I don't care which ruleset it will be as long as it is turn-based.

Careful with your words. Turn-based is not the same as realtime with pause.

https://www.gamespot.com/amp-articles/e3-2019-baldurs-gate-3-aims-to-do-what-no-other-rp/1100-6467440/


But a similar interview is here:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/06/06/baldurs-gate-3-announced-from-the-creators-of-divinity-original-sin/

And rps had it right. I think a Gamespot writer or Larian got confused or misspoke bc they were talking about bg pnp lore in 3.5 at one point.

Thanks, just saw it. I got some info out of the Gamespot one, but skimmed through most of it. With the kind of grammar and spelling errors they had I wouldn't put it past them to make a factual error of that kind.

Yes that made my heart stop. I had to part ways with the Divinity series after they went turn-based, despite adoring the first several Larian titles. I am all pins and needles waiting to hear if BG3 will be turn-based or real-time with active pause.

Yes, I want it to be turn-based, like 2 last Divinity games, which are brilliant thanks to that. I am afraid they will go with real-time with pause, which was the biggest fault of BG games, using the Divinity system would be a dream come true.

I wouldn't count on it. Larian will probably want to appeal to the fans of BG1 and BG2, so we'll see real time system with pause. Most of D&D computer games are based on real time combat. And I think it's good. Lately I was playing a little in Temple of Elemental Evil and I liked its turn based combat, but the further I went the more demanding it was to continue playing. Simply the combat became too slow for my liking.

I wouldn't say that, as there is a sizeable number of D&D computer games, mostly older games, that are turn-based.

In particular:
* All the RPGs in the Forgotten Realms Collection 2 availabe here (that's 7 games, one of which is Unlimited Adventures; note that I am not counting Hillsfar as an RPG here)
* The Krynn series (3 games)
* The Dark Sun games (2 games; not coutning the online one here)
* The other game with the Pool of Radiance title
* Temple of Elemental Evil (of course)

That's 14 games, which is a sizeable number of games, and is in particuar enough so I wouldn't consider the ones that are real time to be "most".

I agree; the real time with pause combat is one of the worst things about the IE engine games; the way I see it, it combines the worst of turn based and real time combat while lacking both the rhythm of turn-based and the fluidity of real-time. (Just watch any video of a non-trivial combat in these games and notice how time keeps stopping constantly, or, of course, play the game and observe.)


Slowness isn't truly the fault of being turn-based; it's more the fault of things like the interface, the speed of animations, the fact that you have to deal with character positioning, and the relative balance of HP, damage, and accuracy/evasion. (That balance is really not well thought out in AD&D; at low levels, attacks miss way too often (making battles heavily RNG dependent), and at higher levels, HP grows faster than damage, particularly physical damage (and this problem is worse in 3e than 2e because at least 2e reduces HP gains at higher levels).

Perhaps somebody who has played D&D 5e could chime in as to whether that edition fixed the balance issues that slow combat down?

Yeah, you got me on this one. I forgot that there are many older titles which include turn-based combat.

Look on the turn-based version of Pillars of Eternity 2. People say that it takes three times longer to get through the first area than in real-time combat. Turn-based system makes a game longer. I can't imagine getting through BG2 with it. The game is so huge that it takes 150 hours to finish it (doing most of the quests) with real-time combat. Can you imagine a cRPG that requires 450 hours to finish? It would be finished only by a small percentage of players this times. Turn-based combat is always more time consuming. To counter this we would have to get less content. This means less quests and probably shorter story.

As for the attacks, it's not as bad as you describe it. At lower levels we confront weaker creatures. Unless someone screws its character creation process, he shouldn't experience a lot more misses than later in the game. There is a sensible balance achieved here.

That's just that particular implementation; there are other implementations of turn-based combat that are quite fast, like in many of the Dragon Quest remakes. Consider, for example, that there are no pauses between turns; if a fast character has acted, a slow character can immediately act, even if there's a huge discrepancy in speed. (Contrast this to, say, the ATB Final Fantasies (4-9), in which there's sometimes dead times where the ATB is still filling up; I would say that even FF10's combat is faster than FF4-FF9 if only physical attacks are used (as long animations can slow down combat in some of these games).

