Sentenza
Member
Hey, I always said I prefer turn-based when at its best, but I also always pointed that I'm not implicitly hostile to RTwP and I think it can work nicely when properly implemented.
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Divinity: Original Sin |OT| Sandbox RPG. Co-Op friendly. Bread.
- Thread starter Casimir
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RTwP is a pretty stupid system honestly. The only reason it existed during the Infinity Engine era is because it was seen as the best compromise to adapt the AD&D ruleset into a game environment without "feeling" too slow or whatever. Never really bought that excuse honestly. It's one thing I don't miss at all really. If every isometric RPG played like Fallout 2, I would be more than happy. 
Crimsonsky
Member
Seems to me you guys are playing BG2 wrong. Setup some AI profiles, or download them off one of the mod sites and let them go to town. The vast majority of my battles in BG2 are real time with me only controlling 1 character. Certain bosses, not all of them, require use of pause and/or the control of up to 3 characters, but honestly you can program the AI to be quite competent. In trash battles you really don't have to control anyone.
Also remember that in almost all RPG's the golden rule applies. Look at the value of an item, is it more valuable than your current? It's probably better. Divinity is one of the few exceptions to this rule and it's why I'm still wearing level 7 bracers at level 19.
RTwP is everything Turn-based is, just faster and with more control. Your space bar makes it as turn based as you wish or as fast as you wish. It's a hybrid and a fairly good one.
Divinity is a perfect example of what's wrong with turn based. It's fine at low levels, but as you get more powerful it's just too slow. Doesn't matter that these spiders are about to get eviscerated in one turn, I have to sit here and wait for everyone's turn before I can progress. RTwP would allow me to hit the space bar, insert my commands that expunge these pests from my sight, hit the space bar again, and continue forth without missing a beat.
Also remember that in almost all RPG's the golden rule applies. Look at the value of an item, is it more valuable than your current? It's probably better. Divinity is one of the few exceptions to this rule and it's why I'm still wearing level 7 bracers at level 19.
RTwP is everything Turn-based is, just faster and with more control. Your space bar makes it as turn based as you wish or as fast as you wish. It's a hybrid and a fairly good one.
Divinity is a perfect example of what's wrong with turn based. It's fine at low levels, but as you get more powerful it's just too slow. Doesn't matter that these spiders are about to get eviscerated in one turn, I have to sit here and wait for everyone's turn before I can progress. RTwP would allow me to hit the space bar, insert my commands that expunge these pests from my sight, hit the space bar again, and continue forth without missing a beat.
If well supported with gambits, yes, RTwP is excellent.
The problem with it, from a level design perspective, is that it encourages placement of trash mobs in the player's way. With turn-based, trash mobs stick out, and hopefully the developer irons them out into fewer, yet harder encounters.
With RTwP, there's nothing stopping devs from going the "Another Wave!" route and sprinkling encounters across maps. It's an enabler of dev "laziness".
Obviously this is the dev's fault rather than something intrinsic to the system, but I feel it's worth thinking about. Like how fast travel can break level design in ARPGs.
Sentenza
Member
Yeah... NO.
That's precisely what I would describe as playing BG2 "wrong".
In fact, one of many areas where I think BG2 vastly overshadows Dragon Age is precisely how it relies a lot on repeatable attacks and passive abilities, making the use of special abilities and spells completely situational and playing with the AI off more enjoyable, while the other relies on short cooldowns that force you to use AI setups or to give new instructions every 2 seconds.
By the gods, we need more wrong games, then.
For all your new-to-Baldur's-Gate needs.
Is this thread going to host another noisy discussion on the relative merits of RTwP?
How could you see this guide and then say that Baldur's Gate doesn't have a high barrier to entry?
Sentenza
Member
I can tell you that this guide has a higher barrier to entry than Baldur's Gate itself, as far as I'm concerned, so I guess you may have a point here.
It goes on and on expanding in a quite long-winded way about things that shouldn't even require any particular explanation.
Deaf Spacker
Memb
is it normal to keep getting my arse handed to me? I'm by the beginning and my party is level 4 but even the lighthouse fight was difficult.
...Invest more in Perception/Initiative then? The purpose of the stat is to prevent stuff like this happening. RTwP on the other hand makes stuff like D&D Initiative useless.
