RTwP is an abomination and harbinger of decline

[octavius]

Can't be. There's no combat, just dialog. If I'm understanding the Disco Elysium thread correctly that means the Codex is a CYOA or perhaps a visual novel.

I'm sure there would be combat if certain Codexers met in person.

But would it be turn based or real time with pause?

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

Can't be. There's no combat, just dialog. If I'm understanding the Disco Elysium thread correctly that means the Codex is a CYOA or perhaps a visual novel.

I'm sure there would be combat if certain Codexers met in person.

But would it be turn based or real time with pause?

Pay2win.

 

[Shaki]

Can't be. There's no combat, just dialog. If I'm understanding the Disco Elysium thread correctly that means the Codex is a CYOA or perhaps a visual novel.

I'm sure there would be combat if certain Codexers met in person.

Wouldn't call it combat, it would be a massacre of the storyfags.

 

[†††]

But would it be turn based or real time with pause?

Probably TB so the fatties don't exert themselves too much

 

[Nortar]

Can't be. There's no combat, just dialog. If I'm understanding the Disco Elysium thread correctly that means the Codex is a CYOA or perhaps a visual novel.

I'm sure there would be combat if certain Codexers met in person.

Wouldn't call it combat, it would be a massacre of the storyfags.

 

[PapaPetro]

I have played and enjoyed games using RTwP combat. But if a game gives me a choice (e.g. PoE2, Kingmaker, Arcanum) I will go turn-based every time. Conclusion: for me, RTwP is not a deal-breaker but it's a decline.

I like turning on RTwP when if beating trash and TB when fighting opponents worth my attention.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

The IE games weren't exactly a true RTwP. Characters could freely move and switch weapons without restriction, but all other actions were constrained to 1 per 6 second interval (round). It worked marvelously, mostly because the list of combat actions for each individual class type was quite low. Move, Attack, Use Item, Cast spell. That's about it. All the same though, it worked well. The combat was highly engaging. Placing a fireball just-so, or reeling in terror from the ricocheting lighting bolts is thrilling. Having all actors perform in the same rounds really brought everything to life.

Josh Sawyer (to some extent with PoE) understood this and tried to keep melee oriented characters emphasized with modal abilities. The end result was still very fiddly, and many people found that overwhelming. I still attest that the biggest problem with PoE wasn't RTwP, it was that overall class/spell/ability concepts were crap. It was a gimmicky, contrarian, pseudo-D&D. I considered those ideas to be an objective failure. PoE2 was more refined, but it was too little too late. No amount of tweaking was going to make those concepts satisfying.

Freedom Force is still the best example of RTwP. Everything is built around time, and it works marvelously. It demands micro, especially if you're using abilities in concert. The player is limited to controlling 4 characters at a time, and each character tends to only have about 4-8 active abilities. Even still, some missions can be quite hard and would filter the majority of gamers today. I enjoyed it immensely though. I really need to get around to writing a proper review.

 

[Lemming42]

Bumping this because I'm trying to replay BG2 and I just fucking hate it, to the point where I think I'll give up within the hour. It's literally just a shitty RTS. As a kid you can at least tolerate it because you know it won't be long until you get to feel big and clever by being the usual BioWare Mary Sue protagonist when your companions start fawning over you, but as an adult who thinks the writing is pretty dumb, I'm just left with this dogshit combat.

The interview in the OP says it all - it was a bad idea thought up by a complete dolt who somehow found controlling his party in the Gold Box to be too challenging (what???), and felt that fucking Warcraft might represent the future of cRPGs. Jesus Christ. I love how this abominable system is paired with a complete lack of care or skill when it comes to encounter design, just mobs of idiot enemies waiting to throw themselves to their deaths. It's boring as fuck and pausing almost feels like cheating because it makes an already-easy game utterly trivial. How they thought this was a way to "bring forward" the Gold Box games is beyond me. It's like they (correctly) realised that fighting endless large mobs of enemies wasn't fun, but instead of taking the obvious route of improving the variety and quality of combat encounters, they thought "hey wouldn't it be great if there were still shitty trash mobs, except the game just played itself while the player sits there masturbating, occasionally clicking a spell, and watching colours fly around on the screen".

