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

RTWP or realtime with autopause whatever you want to call that, like in baldurs gate 1 and 2 is preferable anything else is too slow, you are wasting time, you are watching the monitor/tv for other npcs to take their sweet time, the current system is ALREADY too slow in combat with more than 4 hostiles/adversaries ,the attack/defense @ the damned druid grove, or the goblin camp or the underdark , goood grief.......awfully sssllloowwww.( only because of the current system )

i hate watching other npcs take their whatever to do whatnot and 'plot their next move.." ,especially since the first 2 games had rtwp at any rate realtime combat with pause is needed, NOT as a replacement but as an option/alternate option to the current one.

Can you be a little more constructive?
Why do you think that developers should spend precious development time adding real-time combat mechanics with active pause?
Better to spend this time improving existing mechanics and fixing bugs.
In fact.
BG3 was released with turn-based battles. Most of those who bought and went through Early Access loved it. This is indicated by both the Larian poll and the reviews in Steam.

So far, all the "hype" around the turn-based battles in BG3 looks like trolling from a small group of people who just want to get angry at something. And it saddens me.

I dont think you can really say that man. While I agree that its probably not realistic to expect that RTWP will be part of the game, and I also agree that the game works really well with turn based combat, I dont think its fair to say that the people wanting RTWP are coming from a place of dishonesty, or that their intentions boil down to trolling.

It may be a small group of people, but its more likely they are longtime fans of the series and its what theyve always known. Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 were RTWP. Its not out of the realm of the reasonable for longtime fans to have expected that a game called "Baldurs Gate 3" would be similar mechanically to the previous iterations.

You arent wrong in what you say, at some point, those people are going to have to come to grips with the fact that BG3 is different, and either accept and embrace it, or move on.
But trolling? No I dont think so. There are passionate viewpoints on both sides.

One could say that dismissing their opinions as trolling is equally not constructive.

I can again only stress that most of this discussion is about opinion and preferrence. Some prefer TB some RT.

It would indeed be much more helpful for the games progress to look for ways to improve the existing system.

That said:

I also agree that the actual combat sometimes seems pretty slow, especially when doing fights all over again for the x-th time. The AI is taking sweet time to decide what to do.

For one i would go for simultaneous movement of same turn characters. That could reduce waiting times a lot, especially in larger encounters.

(since i did not manage to read all 80 pages, sorry if this was mentioned already)

I agree. Perhaps I did not put it that way.
I meant people who want developers to do real-time battles, but do not give objective arguments why this should be done.
And I was talking about "hype" in the entire information space.
While writing a message on the Steam forum. There, a very large part of the argument sounds like "I want". And all this goes in a circle.
And it looks like trolling to me.

This has been going on for quite a while now and as mentioned before, it is a matter of opinion and preferrence. I played BG1 and 2 because i love AD&D/D&D and played every game i knew of. My first game was Pool of radiance on the C64. I really dislike RT combat, active pause or not yet i still played the BG series and Icewind Dale-if i remember correctly planescape:torment also has RT combat (awesome story btw).
I was positivly happy to see BG3 having TB combat. Last time was ToEE and the remake of pool of radiance if i remember correctly.

It all goes down to me preferring TB over RT.

What would really help is a comment of the development team if there is a chance of getting an RT option or not.

You could always limit the input times for your turn and have the character act on his next "turn". That could get pretty close to real time without losing the actual TB feeling completly.

I really like the TB system. Though in the interest of full disclosure, I've never played BG1 or 2; I was recommended BG3 EA because I like D&D so much. So I thought it really captured the experience of playing D&D for me. To be honest - and maybe I'm just a baby - but I've recently been playing Dragon Age 2 as well and the RTwP system is really confusing for me and it's kind of hard for me to pay attention to everything that's going on :\ What I end up doing is just playing it in RT like a hack and slash but then I don't really command my party unless I'm in a pinch. I personally prefer the level of control I get with TB.

That said, when fighting the goblin camp, it was painful waiting for all the goblins to take their turn, lol. It would be cool if enemies grouped together in the queue could take their turns simultaneously as was suggested earlier in the thread.

Dragon Age 2 is the worst exemple of RTWP games^^

This may or may not be true. But regardless, I found DA2 combat to be both easy and fun. The only issue in DA2 was having to fight cookie-cutter mobs again and again, which is an issue completely separate from the combat system.

To be honnest, I only remember DA2 as an action RPG, not a RTWP RPG.

Honestly for me, I don't understand this at all. People constantly make these kinds of distinctions, and I don't get those distinctions at all. For me, whether a game is "action" or not has nothing to do with whether or not it is an RPG. I have a very specific understanding of what makes a game an RPG, and a game having action elements to it doesn't necessarily take away anything from its RPG nature.

Action RPG >< RTwP RPG

Both are RPG, I never said something else

Yes but action and RTwP are not mutually exclusive. An RPG (for example, DA2) can be both (or neither).

