As a developer, my path would be to go with option 3 and push the scope creep to "phase 2".

Indeed. They'll release that 10 years from now, in their digital remaster or something, but it's not gonna make it into the initial release.

As grumpy as that makes some people I highly doubt it'll affect sales, anyway. Certainly a lot less than if they rolled it out and the AI kept AOE killing teammates or something as **frequently** happens with rushed AI. Anyone remember companions in Fallout? That wasn't even RTWP (not that it matters, it's all turn-based under the hood...)

WoW, this is second time I see people suggesting "soon" release. Someone said two Patches before release. I wouldnt mind if BG3 was my winter game.

Holly crapness, I had to disinfect my display after reading this and it still reeks.

Engine is just a set of tools to help developers make theirs games. Instead of coding every action, they can just use a predefined function. And engine does not limit visual perspective, for example: Gamedec - Unreal and isometric view, Hellpoint - Unity and over the soulder view.

Turn based combat was devised for pan and paper as it was easier for humans to keep track of everything. With computers there is no reason not to use real time combat. It's more natural and time efficient, though much more complex to implement properly.

Pillars of Eternity and Pathfinder took the third option. You can choose in options which combat model do want to have, either turn based or real time. And with that decision the player base grew. And the thing that is most critisized in Larians production is the turn based combat system.

Different people like different kinds of games. I'd go into detail of why I prefer turn-based but I don't think you are listening. The reason Larian successfully publishes these games in exactly this way is that there is a market for it. I'm sorry your taste in this particular case is not catered to.

If one is unwilling to talk, there is nothing to listen to.

Pretty sure I just pointed out that I prefer a type of game that you just said is unnecessary. Do I really need to justify my preference?

"With computers there is no reason not to use real time combat. It's more natural and time efficient, though much more complex to implement properly."

Reason #1 of why I don't want to use real time combat: I'm not a professional Starcraft player with 400 APM.

Reason #2: Sometimes I just want to take it slow.

"And with that decision the player base grew"

You have data to support this?

Turn based combat was introduced in 2019, there are no sales charts that old. But judging from comments, many people who hesitated buying the game for it's real time combat, decided to give it a try.

My biggest issue with TB is combat time. I tried to play DOS1, but few battles with mere skeletons took ages. I have limited time for play and I prefer to actually progress the plot than spend that time on few skirmishes.
The secon is how absurd it is. I can run circles around the enemy why it's blinking in my direction, move behind him and stab him in the back without him interfering. In RT enemy is trying to close distance, protect back, avoid being flanked etc. TB is ridiculus compared to that. And not forget about mages and breaking concentration. In BG2 that Lich was casting prison. In TB one his round and game over. In RT there was at least a chance to breake his concentration rolls and kill him.

in DOS1 most of the dev time went into making pretty locations and the actual game engine... very little time was spent on story
in DOS2 the key direction was multiplayer and yes combat balence took a backseat

the idea that battles can grow is part of the fun... you are ment to think of ways to draw bad guys into killing points or at least avoid random patrols joining in and that is basic game design not a true TB vs RT result. if Larian had made their engine RT they still would have wanted random patrols growing combats and big areas going bang because the boss thinks that sort of shit is fun

perhaps a different game will be more to your likes

The forum is a medium to share and exchange views. And I think it's way better to rise and argument about combat model here, than write a negative review, like many people have done, critisizing lack of RT combat, known from previos BG iterations. Other developers heard out gamers voices and added TB combat to theirs games, so I hope Larian will do the same and add RT do BG3.
The biggest argument against RT is that TB is more "tactical". But that's not true. In fact it's way more limiting. And with sequential action execution it's way more time consuming.

Sure, as long as you recognize that raising the argument here is screaming into the void. This is GOG's forum, not Larian's. GOG isn't publishing, nor developing, this game.

As far as adding turn-based: all games are turn based. There's a clock tick, and every unit gets an action every tick. Those actions are all rendered at the same time, to make it look like they're all happening in real-time, but under the hood it's really not. That's how video games work. Taking a game that has real time combat (where the ticks just keep going, and AI decides what action to take) and adding turn-based (where we pause on each action for each tick) is trivial. All the hard work of tuning the combat AI is already done; we're just ignoring it and letting the player decide actions. Going the other way, however, is much more work.

It's like standing in the middle of a Wal-Mart complaining that Mars doesn't make a pink M&M. Maybe it'll make you feel good, but it won't get you that M&M.

Not that posting on the Larian forum will do much good, either, for all the development reasons previously stated in this thread and mentioned above. But at least there the devs will hear you, and maybe you'll get an overhaul in some kind of remastered version down the road.

All true. And further, these forums are not even designed to communicate with GOG. These forums put customer gamers in touch with each other. Messages here will probably not be read by any GOG employee.

This is not what 'turn-based' means when it is used to describe a game. Waste of everybody's time to bring this up.

I was addressing the comment that vendors have added turn-based combat to otherwise real-time games in response to customer feedback. The reason I thought it relevant was because it illustrates the logic behind why we would see a developer add turn-based combat to a game based on user feedback, but why we probably won't see Larian add real time.

Because all games are already turn-based under the hood, a game with real-time combat already has everything that's needed to add turn-based; it's minimal work to inject user input into each combat round for player-controlled characters. A game with only turn-based combat is missing a *substantial* amount of functionality required to do real time combat. In some cases, this could mean an entire rework of the combat engine. I'd be absolutely shocked to see a game add RT combat this late in the development cycle. That's the kind of thing you bake in early. But turn-based can be an afterthought.

The best analogy I can come up with would be a car and an airplane. You can add the ability to travel on the ground to an airplane pretty easily. An airplane is already a ground vehicle. Trying to add air travel functionality to a car, however, would take a *lot* of work.