Idly musing on TB vs RTwP ...

[gurugeorge]

I like how one of the leading arguments in favour of RTwP is still "it's better for thrashmobs". Maybe the failures of encounter design should be fixed in some other ways?

But is having some trash mobs a failure in design?

Surely there's some pleasure in having a rhythm between easy fights where you feel godly, and hard fights where you have to pull out all the stops?

Even being "caught out" occasionally (where you think it's going to be easy but it turns out to be the hardest fight in the game) is part of the design.

 

[Goldschmidt]

Full disclosure back when I was playing virgin Fallout 1 turn-based combat, a girl I was trying to get with started going out with a chad LoL player who smoked weed non-stop. This might have negatively affected my perception of wasting your life with TB combat games.

Imagine having sex turn based, the girl thinks. Virgin fallout 1 player rolls his dice. Critical failure! No dick in pussy this round! The girl then throws a defensive spell: equips chastity belt (AC = 0). "No more pussy for you, nerd". Girl leaves and boy cries. Boy thinks better play a roque with lockpicking skills next time

So what happens on a critical success?

Boy unloads his sperm in one turn and girl fails her saving throw and gets insta-pregnated. Because sperm default attack has huge AOE and 5x critical multiplier, all eggs in girl's ovaries are fertilized. Girl's cursed status cannot be undone by simple magic potions. Instead girl has to wait a few turns and rely on Clerics to cast Divine Intervention, otherwise girl succumbs to her inflictions. Boy becomes chad, plays POE and burns virgin Fallout-game with flamethrower.

 

[0sacred]

what's pause doing for your immersion

 

[vortex]

what's pause doing for your immersion

pause is there to select your spells, but if you git gud and learn shortcuts you don't have to use it. rtwp has steeper learning curve and tis' why is great.

I believe some gamers don't like rtwp because of simple AI but that's the AI problem.

 

[laclongquan]

If you say RTwP is better to go with story, you obviously havent played Hammer & Sickle. (Not mention Fallout!!! The heresy!)

If you say TB is better to go with story, you obviously havent played Fallout New Vegas (VATs can be used as Pause in Real time combat, which is how I play FNV).

 

[0sacred]

what's pause doing for your immersion

pause is there to select your spells, but if you git gud and learn shortcuts you don't have to use it. rtwp has steeper learning curve and tis' why is great.

I believe some gamers don't like rtwp because of simple AI but that's the AI problem.

That's a different genre bro. It's called real time.

And while you're learning the ropes how to cheese the shit out of a game so you don't need to pause, the problem with pausing getting in the way of immersion remains.

Not to mention that playing against the design tenets of the game is a weird kind of gittin gud.

 

[gurugeorge]

the problem with pausing getting in the way of immersion remains.

If pausing at your choice gets in the way of immersion, how much more does having abstracted chunks of time that continue till the encounter is over?

 

[0sacred]

the problem with pausing getting in the way of immersion remains.

If pausing at your choice gets in the way of immersion, how much more does having abstracted chunks of time that continue till the encounter is over?

possibly not more and not less.

Once you hand control of time over to the player, the simulation suffers.

 

[gurugeorge]

the problem with pausing getting in the way of immersion remains.

If pausing at your choice gets in the way of immersion, how much more does having abstracted chunks of time that continue till the encounter is over?

possibly not more and not less.

Once you hand control of time over to the player, the simulation suffers.

That doesn't make sense, you can have excellent simulation with TB or RTwP.

I understand the yearning to have simulation in realtime with player based skill and the kinetic flow of realtime; but the problem is that computers and our input/output to and from them just aren't sophisticated enough yet. The more realtime, the more you need all the subtle aspects of being embodied that you use, consciously and unconsciously, to interact with the world, otherwise you're missing out big chunks of what makes the real real. Trying to interact with a fully simulated virtual world in a way that mimics the embodied interaction we normally have, but with only a mouse and keyboard, screen and audio, is impossible - or rather, it's awkward, and can be made fun only if you simplify the simulation to match the limitations of inpute/output.

