I’ve read many discussions where people argue to death over things like the engagement system or encounter design, forgetting the bigger picture: RTwP is flawed by default.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, the pause is an honest admission that fast-paced, party vs party, real-time combat is too chaotic to be controlled on the fly and the AI is too retarded to be relied on, and thus you have to pause this interactive movie to issue some basic orders and show the AI how it's done.

Sequential combat is a lot more complex and a turn, yours or the enemy's, isn't a pause - it's a window to plan, respond to what the enemy's up to, execute strategies, and most importantly, ensure that your party members will survive the enemy's turn. In fact, planning for the enemy's turn is what makes TB so engaging. Any idiot can pick some targets to attack during his turn, but making sure that all your men survive the enemy's turn and the battle (like in XCOM, for example) is the real challenge.

To be honest, I think Obsidian did a fantastic job designing the combat mechanics and I couldn’t help but admire some of Sawyer’s design decisions. Had PoE been a challenging TB game, the system would have shone. Sadly, its potential and all the clever ideas are wasted on a game that often plays itself and goes extra mile to ensure that all your choices are totally awesome (because you’re awesome too!).

Still, neither Black Isle nor Obsidian games were known for great combat. In fact, they’ve mastered the art of making great RPGs with Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Combat: PST, KOTOR 2, MotB, New Vegas, so let’s leave the combat talk to people who have nothing better to do than compare one RTwP system to another and debate which one is worse all day.​

Combat in NEO Scavenger is very special - so much that even the mainstream gaming media devoted an article to it.

It is presented in a simple interface, with your actions and current status on the left, the enemy's on the right, and the current terrain characteristics in the middle. Just like in other events, you select commands, such as “Shoot”, “Kick” or “Walk towards”, and the combat log will describe what happened. There's a wide variety of combat actions that can be performed, depending on the circumstances and on your position, traits, and equipment.

For example, if the enemy is unaware of your position, you can shout to reveal yourself and then try to strike up a friendly conversation (or trick him into believing you are friendly), or you can remain silent and try to sneak up on him. On the other hand, if you are the one being ambushed, then your options will be restricted to searching for the enemy, taking cover, fleeing or [Stoic] just waiting. If the enemy is far away, you can slowly walk towards him or make a quick charge – but that leaves you more vulnerable and increases your chance of tripping and falling over. If you do fall over, you can try to get up, roll in any direction or even attempt to grab the enemy's leg to pull him down too. A character with the "Tough" trait can headbutt enemies, a "Strong" one can create obstacles, a "Trapping" one can set traps, etc. Even your equipment plays a part here - a character wielding a powerful weapon or maybe even just wearing a creepy clown mask can be a lot more persuasive in getting enemies to surrender or flee.

Of course, there's not a single frame of animation in NEO Scavenger, and combat is no exception. The combat log is all the feedback you'll ever get, apart from the occasional nasty status alert popping up on your status screen or the enemy's. While this may seem crude, it allows for actions that even AAA developers would find a challenge to animate, such as headbutting, leg tripping or parrying - all while wielding a frying pan and pushing a shopping cart.​

Telepath Tactics is an SRPG/TRPG (RPG-wargame hybrid with a focus on turn-based tactical combat) in the spirit of the console Fire Emblem series, released this April after being successfully Kickstarted back in 2013. [...] Make no mistake, behind the cartoonish 1990-era console graphics lies a hard and unforgiving wargame-ish RPG with impressive combat and encounter design that sometimes rivals the best titles in the genre.

[...] In the end, overcoming challenges in a mission is done through a series of risk:reward decisions, and this game has them in spades. In fact, one of its greatest strengths is that there are so many ways to deal with those. You can play it safe or be super-aggressive; you can kill everything that moves or win a map without really fighting any enemies; you can even re-arrange the map to create your own strategy for winning the battle. Some examples that came up during my playthrough:

• Do I move in tight formation to protect my squishies, even though this exposes me to AOE attacks and getting flanked by ranged enemies?
• Do I split up my team to deal with enemies attacking from three directions, or do I keep everyone together and try to block off some approaches?
• Do I send off my fastest units to open treasure chests behind enemy lines, thus possibly exposing them to danger while leaving me with less units to carry out the main objectives? Or do I leave treasure chests alone until I've dealt with the main threats, thus risking their contents getting stolen by an NPC thief?
• Do I keep out of movement/attack range of potentially dangerous enemies while I get everyone in position (possibly allowing them to get reinforcements), or do I rush to the most important targets ASAP and try to protect my vanguard?
• Do I move slowly and methodically through the map, destroying all enemy forces for extra gold / experience / item drops at the risk of taking more damage and losing resources, or do I send a flier to beeline for the main objective to avoid getting outmatched?
• Before engaging the main enemy force, do I constantly reposition my casters in reaction to enemy movement to keep them as safe as possible, or do I try to get them into a moderately safe position in the first turn and then pass their turns to gain 5 energy instead of 1 per turn (and perhaps keeping another unit back to babysit them as needed)?
• Do I save that suicidal NPC and expose my own units to danger, or do I let them die and possibly miss out on a new party member or even a side mission?
• Do I burn consumables to burst down an enemy with a dangerous attack, or save them and prepare to take the attack?
• Do I partially destroy a bridge to create a chokepoint and take the risk of the bridge getting completely destroyed by enemy Crossbowmen as a follow-up?
• Do I attack from max range with my casters to avoid exposing them to danger, or walk to a 2-tile range from the target (or even melee range with Mind Blast and some point-blank AOE attacks spells) to get more damage out?
• Do I kill this target by focusing attacks on them, or do I just push them into the water to make them waste their next turn swimming to shore?
• After gaining the upper hand and having the option of finishing the battle at any time, do I let my lower-level characters pick off the last enemies to gain experience and possibly expose them to unneeded risk?
• Do I switch to a weaker/cheap weapon to dispatch a near-death enemy, or do I keep using the good stuff in case the character gets attacked and needs to make the counterattack count?

Now keep in mind that some battles are long... and some are VERY long. They are also mentally exhausting -- once I was done with a 2-hour monster of a fight, I was typically not up for playing the next mission immediately. This is definitely a game that's best played in bursts with some time to recharge in between!

[...] There is basically no randomness involved in combat. I consider this to be -- arguably -- the best feature of Telepath Tactics. Consider that in a typical 'tactics' game, your plans may be thwarted by your sniper missing a 97% headshot (and this will happen every 30 shots), or the last remaining near-dead troll rolling a natural 20 and hitting your fighter for 30 HP, instantly killing him. In some cases this can increase tension and force the player to think of a backup plan... But let's be honest here, most of the time people will just reload a save, restart the fight, and possibly post an angry rant about the unfair random number generator (RNG) while conveniently ignoring the fact that the RNG can screw the AI over just as much. Not so here! If you miss with an attack, it's because you're deliberately using a risky low-hit move, trying to hit someone in defensive stance or attacking while blinded. Similarly, if an enemy one-shots any of your party members, it's your own damn fault for overextending or exposing them without controlling all potential threats first.​

I had originally never intended to play The Elder Scrolls: Arena, as I'd heard enough about this imperfect creation from other RPG fans to keep me away from it. It was said that the game is unbalanced. That it feels incomplete. That its main quest and characters are shallow when compared with that of contemporary RPGs such as the Ultima games or Betrayal at Krondor. But in the end, I decided to give the game a go as part of a larger project I am working on, in order to ascertain these facts for myself. What I found was a game that is indeed quite unbalanced, with many gameplay elements that feel rushed and incomplete, and a main story arc filled with cliche fantasy tropes. And yet, the game was a total joy to play, like a B-movie that manages to be greater than the sum of its faults.

[...] Arena's main quest dungeons are surprisingly evocative. Certainly not the initial dungeon, which is a simple exercise in hacking and slashing, but the game's later dungeons are scattered with clues, which deliver deeper lore and all sorts of tales of tragedy. These tales speak of better times and ancient kingdoms felled long ago through wars and betrayals. For example, one memorable moment takes place upon entering an early dungeon, an abandoned keep where you find a sign forbidding violence and promoting peace within, followed by bloodstains and skeletal remains on the floor further down the hall. Deeper inside, you find messages suggesting that the last defenders of the keep were retreating further in hopes of finding safety. You find no further messages by them, a grim reminder that Tamriel is quite the dangerous world despite the power of the Imperial government.

