The purpose of any combat model has zero to do with the player, but with how the developer wants to portray his vision of combat. Turn-based, phase-based, realtime with pause or vanilla realtime is of no consequence, really. The people behind Fallout wanted to reinterpret combat from a Pen and Paper basis, hence, they felt a turn-based combat model where each unit took their time and where all actions were described in great detail. This, amazing as it may seem to some, worked very well and was enjoyable, despite the many deficiencies of combat itself. Bethesda wants to depict a fast and furious system, complete with a “cinematic” (I know, it’s a bloated term that means vague and juvenile interpretations of both videogames and cinema, but it helps to convey what they are going for) attention to detail. This one is also a crowd pleaser, and it works.

In fact, anything can work. Again, it comes down to what the developer wants, and the tools they gives players so they can experience combat. Because of this, while different combat models have their pros and cons, there is no ‘best’ method to handle this. People praise the general workings of turn-based because it lends itself to complex interfaces and careful planning, but forget that realtime with pause allow access to the same; while others declare realtime combat to be a more fluid and realistic approach when compared to a “turn” but forget that pausing the game is just as abstract, unrealistic, and flow breaking – specially in more hectic situations, where you may pause repeatedly to negotiate between combat and order queues.

I think the more important argument is how much of a part the player will play as opposed to the character. You can attribute this to an old way of looking at cRPGs, or how much it’s based on that Pen and Paper feel if you wish, but there’s a very clear line between what you can do and what the character can do. Is Dirk the Daring a great marksman, shooting down Super Mutant pubic hair from several miles away because of his skill, or because the player has lighting-fast reflexes and can circle strafe with the best?

To me, this kind of debate takes precedence over other things since it embodies the very notion of what we should expect in a role-playing game. The genre was made for the gamer who dreams of being a character other than himself – the might barbarian who can wield swords is appealing because we cannot, and the same applied to the cunning wizard who can use magic to alter reality, the cleric who can heal and save lives, the bard with a wanderlust and the verve to sing about it. That is what the genre does, carefully allowing you to construct a persona – as well as witnessing its achievements and failures – through its own set of limitations and possibilities.

And with Fallout 3, there’s certainly that old Deus Ex and Bloodlines dread on the horizon – how will certain skills or abilities, given the implementation of a more direct control in place, work? If I intend to role-play a very specific character that is not versatile in some areas, will the game be constructed in a way so that my character has optional methods of character and story advancement, or can I bypass the game’s limitations through my own tampering with the virtual environment and its entities, such as running up to a Mutant and shooting it point blank in the snot to counter the fact my character’s Perception is low?

Or am I to follow the mantra of Oblivion defenders and just “imagine” it?

It would have been a better design for real time and pause games to allow control of only your character and to have no ai for that character.

Well in it’s way Fallout’s combat ai had more to deal with than Half Life’s. And how much of Half Life was scripted? Besides I don’t know if Fallout’s ai was even considered state of the art for turnbased games at the time, did the Fallout devs even attempt to revolutionise ai? Comparing a turnbased rpg, where combat is only part of the make up of the game to a first person shooter where combat is the be all and end all of the game is faintly ludricous don’t you think? It’s much more interesting to compare Fallout’s ai to NWN2.

Sure it saves menial tasks, but at the cost of making the non menial tasks more of a chore, what’s so terrible is you spend more time fighting the game’s ai for your characters than fighting the enemy.

Hmm okay, so the terrible part is having badly implemented AI for your character get in your way? I can see this point, but i’m not sure if that’s a drawback of RT&P system per se — after all, one could take older Fallouts and their awful companion AI as example that turn based system is terrible design… on the same basis that you spend more time fighting the AI of your companions instead of the enemy.

Also, would that mean if RT&P game implemented the system in most simple manner — that is, having the character just carry out the order(s) you gave them until you change it, without any attempt from the AI to override them or to come up with its own… then it’d no longer be “terrible design” in your eyes?

Half Life and Fallout 2 are two very different games with different approaches, comparing them is a little farcial don’t you think?

No, i think it’s good counter-example to your argument how turn-based games will *always* have better AI than real time games. Because it shows that theory and practice often vary greatly, and that it’s actually possible in practice for real time game to surpass turn-based game in terms of AI performance. At least when it comes to ’simple’ tasks like combat tactics.

Next people will be back to moaning that big developers don’t make isometric sprite-based games any more. Oh, wait…

Turnbased allows you full control, where as RT&P you are always having to adjust the orders, sometimes having the game override your orders, or take the random chance that the orders the game picks are the best for the situation. Me I’d rather take the menial task rather than leave it up to chance. The trouble with default attacks is your characters might win through, but at what cost. If default attacks use up more ammo/power to get the job done relying on them even in simple situations you can find your characters in a worse position than if you exerted full control for all the characters all of the time. Which is hard really hard to do in RT&P.

RT&P just doesn’t flow faster than turnbased, not unless you set the game to easy and let it play itself. Not when you are constanly stop starting the game to issue orders or to cancel stupid decisions made by your character’s ai. In turnbased you might have to give the orders all the time but at least you’ve got the chance of giving the right orders that’ll end the situation faster. Besides turnbased has other tricks to make the game flow faster, in Fallout you can adjust the combat speed so that the game plays faster, try that in RT&P and you wouldn’t have a chance. Jagged Alliance 2 had an option for auto resolving combat, much like leaving it to the computer in RT&P you had no control and the computer wouldn’t always make the best decisions so it was pure chance if you’d come out unscathed or not. But it made low level random encounters less of a chore (if you thought they were a chore that is).

