Edward_R_Murrow
Arcane
For shits and giggles.
So I was playing Baldur's Gate. I made my character, picked up a few party members and went adventuring. A few screens after the starting location, I ran into a dude who threatened my character. Just one guy. Did he know who he was messing with? His ass was so done for.
A minute or two later, he's mirror imaged, stunning/mind numbing my characters, and shooting off magic missiles killing my characters. Everyone is wiped out. Dead. Tarnesh 4, me nada. That's real-time with pause combat in a nutshell. You either think, plan carefully, and react to changing situations or you are dead.
Realistically, pretty much any game with any sort of challenge will screw you if you underestimate it, or go in too with too much confidence. The example isn't something unique to turn-based combat.
And now, to be even more of a RTWP apologist.
First off, I think declaring turn-based superior to it is more than a little preemptive. See, how many generation of RTWP systems have their been? As far as my knowledge goes, 3 would be the magic number. First came Darklands. Next was Apocalypse ( I think...). Then came the Infinity Engine, and then was the Aurora Engine. That's it for the most part, a few offshoots. Dragon Age looks to be Generation 5. Now compare turn-based combat's generations and how long they have had to build on one another. They've had quite a long time...longer still if you count the fact that pen and paper games had turn-based combat that games could build, grow, and evolve upon.
Another thing to consider is the idea that the quality of the median RTWP game far outstrips the median turn-based game. Because for every X-Com, there's a Star Ocean. For every Jagged Alliance, there's 3 Dragon Quests. For every Silent Storm, a Persona game. For every Temple of Elemental Evil, there's an Arcanum. Turn-based done well is wonderful, but done wrong it's pretty awful. Real time with pause at it's worst likely beats 75% of turn-based games, at minimum.
Then there's one final thing; the one thing RTWP (and a continuous phase-based as well) can do that turn-based sputters and chokes on. See, turned-based combat is all well and good, but it relies too heavily on the player making anticipations and assumptions. I'm going to try and illustrate this through a comparison here.
I'm playing BG2. My party is fighting a mage and his cronies. I'm focusing on the cronies because I feel they are more threatening at the moment. All of a sudden, I see the mage casting a spell. The visual cue tells me it is a necromancy spell, possibly a horrid wilting, which would seriously mess my party up. Since this is RTWP, I can pause the action, and reassign tactics on the fly as new things come up. I can react a lot more quickly, more organically.
If it were the typical turn-based system, I would have to have anticipated and predicted the mage was going to do something, and then saved some time resources (action points, TUs, etc.) to deal with them. And on top of that, my ability to take action is also dependent on another set of rules governing interrupts/reaction abilities. So even if I planned, I may not have the stats to interrupt the mage, or he may do nothing, essentially making my character "waste" their turn.
Real time with pause takes out this anticipation factor, and replaces it with the ability to immediately react to situations. I'll never "waste" a turn in RTWP, because I'm constantly interacting with and receiving feedback on the battlefield.
On to AoD's combat now...
What you're doing with all of the different options in combat I think is key. The lack of those was one of the reasons combat in Fallout fell rather flat. The other main reason was that most enemies were functionally identical; either falling into gunman class or melee class, and each class being dealt with rough the same way no matter what. As long as AoD constantly throws out a variety of functionally different foes to force the player to use a lot of the different options, it should be golden.
One thing you might want to avoid is giving too much incentive to over-specialization. A lot of RPGs make it so that someone who is super-awesome at one combat discipline can ride that all the way against anything, see Fallout, Arcanum, etc. That really chokes out a lot of the fun, even though it does appeal more to the RPG side of things. Punishing over-specialization is one of the reasons games like X-Com (well, if we forget about Psi-troopers...) and Jagged Alliance 2 were so good...you had to adapt and couldn't rely on one strategy/tactic. Got a bunch of soldiers with laser rifles and high reactions? It might be great to camp a battleship and play shooting gallery, but try doing that in a base assault and you're liable to be blaster bombed to hell and back. Like night ops and stealth plus sniping with silenced weaponry? Have fun trying that in the SAM sites, Tixa, Orta, Alma, or the assault on Meduna. Like unarmed skill? Great, because you'll be able to punch everything in the wastes to death. It won't get boring and monotonous...nope. Like sniping? So do I....