The problem with the attacks is that the game is balanced around attacks missing around half the time at first; IMO this leads to combat being way too RNG heavy at the start of the game, and it's very frustrating when you lose what should have been a quick win just because you were unlucky. D&D seems to be balanced around attacks hitting only half the time; IMO misses should be rare when the sides are reasonably easily matched and there are no low accuracy or high evasion builds/set-ups in play. (There's other issues with accuracy; the fact that the biggest combat modifiers in D&D tend to be accuracy/evasion rather than damage (including things like the effect of higher levels and the way armor works) just doesn't scale well; either you have AC becoming pointless (see Throne of Bhaal) or physical attacks becoming useless because they nearly always miss (see Arc the Lad 2, though there the underlying mechanical issue is different).)

One example: In 2e, a PC with THAC0 20 will need to roll a 10 to hit a target with AC 10; that's a 45% miss chance. If we add in specialization andd 18/01 Strength, we can get a +2 bonus to hit, which will reduce the miss chance to 35%, which is still IMO too high against an enemy with AC 10; I would expect even weak enemies to have AC slightly better than that.

Honestly, I think JRPGs generally handle the balance better; attacks don't miss that often (on either side), damage increases at level up (instead of accuracy), and armor reduces the damage received (instead of increasing the chance of evading attacks). Hence, we don't have the problem of constant misses in Dragon Quest games, and the only Final Fantasy games with this issue are the early ones (FF2 being the one where I notice it the most).

I completely disagree. BG was perfect in every way. I'm glad your attempt at imposing your ideas will be completely ignored.

I'm happy they're respecting the old game.

Perfect in every way? You mean like pathfinding? Which btw turn based system would partially solve. D&D is turn based, and that was considered for BG, but such was the time that due to things like Diablo real time was considered the only option, pause system was a compromise - but just that, a compromise. Larian at the time was also making realtime with pause game, because they were forced to by publishers, despite they'd always wanted to do a turn-based one. Origin Sin showed that this was a great idea and that they can be free from real time shackels (and also look at how loved TOEE was despite lack of story and countless bugs simply because it had good turn-based combat).
It all hangs on using a system designed for a game - e.g. Orignal Sin has a turn-based combat and it feels much faster than BG, there is no swinging without doing anything, every move counts. And it is an example of a game achieving mass success, being huge and true to RPG turn-based roots.

Actually, pathfinding is a different issue. All they would have to do is allow moving your characters with the arrow keys, and the player would not need to rely on pathfinding just to navigate. (Action games do this all the time, though the actual keys used might be different.) There's also no reason turn-based games can't rely on pathfinding; after all, in games where positioning is a factor, the AI is forced to use it (unless enemies move via simple patterns instead of following the player). I can cite Civilization 2 as a turn-based game where the pathfinding isn't that great; sometimes a unit would get stuck moving between two squares, causing the pathfinding to time out on railroads (for the player's Go To order, you're given the option to stop the movement; the AI always does in order to avoid infinite loops). (At least Civilization 2 doesn't force the player to rely on pathfinding for basic movement the way Baldur's Gate does.)

Remember that we're still talking about D&D based games. This includes BG3. Developers have huge restrictions on how the mechanics will work. From what I know, 5th edition eliminated THAC0. I don't know how will that influence the miss-hit relation. But it's still D&D, so I don't expect revolutionary changes in the gameplay pace. Your examples would be more accurate if we talked about a game based on a unique system developed from the start by Larian.

BG3 is more demanding. Larian is confronting a true cRPG legend. The expectations for D:OS and D:OS2 were a lot lower. There was more place for gameplay experiments. When we're talking about BG3, we have to remember that the developers will be restricted by the system on which the game will rely. There's no place for experiments which were possible in the Divinity series. Having that in mind I presume that turn-based combat is out of option here.