The main quest dungeons are also fairly diverse in terms of aesthetic presentations. There's the initial dungeon which looks like a cross between a prison and a sewer, dungeons which take place in fallen and decrepit keeps, towers, outdoor gardens, and the game's final dungeon which starts in a palace. As the game progresses, your enemies change and become more difficult, though the last third becomes a bit repetitious through overuse of the same difficult monsters. Exploration is rewarded, with randomly generated treasure laying in hidden vaults off the direct paths. Sometimes keys have to be discovered before you can progress, and environmental hazards such as pits and lava are not uncommon. At times, you might even have to answer a riddle in order to proceed through a dungeon unmolested, encouraging even veteran players to fall towards the habit of saving the game constantly in case a mistaken reply has dire consequences. Often, failure to answer a riddle correctly will result in a tough combat encounter from which you can continue on if you survive, but there is at least one occasion where failure to answer correctly can break the quest line. In summary, dungeon explorations ranges between the interesting and the frustrating, but rarely is it boring.​

When Obsidian Entertainment started their Kickstarter campaign for Pillars of Eternity in 2012 (under a working title of Project Eternity), many saw it as the second coming of Christ for cRPGs. There it was: the veteran developers from everyone’s beloved Black Isle Studios, reinforced by Tim Cain himself, wanted to bring us a modern successor to the Infinity Engine games. In their pitch, Obsidian described Eternity as something that would marry the combat of Icewind Dale, the narrative of Planescape: Torment and the exploration of Baldur’s Gate. Considering that a few years earlier Obsidian had given us the two Neverwinter Nights 2 expansions, Mask of the Betrayer and Storm of Zehir, that also fit parts of the above bill, it looked like there was no other choice but to get hyped.
[...]
Now, what do we make of PoE’s character system? Judged by its own merits, if I had to draw a comparison, I would call it the communism of character systems. Certainly, you have the feeling that everything you pick is kind of, sort of, equally useful (with some exceptions). But the flipside to this is that everything is also equally bland.
[...]
Your only reliable experience gains come from doing quests. That is certainly a reasonable approach by itself. It is however much less reasonable when you consider the amount of fighting you do in this game – all the trashmobs you steamroll through give you nothing, yet you are nevertheless forced to genocide them – most of this game’s playtime is spent fighting!
[...]
The bad encounter design and general lack of difficulty have one more very unfortunate result - they make exploring and dungeon-delving insanely boring. But make no mistake, this is also due to the dungeon design being very lacklustre to begin with.
[...]
Long story short, the stronghold has no use whatsoever. You can spend lots of money to fill it up with underlings and buildings, but nothing ever happens there. The buildings sell garbage. Your underlings don’t really do anything. Your free rest hall is behind 4 loading screens. You can even hold prisoners in a prison, and it has no effect on the game whatsoever. To say that the stronghold has been tacked on is the understatement of the century. Which is why I won’t even bother wasting more time talking about it.
[...]
The way the setting at large is presented to the player leaves a lot to be desired. PoE suffers a lot from its writers being obviously very proud of what they’ve done, so they make sure to tell you how awesome their setting is at every step – when an NPC starts talking about a distant place or a past event, brace yourself for a gigantic encyclopaedic infodump filled with dozens of alien names, regardless of whether the NPC is a commoner or a historian. This kind of exposition should be in the ‘cyclopedia’ section of the game’s journal, not in every second friggin’ dialogue.
[...]
Which brings us to what possibly surprised and disappointed me the most in PoE – the general writing quality is simply underwhelming. It never reaches any heights, it’s at best average and at worst abysmal. Everything is overly descriptive, very often just redundant and not leaving much for the player’s imagination. The majority of texts could easily be trimmed to one-third of their original size, which only tells me that PoE has never seen any editorial work apart from fishing out typos. One of the best examples I can think of is when you first meet Guy McBaddie the main villain, and the game makes sure to tell you at least three times that he is a bearded dude in a ceremonial robe and a fancy hat, even though the description is accompanied by two different illustrations in quick succession.​

For the uninitiated, The Age of Decadence is an RPG developed by our very own Vault Dweller. Set in a low fantasy, post-apocalyptic Rome-inspired universe, the game is developed with a particular focus on choices and consequences, branching storylines, and multiple quest solutions. The intention is for there to be no “right way” to play, but rather to give the player enough flexibility to find his own path.