It's a vicious circle - the game "has" to be RTWP because it's so combat-heavy and the encounter design so shockingly lazy that it'd be unimaginably tedious to deal with in TB, but the encounter design "has" to be a shitty boring slog because the game uses RTWP and therefore anything less than constant boring fighting against ill-thought-out enemies would make the game have almost no gameplay since combat is over so fast. Fuck BioWare.

Awful idea that was botched from the start and whose time has long since passed. I love the story about Josh Sawyer desperately fighting against reality as the other PoE2 devs pleaded with him to let them put a shitty hack-job TB mode in to give the game a snowball's chance in hell of being remotely enjoyable (which it's not). With BG3's critical success, Sawyer's utter humiliation, and Owlcat seeing the light with Rogue Trader, hopefully we've seen the back of RTWP. As for Sawyer, he should be cursed by a genie to live his actual real life in turn based mode forever. He should be forced to use up all his movement points and then watch, frozen in place, as I approach him for an almighty - and decades overdue - kick to the nuts.

 

[behold_a_man]

Bumping this because I'm trying to replay BG2 and I just fucking hate it, to the point where I think I'll give up within the hour. It's literally just a shitty RTS. As a kid you can at least tolerate it because you know it won't be long until you get to feel big and clever by being the usual BioWare Mary Sue protagonist when your companions start fawning over you, but as an adult who thinks the writing is pretty dumb, I'm just left with this dogshit combat.

The interview in the OP says it all - it was a bad idea thought up by a complete dolt who somehow found controlling his party in the Gold Box to be too challenging (what???), and felt that fucking Warcraft might represent the future of cRPGs. Jesus Christ. I love how this abominable system is paired with a complete lack of care or skill when it comes to encounter design, just mobs of idiot enemies waiting to throw themselves to their deaths. It's boring as fuck and pausing almost feels like cheating because it makes an already-easy game utterly trivial. How they thought this was a way to "bring forward" the Gold Box games is beyond me. It's like they (correctly) realised that fighting endless large mobs of enemies wasn't fun, but instead of taking the obvious route of improving the variety and quality of combat encounters, they thought "hey wouldn't it be great if there were still shitty trash mobs, except the game just played itself while the player sits there masturbating, occasionally clicking a spell, and watching colours fly around on the screen".

It's a vicious circle - the game "has" to be RTWP because it's so combat-heavy and the encounter design so shockingly lazy that it'd be unimaginably tedious to deal with in TB, but the encounter design "has" to be a shitty boring slog because the game uses RTWP and therefore anything less than constant boring fighting against ill-thought-out enemies would make the game have almost no gameplay since combat is over so fast. Fuck BioWare.

Awful idea that was botched from the start and whose time has long since passed. I love the story about Josh Sawyer desperately fighting against reality as the other PoE2 devs pleaded with him to let them put a shitty hack-job TB mode in to give the game a snowball's chance in hell of being remotely enjoyable (which it's not). With BG3's critical success, Sawyer's utter humiliation, and Owlcat seeing the light with Rogue Trader, hopefully we've seen the back of RTWP. As for Sawyer, he should be cursed by a genie to live his actual real life in turn based mode forever. He should be forced to use up all his movement points and then watch, frozen in place, as I approach him for an almighty - and decades overdue - kick to the nuts.

I think it is possible to make real-time with pause way more interesting by merely allowing the player to automate most actions. I remember enjoying the hell out of Dragon Age: Origins despite its uninspired encounter design - as, after scripting characters properly, I could sit back and just watch the encounter, maybe later adjusting the script. When I felt like the encounters were a slug, I could find an in-game solution and trace back the source of my problems to my ineptitude rather than live with it.

