Full Frontal Nerdity
Once upon a time, the Banished village of Nyctimus suffered a fire. Its heroic, brilliant and dashingly handsome mayor Werwolfe sprang into action, directing a team of stalwart mountain-folk to rebuild the ruined houses immediately.
I'm griping about this now after struggling through Pathfinder: Kingmaker's endgame, which was crammed full of repetitive fights against obviously cut and pasted groups of enemies to artificially inflate its length. It does too good a job of aping (in both good and bad points) the old DnD adaptations like Neverwinter Nights and the Infinity Engine titles, cRPGs' answer to stop-motion animation. "Real-time" anything was a point of pride back in 1998, so Baldur's Gate and its offshoots featured real-time combat... which you had to pause every second to order another attack. Real-time combat works fine for a simplified system like The Elder Scrolls: one weapon, two spells, let's rock! Yet even there it was necessary to implement pausing to switch said weapons and spells, even for a single character. When it comes to party-based single-player RPGs, it becomes obvious that you'll spend most of your campaign paused. When every single game that's copied the Baldur's Gate formula keeps running into the same tedium, isn't it about time to admit that "real-time" adds nothing to the recipe except inexact frustration?
The problem is that RPGs in the DnD tradition encompass not only the "feels" of narrative immersion but tactical and strategic planning. Strategy is not a dreamy release. It's wide-eyed, precise, predictive and calculating. Random number generation inserts some unpredictability, but even there it's important to know where the unpredictability comes from. Games have rules, and imprecision in what should be a constant feels like being deliberately cheated. I can handle not knowing what trade boat will pass through my town next (because I'm not supposed to know) but villagers in Banished usually know better than to get stuck on terrain, and to see that steadfast rule broken is both injurious and insulting. I'm supposed to be defeated by my own poor decision-making, not by the interface. For RPGs which promise not only a strategic but a tactical element, knowing exactly when and where something is happening becomes paramount. I've lost quite a few fights in Kingmaker for holding my finger off the PAUSE button just a second too long.
I've lost even more for mistakenly thinking my character was out of range of a melee attack or for thinking I was behind cover when I wasn't. And while such games usually do offer some user interface helper features, they simply can't compensate for the inherent imprecision of their terrain. Take Divinity: Original Sin 2, which was thankfully turn-based but ran into constant problems with its range calculations.
The demon-bat I'm shooting there refused to follow me across the bridge, presumably to prevent players from exploiting its patrol algorithm to split enemy groups. Of course, in more than one fight like this, it was quite possible to exploit the anti-exploit feature itself to arrow the damn thing to death while it refuses to chase me, all because that ravine was a pixel or two too narrow. Rivers again. More trouble than they're worth, I tell you. Building the map out of tiles could've solved that, plus any number of more frustrating situations where you end up misguesstimating unlisted distances.
Here's M.A.X.
Mechanized Assault and Xploration was (despite the stupid name) an exemplary strategy game from Interplay's sunset years, followed by a best forgotten sequel which tried (and failed miserably) to jump on the Dune 2 / Warcraft 2 RTS bandwagon. The original was turn-based and tile-based, dealing in small integer values when it came to everything from unit stats to resources. Its greatest challenge was arguably constructing a contiguous infrastructure with a continuous defense, as the AI had an uncanny knack for exploiting even a single-tile unguarded corridor or cutting off your reinforcements. Hence the convenient bank of map overlay toggles on the left of the screen. Not in the options menu. Information at your fingertips, not in your backpack. Nonetheless estimating radii diagonally still proved a crap-shoot. That's probably why, two decades later, another square tile strategy game, Into the Breach, simply doesn't *do* diagonals, approximating such moves instead by letting your units move and fire separately. Suck on that, Pythagoras.
A hexagonal grid offers smoother, more intuitive turning and circling
- though it should be noted a hex grid doesn't guarantee good strategic balance. The Heroes of Might and Magic series, despite their hex appeal, sacrificed it in endless ways in the interest of providing overpowered yet thematically coherent gameplay options (*cough-cough* VampireLords *cough*) Adopting any actual theme beyond the abstractions of Chess or Go will inevitably entail such sacrifices of function to form. Nevertheless, the pattern is obvious: strategy means discrete tiles and turn-taking, and in fact the first more or less implies the second. Even hopscotch is turn-based!
It's safe to say the Real-Time
1) Nobody salivates at hearing the phrase "real-time" anymore. It was more of a technological than a stylistic achievement to begin with, a way to push the envelope back in the late '90s, and the pulse-pounding zerg clusterfuck is an artifact of that era. Looking at a hybrid like Spellforce renders the realization doubly glaring, as both its genres suffer from the same undue time pressure. Strategy means turns and tiles and precise execution.
2) For all the immersive, Hollywood envious, amateur theater appeal of role-playing games, let's remember they began as strategy wargames. Other, single-character genres, like survival horror or stealth-based games, are more apt to incorporate the time element smoothly. The option-rich, multi-unit setup was a board game to begin with and still functions best on a board with discrete distances and timing. The central question of an RPG is not how to add strategic value to good/evil 20-level wizard/fighter/thief archetypes, but how to add moral and stylistic roleplaying choices to chess.
3) It's not like you can't build atmosphere in a turn-based, tile-based combat system, as InXile's RPGs (referenced in the Full Frontal Nerdity comic linked up top) readily demonstrate. I specifically chose M.A.X. as my strategy game example because it so regularly gets described as "immersive" or "atmospheric" due to its interface, music, combat sounds, etc. without the need for constantly streaming action-action-action. Alpha Centauri might make an even better example for all the times it's been described as "playing a novel." In fact, a better alternative to the stop-motion claymation of Baldur's Gate was developed at about the same time by some of the same people: let players run around town in real-time and hide the grid while adventuring, but enforce turns and tiles when combat starts. And, for the life of me, I can't imagine any sane analyst claiming that Fallout lacked immersion, no matter how British its combat sequence.
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