So short of that, if you want fuller simulation you have to have some abstraction - and it can be pretty much the same set of abstractions in TB or RTwP. As I said above, the only difference is that you can have trash fights with RTwP that can still be fun, whereas with TB trash fights tend to be annoying - you want every encounter to be juicy above a certain threshold, otherwise you feel you're wasting your time. (It would be like having a "chess match" where sometimes the pieces are exchanged for chequers pieces.) But hard fights? They can be made similarly hard in both TB and RTwP.

 

[Tigranes]

The problem is in thinking that "immersion" always means one thing and one thing only.

It is a really harmful fallacy that games become more "immersive" when they literally mimic the immediate sensory input of human bodily experience - this has led us into so many bad trends in gaming. First-person isn't always more 'immersive' than third-person. That already presumes that your yardstick for immersion comes down to how closely you can approximate a human eye's position relative to a given space, and there's simply no reason that this should be the standard criterion of immersion into the emotions of the story you are telling, for example. Films don't think that a film entirely in first person is the single, universal trajectory of progress towards more immersive=better films.

OP for example wonders whether it's more 'natural' and 'immersive' to have your toons move around in the same environment & system that they fight in, time flows the same way inside and outside of combat, etc. But does it actually make sense to focus on that definition of immersion? It really depends. For party-based tactical RPGs, maybe what you are really trying to convey is the sense of tactical control and carefully coordinated teamwork of a finely tuned band of adventurers, rather than becoming immersed into the feeling of inhabiting one guy and seeing the enemy's blood splatter all over your gambeson. There is no reason that a party-based TB game is always going to be 'less immersive' than a first-person action game, unless you already rig the judgment by defining immersion in that way.

From a story perspective, too, sometimes it's the ability to see flashbacks to the past, or to revisit the same event from the perspective of different characters, or to observe your own character's facial expressions on the screen, that helps you immerse into a story and experience that ultimately isn't your own. There are classic novels that constantly jump between different characters and they are extremely immersive in helping you understand a certain mood, a certain feeling in the air, that the novel is trying to convey.

I enjoy RTWP, but I think it's a bad argument to try and say RTWP is more 'immersive' than TB: that presumes that we all want the kind of 'immersion' that leads to blood splatters on the screen and characters shitting in toilets at regular intervals. I simply like RTWP because as good as TB is, I don't need every game I play to be TB, and I'm happy if there are plenty of good TB games and also some good RTWP games from a gameplay standpoint.

 

[Tomas]

I've often found that more "realistic" looking games takes me more easily out of immersion, because lesser mistakes in simulation come more apparent.
Sometimes it's just ok to play an abstracted game.

Am concerned about the upcoming Kings Bounty 2 attempt at realism. Quite enjoyed the art style of the prev KB and feel like at best they can equal it with KB2 but can easily go wrong.

 

[gurugeorge]

The problem is in thinking that "immersion" always means one thing and one thing only.

It is a really harmful fallacy that games become more "immersive" when they literally mimic the immediate sensory input of human bodily experience - this has led us into so many bad trends in gaming. First-person isn't always more 'immersive' than third-person. That already presumes that your yardstick for immersion comes down to how closely you can approximate a human eye's position relative to a given space, and there's simply no reason that this should be the standard criterion of immersion into the emotions of the story you are telling, for example. Films don't think that a film entirely in first person is the single, universal trajectory of progress towards more immersive=better films.

OP for example wonders whether it's more 'natural' and 'immersive' to have your toons move around in the same environment & system that they fight in, time flows the same way inside and outside of combat, etc. But does it actually make sense to focus on that definition of immersion? It really depends. For party-based tactical RPGs, maybe what you are really trying to convey is the sense of tactical control and carefully coordinated teamwork of a finely tuned band of adventurers, rather than becoming immersed into the feeling of inhabiting one guy and seeing the enemy's blood splatter all over your gambeson. There is no reason that a party-based TB game is always going to be 'less immersive' than a first-person action game, unless you already rig the judgment by defining immersion in that way.

