PorkaMorka said:
I'm not really convinced that turn based is a particularly good way to show off fancy 3d graphics, unless you're talking about those horrible Japanese cutscene spell animations that you would only ever want to watch once.
Fancy graphics and animations can make turn based seem much more silly than it would with simple tiles.
Take an example where the same game exists in a tile based format and then in a fancy 3d format.
Bloodbowl.
When you display everything in fancy 3d graphics, with full animation and so on, it kind of looks silly to have your ball carrier run into the end zone, while the opposing players all stand there looking menacing, posing aggressively, performing their idle animations and rotating in place to face the ball carrier, but not lifting a finger to stop the ball carrier as he as he runs right past them to score.
With tiles, the exact same mechanics will play out, but everything remains abstracted so the silliness of turn based football isn't rubbed into your face the same way, and it's clear that it is just the game's way of representing the ball carrier bursting through a hole in the line.
Well first of all I dont know what you mean by tiles versus a fancy 3d system, you can have hexagons or square tiles or anything similar integrated with no fuss with the detailed depiction of 3d eye candy, just a matter of switching cameras etc as it was mentioned.
You are not really arguing against the principle of high detail 3d eye candy matched with a fluid turn based system, just against a certain kind of art direction and from what I understand, a form of presentation that is present in alot of JRPG's.
The key is a balance between a reasonable speed of the turns and close in displays of the action in great detail, you can have a ton of variety in terms of animations and effects while the actual displaying of the relevant animations for each turn etc does not take that long, also you can add a speed adjustment bar to the preferences and so on but that is another discussion. So for example no "ultima apocalypse transgodshammer” bullshit spell animations that play like a 25 second movie of a meteor hitting a planet and so on...
From a classic western rpg view you should not have a ton of "fancy" long strings of animations that seem taken out of an arcade fighter game ten hit combo or some such nonsense, although it is to be expected that certain character types would inflict multiple hits per turn within reason.
Think status effects, or better yet body parts in a system that allows you to target different body parts. The attack/spell that caused the negative status effect on the enemy is displayed in great detail ( possibly even from a list of animations that depict various degrees of success of the said attack/spell). In the body parts example you could have gory detailed depictions of dismemberment that would not be there just for eye candy, they would be depicting a relevant combat result within the game’s combat system rules.
Now think of a mix between the results of both magical and melee attacks integrated in a body part system, or any other similar extra layer of complexity added to the combat ruleset. The point is you can have the eye candy without including a ton of fluff ( or even any fluff at all) that’s there only for its visual appeal.
On another note, and concerning the turn based combat plus new gen eye candy in general view consider the fallout 3 example:
Fallout 3. Good system? No. Did most of the people who enjoyed it get the chance to appreciate what a deep and well designed turn based combat system is or better yet how one such system might be? Most likely not. They however did appreciate the gory animations, and many game reviewers were describing VATS as an INNOVATION, and reporting that the VATS animations ( which were not that varied mind you, and of course had only a minor practical connection in terms of combat status effects since the combat and character development system was poor and shallow) “never got old”. I think this is a good example as an indicator that turn based combat is not necessarily buried when it comes to the big players in the industry, since like it or not Fallout 3 is a newgen mainstream success.
Granted Fallout 3 was to some degree a hybrid system but I think it’s easy to imagine how for example a new gen rpg with a party of PC’s and full turn based combat could be appealing to the new gen crowd standards, of course the way movement outside of combat and beginning combat would work is an important design aspect.