Sure, we could use an option to speed up the animations for the late game, but it's not like it's a situation that happens all the time unless the initiative of your entire party is crap.
No. Are you playing on Normal or Hard? How many people do you have? Have you checked skill vendors for higher level skills on every level up?
Tactics really is the key, you need to think about controlling the field with status effects, letting enemies come to you instead of rushing in.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
AD&D2 rules are obscure as fuck and the game explains hardly anything. Fights vary from pushover to herculean challenges with no underlying logic or clear ramping up over time. Difficulty is all over the place. Similar looking enemies have wildly varying stats. There is usually no way of knowing what works against particular enemies without just trying everything and seeing what sticks. Half the spells in the game are worthless because they only work against things too weak for you to want to waste a spell on. The dispell, remove magic, pierce magic, breach, secret word etc spells have huge, confusing overlap and trying to work out what spells work on what enemies with which defensive buffs is like studying for an exam. The game absolutely assumes familiarity with the tabletop game.
Sentenza
Member
And I contest this claim as baseless, considering I learned to play those games as a teenager, without even any previous knowledge of D&D and struggling with a foreign language I was hardly familiar with (English) in the process.
Considering how I don't count myself among the most brilliant minds on the planet (I wish) I'm confident that if I could do it, others could as well.
I know there are better rulesets out there (hell, all the P&P rulesets I actually tried were better, probably) but let's not pretend D&D still doesn't piss from a great high all over the overwhelming majority of these half-assed systems used in videogames these days.
I don't count this as a negative. I'm glad enemies are consistent in their levels of strength instead of "ramping up over time".
If anything, I wish more games would handle their bestiary as D&D does, with level-less monsters who have fixed stats and are consistent as a threat.
That's exactly what I'm hoping for PoE as well.
Another baseless claim. There are a lot of general rules based on common sense for anyone with a bit of familiarity with a fantasy setting (i.e. Undead immune to charm and fear, giant spiders resistant/immune to poison, etc) and beside that plenty of in-game hints about how to deal with some of the most exotic and dangerous creatures.
You aren't required to know a single spell before playing the games, they are all explained individually in their description, in a very detailed way, too.
Sentenza
Member
Click to move.
Aaaaand hype deflated.
Sentenza
Member
Good riddance?
I don't know what people expect from a party based isometric game. A first person camera?
Why the vitriol? Jesus...
Edit: I expected WASD controls. What wasn't clear about my initial question?
Sentenza
Member
Why the drive by post to tell us how much you don't care?
How are WASD controls even supposed to work in a isometric, party based game?
Care to point any decent implementation of the concept?
Well you'd press W to go in one direction. Or D to go in another, repeat as necessary.
Also, my post isn't "drive by". I have a genuine interest in the game so I came here to do some fucking research.
But as usual, some GAF Go-hard to to fucking ruin a simple browsing experience. I'll go ask for information elsewhere next time.
Also, my post isn't "drive by". I have a genuine interest in the game so I came here to do some fucking research.
But as usual, some GAF Go-hard to to fucking ruin a simple browsing experience. I'll go ask for information elsewhere next time.
Sentenza
Member
Well, talk about overreacting.
And by the way I was posting by myself, I don't represent "GAF" as a whole.
I'm sure you'll find others responding to you other ways.
Hell, I'm sure you'll even find more weirdos sharing your dislike for the click to move mechanic, no matter if it's the only solution that makes sense for this kind of game.
This is just patently false. It may be the majority's prefer way of playing it, but other control methods could work, and have worked for other click-to-move games in the past.
Sentenza
Member
Of course, other control methods work finely with OTHER kinds of games.
WASD doesn't work when you have a whole party to manage and a fixed isometric camera.
It sort-of-worked in Dragon Age just because when you are controlling one character it switches to third person camera.
This game doesn't, so it wouldn't work as well.
Anyway, the problem I have with the argument against click-to-move is that it's a completely irrational bias. It's not even based on efficiency, practical sense or what else.