From a story perspective, too, sometimes it's the ability to see flashbacks to the past, or to revisit the same event from the perspective of different characters, or to observe your own character's facial expressions on the screen, that helps you immerse into a story and experience that ultimately isn't your own. There are classic novels that constantly jump between different characters and they are extremely immersive in helping you understand a certain mood, a certain feeling in the air, that the novel is trying to convey.

I enjoy RTWP, but I think it's a bad argument to try and say RTWP is more 'immersive' than TB: that presumes that we all want the kind of 'immersion' that leads to blood splatters on the screen and characters shitting in toilets at regular intervals. I simply like RTWP because as good as TB is, I don't need every game I play to be TB, and I'm happy if there are plenty of good TB games and also some good RTWP games from a gameplay standpoint.

So far as I can tell, the original meaning of "immersion" used by developers was "the sense of being there" - the feeling of being in a virtual world. Nowadays the word "presence" is used more for that, but originally "immersion" was used as well - and that's how I tend to use it.

The more general sense of immersion you're talking about I would call "engagement" or maybe "absorption" or even "trance state."

But it's not a cut and dried thing laid out in a bible. I know what you mean: you can be thoroughly absorbed in a sense of "being there" in TB too, if the gameplay is heavily simulationist. (Otherwise, at the other extreme, it's more like Chess, where your mind is working in a much more abstract way, where you might only jokingly and fleetingly think of the Knight as a knight.)

 

[0sacred]

That doesn't make sense, you can have excellent simulation with TB or RTwP.

so I take it you're backpedaling on your claim that RtwP is better for immersion

 

[gurugeorge]

That doesn't make sense, you can have excellent simulation with TB or RTwP.

so I take it you're backpedaling on your claim that RtwP is better for immersion

lol no. Check my post above the one you made. There are roughly two things, and people often use "immersion" indifferently for both - there's absorption in the game, engagement, being in a gameplay trance state, having your head filled with the "possible moves" of the game, and there's the sense of being there, of tranlocation inside the virtual world and living through the story. The latter is the older sense of "immersion" that developers originally used (which now tends to be called "presence") and that's the way I use it (probably because that's what was current in the 80s and 90s when I first got into videogames).

So: RTwP leans more towards staying "in" the virtual world and "in" the story, and goes with more epic and intricate story, whereas TB leans more towards having something that's more like a series of absorbing chess matches linked by enough story to hold the interest, but with some detachment. Either way you can have more or less simulation, it's a different thing again. It's not a hard and fast essentialist rule, and as people have pointed out there are always examples of games that do it the other way round. It's just a natural going-together, a tendency, a natural fit.

 

[Tigranes]

So far as I can tell, the original meaning of "immersion" used by developers was "the sense of being there" - the feeling of being in a virtual world. Nowadays the word "presence" is used more for that, but originally "immersion" was used as well - and that's how I tend to use it.

The more general sense of immersion you're talking about I would call "engagement" or maybe "absorption" or even "trance state."

But it's not a cut and dried thing laid out in a bible. I know what you mean: you can be thoroughly absorbed in a sense of "being there" in TB too, if the gameplay is heavily simulationist. (Otherwise, at the other extreme, it's more like Chess, where your mind is working in a much more abstract way, where you might only jokingly and fleetingly think of the Knight as a knight.)

Yep, the key is that a 'sense of being there' can come in many ways, and too often devs just revert to "more cinematic, more pixels, more ~ realism ~". And sure, if that's what we wanted to call 'immersion', then the conclusion would be that maybe we don't want immersion.

The idea that a turn-based game is inherently less immersive because you have to divide the action into discrete turns is bonkers, and just leads us to the idea that cinematic AAA action games are the immersivist.

