Interview RPG Dot talks to Planewalker Games

[WouldBeCreator]

You could make computer chess and add 5,000 more enemy pieces, down grade the functioning of each piece, and make the game RT where all your pieces can move at once, but you changed the game from one of strategy, planning, and tactics, to make it largely reactionary. The strategy is vastly watered down, the tactics change to reacting, and the planning is removed. A game that really emphasized the correct use of each piece, making every move count, planning ahead, stressing acting, and provides the greatest challenge, can be changed to a messy click fest with barley any strategy or anything substantial. Any you guys would defend it, because you are all retarded. What is a better game is a matter of opinion. What is more strategic or tactical is not. Stop dreaming about how awesome clicking or watching is and start fucking thinking you fucking monkeys.

Not to belabor the point, but have you watched people play speed chess? It's practically real-time chess, but nevertheless it tracks to skill level quite accurately (I believe chess masters perform at something like 80% of their expected skill using the traditional rating system when they're playing speed chess). Clearly it's still a test of intelligence. The difference is that players become more dependent on pattern recognition, rather than "searching" through all the possible outcomes. In that sense, speed chess emphasizes the human skill in chess over the mechanical skill, since pattern recognition is the only aspect of chess that man does better than machine. For strategy games, I always prefered RTS to TBS (with a couple exceptions) because I prefered games that tested the speed of my strategic thinking to games that tested my patience. I guess that makes me part of the ritalin generation, though.

 

[Roqua]

You could make computer chess and add 5,000 more enemy pieces, down grade the functioning of each piece, and make the game RT where all your pieces can move at once, but you changed the game from one of strategy, planning, and tactics, to make it largely reactionary. The strategy is vastly watered down, the tactics change to reacting, and the planning is removed. A game that really emphasized the correct use of each piece, making every move count, planning ahead, stressing acting, and provides the greatest challenge, can be changed to a messy click fest with barley any strategy or anything substantial. Any you guys would defend it, because you are all retarded. What is a better game is a matter of opinion. What is more strategic or tactical is not. Stop dreaming about how awesome clicking or watching is and start fucking thinking you fucking monkeys.

Not to belabor the point, but have you watched people play speed chess? It's practically real-time chess, but nevertheless it tracks to skill level quite accurately (I believe chess masters perform at something like 80% of their expected skill using the traditional rating system when they're playing speed chess). Clearly it's still a test of intelligence. The difference is that players become more dependent on pattern recognition, rather than "searching" through all the possible outcomes. In that sense, speed chess emphasizes the human skill in chess over the mechanical skill, since pattern recognition is the only aspect of chess that man does better than machine. For strategy games, I always prefered RTS to TBS (with a couple exceptions) because I prefered games that tested the speed of my strategic thinking to games that tested my patience. I guess that makes me part of the ritalin generation, though.

I’ll only play speed chess. Have you ever seen the movie “Fresh”? If not, you should, its great. It has Sam L. Jackson going on a rant about regular chess vs. speed chess.

But, speed chess is still turn-based and every single element of chess is still there, it just forces you to make decisions quicker (which I believe greatly enhances the experience). I like having the pressure of time on me when the mechanics also still lend themselves to strategy, tactics, planning, and every other benefit chess has over, say, Foozball. I wouldn’t mind having a timed turn-base system at all (unless of course it was so restrictive as to make it twitch based, in chess you don’t have to navigate through menu after menu to get the action you want to take, and the decision is what takes up the time, not the move). I have no problem making fast decisions; it’s getting the game system to realize my decision is what takes time. In chess, as in TB combat, you are not diluting the system by having 50 actions going on at once. Its still action, instead of reaction, focused and a timed-TB system further focuses that action by adding the pressure of time.