There's nothing implicitly wrong in it, some people just don't like it because it makes things feel "too RTS-like" (which, by the way, shouldn't be pointed as an implicit negative either).
kinaesthete
Member
As a fellow huge click to move hater I have to say I have no problems with its implementation in D:OS. There are zero twitch game elements that would make WASD controls an improvement and even if you could WASD to move your party leader around outside of battle you'd have to switch to the mouse for fights anyway (unless you wanted to use WASD to move the cursor around???)
Ok since I'm apparently one that started this whole thing, I'm going to better explain what I meant when I said I tried Baldur's Gate 2 yesterday and concluded it wasn't for me even though I love Divinity. First off, I never implied I was too stupid to figure it out. I'm not the brightest guy in the world but was able to successfully navigate and complete a PhD program, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't the fear that the game and everyone who loved it was smarter than me that scared me away.
As far as I can parse it, there are two primary things after playing this game for a bit over an hour that made me conclude that realistically I am very unlikely to ever boot it up again:
1) Aesthetics.
This game is ugly as sin. Or at least the opening area of it is. I'm sorry Baldur's Gate fans, but the screen is a pixelated mess, so much so that many of the smaller details make it even hard to decipher what the hell I'm supposed to be looking at. Similarly the sound is all muffled and garbled. Everything just feels, looks and sounds muddy. Like someone took a cool game and dumped a pile of mud on top of it and said "here you go, have fun."
This is a pretty weird phenomenon because I have no problem going back and playing NES or Genesis and SNES games. I can't really figure out why a game like this ages so much worse but my best guess is that they were trying to be too ambitious and that a combination of that and 3/4 perspective just don't lend themselves well to sprite based games.
But even the menus are displeasing to use. There is no satifsfying "chunk" to the when you move stuff around and their are no nice transparent window overlays. Instead, the menus are all full screen ugly brown things that completely remove you from the experience. Since you spend a lot of your time in menus in games like this, having menus that don't look and feel good is a pretty big negative.
2) Pseudo Realtime Combat
I've come to the conclusion that I hate this shit. I like Divinity because it feels clean. I'm watching the moves happening in order and can plan accordingly. I also like action RPGs whether the Mass Effect or Zelda type because I can also parse what is happening in real time. But what makes this game different from something like Mass Effect is that Mass Effect is actual real time that I can pause and re-plan. This instead steams like a turn based system that is running really fast and I have to keep pausing if I want to keep up with what is going on. It's like watching someone play D&D at super human speeds and then having to constantly yell "Hold on. What just happened?"
What's weird is that I have played one game in this genre of psudeo real time games that I actually liked: Final Fantasy 10. But there I was able to micromanage BEFORE the fights and set up paradigms of "if this then do this." And that was satisfying to watch your well oiled machine go to work. But here since character's actions are automated in the sense that they will auto attack a target you select, it's more like watching someone else who plays badly and then yelling over their shoulder every 10-20 seconds to tell them to stop and do something different. So you dont' get the reward of carefully planning everything in advance, or watching clean turns happen, or the excitement of playing straight up action game and adjusting strategies on the fly.
I don't know who invented this idea of "Hey let's play D&D at 10x's speed and let the player just pause to issue new commands" but I think it's a stupid idea. Obviously tons of people liked these older games that played in this fashion but I have to wonder if it wasn't because there was nothing better because the limitations of this system seem pretty obvious to me. At any rate, there are two things I can objective: 1) Those game aren't for me. 2) Just because people like Divinity, this does not mean they will like those older CRPGs. Far from it.
I'm not arguing to rob anyone of that experience. In an ideal world everyone would have options to be able to control it to their liking. If that means a WASD user would have additional hurdles, so be it. I, personally, just find a huge disconnect in controlling characters via click to move.
Edit:
Interesting. I'm sure there are some Let's Play type videos up around Youtube, I'll have to look into them a bit more when I'm off work and get a bit more eyes-on. Maybe things will click a bit more in my wheelhouse then. Thanks for the input!
Edit:
Interesting. I'm sure there are some Let's Play type videos up around Youtube, I'll have to look into them a bit more when I'm off work and get a bit more eyes-on. Maybe things will click a bit more in my wheelhouse then. Thanks for the input!
Just making sure you know this. You don't have to click to move. Just hold your mouse cursor out in front of your character and hold Left button and guide it. Hold it close to them to walk and hold it further out to run.
