Hey now, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Also, only Arcanum's combat is truly shit, PST's is just mediocre and there's too much of it; and Fallout's combat, while simplistic, is quite fun and perfectly appropriate for a game without a huge focus on killing shit.
I was mostly responding to typical Codexian negative hyperbole in kind, but I really can't see Torment's combat as anything but
bad. I replayed it a few months ago and all the ways in which it failed stick out hard. In short, it's D&D without any of what makes the system appealing.
-Little in the way party formation. Hell, you're stuck with only three members for about 40% of the game, and one of them, Morte, is extremely one dimensional. The game is more than halfway over by the time you can access characters like Grace and Ignus, and even they don't add a ton of depth. It's also really annoying how little options the player has for equipping their character. Shit, only two "hidden" characters can even have ranged attacks...and neither can swap to melee.
Little choice in characters and not a whole lot of depth to the characters you can choose. It's like a bad jRPG.
-Boring enemies. I can count the number of baddies that do things besides melee on my fingers. The Necromancer, the Wizard Construct, Cranium Rats, Ravel, Trias, and TTO. All those nifty fiends and planar critters? Melee only. And even the "special" enemies are non too impressive, firing off a couple spells before switching to naught but simple beaters.
-Poor spell effect variety. Most spells are damage dealers, albeit extremely flavorful ones. There are a few status effect spells, but most enemies seem immune (or maybe it's the strange RNG in Torment that favors "extreme" rolls). Then there are a couple Save or Die effects, including a couple of Chromatic Orb style of spells.
-The worst pathfinding in the IE games. Even with nodes set high (32000) characters regularly get caught on one another and fail to attack. Given how melee-centric the combat is, this is annoying. At least in BG1/IWD1 you had ranged attacks if dealing with pathfinding wasn't your thing
I like the game, don't get me wrong. But the combat is, in fact, bad. That's not negative hyperbole.
So is this game actually playable on PC with a mouse and keyboard?
The game is built around precise directional inputs that would be a nightmare to do with WASD or the numpad. Definitely designed with an analog stick in mind.
Who said anything about jap apologism? Cool down dumber, just because you found one ugly screenshot, doesn't mean the whole game is like that.