I think another TB killer (of course its not a RT killer since actions are not important) is unlimited and unrestricted saving and reloading. I was able to kill the deathclaw in the hub quest as well as in the boneyard just by saving after I liked what happened (getting a 120 damage crit to the eye) and reloading if I didn’t (critting for only 50 damage to the eye or regular hits). I also had a problem in some great TB games, such as ToEE in the temple, flowing the lots of weak enemies model (not nearly to the extent of RT games, but enough o be annoying). Compaed to, say, JA2 Wildfire, where every battle was a challenge, this is unacceptable. No saving, much less but much more challenging battles, plus the pressure of timed decisions, in a good TB system would be the direction I wouldn’t mind seeing the genre going.

And as SP said, RT diminishes characters and their roles in the combat aspect of the game. And since RT only fits with the “millions of weak enemy” model of combat, combat is what you spend an overwhelming majority of the game time playing engaged in.

Again, what type of strategy game--squad like JA, or other like warcraft or heroes of m&m. I can talk intelligently about squad TBS’s, since I play the shit out of them. I cannot talk about warcraft or heroes type games, since I do not like them. But I know enough of them to say, with certainty, that comparing the combat of a squad tbs to an rpg is more than reasonable, since most people think the JA’s, x-coms, and Silent storms were rpgs. Compare rpg combat to warcraft and heroes of might and magic is retarded. You bringing it up is retarded. Basically, you are retarded.

 

[aboyd]

Turn based can be okay with queues. TBwQ I guess. Direct your tank to pound away automatically until a trigger fires (he's too hurt, etc.). Spend your turns micromanaging the spellcaster. Etcetera.

Unfortunately, I know very few that do that. Oddly enough, it's RTwP games that seem to implement queues, such as KotOR2.

Your lack of understanding of basic mechanics and stupidity actually causes me a headache. I cannot reply to your utter gibberish.

Of course you cannot reply while you're throwing a tantrum. But all that stuttering and stammering is doing wonders for your point.

If fact, I have no idea why I even entered this debate. You fucking freshman bitches just don’t have the foundation to enter into an intelligent debate about this aspect of games.

What a sad life you must lead that a topic like this works you into such an ugly frenzy. You talk of having a grown up debate, yet you're spewing invective like a petulant little boy.

-Tony

 

[Roqua]

Turn based can be okay with queues. TBwQ I guess. Direct your tank to pound away automatically until a trigger fires (he's too hurt, etc.). Spend your turns micromanaging the spellcaster. Etcetera.

Unfortunately, I know very few that do that. Oddly enough, it's RTwP games that seem to implement queues, such as KotOR2.

Your lack of understanding of basic mechanics and stupidity actually causes me a headache. I cannot reply to your utter gibberish.

Of course you cannot reply while you're throwing a tantrum. But all that stuttering and stammering is doing wonders for your point.

If fact, I have no idea why I even entered this debate. You fucking freshman bitches just don’t have the foundation to enter into an intelligent debate about this aspect of games.

What a sad life you must lead that a topic like this works you into such an ugly frenzy. You talk of having a grown up debate, yet you're spewing invective like a petulant little boy.

-Tony

I guess I must be some kind of jerk.

 

[WouldBeCreator]

[Rant]

I brought it up because I was only half-heartedly reading this thread, mostly, and because the RT bashing seems to transcend RPGs and go into strategy games, too. I think you can plausibly imagine RPGs where the rationales justifying RT in strategy games apply. For example, if you wanted to depict battles like Helm's Deep in an RPG, turn-based becomes a major problem. (As I recall, Fallout had a pretty tedious sequence where the fight in the Glow [was that the name?] between the oppressive gang and the townspeople gets started and you watch like fifty computer controlled entities take their turns one after the other.) If what you're trying to convey to the player is a frenetic, chaotic combat , turn-based just isn't going to work as well. And I brought up RTS games as an example of how you can have things occuring in RT and not have it non-thinking.

My beef with Bioware's RT decision is that there's no apparent rationale for doing them RT when the battles are so small. Especially in, say, KOTOR, where battles are routinely like 3v3. At that point, I start to assume that the decision to go RT had less to do with the playing of the game and more to do with the "cinematic experience," which I think is a bad trend in game design.

 

[Crichton]

And as SP said, RT diminishes characters and their roles in the combat aspect of the game. And since RT only fits with the “millions of weak enemy” model of combat, combat is what you spend an overwhelming majority of the game time playing engaged in.