It works just like Diablo.
To get past the 10x thing, you need to go into the menu where you can ask the game to pause on every near significant event - a character gets hit or dies, a round ends, a target is dead and so on. That prevented about 90% of the time, any sort of "downtime" and approximated a turn-based experience.
kinaesthete
Member
An improvement Divinity has over Diablo, which I can't stand primarily for the atrocious controls, is that the camera can be freely panned so you don't have to constantly click or hold to get to where you need to go. Just pan and click anywhere and your party paths to it in one go, even if it's from across the map.
Just wish they'd taken it further like BG2 and allowed you to click your location in-map, removing even the camera pan.
grandwizard
Member
Don't Starve has a good implementation where you can click to move but also WASD around if you want. In Divinity since when you click you are ordering your selected person and your followers follow I think it would also work here. I just mean for world traversal though, not so much in battles where the click to move also plots out the route and AP expense.
Actually I tried that and it still doesn't work because it doesn't actually pause after every turn and sometimes it even seemed like it would double pause if you turned on all the pause options. Like for instance if a character got attacked and then a "round" was over for instance. Half the time I wasnt even sure why the game was pausing and it would do it every 3-4 seconds, which caused an even more frustrating experience. Unless you spend all your time reading the action window and frequently pausing its really hard to parse. And I'm not sure why it is good design to have everybody reading a text window all the time rather than looking at the on screen action.
It does pause every turn. If you're hammering the spacebar, though, you could certainly end up jumping through the pauses
Re: text window, D:OS does the same, and nobody minds it that much - in fact, it can be hard to understand from onscreen actions and icons alone what's going on, especially when a rival mage goes ham and casts several spells in succession. Do you not use the text window in D:OS?
I will agree that pure turn-based is "cleaner" that the flow is abundantly clear at each juncture. In exchange, you give up the simultaneity of action possible with RtWP. Alternatively, you need to borrow from real-time movement/action systems like Resonance of Fate.
You do realise alpha-blending was a pretty expensive operation on 2D games back then, right?
Most of the game involves lots of tricks to make transparency effects (Fog of War being a masked 2x2 grid). In fact, IIRC, the alpha blending for spell effects was pretty new as an option since it was a pretty demanding feature. Having transparent overlays would've made the game unplayable on lots of PCs.Deaf Spacker
Memb
i was playing on normal up until an hour ago, after that I switched to easy, I have three people in my group.
What are skill vendors and where can I find them?
I let the enemies come to me but even then I struggled.
I'd like to play on normal but until I get better I think I will have to stick to easy.
Crimsonsky
Member
If by "wrong" you mean more fun, than I agree. You see you aren't making much sense. Your last sentence seems to imply that you don't like pausing and giving new instructions every two seconds. Yet in BG2, if you don't have competent AI routines, you are going to be doing just that. So which is it?
Proper AI routines are mainly for people like myself, who have played the game a dozen times over and are far too lazy to pause every two seconds or for beginners such as those in this very discussion. When the computer is playing, eventually you will find yourself saying "No, I can do this better." and so you do. And now you realize that you have learned(or at least are starting to learn) what works, what doesn't, and what to do and what not to do. There's no need to harsh on anyone, everyone learns in different ways and at a different pace. PhD or not.
Perception and Initiative are a decent investment on one character, and one character only. They are not strong enough stats to invest in heavily. No more than 7-8 base, with 13-15 total from gear/spells. So yea, you'll go first, cool beans. Now there's 4-8 spiders or what have you spread all over the screen. It's going to take a turn or two to get them all together and nuke them or to smash each one individually. This isn't a problem, but it is slower than a more fast paced system like RTwP.
FF12 had gambits, not X(10). X was decidedly turn-based and probably one of the best implementations of turn based combat to exist.
The game can be be hard for those of us new to cRPGs, but I'd encourage you to stick with it. As someone who has never been able to get into the genre before, I love this game.
A few of things that will help:
1) make sure you have FOUR party members before you leave the town. One is in the tavern and one is on the second floor of the Mayor's House
2) If at all possible get the spider summons spell. It's a geomancy spell so you'll need one point in that. If none of your characters have a point in it, one of the characters you'll find (Jahan) does. You can buy the spell from the witch merchant on the second floor of the in. Throw this spider out in front of you to initiate combat and use it to tank/ soak up damage. Repeat when it dies.