In an attempt to provide a Fair and Balanced™ preview, I want to look at each system individually then talk about how they mesh together. This preview will be spoiler-free and, other than generally, I won’t comment on the actual content. Right now there are two completed cities (essentially quest hubs), with a third currently being tested before being added to the regular EA release with a bit more to come after that.

[...] Ultimately, the character system as currently implemented (and this late in the game it’s probably close to set in stone) is effective, if not perfect. I do feel there are some things missing that could greatly improve the system. More synergies as mentioned above would add some depth, especially between the civic skills and the civic stats. Having a high charisma giving a slight bonus to persuasion, or having high intelligence give a bonus to lore just seems like another missed opportunity. This isn’t a system that I feel would be fun to spend hours just building characters on, but for the purposes of providing decent effects on the game world, it does the job.

[...] If you haven’t invested fairly heavily into combat skills, don’t bother. This game is very much one that punishes a jack-of-all-trades play style, and nowhere will that be more evident than in combat. Each point in dodge, block, or your weapon skills will have a big effect on your ability to survive. If you do invest heavily, combat can be challenging at times but generally isn’t too difficult, although some encounters you may lose just due to the numbers game.

That actually may be the problem – often when I lose a fight I feel that it’s not because I played the fight poorly, but rather that I got screwed by the random number generator. When I reload to do the fight again, I don’t really do anything differently to adapt to the battle – I just hope the RNG doesn’t screw me as badly. I have no problem with dice rolls, mind you, but I like feeling that when I lose I’ve learned something new that will allow me to be better at the game, and I just don’t get that here.

Combat is one area where I feel that there is so much promise, but in practice it lacks a certain satisfaction. On the surface it’s got all of the pieces a great combat system would require. You have a variety of attacks, each with their own pros and cons and utility, you have the ability to move around tactically and exercise your brain a bit, and the stats and skills translate in a clear way to your performance on the battlefield. Still, after a heavy dose I feel like I want something else. I would say this is an area where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Part of it is because when you engage an enemy you just stand in the square next to him, going back and forth until one of you doesn’t get up. Moving away from someone who's beside you in combat gives them an attack of opportunity, so your best bet is almost always to engage unless you need to retreat to your support to prevent being totally overrun.

[...] The writing is top notch. I found myself reading in great detail all of the stories from the storyteller, and all the related conversations. The descriptions of what was going on in the world were just fantastic, and the setting really feels fresh. There is an air of ambiguity to everything that is so refreshing in this age of “GATHER ARMY TO FIGHT DARK EVIL”-level of storytelling.

Additionally, the quests are designed to be radically different each time you play through them. You can choose to piss everyone off – and there are multiple ways to do that. Each character I play through feels like I’m just getting one piece of a larger story, and playing through the same area with a different character you can see different angles and how things can play out differently.

Vault Dweller has always been about choices and consequences, and this game tackles that in spades. It seems like every little thing you do will have some effect on the game world. Sometimes it’s small, sometimes it’s massive – it’s always interesting, though. The way you treat people you meet, the decisions you make when deciding who to side with in conflicts – they all have long-term effects. Forget seeing all the content in one playthrough. Shit, forget seeing half the content in one playthrough. This is a game that will cut off quests as you go. But where a door closes, another one opens.​

I could only imagine [Obsidian's] reaction to a request for an interview by someone from the RPG Codex, something between a polite “No thank you” to “You’ve got to be #@!*#$ kidding me!” And then we received their response via an email from David Martinez, Paradox Interactive's PR guy, which stated, “We can certainly get you set up! Seeing as the Codex has a special spot in the hearts of Obsidian.”

[...] mindx2: Alright, this next question is near and dear to the Codex’s heart…

Chris [Avellone]: The heart?

mindx2: Yes, we have heart.

Josh [Sawyer]: Ahhh, yeah…

mindx2: You wound me… What do you think with all these other Kickstarters going turn-based do you think Obsidian might be locked into the RTwP style game?

Josh: I hope not. I want to make a turn-based game. I really want to make a turn-based game. [...]

Tim: I love turn-based games. This actually goes back to something Chris was saying, when I worked on South Park… right when I arrived there it was a real-time game and one of the things I was asked was to make it turn-based. It’s easy to turn real-time systems into turn-based ones, so I’m just throwing that out there [as he looks towards the other team members].

