It’s not really that hard to make turn-based combat fast when trivial. In a lot of Wasteland 2 fights I spend maybe 3 (character, not party) turns shooting dudes for a total time investment of like 20-30 seconds and then I’m done. PoE’s approach isn’t any faster when you factor in waiting for combat to turn back off so I can loot and go back into scout mode, etc. And I don’t care that much about the combat in that game either but that’s because it dissolves into a giant clusterfuck that I have to just sort of skate across and occasionally pick powers. If it were easier to manage, it would be a lot easier to make interesting without making it dominate your experience of the game.
I hope this is more unbalanced and chaotic than Pillars.
I didn’t like the combat either, or rather, I didn’t love it. Turn-based or GTFO. That said, this is a game I will buy for sure. PoE was a good game. This will be a good game.
Is this Unity again?
Yeah, 99% probability of them using the PoE engine and system, and the engine was Unity.
About the combat, I’m playing Wasteland 2, I played PoE a few weeks ago, and I prefer W2. It isn’t perfect, in fact after 30 hours it’s starting to be repetitive, but even then I prefer it. So yeah, I think it prefer too turn based combat. in fact, I think PoE is better than W2 is several areas (worldbuilding, art and graphics, music, characters) but in the end both are “old school rpgs” which is code for “rpgs with a focus on combat, which is party-based”, and because I like W2 combat more, I’m liking W2 more overall.
I agree on this. I didn’t care much for the combat in Pillars, which I’ve just played a bit and will return to when time permits, but I think it delivered on what was promised on the systems.
I generally prefer TB over RTWP, but TB can really turn into a slog coughShadowruncough.
Agreed. I generally prefer a solid turn-based system (Temple of Elemental Evil very faithful adaptation of the 3rd edition DND being my favorite) but I have to say the peeks and valleys of “fun vs. frustrating” tend to be wider in a rtwp system - there are moments when that is just amazing fun; when your paused/planned strategy just clicks and executes flawlessly, a high you simply can’t ever have when you are playing turn-based.
On the other hand, rtwp can be more frustrating due to the chaos of large fights making it harder to follow what’s happening, or even just the idea of not being able to watch a cool spell you selected because half-way through casting it your fighter on the other side of the screen just died and you have figure out WTF just happened.
Not sure Shadowrun is a fair example of turn-based combat, I thought it was the exception in the genera. The combat in that game, while well done for the most part is cumbersome; staying in turn based mode even when no enemies are around, trying to coordinate between real world and hacking combat, lack of map rotation, etc. In games like Wasteland 2 I can get through the random fights pretty quickly because you start close and generally can kill enemies quickly. In Divinity, there is no random combat, so sometimes you can avoid small fights or plow through them quickly because you have an advantage and can move in quickly. Shadowrun is the only TB game I remember quitting because of tedious combat. Real-time plausible on the other hand, I quit every time (I do plan to go back to PoE soon though).
It isn’t like RTwP is inherently bad. I liked a lot in some modern tactical combat games, from Brigade E5 and 7.62mm to Frozen Synapse or Doorkickers. In PoE it’s more the way the combat in general was designed, with an average length of the combat encounters too high, too many filler combat encounters, systems that inherently made you play in a same-y way (like per encounter abilities), stat system I didn’t like it, lack of options like automatic variable slow down of time depending of what’s happening, fixed camera that sometimes was pain in the ass, being a fantasy medieval setting imo also detracted (relative positioning is important, but positioning in the environment not so much), etc.
Huh. Maybe I’m an outlier in that I really enjoyed the combat in PoE; and that was at release before all of the updates and improvements.
I still need to get back in to see the changes and play with the AI scripting.
-Todd
I’ve always considered that a failure in design. The idea of moving to real-time is to allow combats to resolve faster, so they can put more of them in? How about not having shitty time-wasting combat encounters versus giant rats and other pointless stuff, and move towards having less combat, but have it be more meaningful.
