Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides The Turn-Based/Real Time with Pause topic

I can understand the sentiment. However, it is their first game and it was a Kickstarter. Taking that into consideration, I think it'll be a studio to keep our eyes on going forward. If the game does well, budgets will increase, and hopefully we'll see multi and a full 5e license.

I missed the demo window but quite excited for that release as well. Love seeing 5e titles coming !!! Moar plz!

Deadfire was NOT a financial failure. Enough with the hyperbole. Obsidian has said very clarly that they ended up making money on Deadfire. The issue was that sales were a disappointment relative to Obsidian's expectations for the game, including that it was lower than the sales of the first game.

Nobody has yet provided me with any proof that TB combat is what drove D:OS2's sales. It could've been TB, but there are several other factors that differentiate that game from other similar contemporary cRPGs, so claiming TB was the cause is completely spurious. Furthermore, there are plenty of contemporary TB RPGs out there with abysmal sales numbers.

I honestly don't even know how you can claim such nonsense, seeing that Baldur's Gate is considered to be the holy grail of CRPGs, sold millions of copies and put Bioware on the map.

Not to mention that Dragon Age: Origins was marketed as a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate and also sold millions of copies, even more than Original Sin 2, despite it not even having multiplayer.

Also, the new Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Kickstarter is already extremely successful less than one day in. Not surprising, seeing that Pathfinder: Kingmaker sold almost one million copies. It probably would have sold even more if it wasn't so buggy at launch.

That all said, RTwP is probably "financial suicide" in your household, but not in the rest of the world.

The developers of the PoE series were apparently scrambling and looking for answers as to why PoE 2 was severely underperforming. They subsequently tried to "fix" the game by slapping on a turn-based mode and hoped for a resurgence... It changed nothing, because the true problem is the game/series in its entirety.

Turn-based combat also did nothing for Torment: Tides of Numenera. The game still flopped really hard.

^This. So this.
Apparently, when a TB game is successful, its success is only because the game was TB.
But if a TB game is a failure, the game being TB had nothing to do with the failure.

How freakin' amazingly convenient.

you could say the same about RTWP and Kingmaker
Sometimes a good game is good, sometimes a bad game is bad.
Youd think Kingmaker had sold worse if it were TB?
Youd think Tides wouldve sold better if it was RTWP?

We will get to find out, because Owlcat just announced that it's doing a turn based mode for Wrath of the Righteous, and it's not even a stretch or social goal, because they have already started making it.

Below is the Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Kickstarter post with details.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/owlcatgames/pathfinder-wrath-of-the-righteous/posts/2755596

Side note its triggered a spike in backers at a time that had seen things slow down, Mawahahaha.

realy?
hahaha, this is odd!
Owlcat said they didnt plan on that
but they got huge success and the modder that made the mod for PFK doesnt want to continue it (because he constantly has to upate it and doesnt get paid) so its a realy cool move by them.

Tbh, Owlcat is ag reat developer and the Wrath fo the Righteous Kickstarter is proving that quite a bit,t hey got a firm grasp on what their community wants and what constitutes a good game

Owlcat Game went full traitor refunded and called the police!

In truth, it's a huge waste of money they should have stuck with RTWP since there is no way both combat systems will be equally good and I say that as someone who hopes BG3 is exclusively turn-based.

how can you be mad about whats literaly the best of both worlds.
Also they are basing it off the mod...

I am not mad, I just don't like companies waste time and money trying to please everyone which is simply impossible.

Well, the bottom line is that Owlcat has pulled the rug out from under developers being able to hide behind the lame excuse that having both will be too much cost/work. If Owlcat, a very small indie studio, can do it, others can do it too - and especially others with deep pockets like Larian for example. So all the studios out there developing TB cRPGs refusing to consider adding a RTwP mod will now have their true motives exposed, which is: "All RTwP games must include a TB option for them to be considered good games. But a TB game does not have to include a RTwP option because it is perfect just as a TB game." This is the true mentality of the pro-TB crowd. All the talk of "why not have both?" comes up only in the context of forcing a RTwP game to add TB, but never for a TB game to add RTwP. It's rank hypocrisy.

For the record I support BG3 having both. We will hopefully know what it is on the 27th.

It is normal for a developer to be fully dedicated to the combat system they choose and make it as fun as possible. Owlcat Games essentially told fans they aren't completely committed to their own RTwP combat system, so I also felt obligated, although somewhat remorseful, to cancel my pledge. $100 to start wasn't much, but it could have been more.

The funniest thing is that their decision to appease to the vocal minority of turn-based advocates did not pay off at all. Pledges just continued to drastically fall during the mid-campaign slump. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Not gonna happen. Swen has said they will support one combat mode or the other and not both, which makes perfect sense. This two-track approach of supporting both TB and RTwP in one game is just dumb.

I don't see why having more options is necessarily a bad thing. Difficulty settings (which affect gameplay to various extents) have become a genre staple just to name one. If the budget allows it and the core experience isn't rubbish, it shouldn't do any harm. I emphasize the core experience needs to be fleshed out since offering players ten different ways to polish a turd isn't much of an improvement over coming up with just one. Admittedly, if there's a high likelihood that the game will suffer because of divided attention on the devs' part they are better off working on just one feature. Anyways, until someone conducts a poll that is up to scientific standards with respect to gamers' preferred combat mode I'd be wary of ranking particular audiences by order of magnitude.

Why do so many gamers still think games make themself or grow on trees.?
Why is it so hard to understand that time is a resource in game development? Devs who work on an additional combat system cannot create content. Even trying to make sure that combat systems are balanced and bug-free is simply impossible and shouldn't even be attempted at all.

Actually, that's not the most reprehensible thing about gamers in this day and age. Offshoring, crunch and paying developers peanuts so the former can get their latest fix just in time have plagued the industry for a while now. Sometimes I find it hard to sympathize with people on both ends of the industry's pecking order. Should I feel bad for the CEO who won't be able to afford a brand new speedboat this year because of low earnings? Maybe I should feel sorry for the code monkey who doesn't dare to speak out against crappy corporate policies or the low industry standards because that would be freakin' socialism and besides, wage slaves are better off than unemployed slaves. I don't know, I can't say I have a dog in this fight. Regardless, your point is simply a spin on time and resource management which could be applied not just to combat but virtually every other feature characteristic of a video game. You can play DQXI in both 2D and 3D modes and it doesn't appear to have affected the game's quality adversely judging by aggregate review scores.

This would be perfectly fine if it were applied as a principle equally across the board. The issue is the double standard, that it totally makes sense for a RTwP to HAVE to include a TB option but a TB game shouldn't waste resources on adding a RTwP option. It is this double standard that I am questioning.

A game designed around TB will have fewer, more meaningful encounters and games designed around RTwP usually have a higher volume of trash encounters. Translating those two between each other... A game where the encounters are designed around having RTwP would be minding numbing with a TB system slapped on. A game where the encounters are designed around having a TB system where a RTwP system is just slapped on will simply have incredibly difficult encounters.

I hope they just pick a system and make it good. It's wasted resources either way if they're not going to dump a massive amount of time in balancing to make them both feel good. A BG1 & BG2 TB conversion would suck just as much as a D:OS 1&2 RTwP conversion, IMHO.