3) Use the environoment as part of your strategy. You can often aproach a battle from several angles. Find the best one. Create choke points. Hide behind cover. Throw down oil and fire and create a firewall enemies have to come through to reach you. Sneak up on them and toss explosing barrels out before the fight even starts, etc.
Here are a complete location of skill vendors that I can remember in Cyreal:
PERSON / LOCATION / SKILLS
WItch / 2nd Floor of Inn / Witchcraft and Scoundrel Skills
Aureus / 1st Floor Leionaire HQ / Man at Arms Skills
Wizard / 2nd Floor Legionaire HQ / Geomancer and Pyrokentic Skills
Trader / Marketplace Blue Tent / Marksmen Skills
Trader / Marketplace / Aereothurge skills
It does pause every turn. If you're hammering the spacebar, though, you could certainly end up jumping through the pauses
Re: text window, D:OS does the same, and nobody minds it that much - in fact, it can be hard to understand from onscreen actions and icons alone what's going on, especially when a rival mage goes ham and casts several spells in succession. Do you not use the text window in D:OS?
I will agree that pure turn-based is "cleaner" that the flow is abundantly clear at each juncture. In exchange, you give up the simultaneity of action possible with RtWP. Alternatively, you need to borrow from real-time movement/action systems like Resonance of Fate.
I do look at it on occasion. Especially when something happened and I don't understand what/why. But most of the time you don't have to because the visual cues on the screen and the on screen text is clean and easy to interpret.
Edit: beaten
Sentenza
Member
yeah, I mean "more fun", in the sense that playing without any AI and deciding every single cast is.
It's precisely that middle ground that BG2 hits so sweetly and Dragon Age misses.
Requiring constant directions from the players without obsessing him with the necessity of giving new inputs about trivial actions every two seconds.
So I'm making perfect sense, you are just missing the point.
Then again, people who love to set AI routines in BG2 are usually also the same people who love to rest every five fucking steps, so of course they don't mind if their casters waste their spells even when it's completely unnecessary.
Riposte
Member
It's fairly easy to imagine this game with directional controls, given it already exists in the form of clicking and dragging the mouse. WASD would just be a less awkward version of that. Would actually make turning your party before entering a battle easier. Not a fan of clicking and watching my dudes move either, especially in no risk situations.
Sentenza
Member
But it wouldn't change a single thing for the better.
If anything, i would definitely prefer if they went "full RTS" like Baldur's Gate, without the stupid "I'm just moving one character and the others follow" and with the ability to select and move in formation a certain amount of units/characters.
A "hit SPACE to pause and then give directions to all your party members" when out of combat would be a massive improvement in how they control, as well.
You don't need to turn your party before entering battles, just FYI. No matter who is leading at the time, the party will "assume positions" based on the formation and the portrait order.
Finished.
Kinda slowed down toward the end of the game, Hunter's Edge was probably my favorite area of the game, but after that
there was too much fighting and too little talk. Which wouldn't be a problem if my characters weren't walking gods at that point.
Still god-tier game, etc, best RPG since Mask of the Betrayer/New Vegas, imo the major flaws are: randomized loot (toward the end I barely cared about the loot), stupid pixel hunting in some sections of the game. Inventory also despite the many quirks could use some improvement, icon-wise.
Kinda slowed down toward the end of the game, Hunter's Edge was probably my favorite area of the game, but after that
I'm talking about the swamp area in the Phantom Forest
Still god-tier game, etc, best RPG since Mask of the Betrayer/New Vegas, imo the major flaws are: randomized loot (toward the end I barely cared about the loot), stupid pixel hunting in some sections of the game. Inventory also despite the many quirks could use some improvement, icon-wise.
I don't see how it would work even with a significant redesign. The whole game is built around vectors and free movement/positioning.
I guess it would work passably outside of battles.
Indeed. I've actually hit space 3 or 4 times already while playing Divinity. Ever time I'm disappointed it doesn't work
Apologies if I sounded hostile. It wasn't my intention. I will just concede to the point that real time with pause gives you a different experience that people prefer.