Other First-Person Turn-Based Party-Based RPGs

[meganothing]

Puzzles are puzzles, that one has a clock to it is about as offending as another having a musical solution

In a game with turn-based fights you can expect most players to have an aversion against anything which needs nimble fingers and fast reactions. Grimrock is real-time, so timed puzzles are more in line with the game.

Reaction speed deteriorates with age, a challenge that is easy for a 20 year old might be very difficult for someone past 50. In single player shooters old people can play at a lower difficulty setting, but in an RPG the difficulty slider is usually reserved for different tunings. Grimrock sadly doesn't have a slider to adapt the timed puzzles to age/reaction speed.

(A similar case can be made against puzzles that are only solvable if you have specific knowledge, for example of a quote in a shakespeare play. Not a good idea as people who don't know about it just have no chance at all.)

[IHaveHugeNick]

Timed puzzles are unbelievably immersion breaking. And yes, I hate "teh immersiun" crowd as much as anybody. But the reality is, nothing yanks you out of the game more brutally then failing a timed-puzzle a few times. It just conveys this feeling of battling against something that's completely artificial and arbitrary.

[Gizmo]

In a game with turn-based fights you can expect most players to have an aversion against anything which needs nimble fingers and fast reactions. Grimrock is real-time, so timed puzzles are more in line with the game.

Reaction speed deteriorates with age, a challenge that is easy for a 20 year old might be very difficult for someone past 50. In single player shooters old people can play at a lower difficulty setting, but in an RPG the difficulty slider is usually reserved for different tunings. Grimrock sadly doesn't have a slider to adapt the timed puzzles to age/reaction speed.

(A similar case can be made against puzzles that are only solvable if you have specific knowledge, for example of a quote in a shakespeare play. Not a good idea as people who don't know about it just have no chance at all.)

Games with turn based combat are mindful of time, and when time becomes important. There are many games where the exploration part is realtime, and become turn based only when time and sequence become important... as they do in combat. Fallout is a turn based game that had several realtime ~timers that trigger events, and some of them lethal.

The only problem with timers in a turn based game, is if the developer is careless (or clueless) enough to not force the timer to adjust to elapsed time during combat ~per round. Fallout (again, for instance) had realtime detonators that the player could set. These bombs would explode on the clock. If set for two minutes, they would explode two minutes later ~unless the game switched to combat; where at that point they no longer tick in realtime, but in elapsed time.

Of solutions requiring insight... what games do you know that have those, but do not have the solutions present in the game?
(I only recall one title, and that used the questions as an age check ~in a pre-internet era, under the assumption that young kids didn't follow 80's politics.)

Riven comes first to mind for solutions requiring in game foreknowledge. That game [brilliantly] generates passwords on the fly for the game ~making them almost unguessable; and dutifully puts the solution where they are supposed to be found or figured out. It even has a school with toys to teach small children the basics of counting, and other skills... To solve the puzzle, the player uses these to teach themselves the means to understand the answer.

Timed puzzles are unbelievably immersion breaking. And yes, I hate "teh immersiun" crowd as much as anybody. But the reality is, nothing yanks you out of the game more brutally then failing a timed-puzzle a few times. It just conveys this feeling of battling against something that's completely artificial and arbitrary.

Why on earth would it matter if it was arbitrary? Someone made that puzzle, and probably made it for security. When a thief breaks into business, they might find a blinking number pad on the wall demanding the correct solution, else it triggers an alarm. That is not 'immurzshun' breaking. If it is... then I've no idea what the hell people mean by 'immurzshun'... and I doubt they know it themselves.

A timed puzzle in an old abandoned dungeon is from a time when it wasn't old and abandoned. Such a puzzle can very well be the same thing as the burglar alarm, and is not 'immurzshun' breaking for the same reasons the former is not.

Even if it's not an alarm, the timer means the same thing. It's not arbitrary, it is a minimal amount of time for the right person to solve the puzzle and pass; while the wrong person [hopefully ~in their thinking] won't have enough time to guess the answer.

[IHaveHugeNick]

You missed the critical part of my post - I've said failing the puzzle multiple times. Every time you attempt a timed-puzzle, the less it feels like you are in a living breathing world, and the more it feels like you're up against something that came of a drawing board of game designer, with arbitrary rules that were decided basically at random. And thats textbook definition of breaking imersion.

[Gizmo]

You missed the critical part of my post - I've said failing the puzzle multiple times. Every time you attempt a timed-puzzle, the less it feels like you are in a living breathing world, and the more it feels like you're up against something that came of a drawing board of game designer, with arbitrary rules that were decided basically at random. And thats textbook definition of breaking imersion.

That is not missed, That is supposed to be "tough, deal with it". No game should bother accounting for player reloads in its puzzle design, except to protect itself from the player trying to cheat it.

[IHaveHugeNick]

Oh I know its supposed to be "tough, deal with it". But what it ends out being, is "fuck you, i'm don't doing that shit".

You want to make a puzzle? Make a puzzle. There's are ways of designing tough puzzles without involving arbitrary rules that yank you out of the game and back into real world. It basically makes the game break character, because it abruptly introduces mechanics that are based on a completely different skillset then the rest of the game.

[Gizmo]

It's not combat, and reading the wall is not turn based. I do not see how this pulls anyone out of the game-world. Exploration in BT1-3 was real time.

I can understand deathtraps being an issue, but for puzzles the player fails at due to timing... they fail at them; they should move on to something else.

[Crosmando]

You can have "timed" puzzles without having an actual real-time clock in the background, just make every grid "step" count as an amount of time, so the player can finish the puzzle at their own pace. There's another good reason why the game should be grid based!

Either way, I think InXile already have the right attitude to this. When it was decided Torment would have turn-based combat, they said that this logic would be applied to the entire game, and there would be no real-time timers.

