So I've been plugging along, got to the elemental plane now, and I am pretty bored again. Why you ask?
Well the primary reason is that it's such a combat heavy game, and those always tend to wear me out quickly. The beauty of "full" RPGs is that they combine these different types of gameplay together, that serve as a welcome change of pace from each other. Tired of fighting? Go explore the world and find cool stuff. Walking getting old? Stop and talk with NPCs and engage in dialogue and lore. Don't feel like reading? Go solve puzzles or get back into combat.
But these combat slogs (ToEE, Icewind Dales, Diablo clones) just get really repetitive and boring after a while.
Then the other thing. But first, sit down. This WILL trigger you. As I made an argument elsewhere here before, tactical combat in RPGs is generally extremely repetitive and mindless. ToEE, which is considered one of the better tactical combat RPG systems, is a perfect example of this. It's a pretty good system as far as DnD goes, but every freaking fight, I am doing the same exact thing and having 100% success:
- move the tank in front and assume a defensive position
- move the healer behind him and other melee units slightly back of him
- wait until enemies aggro on tank, and start attacking them with melee
- throw in damage spells, occasionally utility/cc spells
There is absolutely no interesting decisions to make in any of this, and it just repeats every fight. How many fights in does this just start to bore the hell out of you?
This is exactly why I feel like aRPGs have an advantage, because the real time/timing elements bring excitement to a similarly shallow decision tree making that's missing in tactical RPGs. And among tactical RPGs, RTwP and single character turn based does better, RTwP because all this repetitive stuff runs in parallel and goes faster and allowing you to put more of it on auto pilot, and single character turn based lowers the amount of repetitive overhead.
But ultimately, I would love to see more truly tactical RPGs, where you are not just doing the same stuff over and over, but have to adjust dynamically every turn.