Could you get past that for BG2?
I much prefer turn-based combat by far, but have to confess that in BG the RTwP doesn't bother me at all.
Because you are a normal person who understands that, while TB is a cleaner system, there are shitty TB games and excellent RTwP games
Everyone knows that a RTwP RPG can be good. It's just a crying shame when an excellent game could have been even better had it been designed with TB combat rather than RTwP.
Furthermore, a botched implementation of RTwP completely ruined Arcanum's combat, and for that, RTwP can never be fully accepted as kosher by anyone who isn't a massive newfag. Had Troika been able to focus on a TB implementation, the result would almost certainly have been much less disastrous.
I've explained this before, because it seems everyone has forgotten (or, more often, never knew in the first place due to being newfags who think Oblivion was the world's first RPG): With the sole exception of Darklands, in which RTwP was truly a choice and an innovation, RTwP isn't merely a preference, an alternative, or a different approach to implementing combat. It was born as a bastardized compromise to make RPGs seem more ACKSHUN-y. You see, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was immense pressure for games to be fully 3D, to be full of ACKSHUN!, to have lots of CINEMATIC CUTSCENES, etc. The Infinity Engine RPGs all utilized RTwP because studio execs thought that HEART-POUNDING ACKSHUN would help cRPGs, traditionally turn-based affairs, to sell better. Prior to this period, virtually all proper cRPGs were TB.
Sadly, this strategy worked, which is why the hobby is now full of morons who think that there's nothing wrong with RTwP and who have no idea why TB is clearly superior in every way. These baboons would never have gravitated toward cRPGs in the first place without the appearance of ACKSHUN! and a CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE! to draw them in. RTwP diehards fall loosely but squarely into the category of graphics whores.
Have you ever seen a hardcore wargame—an actual wargame in the vein of hexes, dozens or hundreds of chits, varicolored markers, a thick instruction manual, etc.—employ a real-time conflict system of any kind? I haven't, and that's because TB systems always allow for much more nuance and detail as conflicts unfold. When everything must happen on a second-to-second basis, detail is omitted wholesale, and this propagates through every facet of the mechanics. TB always allows for much more granularity of mechanics and breadth and depth of action (even if this potential isn't always fully tapped by an individual TB game).
Action-based cRPGs aren't bad per se, but the direct replacement of TB with RTwP is bad. That's the real problem, and it's why I'm such an aggressive asshole. The morons' dogshit compromise ACKSHUN! mechanics largely supplanted TB entirely.
But don't worry, Gen Z has an even smaller attention span than any previous generation. To them, RTwP games are unbearably slow and tedious. Eventually, full-blown CINEMATIC ACKSHUN will be the ONLY approach to combat—and in the gaming mainstream, it just about already is.