Action RPG >< RTWP RPG, for me is not the essential question for me. More imported are better controls to have more fluid gameplay. Now gameplay hurts, because is too difficult to manage the team. I am sure the controls works fine, nobody asking about arpg ore rtwp rpg

While Baldurs Gate wasn't the first real-time RPG, it was certainly one of the first popular real-time RPGs and is the game many credit with propelling real-time RPGs into the spotlight. So I totally understand the insult that BG fans feel when a game calling itself Baldurs Gate 3 comes out with turn based combat that feels like it is strait out of a 1980's gold box. It is equivalent to coming out with a new Wolfenstien game that has these awesome trailers and home page but fails to mention that it is a 2D platform game. If you aren't familiar with Larian or played the DOS games, I could see someone's disappointment when that first battle starts and they realize they can't unpause. Might even be a reason for some to hit the "Don't Recommend" button on Steam.

But personally, I wont dismiss the other amazing things this game has going for it. The graphics, the non-cookie cutter animations, the companion interactions, the choices, the story and how things unfold. I mean... I am not a fan of the combat system at all, but in ALL OTHER REGARDS... this game is amazing. So per my Steam review, the lack of real-time combat is disappointing but not a deal breaker. My hope is that Larian announces plans to have a real-time combat DLC post release. Preferably announce it before the end of EA. They wouldn't even have to give a timeline. Just state that one will eventually come. That seems like it would be a win-win strategy to me.

Your personal opinion, which you are certainly entitled to of course, but I strongly disagree. For me, as much as I hate TB combat, that is not by any means my only issue with this game. Things you've mentioned as being amazing such as companions, choices, and story, are all areas in which I have major complaints. The only thing I see in this game that's amazing is the graphics, and graphics is somewhere at the very bottom of my list of things that are important in my cRPGs. All other areas need major improvement.

To be clear, I am +1 for real-time. If I had my way, real-time would be the default and turn-based would be the optional play mode. But I'm pragmatic. Larian has no experience with real-time. They have admitted as much. And others have pointed out if they tackle real-time now, they would have to use time and money for that instead of working on all those other issues. So which is more important? Getting real-time but still having many of the other issues on release? Or fixing some of those issues but still release with Turn-Based as the only play option? The best solution in my mind is that they don't worry about real-time right now, but essentially promise it in the future as a DLC. Then any engine overhaul effort can have its own development team, its own timeline, its own rule-bending agreements with Wizards and its own budget, paid for eventually by the DLC sales. I say a DLC is a win-win strategy. I just wish they would formally commit to it, even if that commitment doesn't have a date. I think it would avoid a lot of bad PR and bad Steam reviews if a promised DLC is already on the table.

I've just read through all 81 pages of this thread and feel like throwing in my 2 cents (as everyone else has apparently already done)

For me, there are a lot of reasons to prefer TB to RTwP, but there are two that stand out well above the rest (and I'm too tired to think of the others right now):

1. In RTwP, I tend to get over-focused on one character or one aspect of the battlefield and get bad tunnel vision, and even if I consciously think about it I can't stop it from happening, only get burst of the broader perspective. In turn based, I end up having to go to each and every character and note how the battle is evolving for them, giving me a much easier time of seeing broader perspective.

2. TB, for me, creates many more memorable moments. to use a non-BG3 example, I've been playing Battletech recently, and in a random battle I lost Glitch (one of your starting mech pilots) to a lucky missile strike to the cockpit. Now, in a RTwP battle, that probably would have gone unnoticed or barely received a passing glance until much later, as I would be focusing on my protagonist, but here in the TB system, I got to see it happen as it did, and it really affected me. Here, this woman who lost ten years of her life to a faulty scanner's misread and now is fighting for something more than just a paycheck gets killed out of nowhere. It reminds me of how harsh and brutal the war they're now fighting is and that adds to the depth of the game for me. Will it affect everyone the same way? No, but it affected me greatly.

Also, a couple of people mention long fights. I'm doing a mental count of my playthroughs, and I can only come up with three: Goblin Fortress Courtyard, Auntie Ethel, and the dark dwarves if you choose to slaughter them. The only one that comes off as annoying in those three, in my opinion, is the goblins, since I have a simple and effective strategy for wiping them out (come out of the collapsed passageway above them and begin sniping). The other two are tense and honestly fairly difficult (especially Auntie whose doppelganger attack is brilliantly evil, though it does add to the whole drawing out thing considerably) but hit the right notes to be fun for me.

And that's three battles out of how many? Dozens? In most of the fights you're not waiting around very long for your turn, I've found.

I'm slowly getting accustomed to TB combat, but I still prefer Bioware's Real Time Battle (with the option to pause combat whenever you need). IMO a simple solution to the frustrating long wait players experience when fighting large amounts of enemies per battle is simply to speed up their attacks and give them zero time to plan their next move, or even to make them attack simultaneously.
Whatever they're going to do to your characters, they'll only do it in one turn. If anyone dies, it doesn't matter whether they were attacked by two characters at once or by the same two in a row. The end result is the same. So, make them all attack at once or nullify the amount of time required for enemies to plot their next move. I know it's not a perfect solution, but it should reasonably improve combat.

RTwP has a steeper learning curve but once you become very fast at pausing/unpausing it is very deep and rewarding. PoE2 developed a great RTwP system that would have suited a Baldur's Gate better than Larian's brand of turn-based combat.

In DoS2 the amount of time it takes for enemies to take their turns is unbearable, made me quit the game halfway through. All Larian has to do is give an option in the menus to speed up combat, like in Heroes of Might & Magic. If they stubbornly refuse to do so then it says a lot.