Game News Torment Kickstarter Update #25: Combat System Vote!

[Monty]

Why all the talk of trash mobs? They have clearly indicated that there will be no trash mobs in Torment, only carefully planned encounters. So the talk of rtwp being better for trash mobs is pointless.

 

[Balor]

Alright Bro.

turn

Bro, I don't know about what you just wrote, but I want to hear your thoughts on how to make either of the systems good. See, you said:

Anyone saying neither system can be good lacks imagination

Surely, that means that with this imagination thing you're talking about anything can be good, no? Please, share with us your imagination.

Until then, let's just file it under "think positive", huh?

I just think it is naive for anyone to say because I have or have not enjoyed a particular style of gameplay in the past I am going to be bitterly opposed to any future incarnations because they clearly can't be good. The Codex often stinks of this mentality. I enjoyed ToEE as much as I enjoyed the IE games. Both were fun as they existed, but I don't think it is a leap of imagination to say both systems can and should be improved. Honestly for me arcanum had the right idea executed poorly. I think a merger of both systems would be best. Have an attack order established during real-time which all of the background math is operating under, but let your default attack operate when executing in real-time unless you queue some actions that can be interrupted at anytime. This would let you quickly resolve any buffing turns, trash mobs, or mopping up the last couple enemies. As I've said earlier I actually do think trash mobs are useful if you're focused on having an overall fun combat experience. Combat should have variety of challenge, and I think easy encounters help reinforce a sense of progression, and having progressive difficulty as you navigate deeper into a dungeon is consistent with traditional dungeon design in many previous crpgs. Let your party operate under AI for certain conditions as well so a party member, as an example, can immediately cure/heal a party member depending on a set priority as far as interrupting queued orders. These abilities would let you have a better sense of managing combat without letting it deteriorate into chaos. When you enter pause mode though have a fully functional turn-based mode. It can all operate on a grid that you can overlay (and could set waypoints similar to xcom that could operate in real-time as well) and would let you have the precision control needed for tougher encounters. Finally let the enemy AI operate under a set of progressively worse best options which is randomly determined with modifiers. The option chosen could even be tied into a challenge rating or intelligence stat for each enemy that would be consistent with the stats of the enemy (e.g. the dumb orc's best move is to interrupt the spellcaster but because of a low intelligence modifier they continue to engage the fighter).

Well, RTwP is cruicial if we are talking about an indeth simlation of reality. Again, 7.62 is an excellent example of this: It is basically TB with a turn length of 0.01 sec, heh.
However, 'end turn' (or pause) is only activated if something of note happends. (New enemy sighted, merc run out of orders, etc) You can queue orders, set orders like "shoot to kill", to make things less hectic.
What it does, it opens enless tactical opportunities, including stuff you can NEVER have in 'classic' TB like simultaneous attacks, dodging projectiles (like grenades), etc.
But this is only feasible if you apply a BUTTLOAD of polish. And why should one do that, if the game is not about combat?

 

[Longshanks]

I'm like RTwP more than most in the Codex, in fact i don't prefer TB on principle as many do here. And yet, i disagree with what you wrote. What inXile wrote is spot on. RTwP strength are others.
Read again what you wrote. The only way for RTwP to come close to TB is to literary pause every other second. That's the main reason many Codexers hated IE combat. Because they played it in the way you propose, trying to mimic TB gameplay as much as possible. Quess what? RTwP is unfun played that way, and it's no surprising. It turns into poor man's TB. If you want to play it that way, go TB from the start.

And yet excluding planescape I would disagree on whether the combat was fun. I think it was appropriate for the encounter designs because for most of the IE games my level of micromanagement was tuned to the difficultly of the encounter. I would argue that turn-based would not have been as fun for any of the BG or IWD titles because of the trash mobs. Maybe what I really want is turn-based combat with only well-designed encounters because resolving combat against the 20th mob of skeletons quickly becomes tedious. Is that really the correct course though? Trash mobs have their usefulness too. Wiping out the village of goblins with relative ease when you initially struggled with a couple of them at level 1 gives you a sense of achievment and power. Does a good RPG require a certain gameplay length? Are trash mobs essential for getting that gameplay length? If so, do I really want to slog through a bunch of encounters with TB? Maybe past iterations of RTwP have been "poor man's TB", but that doesn't mean it can't be achieved with the same sense of tactical depth and reactivity now.