 

[scytheavatar]

Bumping this because I'm trying to replay BG2 and I just fucking hate it, to the point where I think I'll give up within the hour. It's literally just a shitty RTS. As a kid you can at least tolerate it because you know it won't be long until you get to feel big and clever by being the usual BioWare Mary Sue protagonist when your companions start fawning over you, but as an adult who thinks the writing is pretty dumb, I'm just left with this dogshit combat.

The interview in the OP says it all - it was a bad idea thought up by a complete dolt who somehow found controlling his party in the Gold Box to be too challenging (what???), and felt that fucking Warcraft might represent the future of cRPGs. Jesus Christ. I love how this abominable system is paired with a complete lack of care or skill when it comes to encounter design, just mobs of idiot enemies waiting to throw themselves to their deaths. It's boring as fuck and pausing almost feels like cheating because it makes an already-easy game utterly trivial. How they thought this was a way to "bring forward" the Gold Box games is beyond me. It's like they (correctly) realised that fighting endless large mobs of enemies wasn't fun, but instead of taking the obvious route of improving the variety and quality of combat encounters, they thought "hey wouldn't it be great if there were still shitty trash mobs, except the game just played itself while the player sits there masturbating, occasionally clicking a spell, and watching colours fly around on the screen".

It's a vicious circle - the game "has" to be RTWP because it's so combat-heavy and the encounter design so shockingly lazy that it'd be unimaginably tedious to deal with in TB, but the encounter design "has" to be a shitty boring slog because the game uses RTWP and therefore anything less than constant boring fighting against ill-thought-out enemies would make the game have almost no gameplay since combat is over so fast. Fuck BioWare.

Awful idea that was botched from the start and whose time has long since passed. I love the story about Josh Sawyer desperately fighting against reality as the other PoE2 devs pleaded with him to let them put a shitty hack-job TB mode in to give the game a snowball's chance in hell of being remotely enjoyable (which it's not). With BG3's critical success, Sawyer's utter humiliation, and Owlcat seeing the light with Rogue Trader, hopefully we've seen the back of RTWP. As for Sawyer, he should be cursed by a genie to live his actual real life in turn based mode forever. He should be forced to use up all his movement points and then watch, frozen in place, as I approach him for an almighty - and decades overdue - kick to the nuts.

I think it is possible to make real-time with pause way more interesting by merely allowing the player to automate most actions. I remember enjoying the hell out of Dragon Age: Origins despite its uninspired encounter design - as, after scripting characters properly, I could sit back and just watch the encounter, maybe later adjusting the script. When I felt like the encounters were a slug, I could find an in-game solution and trace back the source of my problems to my ineptitude rather than live with it.

Games like FFXII and POE2 already proved that "sit back and just watch the encounter" combat is boring and appeals only to a niche audience. If you force the player to be constantly micromanaging the combat then there's no advantage in using RTWP, you are just making the combat defacto turn based with pause.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

"Real-Time with Pause combat might have had its place, as with isometric perspective, given the technological limits of the time, but now that computers are more advanced we have moved on to more complex turn-based combat, and RTwP is obsolete."

 

[Lemming42]

I think it is possible to make real-time with pause way more interesting by merely allowing the player to automate most actions. I remember enjoying the hell out of Dragon Age: Origins despite its uninspired encounter design - as, after scripting characters properly, I could sit back and just watch the encounter, maybe later adjusting the script. When I felt like the encounters were a slug, I could find an in-game solution and trace back the source of my problems to my ineptitude rather than live with it.

DA:O is among the less awful examples I can think of of RTWP in an RPG, but I feel like the system ultimately needs a totally different type of gameplay than RPGs usually offer. RTWP works in something like FTL because the player is constantly dealing with unexpected obstacles and having to change their plan as they go along to deal with hazards and mishaps, as well as exploiting any opportunities created by mistakes or bad luck on the part of the enemy. In a game with combat like that offered by the IE games though, there's very little of that kind of thing going on.

