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Baldur’s Gate was released a few days before Christmas in 1998. Significantly, Blizzard’s Diablo had been out for two years, shattering sales records and dramatically closing the gap between computer and console RPGs. Essentially, Diablo was an effort to make a Legend of Zelda style game for computer gaming adults, and it worked. Of course, it also helped that CRPGs as a whole had been declining, with mostly derivative titles that, for a variety of reasons, just didn’t capture the imagination the way the earlier Gold Box titles had. The few standouts, such as Fallout (1997), were saddled with “B-grade status” and improperly funded even by publishers who should have known better (Interplay, in this case).
Bioware naturally wanted to duplicate the success of Diablo, but recognized that the sophisticated rules of D&D just couldn’t be reduced to clicking a mouse on the bad guy and quaffing potions. The result was the kludge called RTwP, which tried to capture the “excitement” of Diablo but that would still let you pause the game at any time to pop open the hood and make adjustments.
Bioware was mostly successful with its compromised solution, though it’s debatable whether the game would have been worse off with a more traditional turn-based engine. I’d like to think that the game’s excellent production values and great story would have been enough to quell dissent that the game wasn’t enough like Diablo. In any case, I doubt any publisher would have been interested in a turn-based game anyway given that title’s success.
I think many gamers who were fans of the older turn-based style were probably put off by Baldur’s Gate RTwP. However, it really had been a long time since we had a CRPG with such excellent production values, and it was “good enough” to keep us playing–hey, at least it wasn’t Diablo. Eventually, once you got into the game, you quickly forgot (or were willing to overlook) how often RTwP combat can be painful, tedious, and awkward. Was getting to see some flashier spell animations really worth all this constant pausing and fighting with the AI?
In short, I don’t think turn-based combat is boring or tedious at all. Rather, it’s just that Diablo was so successful that publishers (and many gamers who hadn’t experienced anything else) were suddenly convinced that it was a throwback. That prevented the natural development we’d expect to see in interface and AI design. We’re just now finally starting to see what a modern CRPG with turn-based combat might look like, thanks mostly to X-Com and Shadowrun. However, neither of these games comes anywhere close to the raw passion and craft we got in Baldur’s Gate.
If anyone is in a position to update turn-based combat and make it fun again, it’s Torment’s developers. Fortunately, we are finally back to a position where gamers can and have overridden the publishers to get a new turn-based game that won’t suffer from lower production values. I, for one, am excited to see what the team eventually comes up with.