Would you mind backing some of this garbage up with some sort of reasoning?

The only difference between TB and RT is what the player knows when he chooses his actions, there's something to be said for TB in party games since you can watch the consequences of each action individually, but it does nothing in and off itself to improve gameplay, and in fact, it introduces artifacts that need to be addressed (opportunity fire/attacks become neccesary, the game needs to explicitly keep track of what the position of the players represents i.e. who should be assumed to be moving, who is in melee, etc).

D&D 3rd offers a number of improvements over 2nd edition in terms of offering multiple types of attacks and a slightly better damage model, but deciding on your actions in full knowledge of the attack order isn't inherently better than deciding on your actions before rolling for initiative, and in fact it does a much worse job of simulating real life. As for RTwP being the cause of masses of lousy opponents, compare the frequency of combined arms (and hence the possibility of tactics) in ToEE and IWD (and reread my other post in this thread where I discuss ToEE in more detail).

 

[Zomg]

Yeeargh, this thread got ugly. If anyone wants to revisit the issue in a week or two, go for it, I'd say some stuff.

 

[galsiah]

Not to belabor the point, but have you watched people play speed chess? It's practically real-time chess, but nevertheless it tracks to skill level quite accurately (I believe chess masters perform at something like 80% of their expected skill using the traditional rating system when they're playing speed chess). Clearly it's still a test of intelligence.

No - it's a test of memory and reflex action with occasional pattern recognition. Most chess masters know most conventional openings completely by heart until about 10 moves in. Most games don't last 50 moves - probably not even 40 -, before you get a result. At least 25% of the game is played on total auto-pilot. If someone deviates from the script early on, it's usually a mistake a master can capitalize on - after which a master will be able to win without thinking too hard just by making almost optimal moves.

I'm not saying that masters playing speed chess can't have interesting games, but most of the interest comes from the speed. Most games will be significantly less interesting than games played slowly when you actually look at the moves - the chances of any really remarkable strategies / tactics being used are vanishingly low. The advantage is that all the interest is distilled into a few moments.

I'm sure I can play at 80% of my ability by making the first half-decent move which occurs to me in a few seconds. That doesn't make it an intelligent progress. It just means that very often in chess one of the most obvious moves is one of the best - if not the best.

In that sense, speed chess emphasizes the human skill in chess over the mechanical skill, since pattern recognition is the only aspect of chess that man does better than machine.

Nonsense.
The idea that speed chess tests "the speed of strategic thinking" is laughable. It tests strategic knowledge [which a machine does very well], reflex response [which a machine does very well], and speed of tactical thinking [which a machine does very well].

What it lacks is depth of long term strategic thinking - i.e. the only thing (in chess) humans can do better than machines. [EDIT: if you doubt this, try comparing your performance against a chess program on a one minute move time limit to a five second limit.]

My opinion of RTS is pretty much the same. They can be a laugh, and they're over relatively quickly, so the enjoyment is distilled into a short period. However, what wins out is knowledge, reflex responses and fast tactical thinking. Strategy is present pretty much nowhere.

My favourite RTS is probably Shogun Total War. There is quite a bit of strategy in initial movements (given that no unit can cover much ground at speed, there is the time to think). Also, the most important decisions are on large scale unit positions and timing and direction of attack / support - micro-management of individual units doesn't matter much.
In spite of that, I still pause things quite a bit, since it doesn't make sense to me for half my units to be standing around doing nothing, or not responding to attacks (most RTSs are nonsensical in this regard, since there simply is not the range of individual unit orders / AI to cover any reasonable battle plan where a commander actually gives a damn what everyone is doing).

RTSs may or may not be fun, but "strategy" is a misnomer in pretty much any I've ever played. Knowledge, reflexes (mental and physical), tactics and intelligence, perhaps - but not strategy (in any non-trivial sense).

