What combat system do you prefer?

It´s usually not a big deal for me as long as it is well done but I tend to prefer turn based when you handle a whole party or complex magic system so voted for that

I´m planning to do a second playthrough of pathfinder and try the tb-mod since I want to play a magic class and I don´t have the reflexes to do that in a rtwp anymore or if ever

Sadly this poll won’t get at the “Great Turn Based Holy Wars” that we have seen polluting just about every thread on the site that have led more than one person to basically leave the site over being attacked.

I wonder if a more elucidating poll might have been:

“A New Party Based RPG with Real-Time with Pause Combat is Announced, Do You:
A) Cool, not enough party-based RPG, I’ll buy it!
B) Figure out if the setting is interesting setting, etc. and then decide.
C) Oh well, prefer turn-based but as my friend “A” said not enough games so I guess I will buy on sale
D) Take vacation time to plaster every forum and social media site with frothing attacks about the inferiority of RTwP and those who will subject themselves to such horrors.”



I kid ... mostly!

txa1265 said:

Sadly this poll won’t get at the “Great Turn Based Holy Wars” that we have seen polluting just about every thread on the site that have led more than one person to basically leave the site over being attacked.

I wonder if a more elucidating poll might have been:

“A New Party Based RPG with Real-Time with Pause Combat is Announced, Do You:
A) Cool, not enough party-based RPG, I’ll buy it!
B) Figure out if the setting is interesting setting, etc. and then decide.
C) Oh well, prefer turn-based but as my friend “A” said not enough games so I guess I will buy on sale
D) Take vacation time to plaster every forum and social media site with frothing attacks about the inferiority of RTwP and those who will subject themselves to such horrors.”



I kid … mostly!

Click to expand...

I guess from that selection I am somewhere between C and D.

If I am baited well enough (e.g. awesome story or setting), or if there is just not any other option of decent RPGs at the time, I will fall back to RTwP games. But I'll leave them out if I got options which suit me more.
And on general threads I comment about it as well as on game-threads which had a chance to be TB. There is no point in just going into a thread about Baldurs Gate 1 and tell everyone that the combat there sucks.

Kordanor said:

It would probably also interesting to know what importance combat has in a game for you and on which difficulty you play.

For me Combat has a very high importance. There are games where the combat is rather bad but acceptable due to the other strengths of the game. For example I liked Insomnia but the combat was really not good.
Witcher 1 had a horrible, horrible combat system, but I switched to easy and finished it for the story.
Witcher 2 however I tried two times (before and after the combat revamp patch) and I just resigned because of the combat which I couldn't stand.

I usually play on hardest difficulty and if I switch to something different, that must be because I think the combat is terrible. And chances are I would then just stop playing the game alltogether.

I think RTwP is preferable for people who put less weight into combat and play on easy, as you can get past it faster and almost skip it if it annoys you.

For me this damages the game however. Similar to 3rd person perspective and combat.
Usually the immersion is worse than in first person, and I hate controls which are made for audiences playing with a controller and who need aim assistance and similar to make it playable - which on a PC with Mouse and Keyboard just makes it worse.
I cannot think of any third person RPG where I really liked the combat. They usually have to come with other strengths to appeal to me. (btw: never played Dark Soul and Co due to this, but this is also because I dislike asian "settings" with gigantic weapons and other things which make the world unauthentic and for me un-immersive, but thats a different topic).

Click to expand...

You not liking something doesn't make it horrible.

Ironically, I didn't like the combat in The Witcher either at first until I put it on the hardest difficulty. It actually became pretty fun after that. The problem is that the default difficulty has very little challenge, and having an onscreen icon to tell you when to swing your sword was a terrible idea. Switching to Hard removes the icon and requires the player to use signs and alchemy intelligently.

I enjoyed the combat in TW2 as well, but I don't have the grudge against third-person that you seem to have.

Kordanor said:

(btw: never played Dark Soul and Co due to this, but this is also because I dislike asian "settings" with gigantic weapons and other things which make the world unauthentic and for me un-immersive, but thats a different topic).

Click to expand...