 

[gurugeorge]

So far as I can tell, the original meaning of "immersion" used by developers was "the sense of being there" - the feeling of being in a virtual world. Nowadays the word "presence" is used more for that, but originally "immersion" was used as well - and that's how I tend to use it.

The more general sense of immersion you're talking about I would call "engagement" or maybe "absorption" or even "trance state."

But it's not a cut and dried thing laid out in a bible. I know what you mean: you can be thoroughly absorbed in a sense of "being there" in TB too, if the gameplay is heavily simulationist. (Otherwise, at the other extreme, it's more like Chess, where your mind is working in a much more abstract way, where you might only jokingly and fleetingly think of the Knight as a knight.)

Yep, the key is that a 'sense of being there' can come in many ways, and too often devs just revert to "more cinematic, more pixels, more ~ realism ~".

The idea that a turn-based game is inherently less immersive because you have to divide the action into discrete turns is bonkers, and just leads us to the idea that cinematic AAA action games are the immersivist.

Yeah, my contention isn't that, but rather that having the "series of chess matches" effect can be (isn't always but can often be) at loggerheads with immersion in virtual world and story. Either the story is negligible (and maybe even slightly bothersome) glue for the series of chess matches, or the chess matches are too long at moments when you really want to see what happens next in the story. So RTwP has a nice compromise for that - instead of a series of chess matches that all have to be above a certain threshold of complexity (can't afford too many trash fights) with RTwP you can have a rhythm between trash fights and hard fights, where the hard fights can be pretty close to chess matches in terms of juiciness, but a lof of the time fights can be things that happen as incidents in exploration that don't take you too far out of the feeling that you're exploring (or following a story).

 

[anvi]

It all depends on the game and the implementation.

 

[0sacred]

So: RTwP leans more towards staying "in" the virtual world and "in" the story, and goes with more epic and intricate story, whereas TB leans more towards having something that's more like a series of absorbing chess matches linked by enough story to hold the interest, but with some detachment. Either way you can have more or less simulation, it's a different thing again. It's not a hard and fast essentialist rule, and as people have pointed out there are always examples of games that do it the other way round. It's just a natural going-together, a tendency, a natural fit.

Simulation is paramount for immersion. Unless you're absorbed by just doing shit... which I gather is how you define it. Which is a really useless definition of immersion, as it's no different from saying a game is fun or gud.

 

[Bastardchops]

RtWP is interesting but I wonder how a system which used Retarded time with Porn would work?

 

[gurugeorge]

So: RTwP leans more towards staying "in" the virtual world and "in" the story, and goes with more epic and intricate story, whereas TB leans more towards having something that's more like a series of absorbing chess matches linked by enough story to hold the interest, but with some detachment. Either way you can have more or less simulation, it's a different thing again. It's not a hard and fast essentialist rule, and as people have pointed out there are always examples of games that do it the other way round. It's just a natural going-together, a tendency, a natural fit.

Simulation is paramount for immersion. Unless you're absorbed by just doing shit... which I gather is how you define it. Which is a really useless definition of immersion, as it's no different from saying a game is fun or gud.

But no specific grain of simulation is paramount for immersion. Is a storybook section less immersive for being just a few words, choices and a faux woodcut?

 

[luj1]

Player skill is quite evident in any competently-designed turn-based combat system, although it does not include physical skill but instead mental skills concerning the utilization of assets and game mechanics, as well as party customization outside of combat to generate the composition of assets available in combat.

Real-Time with Pause combat systems lack either the action-based physical-skill requirements possible with real-time systems (Demon's/Dark Souls, Dragon's Dogma, etc.) or the considered tactics possible with turn-based systems, instead combining the worst aspects of both.

/thread

 

[Jason Liang]

I solo'd Pillars of Eternity with a rogue playing like it was Gauntlet. It was fun for 8 hours (outside of the 5 hours of loading screens) but I didn't get much immersion into the story.

