Both options please. Turn based takes too long for me and I have little interest in learning a complex combat system, I’m mostly there for the story :)
Unfortunately Pillars 2 famously undersold, which is a massive disappointment for me personally, especially given they made a fantastic turn-based mode and a very enjoyable RTwP mode out of the box. They are “re-evaluating” the franchise before they attempt a third entry. sigh
There are some +3 weapons in BG1EE, although very rare. The majority of them are all in Durlag’s Tower. You can also get a +3 Two-hander very early on in the game, but it is a cursed berserker sword. I might even say there are too many cursed items.
The very best weapons are used by Drizzt though, +5 Scimitar…good luck killing him though.
And Tower of Time IIRC.
It’s just a matter of efficient planning. You have to know where he is so you can avoid going there until you’re ready, but from there it’s straitghtforward to kill and rob the self-righteous cliche.
Have I mentioned that my favorite BG runs were always when playing evil?
I think RTwP has a lot of room for improvement. It’s fine for having the battles just pass you by, but your awareness of what’s actually going on at any one time is minimal. It’s really ideal for a party of just one or two people – any more than that and you can’t keep up with the information. It’s also really built on reloads. Since it’s so easy to just let things play out as is, you only really start paying attention to a battle after you’ve already lost it.
My ideas for improving it:
- Focus and zoom in on dangerous enemies, highlighting their danger level. The game needs to send a strong signal that this isn’t a fight you can sleep through before it actually happens.
- Allow for a rewind feature, letting you replay the same segment of the battle multiple times from multiple angles. That way, you can figure out exactly what happened if you want to, including keeping track of multiple groups of fighters. This makes it more like the WeGo system, without the inability to control the moment-to-moment gameplay that WeGo has.
DoS2 has the perfect RPG combat system, in my opinion. If they iterate on this for Baldur’s Gate 3 I will be very happy.
I’m playing Pillars of Eternity (the first one) right now, and I’m enjoying it a lot. However, I am frequently annoyed at the combat. In particular, when you get into a big fight and everyone just kind of swarms and I have no idea what’s happening and I hope the AI scripts can keep my crew alive. I guess that’s realistic, but I want to play a strategy game. I want to make decisions for my characters in difficult fights. I want to know when my team gets hit with a status effect. It’s just a big swarm of shit flying around, and the combat log truncates after like 50 lines so I can’t even pause and scroll back to see what happened.
PoE’s problem with real-time combat is mostly that their UI is awful. The combat also has the typical “everyone unload your biggest attack at battle start!” problem as well as too many bad debuff spells, but by far it’s just the UI. I’m really supposed to decide whether to try to interrupt the enemy spell by looking at an unnamed 8x8 circle icon? Seriously?
That’s fine if they don’t try and balance for both. Turn based is the real game with difficulty levels and real time is the easy mode for people who just want to play through.
We have definitive proof that D&D can be done turn based on the PC and be awesome, so if they come out and say ‘turn based just doesn’t work in a video game’ again like they did with BG, Pathfinder, and so on I am going to be very disappointed.
Numenamana has turn-based combat, though, which is what matters.
I thought it had moved on to “people don’t like turn-based games, it’s too old”, which plenty of people say, along with “I don’t want this cheap pixel isometric crap” and “why are there so many spells that don’t do damage?”. Game design is probably a depressing job.
Woops, you’re right. Shows you how far I made it into that game. But yeah, you’re very right: they did have their crazily over described “Crisis” system to handle multi-roll problem-solving, including fights.
I just lump all that garbage together under ‘it doesn’t work.’
I am not militantly against RTwP. I think it can work, theoretically anyways, but I am not sure I have ever seen an instance where I didn’t wish for pure turn based. I think one of my major issues is that the animations rarely match up to the actions. So you get a lot of standing around and it’s very hard to tell who is doing what and why they are just standing around waiting for their next turn when it’s all real time.
I think the most interesting and slightly depressing stat about Numenera (not having got much further myself) is the drop off between the first two achievements in the game.
Yeah. In principle I’m very interested in a text heavy philosophical journey into magical mysteries via sick scifantasy combat and weird out NPC friends… But truth be told I just don’t have the fuckin time to read all that shit right now.
It doesn’t help that it’s just trying to imitate another older game, rather than trying something truly new.
Eh, I’m a total sucker for nostalgia. I mean shit, I’m passionately following the BG3 thread on an actual video game FORUM in 2020 for goodness sake
I think a sequel wins out in this case. I’d much rather have something honestly telling me it’s a continuation of the exact style of the previous thing, rather than trying to conjure up everything the first thing did in a generically different unlicensed environment. For one thing, a true sequel, given the creative power involved, would have probably taken them in a very different direction, with different themes to avoid a retread, whereas the no-frills copycat keeps trying to prove its worth by showcasing the same themes.
I suspect Wizards of the Coast’s caginess and Monte Cook Games’ interest in breaking into the digital space had a lot more to do with that decision than any kind of creative bankruptcy on the part of the creators.
I mean, not to say that they don’t suffer from at least a little of that :-)