Found some neat articles, sorry for bumping my own thread, i didn't know where else to put them.
While turn-based games favor more strategic and transparent play, they can feel a little stodgy to players used to action-oriented titles. Real-time games, on the other hand, are more immersive and multiplayer-friendly but can also easily overwhelm new players if they are not well-paced. Turn-based games, of course, descend directly from the board game tradition which predates video games. Indeed, the fanbase for turn-based games still overlaps significantly with the fanbase for board and card games. Real-time games (excluding sports) were only truly possible with the advent of computers.
BioWare planned for Baldur’s Gate to be a blend of old and new. “It was kind of this examination of the old Gold Box games in terms of their depth and their adherence to the [D&D] rules,” Oster says, referring to a series of D&D RPGs produced by Strategic Simulations, Inc. in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “But then bringing that forward into an almost real-time-strategy-style interface.”
“It became pretty obvious pretty quick that there was no way you were gonna be able to play the depths of D&D in real time without ever pausing the game,” Oster says. “That’s when we came up with the ‘pause and play’ plan.” That addition enabled players to stop in the middle of the game, queue up commands to their party, and then restart the real-time action. Although Baldur’s Gate didn’t invent this “active pause” approach, it did help popularize it. “When you play Fallout to this day with the V.A.T.S. system for the slow-motion targeting, I think you can trace the origins of all that back to the ‘pause and play’ idea,” Greig says. Those mechanics made Baldur’s Gate a technical improvement upon previous RPGs...
Baldur’s Gate became the best-selling game in the two weeks following its release, moving 175,000 copies in that time and vindicating BioWare’s pre-release outreach. It topped 500,000 by the end of February and hit the 1.5 million mark by May 2001. “This is a 100 percent standard procedure now for any game,” Greig says. “A key part of the marketing is engaging with the core audience and doing developer diaries, and they’ve got teams of people whose job is just to do this.” Inadvertently, BioWare had helped guide developers in how to sell games as well as how to make them.
“The ones that have been successful haven’t tried to remake what we did, because when we made it we weren’t trying to make Baldur’s Gate,” Kristjanson says, adding, “You can reduce that too much to, ‘Oh, this should be authentic D&D with the numbers.’ Well, even D&D isn’t authentic D&D. It’s every group has their house rule, and that house rule is because of the way that your particular collection of awesome weirdos wants to play it.”