 

[WouldBeCreator]

The extent of my chess experience pretty much ends at the information in your post, Galsiah (I know about opening moves and whatnot and have watched a little, played a few hundred games), and I know even less about speed chess. But a cursory search seems to support my hypothesis:

For example, this article about a study into speed chess (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99513&page=1) identifies pattern recognition -- which it identifies as the human chess skill, as opposed to "searching" -- as the primary element in speed chess. Wikipedia (ever a dubious source of information) also identifies pattern recognition and "intuition" as the primary human elements of chess. This article (http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/ ... 35,00.html) discusses the role of pattern recognition in speed chess, too.

A part of me wonders at the effort to push such a crabbed definition of intelligence that "fast tactical thinking" and pattern recognition are dismissed from the sphere of intelligence altogether. My experience with the Civ line of games is that the "intelligence" involved there is very intimately connected to rules-memorization; the sheer volume of data the player is expected to be familiar with is fairly astounding. Likewise, I find that they often involve longterm thinking, but the longterm thinking seemed rather rote to me. A patient and studious, but not particularly brilliant, player, seems well-suited to the game. RTS games always seemed to me to reflect brilliance as I think of it -- I often saw extremely elegant maneuvers of a sort I never saw in TBS games and on occasion saw really creative tactical (if you insist on using the word) methods. More seldom, but still not blue-moony, I saw novel build orders.

Since I'm supremely arrogant, etc., all aspersions cast on my intelligence will do little to convince me that I'm not extremely smart, and my experience with RTS games is that my brain was actively engaged almost the entire time, processing a huge variety of inputs and rapidly engaging responses to them. TBS games never seemed to engage my brain the same way, but I know awfully smart people who found them very stimulating. Perhaps my intelligence is more "twitch based" than others', hence the preference for more active games.

(FWIW, my efforts to play more recent RTS games have been utter failures, suggesting that there's a definite patterning of the brain and body necessary to play RTS games that seems absent with TBS games, which I fare equally well (or poorly) at no matter how infrequent my excursions.)

 

[Zomg]

I find that the level of strategy vs. reflex burn-in peaks and then falls as a function of total time played in RT games, and "community"-wide time played in competitive ones. Typically you spend some time in the early days of a game learning the nature of the game and the function of the "pieces". Then the actual strategic thinking can begin. But after that when the strategy phase grows increasingly obvious you start getting into the burn-in phase where skill of execution starts dominating.

Fighting games follow that pattern religiously - there are guys in the fighting game community that are great in the first few months of a game's release when grokking the underlying nature of the game and then pushing that nature around wins tournaments, but they fade when hands and reflexes begin taking over (with occasional hiccups in the pattern if some off-the-wall strategy appears late in the lifecycle). The early phase winners are typically articulate guys, the late phase guys are typically ogres and nerds that have worked the controls and pattern recognition down into their DNA. I assume RTS is the same way, with "micro" dominating once the real basis of the game is widely understood (although for the PC I'd expect aggressive Blizzard-like balance patching alters the dynamic somehwat when strategies live and die on patch notes). I'd bet that's the reason RTS games usually slowly dole out new game features, units and buildings in the obligatory single player campaign, to extend the strategic portion of the game by spreading it out a bit.

 

[galsiah]

... identifies pattern recognition -- which it identifies as the human chess skill, as opposed to "searching" -- as the primary element in speed chess...

Sure - pattern recognition is what humans do best. However, pattern recognition in speed chess is primarily a case of reflex response, both strategically and tactically.

Strategically a human sees that certain lines give him doubled pawns (bad thing), the opponent control of an open file (bad thing), isolated pawns (bad thing), bishops of the same colour as the squares occupied by his own pawns (bad thing)... these are all elements that will lose you the game in the long term (usually) for more or less complex reasons. However, identifying them is as simple as identifying the pattern, then avoiding it or prefering it as appropriate. It's pattern recognition with reflex response.

In tactical terms, humans use search quite a bit in any case. Where they don't, they'll see things such as the potential for a fork, pin, skewer, or the potential to create some long term positional advantage. Again, it's pattern recognition and largely reflex response.

Where the thinking comes in is in noticing rarer or more hidden patterns (which is more interesting, and takes time), and analyzing the effects of pattern combinations (more interesting - more time consuming).

