How do you control your individual party member abilities and skills when you're essentially only controlling one character?

You're not controlling one character, you are controlling the party as a whole: they move always grouped as a single entity but you are controlling attacks and special abilities individually ( see the four bottom panels in the screenshots & videos)

Oh ok. I thought those panels were the special abilities for each individual character. Man, that sounds like its going to be difficult to manage 4 character's abilities at once in real time.

Yeah... Not to be the whiny type, but I've got to admit I'm a bit put off by the real-time aspect of this game. In this type of dungeon-crawl I really prefer the turn-based method.

That said, it looks great and I'll probably still end up buying it.

You can download the manual for the game from your library. That should detail the controls and how combat works. I also prefer turn-based for this kind of game... Or at least if the movement is grid-based and you're controlling a group together; for something like Skyrim, turn-based would be horrible.

Dungeon Master, EOB and others all were also real-time games, so this should be really similar than those old classics.

To be precise, they weren't exactly "real time" because of the movement being grid-based. So monsters did step one step (or other action), then waited the timeout value based on their speed before acting again. It is just the same method used in Legend of Grimrock.

Aye the game will be fine in Real time just like it's predecessors, it's designed to be run in real time so you really shouldn't have any issues.

I'd recommend giving it a try. :-)

Daniel.

Keep in mind, that the Eye of the Beholder series and Dungeon Master were also realtime dungeon crawls. While I would also enjoy a modern turn-based successor to Wizardry, Magic Candle, or Bard's Tale, this game appears to be a great continuation of the dungeon crawl genre.

Turn based doesn't really suit this kind of game as it takes away more than it gives.You'll only get a smidgeon of strategy while taking away atmosphere,scare factor and need for quick thinking/reactions.

When you look at videos of the game play (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzIiXx-8BHc&feature=related) you'll notice there are ways to take advantage of rate of movement when creatures walk and turn. I suspect this will also be true when attacking, if you time your attacks correctly to interrupt the attack of the monster in front of you.