(Don't) Give me that old time RPG combat

I agree with you, danielje.
All the article basically says is that it won't be menu based combat. And that one is pretty much given, so the the point in writing that article in the first place is probably just to educate people. Maybe.

But please - OMFG. PLEASE! - do format your postings.
Almost each sentence a different paragraph is incredibly painful to the eyes to read. Almost as bad as no line breaks at all ;)

Or we should have some better forum styles to limit the width of postings in general...
 
Upped it from $115 to $165, 'cause I have faith in Mr. Avellone.

And yeah, I want to sort of compensate somehow their recent layoffs...
 
Basing a combat system on realtime means there's less time to react and think. Not enough time to check where all the enemies are at, no time to check your inventory for the various junk that might help you in winning the encounter, no time to monitor what your companions are doing.

That's a significant factor in difficulty. Experienced players will know what the best option in a given time is when playing realtime. New players won't, will make the wrong choices and die. That's why realtime games are easier - to compensate for the added difficulty of not having unlimited time.

With turn-based the player has as much time as is needed - an inexperienced player will take more time per turn to think things over. An experienced player will spend more time per turn in difficult encounters.

So what I'm saying is that turn-based combat allows for more difficulty and more depth.

I really like action-based systems though. Action-based systems are great for when you don't need to pay a lot of attention aside from giving out general orders and see it play out. In Fallout Tactics I often switched between TB and realtime, depending on the difficulty of the encounter. However with realtime the AI has to do more of the micromanagement work and not be stupid.
 
Strange for me but I just listened sea's advice and have skipped that article entirely.

From what I noticed by reading OP's post, this is again that moot point about modernizing game by making it, or twitch based or console friendly or "more fun" by "streamlining it" for "wider funbase". All perfectly logical, but wrong answers for this particular case. imo

There is a boxing and there is a chess. They are both sports. But they have in common just one thing - breathing. Point is, RT is good, but this is not RT game, or at least it shouldn't be. At best, FOT gameplay could be good for me, if I have an option to choose which type of play I like at that moment, but that's more or less all that I would like to see as "improvement" over F1/F2 games. It's not a matter of conservatism vs technology or something like it - it's the way I would like to play this game. Period.

I don't have doubt that inxile will choose what is right. Frankly, I'm more worried about they slide from right approach by listening too many "fan" opinions. Insert here joke about fies and who know the best.

In this case, being firm in decision what should be done is a right approach.
 
I am the only one not to understand anything about this article ?
He says he wants a wizardry 8 combat system, but W8 is 100% menu driven, it's amost exactly the same as in Wasteland.
I really don't understand.
OoPs forgot W8 have kind of "RT option" but it was a bit like in Fallout tactics exccept even less people used it (i never used it and know nobody who used it, moreover it was still menu driven anyway).
An improved menu driven combat system for W2 would be very fine for me (you can still tweak it to take Action point into consideration)
 
Re: formatted 3/31/2012

danielje said:
Lets face it, you don't compare games like Wasteland and Fallout. Wasteland inspired Fallout, do you take a step backwards at this point and say to yourself. "Hey, you know we moved forward from technological limitations and innovated new, wildly popular styles? Lets forget about that, and make something very obscure and not user friendly. You know, lets make something super literary, without very many graphics. You know, a flashy border maybe, some Hi - Res combat face cards that show the enemy types. Yes, I've decided guys, lets make a HD 1980s Reboot game!"
Click to expand...
Why not?

I know what you mean and I somewhat agree. There is no reason NOT to use new technology.

But sometimes a design is a well that. Design. Replacing it is not "upgrading" it or improving it. That is what happend from Fallout 1/2 to Fallout 3 where they replaced one design with another one - and if you ask me a shittier one.

Magic the Gathering is still basically the same kind of "game" as it was years ago on the PC. Graphics changed. Visuals changed. The cards look better. The menues are more interesting. But the "design" is in its core still the same.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_ktaczuxJg[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wGURzneEi0[/youtube]

Honestly though? If they go with Fallout 1/2 design. I will not complain. I like Fallout enough.

But saying that a "design" like wasteland can no tbe upgraded is not right I think.
 
VRaptor117 said:
You know how you solve this problem? Options. Give me turn based combat, realtime with AP (like FOT), and for the new people, yeah, let them have their fully realtime combat.

Seriously, if they try to force one combat system they are only going to drive people away, instead bringing more people in.
Click to expand...

They aren't worrying about "driving people away". If you want RT option, you are going to be dissapointed
 
I was confused by the reference to phase-based combat, which he seems to equate to real time with cooldown timers. But a cooldown system in itself doesn't change real time into anything else (and although I suppose they probably exist I don't know of a real time game with true turn divisions - the Infinity Engine allows for arbitrary pausing and movement, for instance). With the Codex definition, phase-based combat means division of order decision and execution. In wargame design, it would mean division of different types of activities, like missile, mêlée, movement, reaction, etc.
 
By the definition I already operated under, Wasteland's WEGO *was* a phase-based system, like, I dunno, more recently...Frozen Synapse?
 
In Wasteland's case, the mechanics are so simple that you could call it phase based or turn based, though the interface suggests phase based.
 
people have completely warped senses of authority.
opinions are simply not for everybody. a formula 1 racer is entitled to opinions about racing, a molecular biologist is not.
why does this guy even get a say on the matter?

people do allocate authority in the wrong places tho, like politicians who ask fishermen about the status of codfish populations in the north atlantic, while marine biologists stand there w their mouths open "um... hello?"
 
Except people who funded this project don't want the "technological advances" of modern games. They want a proper RPG with strategic combat.
 
Real Time combat won't work, no chance. Real time with pause could work but Turn Based is still the best of the bunch in my opinion.
 
I personally prefer RTwP to TB, but when you are doing a sequel to Wasteland with a target audience explicitely being fans of the first game, it's beyond me why you would integrate anything else than phase or turn-based. More options doesn't mean said options will be well integrated. See Tactics, I found neither the real-time (too chaotic) or the turn-based (slooow) convincing. Ditching one to focus on the other would have been better imo.
 
maximaz said:
Except people who funded this project don't want the "technological advances" of modern games. They want a proper RPG with strategic combat.
Click to expand...

yes. so if everyone who's interested in this game allready knows this, it would - in theory - have cost the author of that article very little effort to actually find this out, and have it clarified, before he wrote a whole article about it, making an ass of himself :D

my point was, you see this all the time, in all fascets of society - people who would very much like to have a say in a matter - without doing anywhere near the adequate research. these people not only get a word in - but they are granted authority on the issues they arent even familiarized with.
 
KOTOR was turned based...

KOTOR was in essence turn based. I really liked that queuing system.... That was a very popular series, too.

I can imagine a combat system where there was a pause before attack to queue and then default attack if no actions were queued. Maybe set triggers if party health gets too low to pause... stuff like that.
 
Crni Vuk said:
Kotor is just real time with pause.
Click to expand...

I disagree, you could queue attacks and pause after your queues were empty... which made it much closer to turn based then DA:O which really was real-time with pause. There was no real twitch factor except when you needed to move, but that didn't matter much because most combat was in your face light sabers.
 
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