[...] mindx2: Well then I have one more question for you then [to Josh], what do you think in Pillars of Eternity is the “funnest” part?

Josh: Um, I think it’s really trying to build… finding all the different ways to build your character and parties. That’s something that… well, that runs through a lot of stuff. To be honest a lot of what people say is this isn’t realistic or they don’t like some aspect of it like weapons for example. Like why do daggers do so much damage or a hatchet do so much damage or whatever. It’s done that way so that if you have an idea for a character that’s kind of an oddball or something that character might actually suck or be terrible in D&D but I think it’s important for it to be pretty good in our game. And if people want to make this really oddball collection of characters there’s going to be some things that are hard for them but I think it’s important for players to feel like they have that freedom to develop it. There are going to be trade-offs for it but as much as possible I want them…

mindx2: So that’s where the balance thing comes into play?

Josh: Yeah.​

Balance!​

Chris: You’re familiar with Anthony Davis, right?

mindx2: Oh yeah, Anthony is great!

Brandon [Adler]: Sometimes Anthony writes something and I’m like, “Oh Anthony why…?”

Josh: We get so many alerts about that… “Anthony just posted on the Codex!”​

Alex was very clear in stating that Early Access saved Eisenwald. Without it, he doesn’t think that the game would have survived. If he'd had a choice he would have delayed the Early Access release, because he didn’t want people to receive a negative view of the game based on its state at the time. He wishes there had been a little more of the main campaign available, as he wants people to see that the game has many RPG mechanics and that it’s not just a strategy game. Whatever the case, because of those Early Access dollars, the game's development is now in its final stages before release. Alex also credits Early Access for improving the game, due to all the feedback solicited from players. In the meantime, Aterdux have also found another investor to help them with marketing and PR, which is what led them to GDC and PAX this year. I mentioned that Eisenwald doesn’t seem to get as much negative press as other Kickstarter games that have experienced significant delays. Alex attributes that to his team's habit of being brutally honest and open about their stupid mistakes. They are now looking at a mid-May release date, as Alex says they are pretty much done. The release won't be postponed any further, even if one of the localizations misses the deadline. From what I’ve seen of the game (which is admittedly little as I don’t play Early Access games), and just from listening to Alex talk about it, Eisenwald has become one of the titles that I’m most looking forward to in the coming months.​

Many so-called adventure games are nothing more than visual novels today. We both agreed that as far as gameplay is concerned, they often have very little to offer other than pressing X to get to the next animated scene. That was not the game he wanted to make. He wanted to make the kind of game that Sierra would have published back in the day. He’s very proud of his creation, and he can’t wait to get the physical boxed editions finished and printed. He's just as eager as I am to have it on a shelf so he can point it out to his relatives and say, “I made that!” He explained that the boxes should be finished in a few weeks, and that he'd made sure throughout the game's development that he had enough funds to produce everything he had promised. One thing he failed to take into account, and something he thinks far too many Kickstarters fail to take into account as well, is the cost of international shipping. The shipping costs are much higher than than the physical tier prices most Kickstarter projects are offering. Regardless, Steve said that he absolutely loves the interaction between developers and players. He sees this as one of the best things about crowdfunded game development. When I asked him about his future plans, he explained that his team is hard at work on the follow-up to QFI, Quest for Infamy: Roehm to Ruin. Its overall scope will be smaller than QFI's, but it will help flesh out the story of how Roehm found himself fleeing the Baron in the first game. They’re finalizing things now and are confident they can get it out this summer.​

One of those side projects Will wants to explore is his own Kickstarted game called Cat-Shaped Life (currently running here), that he and one other person are developing. It's a kind of CYOA RPG, where you control a cat that has stats for cat-like abilities such as agility. He compared it gameplay-wise to Long Live the Queen and Princess Maker. The premise is that you, the cat, are adopted by a family and have to last a month in their house without your new owners returning you to the pound. Various encounters you experience throughout the house and the surrounding area determine how your new owner views you. Apparently, you might even end up at another house entirely by month’s end. I asked if the cat can die in various unpleasant ways, and he said they haven’t thought about that yet. I joked that if he could come up with many different horrible fates for the feline, he could rake in millions on Kickstarter, like a certain card game. He laughed and replied that they’ll definitely have to put that game mechanic in. I thanked Will for stopping by, and explained that I needed to head over to the Obsidian presentation that would be starting soon. Before I left, I asked him to try to arrange another visit to OtherSide for me when they had something to show off, and to keep Paul as far away as possible from any more MMO-type advice.​

mindx2: Back when you Kickstarted the game there were no new JRPG or TRPG-style games on PC at all, but now there's a bunch of new ones. What makes your game different than all the others?

