My wet dream: Battle replays

[omgFIREBALLS]

I contend that in order to control a six character party anywhere near effectively, you need to pause a lot. But I'm not here to discuss that. I just think that the pausing makes a replay ten times less epic. Imagine if you recorded (with another program) a hard-won victory, one that gave you the nerdchills, or perhaps one that had great plot significance and could give you the same chills. And then you're going to watch it with pauses and cursors and all that junk. Better it were more like a cutscene, no?

 

That's what I think at least. So I gave it a try. This is the result, and it's an inconsequential trash fight in a place I won't even name so I hope there will be no allergic reactions to spoilers:

 

 

The thing is, it's not only very cumbersome to edit (because you need to find the exact frames for pauses and unpauses), it's also difficult to play this way, unless you want to add more auto-pause conditions (I only had finished actions). I could have the UI showing but I think it would cost too much viewing pleasure, although a narrow victory could be more epic if you actually see your party on the brink of death.

 

So obviously my unlikely dream is that the game, or a spiritual successor would support battle replays. The recording would be from combat start to combat end (which fortunately are 100% defined in PoE), you could choose to have UI showing or not, but all pauses and all commands would be gone. You'd just see the combat.

 

And just in case you're wondering, no I don't play without SFX but I recorded with music on and obviously music doesn't pause so I had to cut out the original audio and slap on the naked combat music afterwards. And now I don't think it even fits the tempo.

[Slapstick87]

I would like this as well actually, if they found a very non-intrusive way of making it available. I've often thought that the combats are incredibly short in real-time, but very long in play-time with all the pausing. It's one of my very minor annoyances with the game. The combat loses so much fluidity because you can't just watch the combat happen and react accordingly "while the game is playing". Which again, makes me not "feel" the combat as well as I'd like.