But the issues caused by the system extend beyond the system itself, especially in the IE games. Developers fill the world with trash mobs and lazy combat encounters, and think they'll get away with it because combat is already such a clusterfuck that nobody will really care if the next three rooms all have twenty guys waiting to do the usual barebones "melee guys rush, spellcasters stand back and fire" routine. I remember in a lot of RTWP debates back in the day, RTWP fans would say "but imagine playing through all those trash mobs in BG if it was turn-based, at least RTWP makes it go by quickly" - the answer to which is surely that the game's combat shouldn't consist primarily of mind-numbing content that the player actively wants to skip.

You're right that DA:O had a solid AI/command system that allowed most fights to take care of themselves if the party was set up right, but surely combat should be so fun that the player actively wants to take part in it, rather than finding the most optimal way to minimise their engagement with it.

 

[behold_a_man]

Games like FFXII and POE2 already proved that "sit back and just watch the encounter" combat is boring and appeals only to a niche audience.

Well, I think we're all here to discuss games and ideas appealing only to a niche audience.
Was there any challenge to automation in those games? I never touched anything related to Final Fantasy, and I hated the first Pillars quite vehemently.

RTWP works in something like FTL because the player is constantly dealing with unexpected obstacles and having to change their plan as they go along to deal with hazards and mishaps, as well as exploiting any opportunities or bad luck the enemy has. In a game with combat like that offered by the IE games though, there's very little of that kind of thing going on.

The better player you are, the fewer problems are "unexpected". It is a game I spent an ungodly amount of time on, and I wish this exact game allowed me to automate the combat - because winning on hard difficulty tends to require conscientiousness (unless you have lasers + hacking), and I don't want to go through the same fight with a similar ship design over and over again. I noticed the best players tend to pause combat every second or so, so some winning strategies almost reduce this game to being turn-based.

You're right that DA:O had a solid AI/command system that allowed most fights to take care of themselves if the party was set up right, but surely combat should be so fun that the player actively wants to take part in it, rather than finding the most optimal way to minimise their engagement with it.

The point is to allow the player to have an alternative way of resolving combat encounters. It gives me a sort of rewarding challenge to be able to effortlessly carve my way through more and more encounters. Combat will usually get repetitive if you play any game the next time; automation minimizes the boredom.

 

[Cheesedragon117]

I'm surprised nobody has tried a hybrid of RTwP and XCOM style phase-based combat. I'm planning a game right now where you have XCOM movement and consumable-use phases, but then the actual combat phase transforms the game into a "Tales of" style action combat system where you can move, attack, and combo freely on a 10-second timer. Once that timer's up, everyone jumps away from each other if they're too bunched up and you get a second chance to use your item phase if you didn't use it after the movement phase. You also have an optional "Shoot" phase that can be used instead of the item phase, where the game instead transitions into a brief over-the-shoulder shooting sequence as you try to take potshots at your foes from behind cover. This would ensure that even those that aren't big fans of action-based hack-and-slash combat can still gradually chip away at enemy health.

Anyway, I think I'm over my hyphen quota for this week.

 

[Harthwain]

The interview in the OP says it all - it was a bad idea thought up by a complete dolt who somehow found controlling his party in the Gold Box to be too challenging (what???), and felt that fucking Warcraft might represent the future of cRPGs. Jesus Christ.

Ironically enough Warcraft III (released in 2002) did make the game more interesting by introducing heroes and spells that had significant impact on the battlefield (and, yes, I don't consider a slighty stronger units from Warcraft II to be the proper heroes. They are "heroes" at best).