Craig: Mine is better! [laughing] That’s the short version. The long version is the design tack I take with TT is not seen anywhere else even among this new crop of strategy RPGs. My approach here, which as far as I know is unique amongst strategy RPGs, is to have a game with a deterministic core. There are a few things where die rolls come into play but for the most part it is deterministic. Unpredictability is achieved instead by having a difficult and challenging AI and a large possibility space. There are so many different mechanics in the game that intersect in sometimes unpredictable ways that you’re always having to stay on your toes just to be sure you’re not taken by surprise by what the AI might do. It’s not an easy game.​

Primordia starts off with your character (a robot), and your robotic companion, being attacked by another rather seemingly simple-minded robot which takes your power core. It all snowballs from there. Part of Primordia's charm is that it doesn't give much away either in the way of its story up-front. In order to understand what's going on, you must explore and solve puzzles. With each puzzle revealing a small piece of the larger puzzle that drives you through-out the game: Who am I, and what am I doing here? And even, what happened in this place?

[...] Tormentum, sadly, just doesn't have the same drive. You start off captured in prison. You escape... and... keep escaping... or something... It "makes sense" in the end but while Primordia's world has you wanting to know what happened, Tormentum just never really bothers. There are no hints dropped or clues to be found. No signs you can look at and think "That's actually a number... not a name." or "I wonder what that means?". In fact, if anything, Tormentum down-right sins when it comes to Adventure gaming.

It gives the puzzle away.​

... and finally, not forgetting (even though I actually did and Infinitron had to remind me) Expeditions: Conquistador. In a sign of the year that 2013 was, it first got delayed until February 28, before being postponed, then publishers getting involved (note bitComposer, we have more on them later), drama with publisher being resolved before game being released and reviewed.​

Moving on to other legal stoushes and stories of inanity from 2013, we have Chaos Chronicles. It was supposed to be a turn-based, old-school, classic... and other buzzwords we like to hear... RPG under development by CorePlay. It started the year by putting its official forums on the Codex.

And it was all downhill from there.​

... and they died. THQ that is, not Trey Parker or Matt Stone. The remains of the company were acquired by UbiSoft which, after some concern about what kind of limbo the game would end up in, did confirm they would complete the game.​

If 2012 was the year that gave rise to the KickStarter, then 2013 was the year of delayed incline. For all those who thought release dates for KickStarter projects of just one year later were a tad optimistic, you were right, as several major projects got delayed.​

Long-time gamers would know that video games don't get finished, they just get released. Often in a horribly buggy and unfinished state that then requires multiple follow-up patches. In many cases, the game fails to sell enough copies, the patches never materialise (or some legal road block from the publisher gets in the way) and that's the end of that. You'll take your buggy unplayable piece of shit and you'll like it.

Not so anymore! 2013 finally saw the year when the standard industry model... actually became the standard industry model. And it pretty much happened that quickly.​

​

At first glance, Armageddon looks like your typical Panzer General game. You have your hexes, your multitude of units in squads of various types and sizes, a top-down view on the strategic map, etc. But the game also brings some additions to the formula, and I honestly can’t say that any of them are very good.

Perhaps the biggest difference, which also influences a lot of further negative aspects of the game, is the lack of the soft/hard target distinction for units. Everything just has a single defensive value simply called “armour”, which is also why the overall damage model is different as well. To do any harm, an attacker’s weapon must cause more damage than the armour value of the defender – the damage roll has many factors to it, such as the cover level of the enemy, the line of sight obstruction provided by certain hexes, the unit’s inherent accuracy, the loss of accuracy per tile, the armour piercing value of the weapon and the amount of shots a unit fires when it attacks. There are a lot of somewhat vague variables at work here, and they lead to a ton of rather unnecessary randomness that can influence the attack roll in both ways and lead to hilariously unexpected results.​