Half Life and Fallout 2 are two very different games with different approaches, comparing them is a little farcial don’t you think? Half Life isn’t even a real time and pause game so it hasn’t to do with this discussion at all.

Turnbased games not showing a stellar track record? Well there’s not exactly many of them being made recently for the mechanics to be refined and improved, but so far they’ve shown a lot better track record than any RT&P game.

@sinister agent, aimed shots were always the best option anyway due to their much lower chance to hit but I don’t think you’ll find many who wouldn’t agree that Fallout couldn’t be significantly improved in many areas. But the key word here is improved, not replaced with a radically different system which has it’s own foibles. You don’t need to replace Turnbased combat to add an location based armour system, you don’t need to replace the viewpoint to add gaps in the fence, as long as the character can see through the gap you don’t need to. That’s where line of sight rules come in, something already available in turnbased games.

See, that’s one thing that seems to be ignored by most people in these discussions – those many areas where Fallout could be significantly improved. For one thing, you could vastly improve the ‘aim at specific body part’ options by adding location-specific armour, so that head/eye shots aren’t always the best option – a bloke with a helmet but bare arms, say, or something as simple as shooting someone through a gap in a wooden fence, which you wouldn’t even be able to see without the new perspective. Very simple, but that alone could make for a better tactical system, while everyone is obsessed with where Bethesda might go wrong. And that’s just off the top of my head – they’ve had scores of people considering things like this for months.

Unusually, the more I think about this, the more I’m thinking it might end up being a net gain for the series, even if they’ve lost some points in a couple of areas.

if you just click next all the time in turnbased the enemy will attack and your character will always just do nothing. But in RT&P quite often you can leave them to get on with it and they’ll come out on top. Or they’ll lose badly to a bunch of enemies that you’d have no trouble squashing when in control. Do you really think that’s good design?

Well let’s see. In situation where the character has no problem to win using just the basic autoattack, the RT&P allows the player to skip all the menial clicking on ‘attack’ and ‘next round’ buttons. In situation where this simple approach won’t work due to number of enemies or whatnot, the player can (and is expected) to take full control over the character and carry them through.

What exactly is so terrible in this design? Saving you the menial parts when your input wouldn’t make any difference? Or requiring you to actually provide input when it does make the difference?

In turnbased your characters have no ai, so you supply all the tactical decisions.

The same applies to RT&P games really — you supply the character with the tactics and they carry them out. The only real difference is, you don’t have to re-supply the same tactics over and over and over and over on every turn, if there’s no actual need to change the last issued action.

If the level of your tactical acumen is just to shoot shoot shoot then yeah you might as well be playing a real time and pause game.

If the game encounters are simplified to the point where i can get away with this approach, then the problem is entirely different from just the choice between turn-based and something that has potential to flow faster. And replacing RT&P with turn based gameplay wouldn’t magically make it any more interesting.

AI in real time games is never going to be as good as in a turnbased game since no matter how powerful your computer it’s got to handle the ai for several characters at once compared to one at a time.

Fallout 2 and Half-Life were released virtually at the same time. And yet, the AI of enemies in real-time Half-life was leaps and bounds beyond that of Fallout.

The whole ‘great potential’ thing is meaningless if it’s not realized, and the turn based games don’t exactly show stellar track record in this area. Not to mention it’s hardly needed when as long as the basics are done well most people playing the game could never tell the difference.

I’d like to have a chance to play it, and see if the choices the pause-time gives you are meaningful. Is it worth it, say, to shoot at someone’s arm and cripple their aim, if the same shot would just kill them anyways? Does aiming at the head decrease the chance of hitting sufficiently enough to make attempting one a gamble, and is the extra damage enough to make the gamble worth it?”

So you mean, unlike in Fallout, where you always wanted to aim for the eyes?

In turnbased your characters have no ai, so you supply all the tactical decisions. Say you have enough action points to make three snap shots, do you take them all and leave your character standing in the open, what if they all miss? Do you spend a few extra action points to make one aimed shot that has a better chance of not only hitting, but hitting a vital area and then use the rest of your action points to get behind cover? If your first shot doesn’t penetrate your opponents armour do you switch weapons, switch ammo, run like hell? If the level of your tactical acumen is just to shoot shoot shoot then yeah you might as well be playing a real time and pause game.

AI in real time games is never going to be as good as in a turnbased game since no matter how powerful your computer it’s got to handle the ai for several characters at once compared to one at a time. It gets even worse when you add in the party ai for which ever characters you aren’t controlling at the time. If you think getting shot in the back was bad in 10 year old Fallout it’s nothing compared to the ai in the 2 year old NWN2.

Sure you can turn the party ai off in NWN2 but that’s rare. Having to control all your party in a RT&P game is tedious, with you usually having to start stop all the time quite often after every action. Leave a character alone for too long and the ai would kick in and they’d go off doing something stupid, or they would just spam their default attack, when much more powerful attacks were available.

Virtually every RT&P game I’ve played except for the Freedom Force games which have no party ai IIRC, when I’ve had to leave the game during or just before combat. I’ve come back to find the combat resolved, not always successfully but usually my characters are still standing. Though not as unscathed as they might of been if I had been directing things, who’s meant to be playing the game me or the computer?

Yeah, I had a similar reaction. Particularly since Microsoft are pushing the family console angle. Seemed strange to have *such* gratuitous gore at their press conference.