The Dark Souls games have every kind of weapon of every size and the setting isn't remotely Asian themed unless you're playing Sekiro.

JFarrell71 said:

The Dark Souls games have every kind of weapon of every size and the setting isn't remotely Asian themed unless you're playing Sekiro.

Click to expand...

It is an asian game, and it has an asian style or influence. This does not reflect in Manga Graphics this time, and also not in an asian setting. But in some other aspects.


And I am not saying this is bad. I am just saying that I don't like it. I would like a manga style even less. And I also keep my distance from any FF game or anything similar.

Kordanor said:

It is an asian game, and it has an asian style or influence. This does not reflect in Manga Graphics this time, and also not in an asian setting. But in some other aspects.

And I am not saying this is bad. I am just saying that I don't like it. I would like a manga style even less. And I also keep my distance from any FF game or anything similar.

Click to expand...

You can screen cap a giant hammer, but you could as easily screencap daggers or short swords or maces or a hundred other normal sized weapons. Being a game made by Asians does not mean it has an asian style. It's a thousand miles from Final Fantasy in tone, visual style, gameplay, storytelling and pretty much any other aspect of game design you could name.

I know you're not saying it's bad. I just wonder if you might be missing out. Dark Souls has some of the best world-building in games, imo (I also like the gameplay, for which your mileage may of course vary)

JFarrell71 said:

I know you're not saying it's bad. I just wonder if you might be missing out. Dark Souls has some of the best world-building in games, imo (I also like the gameplay, for which your mileage may of course vary)

Click to expand...

Yeah, the way of worldbuilding with indirect storytelling as well as the difficulty is quite appealing to me. But especially the actual gameplay is not. And I also don't even own a controller.

RTWP or Real Time pretty much exclusively. I do not like or play most TB or Twitch style FPS games. I can deal with TB if it is in a game with not a lot of combat, like Tides of Numeria. The more combat the more I dislike TB and the less likely I will purchase a game that has it.

These days as soon as I see a new game, kick starter, etc. and see the words "turn based" I take it off my radar pretty much. A game would have to be spectacularly mind blowing amazing for me to pick up a TB game with lots of combat.

I also am not a fan of twitch based combat that requires a lot of very fast paced combat with quick reaction time or has a lot of twitch based combos where you have to press a variety of key sequences at just the right time to carry out - I dislike those way more than TB combat.

Combat styles I like would be in these kinds of games:

BG, NWN, KOTOR, Skyrim, FO4, FNV, DAO, DA2, DAI, Outer Worlds, Greedfall, PF:KM, MEA.

Kordanor said:

Yeah, the way of worldbuilding with indirect storytelling as well as the difficulty is quite appealing to me. But especially the actual gameplay is not. And I also don't even own a controller.

Click to expand...

I don’t care to get into a k&M vs controller debate. I’ll just say I beat all 3 games in the series with M&K. The first one required some work to get it to play nice with M&K but 2 and 3 were fine out of the box. Just a couple key remaps. Also I played a rouge with daggers or swords only. So no giant weapons, they really aren’t the norm for the game.

I’d suggest playing them in reverse order as the stories not really important. DS3 will work flawlessly with K&M. If combat is really your thing it couldn’t hurt to pick it up cheap in a sale and try it out. My 2 cents anyway.

As for importance of combat. Combat is king for me. If the combats solid I can forgive all else. However if a game has combat I don’t like it doesn’t matter how good story or anything is. I’ll drop it. Probably the reason I’m such a souls and souls like fan.

I have read a lot about UgoIgo lately in these forums. I am starting to get convinced that UgoIgo may be the best system out there...

I've never heard of UgoIgo before. I just Googled it and didn't learn anything. Is it pronounced "oogo-eego"? That was how I thought it on first read. But then I figured it must be "you go, I go." If that's the case I'm going to pronounce it wrong intentionally because I refuse to pronounce "u" and "ur" as "you" and "your."

This poll further confirms I'm definitely in minority. I play games regardless of combat system (RTwP, TB and RT) providing they are fun but definitely prefer RTwP.