Trash mobs are more necessary with RTWP than TB as the combat is over more quickly and tends to the more simplistic. Why? Because you've gone with RTWP over TB for a reason, and that reason is: players want combat to be fast and "visceral", which means as few pauses as possible. As few pauses as possible means simplistic often auto-pilot combat. If a designer were not worried about limiting the number of pauses, then you may as well go with TB.

In turn based you have to take in account what your opponent will do on his turn since you are unable to react until it is finished. in RTwP, you are able to react immediately to anything that happens.

Again this is a difference, but I just am not convinced that one or the other requires more "thoughtfulness". I think them saying it allows more thoughtful action is a bit abstract.

Not requires necessarily, but allows for, and it's not abstract at all it's a fundamental advantage of the system. And that's not to say "thoughtfulness" or in encounter planning is something you have to have, but TBC is objectively better for this than RTWP. The latter outdoes TBC in bringing a more frenetic, reaction based gameplay.

 

[Infinitron]

Lots of fallacies in the above post. Strictly speaking, traditional IE-style RTwP combat isn't very "visceral" and it often feels slow and even boring because it's heavily based on auto-attacks with little player input. This was a common complaint about Dragon Age, for instance, which is why they added AWESUM animations in the sequel to make it feel pseudo-actiony.

 

[janjetina]

Trash encounters are never necessary. They are a definition of tedium. I'd like to resolve them in hand-to-hand combat with the designer(s) who implemented them. Barring that, even the 'skip combat' button is preferable to repetitive mundane trash encounter experience. If someone is using 'the system is better suited for trash encounters' as an argument in favour of his system, he should be booted out of the game industry. Unfortunately, there are too many trash encounter afficionados among game designers and players. Possible correlation with the assburgers should be closely examined.

Thankfully Torment will not have trash encounters.

 

[Infinitron]

Depends how you define "trash encounters". IMO fighting off hordes of low level critters is an essential part of the traditional low level RPG experience. I prefer to distinguish between "filler combat", which is always bad, and "trash mobs", which used properly and in moderation can be a tactical challenge.

 

[Longshanks]

Lots of fallacies in the above post. Strictly speaking, traditional IE-style RTwP combat isn't very "visceral" and it often feels slow and even boring because it's heavily based on auto-attacks with little player input. This was a common complaint about Dragon Age, for instance, which is why they added AWESUM animations in the sequel to make it feel pseudo-actiony.

I may have not used the right word there. With "visceral" I meant more in terms of a lot happening on the screen at once and the player needing to react, and even if not, to be able to view a full-scale fight going on around them. This is a lot cooler and, at least on the surface, more exciting than discrete turns.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Don't think you can avoid trash combat in an open world and/or non-combat build allowing game unless you implement a good fleeing/negotiation system. In AoD, the game without trash combat, you have a possible encounter in the second city with three hobos who attack you with shovels even if you're a famous arena champion. Even if they hadn't realized that, they should've after you've dispatched two of them in five seconds, but the last one still happily carries one. It probably isn't a trash encounter if you head straight for it at game start, or if you're a non-combat character, but the rest of the time it sure is.

 

[Infinitron]

Sure, it's more visually impressive. Thing is, action games and action-RPGs are even moreso, which is why classic RTwP RPGs are something of an endangered species even as turn-based makes a resurgence. They're too hard to do properly, and the niche of players who want a pseudo RTS-like experience in their RPGs and prefer it over action-RPGs is pretty small. That might change if PE is a huge hit, though.

 

[janjetina]

Depends how you define "trash encounters". IMO fighting off hordes of low level critters is an essential part of the traditional low level RPG experience. I prefer to distinguish between "filler combat", which is always bad, and "trash mobs", which used properly and in moderation can be a tactical challenge.