The amount of patterns / combinations which are obvious will depend on the level of the player of course. However, for any player, the most interesting patterns he can cope with will not be the ones which jump out after two seconds - they'll be the ones which take some consideration / working out.

A part of me wonders at the effort to push such a crabbed definition of intelligence that "fast tactical thinking" and pattern recognition are dismissed from the sphere of intelligence altogether.

I was careful not to do that. I didn't say that it's not "thinking" or "intelligent" - just that it's not strategic (for that player), since it isn't. It does seem strange to champion something on the basis that it's "intuitive" (and therefore human) though.
Humans seem to have gone from:
"We can think abstractly and plan etc., whereas animals are just intuitive - we are really thinking."
to
"We can use intuition, wheres computers just use mechanical search - we are really thinking."

I don't see that "I'm great because I'm like a dog." is much better than "I'm great because I'm like a calculator.".

Likewise, I find that they often involve longterm thinking, but the longterm thinking seemed rather rote to me. A patient and studious, but not particularly brilliant, player, seems well-suited to the game.

Then play on a harder difficulty. You can't play on Deity without being patient, studious and brilliant.

RTS games always seemed to me to reflect brilliance as I think of it -- I often saw extremely elegant maneuvers of a sort I never saw in TBS games and on occasion saw really creative tactical (if you insist on using the word) methods. More seldom, but still not blue-moony, I saw novel build orders.

Sure - elegant and novel to you, but not to the player carrying them out. You don't develop some astoundingly novel tactic / strategy in five seconds during a frantic RTS session. You develop it over many games, and while thinking in between games. The actual playing of the game is mostly mechanical - it's just a display of what you know and how good you are.

If someone does come up with amazing new (to them) tactics almost every game, then perhaps they are brilliant, but that's rarely the case. Brilliance isn't something really different in any case - it's just that the brilliant person has become very comfortable with more complex patterns than we have, and so can combine them in ways we wouldn't think to. No-one pushes the boundaries of their own creativity when they need a good answer within two seconds - nearly all the time they're forced to stick with what they've done before, however "brilliant" that might seem to an observer.

If you want experienced players to come up with new and interesting (to them) strategies, they need to have time to do so. New players might develop interesting strategies during play for a short while, but that will quickly give way to repetitive combination of tried and true methods.

and my experience with RTS games is that my brain was actively engaged almost the entire time, processing a huge variety of inputs and rapidly engaging responses to them.

Sure - your brain is actively engaged. You're just not learning anything new. It's like the difference between solving a load of equations at high speed, and proving a theorem that's new to you. The high speed equation solving needs intelligence (in that you must have been intelligent to learn the skill), and needs mental agility. It'll also require constant intense mental activity. However, it's still mechanical, and you're unlikely to do anything that surprises you.

If you're proving a new theorem, there is nothing like the same level of intense mental activity. However, there is a lot more novelty in the ideas and concepts you'll attempt to combine. There is also a much higher chance that you'll learn something new - even if you don't prove the theorem.

TBS games never seemed to engage my brain the same way...

That's the point really - they engage the brain in a different way. They don't give you constant, intense activity, but they do provide novel thought processes even for experienced players.

I'd say that an RTS / speed chess is most fun for players of similar ability who don't know each other's game - or for players who are just learning a game. When you play a lot of fast games against an opponent who has different strengths from yourself, you'll pick up new things by seeing what he does. He won't be doing anything that new to him, and you won't be doing anything that new to you, but it can be interesting to get to know his game.
Once you've played many games like this against one opponent, you're really not going to learn anything new unless you start to think for longer (in chess), or play something else for an RTS.

 

[Roqua]

Yeeargh, this thread got ugly. If anyone wants to revisit the issue in a week or two, go for it, I'd say some stuff.

I agree. No sense talking about it to people that keep talking about RTS's.

I'm 100% happy this game is RT. No true BG clone would have any different combat. I hate when people just switch the combat, like Fo3 will. Or the next DSA. Its drives me wacky. In this case RT is the only acceptable combat model.