Only thing missing was having 3 or 6 second rounds and a pause option, heh.
There is no combat system I utterly despise, abhor, loathe as much as RTwP with arbitrary 6 second rounds.
I hate it. Hate, hate, hate, hate. If the word hate was written in every single post made on the Codex from its founding to today, it would not describe even a fraction of the hatred I feel for this kind of system.
Why ? The Infinity engine games have enjoyable combat overall. I'd switch Pillars continuous rtwp with the infinity engines variant that uses 6 second rounds if I could.
Because it is incredibly slow, especially in a single character RPG. Neverwinter Nights has the most tedious combat ever because of that, it's just so slow and boring. Morrowind with this kind of shit would have so much worse combat than it already has, holy shit.
It's also an unfitting cargo cult feature that makes absolutely no sense in a real time game, and the only reason it even exists is because someone somewhere thought "A-ha, this is how we can translate D&D rules into real time!"
Do you know how long 6 seconds are? In a single character game that would mean only ONE action every six seconds because you only have one character under your control. Extremely slow, therefore turns combat into a slow and tedious slog. If you are attacked by 4 enemies and each of them takes 5 hits to kill, that means you require
2 minutes to dispatch them at minimum, assuming you don't miss a single attack. So even weak trash enemies that should be quick fodder to dispose of, like a cliffracer, would bring extreme tedium with it because it takes so long to dispatch. That's why NWN is such a shit game, not only does it flood you with boring trash mobs, those mobs also take a lot of time to get rid of.
Morrowind specifically (since that's what Fluent argued would be a good thing) would suffer heavily from such a system, because using a lot of different custom-made spells is such a core element of its gameplay. Utility spells, buffs, damage spells, etc. Imagine you had to wait 6 seconds between each casting, it would be so tedious.
The six-second-round in real time systems is basically like a cooldown, except it applies to EVERY action and not just the one you just used (unlike spell cooldowns that only let you cast that particular spell once every 10 seconds, for example). Performing several actions in quick succession becomes impossible. Also, Morrowind's system of quick attacks and power attacks depending on how long you hold down your mouse button wouldn't work under such a system either - because real time systems constrained by "rounds" are extremely static and restrictive. Every action becomes equal, there are no quick actions vs lengthy actions.
Any good RTwP system uses actual real time and slaps a pause function on it. Games like 7.62 High Calibre, for example. Which in itself is an attempt to approximate the turn based mechanics of Jagged Alliance 2 in a real time system, which works much better than attempting to translate D&D into real time - because JA uses action points rather than one-action-per-turn. It makes combat more tactical because you have a choice between quicker and slower actions, weaker weapon types like pistols and daggers actually have a use because they cost fewer action points to use/have a faster attack animation and therefore can be used to attack more often than with a more powerful but slower weapon.
Round-based real time is the absolute worst possible combat system ever conceived. It combines the worst aspects of real time with the worst aspects of turn based and tosses out the fun aspects of either.
) ; the level scaling for creatures caps pretty low and makes sense in universe (you see an increasing number of diseased and then blighted creatures, but well, that's part of the Prophecy isn't it ?).
