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

I was tempted to stop reading after the "The main issue with pausable real-time combat in CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate is the argument that it lacks tactical depth." bit.

Lmao.

But decided to read the rest anyway.

After the claim above, the article goes on "You are forced to micromanage all your party characters at once, buffing them up and setting up spells. Then you get to passively watch them hack and miss very often.", then stops there. Umm, ok....? "You are forced to micromanage"... because... it's a real-time game? And what does "passively watch them hack and miss very often" even mean? Don't want to be mean or act high and mighty, but this person doesn't sound like he knows what he's talking about. He sounds like another player who is turned off as soon as he hears "micromanagement". Disliking the games or even saying they lack tactical depth is his opinion, fair enough, but if this is all he could come up with to convince readers that the system "lacks tactical depth", or that TB is a superior system, then I find it hard to take him seriously. Yeah, go tell that to the players who really played the BG games and knew their stuff.

How does this article even "make a good case"? There isn't any decent reasoning in it.

A problem with RTWP is that people playing on console have a harder time to manage a big party. If you ask me, this is probably the main reason why the DA games' combat got worse and worse. Consoles.

That being said, Swen did say in an interview that "We are moving forward, so we don’t want to go look backward." when he was answering the question about gameplay. This sounds like a hint that they won't return to the RTWP system. The fact that they "would prefer to show it rather than talk about it" is another hint. They don't want to deal with the backlash from the fans of the original games who want RTWP. Just my thoughts, of course. I may very well be wrong.

This article is a much better opinion article that actually has some solid reasoning behind why the writer prefers RTWP over TB:
Opinion: Why RTWP?

(EDIT: essentially, in this article, the writer says that RTWP is exciting because everything happens at the same time, and his quick example is on point, when he says that "a well-timed critical hit from an axe could lead to victory". He also says that TB combat inevitably makes combat feels dragged out sometimes, especially when there are two many enemies and each of them gets a whole turn just to do simple moves. At least you can say that this guy knows what he's talking about.)