Yes, but your minority is larger than mine minority: real time.

Anyway, I add the ones that have chosen ‘I don't care, I like them all’, to mine. And they can be counted to yours as well. So, not that small a group.

Nathaniel3W said:

I've never heard of UgoIgo before. I just Googled it and didn't learn anything. Is it pronounced "oogo-eego"? That was how I thought it on first read. But then I figured it must be "you go, I go." If that's the case I'm going to pronounce it wrong intentionally because I refuse to pronounce "u" and "ur" as "you" and "your."

Click to expand...

I don’t think anyone heard about it before, until Chien brought it up.

I enjoy the tactical value and playmaking potential of "well done" turn-based games. Nothing like being able to analyse every turn and use the set of rules given to turn the situation in your favour. "Well done" being key here, not everything that is turn-based is good. I will play any good RPG, and I enjoy even the "action" ones (Zelda, Dark Souls, etc) but to me, the game is not chess if it's not played like chess.

Myrthos said:

I don’t think anyone heard about it before, until Chien brought it up.

Click to expand...

I think I've seen it mentioned in ancient texts of the 90s (aka, old articles and magazines), alongside such technologies as play-by-mail and web 2.0.

I voted turn based. I prefer a play style, where I can think throught every move I make as long as I like. As a contrast I strongly dislike any twitch-based combat, where timing and player reaction speed play any role.

Therefore games like Might and Magic VI, Xulima, Divinity OS etc. fit best to my play style. But I equally like the fighting mechanics in all games which have automatic pause options like Baldur's Gate, Drakensang or Pilars of Eternity (didn't play the turn-based variant yet). I activate all pause triggers in the beginning (in particular things like "round finished", "spell cast", "out of ammo" etc.), but deactivate some redundant ones later. For me it plays like turn based that way, because I control every action of every character. Of course I deactivate all AI fighting scripts.

For me the mere distinction between "turn based" on the one hand and "real time with pause" on the other hand is completely misleading, because for me the "auto pause" makes a game turn based. I know that purists will find differences (turn based versus round based etc.) but for my preference of a chess-like play style this makes no difference.

Having said all of this, it is important to note that preferring this combat system does not mean that I prefer games using this system over games using other systems.

For example Gothic 2 and Elex are my number one in all times games. Also I love Grim Dawn, for example.

The reason is that combat for me is only "the salt in the soup" in games. While too much or too little salt can make a dish taste bad, it is not the main reason for liking the dish. Things like story, art style, atmosphere, world building are much more important for me.

There are even dishes, which do not need salt at all, like sweets. I love point and click adventures and do not miss combat there at all.

In short: If a developer would ask me in advance which combat style I would prefer, I would say "turn based". But when asked which game of an existing set of games I like most, combat is only one of many aspects like the amount of salt in a dish.

I was contemplating to chose the option "I don't care". However, the question was not "which type of game do you like most" but "which combat system do you prefer", so the answer had to be "turn based".

May be some discussions here would have been less heated, when people had that distinction and also the "salt in the soup"-aspect in mind.

Edit: The heated discussions were not in this thread but in other ones, but I believe the point still holds.

My preference for turn-based is more about level of control than it's about the concept of taking turns in itself.

So, it's more about how games have historically used TB versus RT systems.

I can think of about two games that had real-time combat systems, where I had what I consider a satisfactory level of control over my characters. Those would be:

Dragon Age Origins
Pillars of Eternity 2

In those two games, the real-time systems could be easily customized - and after some getting used to how they worked, I felt very much in control of my characters during combat. Well, my control was really applied before combat - but you get my meaning.

However, I've played countless CRPGs over the past 30+ years - and those remain the ONLY two that I can remember with that level of control.

So, since I'm such a big fan of being in control of my character(s) in a game - I have to say turn-based is still my preference.

But as for the concepts in and of themselves - I don't have a preference. It would depend on other things, like pacing and whether or not the game in question had multiplayer.

Well, maybe my preference would be real-time - because I'm just as impatient as I'm a control-freak.

So, if I could be in control and have a faster pace - that would probably be ideal.