But the issues caused by the system extend beyond the system itself, especially in the IE games. Developers fill the world with trash mobs and lazy combat encounters, and think they'll get away with it because combat is already such a clusterfuck that nobody will really care if the next three rooms all have twenty guys waiting to do the usual barebones "melee guys rush, spellcasters stand back and fire" routine.

Fighting advanced spellcasters is what gives the most challenge, exactly because it can't be dealt with by just trying to hack down the opposition. But part of the issue is also that you can rest pretty much anywhere, so these "barebones" encounters don't matter as you can take them on individually after resting, rather than making them work as gradual difficulty building. I mean, imagine having to go through the entire dungeon in one go. Then even these "trash mobs" and "lazy combat encounters" would build up the challenge. Especially if you were not to scout them out beforehand (thereby increasing the importance of stealth classes).

 

[Lemming42]

The better player you are, the fewer problems are "unexpected". It is a game I spent an ungodly amount of time on, and I wish this exact game allowed me to automate the combat - because winning on hard difficulty tends to require conscientiousness (unless you have lasers + hacking), and I don't want to go through the same fight with a similar ship design over and over again. I noticed the best players tend to pause combat every second or so, so some winning strategies almost reduce this game to being turn-based.

It works in FTL since there's always something for the player to do even in fights where the player ship outranks the enemy and the battle can be won by just setting your weapons to auto-fire at the enemy's shields. Boarders, fires, hull breaches, system failures, possible power allocation issues, drone attacks, etc. There's no deadweight encounters in FTL and every decision you make (including whether or not to fight in the first place) is consequential, so RTWP there becomes a system through which to pause at crucial moments and issue orders, as opposed to the role it usually plays in IE games which is to pause only when the friendly AI spazzes out or you stumble upon the rare battle that can't be won by either doing nothing or using standard cheap RTS tactics (kiting etc).

FTL also obviously has dire consequences for any misstep, which keeps the player engaged, while the consequence for failure in IE games is just having to click the rest icon.

Fighting advanced spellcasters is what gives the most challenge, exactly because it can't be dealt with by just trying to hack down the opposition. But part of the issue is also that you can rest pretty much anywhere, so these "barebones" encounters don't matter as you can take them on individually after resting, rather than making them work as gradual difficulty building. I mean, imagine having to go through the entire dungeon in one go. Then even these "trash mobs" and "lazy combat encounters" would build up the challenge. Especially if you were not to scout them out beforehand (thereby increasing the importance of stealth classes).

It's doubly confusing because Warcraft and Command & Conquer already did that with the levels where you have no base and instead have to lead a premade party through an indoor dungeon (plus the commando/Tanya levels). Myth: The Fallen Lords did it a year earlier than BG too. In both games you can see the tension created by losing a single unit. The approach in the IE games is so bafflingly bad compared to what already existed that I genuinely don't get what they were thinking; if they started out developing an RTS then you'd think they'd have laid a better groundwork.

The part I can't get my head around is why they thought combat should be so inconsequential and so frequent, even putting aside RTWP for a minute. Like imagine playing something like Fallout and thinking it'd be improved if the player was attacked every ten steps by large groups of nameless, identical enemies who are no match and drop near-worthless loot. Even if the game was intended as a pure dungeon crawler it'd be a questionable approach, but considering that BG2 is meant to be the usual "epic" BioWare story-driven stuff, it's even more jarring.

 

[Joggerino]

Bumping this because I'm trying to replay BG2 and I just fucking hate it, to the point where I think I'll give up within the hour. It's literally just a shitty RTS. As a kid you can at least tolerate it because you know it won't be long until you get to feel big and clever by being the usual BioWare Mary Sue protagonist when your companions start fawning over you, but as an adult who thinks the writing is pretty dumb, I'm just left with this dogshit combat.