 

[Lurker47]

RTwP bad.

 

[Norfleet]

Well, first, let's just disregard "immersion" as a meaningful argument, since people can't even define it clearly. Although personally, I'd define it as "willingness of the player to give up sleep to keep playing your game". By this definition, it seems clear that real-time or turn-based are irrelevant as both Diablo and Civ have the capability to induce players to forsake sleep in favor of playing them more.

Thus it comes down to "what better fits the game you're making". If you have a singular unit with a relatively limited moveset, it seems pretty clear that real-time works better. If your actions are basically commanding a single unit to move and/or shoot, you're not getting much out of turn-based. The first two Fallouts, as much as people love those games, are an example of TB used poorly: You only ever command one unit and his moveset is basically just "move" and "shoot". The entire turn-based combat business just drags down gameflow for no real gain in your control of the system. The flipside of this would probably be TOEE, where you have a small, but not too small, number of units that each has a fairly complicated list of possible move choices drawn from a large swath of the 3E moveset. This game is pretty much spot on for where TB hits best. At the very edge of the territory might be X-Com, where TB fits almost perfectly, but at the very endgame, the number of units involved can get so large that it starts to strain and flow starts to grind down because of it, which is probably why the franchise has flirted with RT combat. This here is pretty much where you're going to find the border between where TB works best and where RT becomes the better option, because you have a single game that is starts where TB works pretty much perfectly and expands to where you're seeing it fray at the edges, but when done as RT, the exact opposite situation occurs.

In short, there's some ideal sweet spot where TB works best, probably defined in terms of how many choices a player has to filter between. If the player has insufficient choices to make, dragging it out into a slow turn-based game makes it BORING. But if the player has too MANY choices to make, so most of the time he's just going to do the default action, then TB will slow the gameflow to a crawl. In the middle, you have this range where the player still needs to make detailed choices to get good results, and a real-time gameflow would tend to obscure these or turn them into a battle against the interface rather than the enemy.

 

[JarlFrank]

However, is there even one WEGO classic D&D style RPG with positioning and melee combat out there which works? Or at least a wargame but which is quite close to that, not any wargame?

As someone who really doesn't like WEGO for several reasons, I can point to the ancient naval wargame Mare Nostrum as an example of why it doesn't work.

Mare Nostrum is a wargame with ancient battlefleets, from Greek naval battles to Rome vs Carthage naval battles. It has a hex grid and you command ships in squads as well as individually. You can set their direction and speed, and the game tells you on which tile they will end up in the next turn.
So far so good.
The problem is that ancient naval tactics relied a lot on close touching maneuvers: ramming enemy ships or shearing off their oars with a close "drive-by".
But in the game's WEGO system, both you and the AI make their movement decisions simultaneously, and then watch them play out.
You don't set a target for your ships. You tell them which tile to move to. That means you have to guess which tile an enemy ship is going to be at during the next turn. Will the enemy stop his ship? Will he continue rowing it forward at constant speed? Will he turn away? Will he turn to face you? You don't know. So it becomes a guessing game, and in most cases both you and the enemy will just maneuver your ships past each other. Because WEGO just doesn't work in battles that rely on close combat and maneuvering.

It would work much better if you could tell your ships to target enemy ships and adjust their course dynamically based on enemy movements (like, you know, an IRL ship captain would do), instead of having them target a specific tile. But you can't do that, so it becomes a mess.

The only games I played where WEGO works are games with a focus on ranged combat. Modern squad tactics, or spaceship battles, where it's all about moving into advantageous firing positions, moving from cover to cover, or aligning a broadside with your railguns. Those work because you don't have to predict the exact position of your enemy, just their rough location within the map space: as long as your guns are aimed northwards, your units will be able to fire at any enemy crossing north of you.

But with melee combat, it just becomes a total mess of soldiers running in circles around each other.