight 30 gibberlings with your 6 men party in turn-based combat. 2 Hours to clear the room. Yay.

This doesn't usually happen in TB games and if it does it's a bad encounter design. It's better to have 8-12 mobs that can actually hurt you and offer challenge, rather than fighting 30 trash mobs and rolling through them because they are weak just to stroke the player's ego.

 

RTwP is just there so developers can speed up combat and make it faster and easier to defeat encounters. The solution to this would be to simply remove trash mobs and make most encounters unique and challenging in some way in a turn based setting. Just for some reason developers have problems with this, so people think they need real time combat because they're bored or something. Maybe they can't handle the challenge and want something easier, because that's also what RTwP is.

Edited October 25, 2012 by Grimlorn

[Fluffboll]

Fight 30 gibberlings with your 6 men party in turn-based combat. 2 Hours to clear the room. Yay.

This doesn't usually happen in TB games and if it does it's a bad encounter design. It's better to have 8-12 mobs that can actually hurt you and offer challenge, rather than fighting 30 trash mobs and rolling through them because they are weak just to stroke the player's ego.

 

RTwP is just there so developers can speed up combat and make it faster and easier to defeat encounters. The solution to this would be to simply remove trash mobs and make most encounters unique and challenging in some way in a turn based setting. Just for some reason developers have problems with this, so people think they need real time combat because they're bored or something. Maybe they can't handle the challenge and want something easier, because that's also what RTwP is.

 

Oh yes... unique and interesting... I guess the 32895463478563286 bandits/scorpions and other worthless trashmobs I murdered throughout Fallout 1&2 were extraordinarly diverse and unique...

[Uomoz]

That is your point of view. 30 mobs is not bad design at all, it's just horde fighting, and is completely precluded in TB games. Stop with this "trash mob" approach, there's no such thing.

[Grimlorn]

Geez you guys don't get it. When I'm talking about unique and challenging. I'm talking about different tactical situations and enemy party combinations with different skills and abilities that challenge the player in different ways.

 

30 mobs that constantly miss you and you run through easily isn't good encounter design. RTwP games have this in spades because you can't make it as challenging as turn based combat. So they just throw a ton of mobs at you to make combat seem interesting and challenging.

 

edit: Another thing. When you use fighting 30+ mobs taking 2 hours to kill in a turn based game then they do become trash mobs. Because there is no reason not to create more difficult mobs with a smaller party that can challenge the player instead of just throwing a ton of weaker mobs at the player constantly.

Edited October 25, 2012 by Grimlorn

[Nerei]

Fight 30 gibberlings with your 6 men party in turn-based combat. 2 Hours to clear the room. Yay.

This doesn't usually happen in TB games and if it does it's a bad encounter design. It's better to have 8-12 mobs that can actually hurt you and offer challenge, rather than fighting 30 trash mobs and rolling through them because they are weak just to stroke the player's ego.

 

RTwP is just there so developers can speed up combat and make it faster and easier to defeat encounters. The solution to this would be to simply remove trash mobs and make most encounters unique and challenging in some way in a turn based setting. Just for some reason developers have problems with this, so people think they need real time combat because they're bored or something. Maybe they can't handle the challenge and want something easier, because that's also what RTwP is.

 

Difficulty is not really tied to the type of mechanic unless it is so badly made that is a challenge in it's own right. If you claim that only TB games can be challenging is borderline silly, usually it just gives you more micromanagement options and generally runs slower than RT.

Not really sure why you assume challenge = fun. If people find faster running combat fun, then that is fun. If you find challenging TB encounters funny, then that is fun. Do not assume that other people cannot have fun with a system if you cannot.

However a funny question really is, what do you call RT with autopause? Is that RT or TB? I could argue that it is simultaneous executed TB. Yes, there are games that use that system.

 

Also you brought up the very limitation of the sequential TB combat in that it handles large number of enemies quite badly. If that is good or bad is something else (I would say bad, being limited is rarely good), but it very much is a limitation of the system. In some 4X games it means that you do not want to spam a ton of small crafts against a few large capital ships as it just takes eons to go though! Yes it is another genre but it is still TB and demonstrates the problem with sequential TB games.

 

Your solution by effectively removing "trash" again highlights a problem with sequential TB combat, it can take a decent amount of time to kill "trash" well after you have effectively won the fight. That just makes the fights drawn out and makes people wish for them to end already, which is really the worst situation. Slow or fast combat is about preference, but when the player wish for it to end, then you got a problem.

Having to remove things due to your system being less ideal towards it does not really paint it as being better as a whole, it might do well at some things, but it is limited.

 

 

I say all this as fairly large fan of TB games, I still play games like the original X-com to name a real TB classic, but I can see the limitation in the system and I understand why it is not something for everyone!

Edited October 25, 2012 by Nerei