The interview in the OP says it all - it was a bad idea thought up by a complete dolt who somehow found controlling his party in the Gold Box to be too challenging (what???), and felt that fucking Warcraft might represent the future of cRPGs. Jesus Christ. I love how this abominable system is paired with a complete lack of care or skill when it comes to encounter design, just mobs of idiot enemies waiting to throw themselves to their deaths. It's boring as fuck and pausing almost feels like cheating because it makes an already-easy game utterly trivial. How they thought this was a way to "bring forward" the Gold Box games is beyond me. It's like they (correctly) realised that fighting endless large mobs of enemies wasn't fun, but instead of taking the obvious route of improving the variety and quality of combat encounters, they thought "hey wouldn't it be great if there were still shitty trash mobs, except the game just played itself while the player sits there masturbating, occasionally clicking a spell, and watching colours fly around on the screen".

It's a vicious circle - the game "has" to be RTWP because it's so combat-heavy and the encounter design so shockingly lazy that it'd be unimaginably tedious to deal with in TB, but the encounter design "has" to be a shitty boring slog because the game uses RTWP and therefore anything less than constant boring fighting against ill-thought-out enemies would make the game have almost no gameplay since combat is over so fast. Fuck BioWare.

Awful idea that was botched from the start and whose time has long since passed. I love the story about Josh Sawyer desperately fighting against reality as the other PoE2 devs pleaded with him to let them put a shitty hack-job TB mode in to give the game a snowball's chance in hell of being remotely enjoyable (which it's not). With BG3's critical success, Sawyer's utter humiliation, and Owlcat seeing the light with Rogue Trader, hopefully we've seen the back of RTWP. As for Sawyer, he should be cursed by a genie to live his actual real life in turn based mode forever. He should be forced to use up all his movement points and then watch, frozen in place, as I approach him for an almighty - and decades overdue - kick to the nuts.

I see you got filtered hard. Can't make up for shit taste, go play your TB slop instead.

 

[behold_a_man]

It works in FTL since there's always something for the player to do even in fights where the player ship outranks the enemy and the battle can be won by just setting your weapons to auto-fire at the enemy's shields.

Sure, it works - but wouldn't it work in turn-based mode either?
One can argue that the game would become slower - but the developers did not allow players to speed up combat, so time was probably not of the essence for the developers.
I think that what makes FTL special are forms of emergent gameplay that wouldn't make sense to implement in turn-based mode - like healing all crew members at once or hacking a ship with defense drones. The thing is, all of them require some sort of discretization of time - that is, pausing the game every several frames.
On the other hand, turn-based mode would allow to minimize the amount of blunders during the game - like not taking down shields before an incoming ion pulse or handling situations with multiple boarders and broken crucial systems. There are quite a few situations requiring constant pausing to be handled properly.

I think that real-time with pause barely has any edge over turn-based mode without automation.

 

[Lemming42]

I think that what makes FTL special are forms of emergent gameplay that wouldn't make sense to implement in turn-based mode - like healing all crew members at once or hacking a ship with defense drones. The thing is, all of them require some sort of discretization of time - that is, pausing the game every several frames.

That's what I'm getting at, I think - FTL is built around a lot of things happening simultaneously with the player having exact control over when and where things happen, allowing for things like bringing enemy shields down and getting crucial shots in during the short window of time before they're raised again, or for shots to collide with enemy drones in mid-air, or turning off your own oxygen as a gamble to get power to other systems.

It's hard to imagine how that'd translate into turn-based mode. Even weapons fire is built around real-time in FTL, like having your laser charged but holding off on firing until a prime opportunity presents itself. There are cooldowns and charging times on weapons and teleporters but not in a way where I think it could be recreated in a turn-based format, use of those things is designed with split-second decision-making in mind, like teleporting out of an enemy ship half a second before it explodes or firing right as you see the enemy weapons come online.

With BG on the other hand you could very easily make it turn-based without losing any core gameplay mechanics but, like with PoE2 and the Pathfinder games, doing so would reveal the combat as being boring and simplistic with not much going on for anyone other than spellcasters, and would also cripple the game due to the devs' bizarre decision to make combat simultaneously ultra-frequent and yet zero-stakes.

