each time a member of Larian opens up to the press, they reveal more and more how little they actually care for or like BG
I hate to break this to you, but there are fans of BG 1 and 2 who think RTwP is messy. There are fans who like RTwP combat and still think it can get messy.
Whenever I talk about Baldurs Gate with my friends we always agree that RTwP is less than ideal. However, the games had very little to do for characters who werent spell casters. Like, did you ever do anything with Minsc except have him swing his sword? Yea ok, use a healing potion, but that was it. Same with your rogue/archer, they did nothing but autoattack.
More recent game systems have every class basically able to use abilities every turn so its quite different. I could imagine BG1/2 with TB combat being quite underwhelming.
But even with RTwP BG1/2 are both on my top 10 list of greatest games of all time.
Obsdian had a special problem with PoE and Deadfire when it comes to RTwP: as soon as "mundane" classes like fighters, rangers etc. received more active abilities the RTwP combat became more and more convoluted since you had to micromanage every character. In BG I/II there are often several party members who just ran around and hit with auto-attacks. Only casters needed special micromanagment. That led to the bahavior in PoE that players - after reaching certain levels of XP and game mechanics expertise - tended to just select all characters, attacked one enemy until dead, rinse and repeat - because the alternative (micromanage every char) became too tedious and complicated. Also more active abilities meant more VFX on screen which didn't go too well with the RTwP approach: multiple players complaied that they couldn't really keep track (visually) what was happening. THis was one of the reasons why they reduced party size from 6 to 5 in Deadfire and put mor work into a sophisticated player-AI scripting tool. This is pulled from conversations and interviews or talks with/of Obsidian devs.
Turn Based has other disadvantages (like taking potentially longer for example or the tendency of feeling too much like a puzzle/being too abstract), but those problems I mentioned above it has not.
And for the record: I am a die-hard PoE/Deadfire player and an old BG fan and only played them with RTwP mode, not Turn Based. But I also played a lot of TB games and find them great, too. Depends on the game and how well everything fits together or how the encounters and combat mechanics are designed. So pleaso no comments like "no real BG fan/hates RTwP".