There is no clear cutoff definition (if it was, trash encounters probably wouldn't exist), but in my opinion the 'trash score' of an encounter goes up if:

1 - it is not tactically challenging - this changes according to the level of the party - what a party at level 1 finds challenging is not what the party of level 10 finds challenging
solution: enemies should attempt to flee the hopeless situation or not engage the party that is much stronger than them in the first place
2 - if it is repetitive - even good encounters can become boring through repetiition, once optimal tacitics is discovered and the player is only going through the motions
3 - if the enemies are generic, which facilitates repetitiveness
4- if the encounter does not tie into the story (so random encounters should be held to higher standards of (1), (2) and (3) than the encounters that affect the game world)

 

[Scruffy]

The problem with turn based is that it can break up the flow of the game. It is a very artificial solution, which can break the immersion.

Ugh....these immersion faggots need a good beheading.

truly
how is stopping time and then start it again less immersion breaking than switching to turn based?
and i still don't understand the difference between "immersion" and "larping".

 

[Scruffy]

I flagged the RTwP idea as "inappropriate", maybe this will help!

 

[hiver]

its not about immersion per se.

Its about the specific feeling of immersion they got from a specific system - which they cannot find in a completely different system - who most of them falsely understand as some form of badly done RTwP system.

 

[Turok]

TP don't sell, RTwP sell.

TP bring slow combat, lot of people don´t want spend all the time on fights.

 

[hiver]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera/posts

 

[AstroZombie]

TP don't sell, RTwP sell.

TP bring slow combat, lot of people don´t want spend all the time on fights.

 

[fanta]

I suggest every time a RT system with optional auto pause is proposed as essentially equivalent to TB, counter-propose a TB system with optional auto turn ending as equivalent to RT. Say 0.75 seconds auto ending turns for that dynamic, visceral real time experience.

 

[Korron]

Why all the talk of trash mobs? They have clearly indicated that there will be no trash mobs in Torment, only carefully planned encounters. So the talk of rtwp being better for trash mobs is pointless.

That's true but how far can carefully planned encounters actually take you gameplay wise? Tim Schafer stated in one of the backer videos that he thinks there is a certain value proposition as far as gameplay length is concerned for people that backed his game. Does that hold true for RPGs as well? As shorter games have come out in the recent past I've certainly learned to appreciate short but sweet experiences. I do wonder what our expectations are for a game that is a spiritual successor to games of epic size and length, and can a developer on a small budget manage to accomplish that size and only have planned encounters? WL2 is estimated at 25 hours without a stated focus of carefully designed encounters, which is a bit smaller in size than a lot of classic rpgs. They may beta test T:ToN and find people aren't happy with the length if they focus this way. Which brings me to:

In AoD, the game without trash combat

I haven't played the demos and I'm not sure how the team is resolving the issues now, but I vaguely remember some of the criticism from the initial demo release was that the game was too short because you rapidly transition from meaningful encounter to meaningful encounter without exploring the cities. Should that be a concern with Torment as well?

 

[tuluse]

PS:T wasn't an epic length RPG like BG2 was. It's about a 20-30 hour experience I think.

 

[Roguey]

I haven't played the demos and I'm not sure how the team is resolving the issues now, but I vaguely remember some of the criticism from the initial demo release was that the game was too short because you rapidly transition from meaningful encounter to meaningful encounter without exploring the cities. Should that be a concern with Torment as well?

No.

I expect something like Sigil minus the Hive Thugs.

 

[Smejki]

RTwP'd to piss Dex. But in fact I don't care. Torment isn't played for combat so whatever. Just make it good. With all the exp these guys have tt can't end up worse than PS:T.

 

[taxalot]

I'm in for Turn Based, but as it was said many times already, Torment isn't a combat game. If I disapprove of the combat system and the fights annoy me, I can switch the difficulty level so as to not be bothered by these.

Which I will not do if it's turn based, because that thing is strangely addictive.

 

[Scruffy]

over 200 votes up for TB, who would have thought...

 

[KickAss]

My bet is that both combat types will be in, no matter how the votes go..

 

[aVENGER]

Having two combat modes would be a bad choice. It didn't work out so well for Arcanum and Fallout: Tactics.

They should focus on one mode turn-based and make it as good as they can.