Larian are making a game with more complex environments, objects to interact with, and options for both the player and enemy to use that to their advantage. IMO the more of all that they have the more frustrating it would be trying to control it with real time with pause.
It doesn’t mean you always have to do something fancy or agonize over every more. In both DOS and XCom games, I’m usually thinking about options as the enemies move and take my turns pretty quickly unless I get into trouble and have to stop to think about it. It’s probably not optimal, but it’s faster than watching Sven play who explains everything he’s doing.
Well first of all, interacting with the environment is happening quite a bit outside of combat as well and not all inside of combat. And outside of combat it is happening in RT. So it depends.
Within combat the issue for me, as I said on many occasions now even though a certain few people (not you) keep trying to misrepresent my views, is that combat is tediously slow and there is no flow to the combat. And even if TB fans here refuse to admit to it, at least Larian is obviously in agreement that this is a very real problem because their own lead developer spent a lot of time in that RPS interview talking about them trying to find ways to speed up the combat (including tweaking their combat animations) and maintain some semblance of flow. Nevertheless, I have to question whether any of these efforts make any meaningful difference. Combat remains start-stop-start-stop and there's no way around that.
So I have given up on the idea that combat can be made better (i.e. faster and less tedious) within a TB system. Instead, my focus now is looking at what options may exist for (a) getting through combat easily (ex. lowering the difficulty to story mode just for the combats), or (b) avoiding combat altogether (using stealth or dialog checks or whatever).