 

[behold_a_man]

That's what I'm getting at, I think - FTL is built around a lot of things happening simultaneously with the player having exact control over when and where things happen, allowing for things like bringing enemy shields down and getting crucial shots in during the short window of time before they're raised again, or for shots to collide with enemy drones in mid-air, or turning off your own oxygen as a gamble to get power to other systems.

It's hard to imagine how that'd translate into turn-based mode. Even weapons fire is built around real-time in FTL, like having your laser charged but holding off on firing until a prime opportunity presents itself. There are cooldowns and charging times on weapons and teleporters but not in a way where I think it could be recreated in a turn-based format, use of those things is designed with split-second decision-making in mind, like teleporting out of an enemy ship half a second before it explodes or firing right as you see the enemy weapons come online.

I'm still not convinced. I saw only two RPGs with better than passable combat in real-time with pause: FTL and DA:O. While I think I know why I liked DA:O, I don't know why FTL was so good; was it thanks to the RTwP, despite it, or it could have been done in both ways with similar quality? Especially given that I never saw anyone replicating it successfully.

Translating FTL into turn-based would not be so hard; reducing boredom would be. The game is way simpler if you constantly pause and analyze, and it effectively boils down to turn-based, but it's not very entertaining. And moving the game from that form to pure turn-based shouldn't be hard either - make any action taking some part of a second a turn, and then only speed up the game.
This guy (probably one of the few people knowing the game better than its devs) showed quite a few of his tricks for beating the game in very odd ways, for example, here:

And he paused the game every few frames. Note that taking down only a flagship in that way may take more than an hour.

 

[Vic]

I saw only two RPGs with better than passable combat in real-time with pause: FTL (?????) and DA:O.

 

[Harthwain]

The part I can't get my head around is why they thought combat should be so inconsequential and so frequent, even putting aside RTWP for a minute. Like imagine playing something like Fallout and thinking it'd be improved if the player was attacked every ten steps by large groups of nameless, identical enemies who are no match and drop near-worthless loot.

Obviously because it's an RPG.

Even if the game was intended as a pure dungeon crawler it'd be a questionable approach, but considering that BG2 is meant to be the usual "epic" BioWare story-driven stuff, it's even more jarring.

From my own experience I can't say I had any issues with the kind of foes I was facing as they were replaced both in terms of theme and level as locations changed. The game could certainly benefit more from better encounter design as well as rethinking some in-game features (such as allowing free resting everywhere), but even an epic story needs mobs that aren't legendary enemies (on the level of vampires, lichs or dragons). It is also less of an issue when fights with trash mobs are resolved quickly. Another good thing is that you do get to explore the world and meet NPCs going about their daily lives, which provides nice breaks between encounters. This is something I liked a lot.

 

[Dadd]

Pause with real-time (e.g. WazHack) would be better than RTwP for intelligent RPGs

 

[Quillon]

only like 1 in 50 unreleased RPGs will be RTwP, what's this thread fo...ah shit its a codex circlejerk fest

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

RPGcodex is the best rpg I've played in years.

Can't be. There's no combat, just dialog. If I'm understanding the Disco Elysium thread correctly that means the Codex is a CYOA or perhaps a visual novel.

Anybody who reads the threads here take psychic damage. It's also unavoidable true damage.

Is that why I have a headache atm? Anyone recall the “Quick” command in goldbox? Boy, it works and sometimes with the most horrible results. You can spacebar or w/e out of it. I always thought that was also a partial inspiration to RTWP. You don’t see many games with the quick combat from Wizard’s Crown/Eternal dagger. I also recall the timer TBT combat in the AOL Neverwinter nights. And ultima 3-5 I believe. Couldn’t see the timer in ultima. It’d just PASS you for sitting on yer arse. I’d use z-stats to pause if I had to leave the room.