Vault Dweller said:
So I was playing Baldur's Gate. I made my character, picked up a few party members and went adventuring. A few screens after the starting location, I ran into a dude who threatened my character. Just one guy. Did he know who he was messing with? His ass was so done for.
A minute or two later, he's mirror imaged, stunning/mind numbing my characters, and shooting off magic missiles killing my characters. Everyone is wiped out. Dead. Tarnesh 4, me nada. That's real-time with pause combat in a nutshell. You either think, plan carefully, and react to changing situations or you are dead.
Realistically, pretty much any game with any sort of challenge will screw you if you underestimate it, or go in too with too much confidence. The example isn't something unique to turn-based combat.
And now, to be even more of a RTWP apologist.
First off, I think declaring turn-based superior to it is more than a little preemptive. See, how many generation of RTWP systems have their been? As far as my knowledge goes, 3 would be the magic number. First came Darklands. Next was Apocalypse ( I think...). Then came the Infinity Engine, and then was the Aurora Engine. That's it for the most part, a few offshoots. Dragon Age looks to be Generation 5. Now compare turn-based combat's generations and how long they have had to build on one another. They've had quite a long time...longer still if you count the fact that pen and paper games had turn-based combat that games could build, grow, and evolve upon.
Another thing to consider is the idea that the quality of the median RTWP game far outstrips the median turn-based game. Because for every X-Com, there's a Star Ocean. For every Jagged Alliance, there's 3 Dragon Quests. For every Silent Storm, a Persona game. For every Temple of Elemental Evil, there's an Arcanum. Turn-based done well is wonderful, but done wrong it's pretty awful. Real time with pause at it's worst likely beats 75% of turn-based games, at minimum.
Then there's one final thing; the one thing RTWP (and a continuous phase-based as well) can do that turn-based sputters and chokes on. See, turned-based combat is all well and good, but it relies too heavily on the player making anticipations and assumptions. I'm going to try and illustrate this through a comparison here.
I'm playing BG2. My party is fighting a mage and his cronies. I'm focusing on the cronies because I feel they are more threatening at the moment. All of a sudden, I see the mage casting a spell. The visual cue tells me it is a necromancy spell, possibly a horrid wilting, which would seriously mess my party up. Since this is RTWP, I can pause the action, and reassign tactics on the fly as new things come up. I can react a lot more quickly, more organically.
If it were the typical turn-based system, I would have to have anticipated and predicted the mage was going to do something, and then saved some time resources (action points, TUs, etc.) to deal with them. And on top of that, my ability to take action is also dependent on another set of rules governing interrupts/reaction abilities. So even if I planned, I may not have the stats to interrupt the mage, or he may do nothing, essentially making my character "waste" their turn.
Real time with pause takes out this anticipation factor, and replaces it with the ability to immediately react to situations. I'll never "waste" a turn in RTWP, because I'm constantly interacting with and receiving feedback on the battlefield.
On to AoD's combat now...
What you're doing with all of the different options in combat I think is key. The lack of those was one of the reasons combat in Fallout fell rather flat. The other main reason was that most enemies were functionally identical; either falling into gunman class or melee class, and each class being dealt with rough the same way no matter what. As long as AoD constantly throws out a variety of functionally different foes to force the player to use a lot of the different options, it should be golden.
One thing you might want to avoid is giving too much incentive to over-specialization. A lot of RPGs make it so that someone who is super-awesome at one combat discipline can ride that all the way against anything, see Fallout, Arcanum, etc. That really chokes out a lot of the fun, even though it does appeal more to the RPG side of things. Punishing over-specialization is one of the reasons games like X-Com (well, if we forget about Psi-troopers...) and Jagged Alliance 2 were so good...you had to adapt and couldn't rely on one strategy/tactic. Got a bunch of soldiers with laser rifles and high reactions? It might be great to camp a battleship and play shooting gallery, but try doing that in a base assault and you're liable to be blaster bombed to hell and back. Like night ops and stealth plus sniping with silenced weaponry? Have fun trying that in the SAM sites, Tixa, Orta, Alma, or the assault on Meduna. Like unarmed skill? Great, because you'll be able to punch everything in the wastes to death. It won't get boring and monotonous...nope. Like sniping? So do I....
