Curious: How did you play the IE games?

[Osvir]

Simple poll.

 

I play active with some pausing and some auto-pausing I prefer to have some control. Tried setting everything "On" on Auto-Pause and enjoyed it but there's a but active pausing is more fun and I get to decide myself the "Turns" myself. I've tried entirely active (like Diablo) but ever since I found that space button I pause by reaction and routine

 

This poll is related to some thoughts I got from this thread (Respec), just so you know where I'm coming from.

 

Auto-Pause

There's an options feature in the IE games which lets you change some values around and you are pretty much playing Turn-Based. Don't know about DA:O.

 

Pause

Pressing the spacebar you pause the game in any situation. DA:O has this too.

 

Active?

Like Diablo, never pausing. DA:O does this too.

 

Mix

A mix of some or all of the above features.

 

Finally, question related to the Respec, how important was stats in the IE games as a "Level Up" Resource that you "mine" with a "pickaxe"? (interesting metaphor) Whenever I find an unidentified item or not I am hopeful and somewhat excited that it is going to be a "better than my currently" so I can get an easier time against my enemies, or maybe even a second weapon for the off-hand or certain situations. In Diablo I shrug at the unidentified items and stop picking them up after a while because the chance that it is a better item looses all its interest (Diablo III, farmfest anyone?).

[GhostofAnakin]

Pause.

 

Usually though I concentrate on my characters who use spells. My fighters I tend to just press attack and let them do their thing, only pausing when I need to cast another spell.

 

So if it's a particularly easy fight, or if it's a fight that's mainly melee-focused, I don't bother to pause until I need my clerics to heal or buff my fighters.

[nikolokolus]

I think i may have auto paused occasionally, but 90% of the time I manually paused combat.

[Hellfell]

Quick save rest quick save rest quick save quick load

[Tigranes]

Manual pause, used to just rest whenever necessary. As I played multiple times, got very good at powergaming, and started installing difficult mods, I also began to impose house rules on resting myself.

 

I also used Ctrl+J and MoveToArea quite often after the first few playthroughs as walking back and forth got boring; recently I've switched back to not using them, as they really end up destroying your sense of place.

[Wulfic]

I Always played the dnd rules difficulty so in most encounters I didn't had to pause at all I managed to control my whole party without any problems but in hard battles I had to use the spacebar to pause. So yeah I voted mix. I hope the same will be in PE

[JayDGee]

I always set up auto pause with the intention of using it but ended up auto-pausing and micromanaging each fight to the point auto-pause would become a distraction and then switched off.

[LordCrash]

Manual pause...there is always some need of micromanagement

[Osvir]

Quick save rest quick save rest quick save quick load

 

I do this too, but to what I define as a moderate amount without loosing my sense of game design. Enough to be enough *shrug*

 

The "Quick save, rest, quick save" should've been an option in the poll I guess (too late to edit now).

[Death Machine Miyagi]

Never bothered to use autopause. I pause manually as needed.

 

I did try to rest as rarely as possible, even as a mage. You have no idea how much of a headache this approach was on my first run-through of Durlag's Tower in BG1.

Edited November 2, 2012 by Death Machine Miyagi

[JayDGee]

How did you play the IE games?

 

 

Like A BOSS!

[Nerezza]

I’d say a mixture between manual pausing and auto-pause. I generally set auto-pause to activate under the following conditions:

• Enemy sighted
  
• Trap found
  
• Character injured
  

 

These are the major events that I don’t want to miss, which may happen if I am relying solely on manual pausing.

Auto-pause when enemy sighted allows me to assess the situation and devise a plan to act accordingly.

Auto-pause when a trap is found is to me 100% essential. Gives me the chance to stop my idiot party from prancing through deathtrap.

Auto-pause when character is injured can be a life saver. It gives me a chance to get that member out of harm’s way and patch them up if necessary.

 

I’ll manually pause as well for other situations, but those three are my golden rule for the auto-pause function.

[Adhin]

I basically just had it set to auto pause on finding traps to avoid setting them off. Often times you'd find them, mid move, a foot in front of a character which would, more often then not, result in a trigger if the game didn't force pause it for you so... I always kept that on. I know I had 1-2 other boxes checked but I can't remember which ones but it mostly involved non-combat related pauses.

 

Other then that I'd pause in combat if I needed to use a mage or there was just a lot of enemies and I needed to take it all in but my basic first-go would always just be my main fighters set to auto-attack stuff once I had them going and I'd let them mop up most stuff on there own like it was an RTS. More complex encounters had the pausing and micromanaging for better effective spell use... archers where never set to auto-attack, mages neither, just fightery melee types. Clerics I had setup for melee where just respond fighters in case something got to them.

 

...if there was an option to pause below 50% hp or on low hp I think I may of had that on... enemy sighted I think I tried a few times but it just bugged me to much. Anyway that's the jist of it, I picked 'mixed'.

[Hormalakh]

I wonder how many people would still continue to pause if the hotkeys and shortcut keys for spell usage was remotely good in the IE games. I think it would become more action based.

[Nomine Vacans]

I'm playing IE games on my PC with mouse and keyboard.

Not the most brilliant of all polls, isn't it?

[Tamerlane]

I wonder how many people would still continue to pause if the hotkeys and shortcut keys for spell usage was remotely good in the IE games. I think it would become more action based.

A valid point, but I've still gotta stop and read the damn combat log.

[qstoffe]

I paused manually but I also have the game pause automatically on certain "events" like weapon unusable, character hit/death, trap found etc.

[Sensuki]

How did you play the IE games?

 

 

Like A BOSS!

 

This.

 

Manual everything.

[LadyCrimson]

Manual pausing. I tried auto-pause and no matter the setting I always felt like the game was pausing when I didn't want it to, so I turned it all off. To this day I can't stand auto-pausing and still turn it off in all games, heh. I don't remember ever feeling a need to pause for traps. I just led the party by making each step forward very small.

[Gorth]

I’d say a mixture between manual pausing and auto-pause. I generally set auto-pause to activate under the following conditions:

• Enemy sighted
  
• Trap found
  
• Character injured
  

I used the first two of those. Once encounters started, it was micro management... pause, unpause, pause, unpause for every fraction of a second. Sometimes pause unpause etc. was interrupted by new instructions to party members

[GrinningReaper659]

I generally used the auto-pause only for trap detection, as traps were often detecting as you were walking onto them, setting them off. Apart from that I used manual pausing pretty often.

[TheDogProfessor]

I turn on auto-pause for trap found to make accidentally stumbling onto traps less frustrating. Apart from that, manual pause all the way.

[teknoman2]

i had autopause on for: enemy sighted (so i would not run into enemies when i was going around without paying much atention), trap spoted (so i would be able to stop my party from steping on it at my leisure) and spell cast (so that i could know in the chaos of battle, when a spellcaster was ready to accept the next command so he would not just stand there idly). the rest of the time i used manual pause

[wanderon]

Manual pause and I used it alot - sometimes round to round to position/reposition and/or give direct orders to those needing it.

 

 

 

(hate auto-pause feature - it's a control issue - if I need to pause I can find the space bar thank you very much I want to play the game not watch the computer play the game... )

 

Didn't get your metaphors on level ups especially when they seemed to be mixed in with comments about finding unidentified weapons what exactly are you asking about leveling up?

Edited November 2, 2012 by wanderon

[Amentep]

I used manual pause for spell casting.

 

After a while I turned on auto-pause for enemy sighted, just because I kept finding myself missing the start of combat due to distractions where I was playing.

 

So a mix.