Yeah, I hate RtwP overall. I agree with Josh that each encounter should be meaningful. If you want to doll out more experience than those few combat situations allow, then have more rich conversation trees where dwelling deeper can lead to plenty of bonus experience situations (like in Planescape: Torment, which we’ve been playing for the Classic Game Club recently).
My favorite combination of real time and turn-based combat was actually done for Fallout: Tactics. You still use action points, like in the classic RPG, but those action points tick by at a set pace. It works really well in that game, it feels as tactical as turn-based, even though it’s real time.
That actually gets into a parallel topic in that RPG players have historically desired and preferred “trash mobs” and they are part of this genre’s legacy. Jeff Vogel of SpiderWeb software talked about the balance of trash mobs and challenging difficulty spike fights back in 2011:
Observation Two: In an RPG, you have to have some of both sorts of fight.
RPG fans expect a lot of trash to slaughter, so they can be a badass and Conan-like and so they can collect experience to get strong and get new spells and swords and stuff.
The trickier part is understanding the need for tough fights. Very often, players don’t like to be seriously challenged. They hate to lose. They hate to lose repeatedly. Sometimes, the temptation to just give up and have every fight on the default difficulty be easy peasy is overwhelming.
But you still need to have tough fights, for several reasons. A game full of only easy fights against trash is monotonous and dull. The suspension of disbelief in a role-playing game is delicate, and, if a dragon is only as tough as Goblin #0145, it just feels wrong. And because the adrenaline rush of achieving something difficult (be it slaying a demon lord of winning a game of solitaire) is one of the great pleasures of computer games, and you just can’t lose that.
So, you might ask, why don’t I just put in tough fights and really carefully balance them so that everyone can beat them in just a few tries? That brings us to the third observation, which is both subtle and vitally important.
Observation Three: If a fight has any chance of beating the player, there is a percentage of users who will NEVER be able to beat it.
Not saying it is good or bad just that many lower difficulty fights are somewhat of an expectation or desire in the RPG genre. I am sure their are exceptions with some great RPGs with minimal more meaningful/impactful fights too. You can probably blame the concept of leveling.
-Todd
That’s another alternative, but then dungeons would either be largely empty or every room an extended tactical puzzle (but take forever to finish). Or you go the route of Wasteland 2 and just up the the player’s power when optimized properly so many enemies are one or two-shot kills, but that also trivializes a lot of the combat.
I like phased realtime for easy battles; I pause, set everybody to attack, and the AI resolves it. For difficult fights and where it starts to go poorly, I micromanage. Best of both worlds.
In RPGs that are perfectly paced to my rate of learning and desire for difficulty, easy fights give me an opportunity to experiment with different approaches to combat in lower stress environments and a safer place for learning how new enemies work. In Diablo 3, I’m happy every fight isn’t against Elites both for the emotional pacing of high intensity vs. low intensity fights but also because sometimes it’s easier to learn what things in your build are and aren’t working when you’re not staring exclusively at your health bar.
My ideal scenario is a balance of easier and tougher fights with a reason to do as well as possible in easy fights. Roguelikes provide this by carrying over resources from one fight to the next. (Arguably POE provides it via the supply system, though I don’t think this entirely works.) But short that, I still generally prefer when every fight isn’t tough for the above reasons. The problem is some players need more low-key encounters than others because it takes them longer to experiment and learn, so whatever pacing a developer chooses won’t work for everyone. I don’t know what the solution is, but I always burn out on games that are consistently difficult fights in a couple of hours.
Well, some games are about difficult fights, like X-com. RPGs typically are more about exploration and story. There’s room for an X-com with exploration elements too, the ancient game Fallout Tactics did a bit of this, although it fell far short of what I wanted.
I remember it being a pure tactical game?
I remember exploring a vault at one point. It was a very long time ago.
Tyranny will be the last Avellone Obsidian game. :(
Worked as Creative Lead during pre-production and a little during production. Kept getting hauled off for extra Eternity work. ;)