[meganothing]

Games with turn based combat are mindful of time, and when time becomes important.

??. Mindful is such a vague term in this all-encompassing sentence. Many turn-based and even real-time games simply forget time when you open the inventory and move potions and two-handed axes from backpack to backpack. Is that what you call mindful?

There are many games where the exploration part is realtime, and become turn based only when time and sequence become important... as they do in combat. Fallout is a turn based game that had several realtime ~timers that trigger events, and some of them lethal.

Please be specific whether you mean Fallout<3 or Fallout>=3. The reason I gave previously why fans of turn-based games don't like timed puzzles doesn't get invalidated by pointing out realtime aspects of those games. Real-time exploration in these games usually does not depend on fast reactions. There is a reason why time stops immediately when enemies spot each other, even that aspect isn't left to the fast fingers of the players. And yes, that is one of the reasons why Fallout>=3 is called *pseudo*-turn-based.

The only problem with timers in a turn based game, is if the developer is careless (or clueless) enough to not force the timer to adjust to elapsed time during combat ~per round. Fallout (again, for instance) had realtime detonators that the player could set. These bombs would explode on the clock. If set for two minutes, they would explode two minutes later ~unless the game switched to combat; where at that point they no longer tick in realtime, but in elapsed time.

If you wanted to propose the excellent solution Crosmando just talked about, that timed puzzles in a turn-based game should be handled like combat and depend only on the number of turn-based steps you do, then yes, I'm all for that. I would assume that people who are against timed puzzles don't like the twitchy *real-time* aspects of it and not the scarcity of time per se.

Of solutions requiring insight... what games do you know that have those, but do not have the solutions present in the game?

Probably many examples were in adventure games or myst-type games, I've seen a few in "top 10 worst puzzles in games" compilations. I think most were based on cultural or language knowledge like the "monkey wrench" puzzle in Monkey Island. Rhymed riddles are often in danger of depending on this type of knowledge as well.

[Gizmo]

??. Mindful is such a vague term in this all-encompassing sentence.

It has to be, it says, "Games". Mindful means that time can become important, but isn't always so, and the games distinguish the two. In Fallout (for instance) realtime exploration becomes turn based when a fight begins, and time gets segmented into discrete packets of who did what and when.

But there are times in the game where the player has a few minutes to escape a deathtrap.

Please be specific whether you mean Fallout<3 or Fallout>=3
...
And yes, that is one of the reasons why Fallout>=3 is called *pseudo*-turn-based.

There is only one Fallout.
There is also Fallout 2, and FO3; and there is nothing turn based (or even psuedo-turnbased ~if there is such a thing) about FO3.

If you wanted to propose the excellent solution Crosmando just talked about, that timed puzzles in a turn-based game should be handled like combat and depend only on the number of turn-based steps you do, then yes, I'm all for that. I would assume that people who are against timed puzzles don't like the twitchy *real-time* aspects of it and not the scarcity of time per se.

Not at all. BT was realtime until combat ensued, and was realtime again after combat. I see nothing wrong with realtime ~time when not in combat.

Think back... Did the light spell expire eventually, or did it only expire after a certain number of steps?
*There were spells that lasted for a single combat, spells that lasted indefinitely (until entering anti-magic-zones), spells that lasted a few minutes; and spells that lasted a few minutes more.

[Crosmando]

There's no point making BT4 real-time out of combat, it accomplishes nothing. If the game is going to have turn-based combat (and combat is the main activity of the game), then it should at least be consistent and make other activities like movement turn-based, it makes the game play more fluidly.

While it was true that in BT1-3 time did pass in real-time outside combat, that was mostly a technicality. Yes you could get attacked if you left your party in one spot and left the computer to make a cup of tea, BUT when you moved a step/square in any direction it also progressed time a certain amount, and after a set amount of "steps" the day would end and night would fall. The whole step-based movement system and day/night cycle was a very important part of how classic BT played.

Gizmo you're just clinging to some technicality to argue a point you know others will dislike, at this point I'm thinking you're a troll or maybe just ignorant.

[Gizmo]

There's no point making BT4 real-time out of combat, it accomplishes nothing.

we know it's realtime; one can see that in the demo.

Gizmo you're just clinging to some technicality to argue a point you know others will dislike, at this point I'm thinking you're a troll or maybe just ignorant.

Have you not described your own comment?

I am told three kinds of 'no', and when I prove it is otherwise, then I am told, 'well... yeah, but so what?'

[Crosmando]

All we saw in the video was a movement animation. Even without a grid you can still make it that time will pass only when you move.

[Gizmo]

All we saw in the video was a movement animation. Even without a grid you can still make it that time will pass only when you move.

Aaannnd... it was not paused, and not stepped. In the tunnels the mouth spoke regardless of party movement, and when between tiles. You will almost certainly find that in the game, the monsters wander about regardless of PC movement; they won't stand in place awaiting their turn (until combat is begun), and the world won't stop just because the party does.

(And this is not new behavior in the series.)

[Crosmando]

You don't actually think that was gameplay right? It was a cinematic.

You will almost certainly find that in the game, the monsters wander about regardless of PC movement; they won't stand in place awaiting their turn (until combat is begun), and the world won't stop just because the party does.

Are you a time traveler? It was a cinematic trailer put together during a Kickstarter, before the game had even begun pre-production. And even so, a better way to do it would be the monsters do wander around, but they move only when you move, something like a roguelike. That would make the combat gameplay consistant and fluid between the movement/exploration gameplay, instead of creating some annoying and twitchy real-time minigame between combat (which was a weakness of WL2 btw, especially how after combat you had a real-timer going if a party member was down, so you needed to fix him in however many seconds or he dies, which was a much criticized feature which made the game feel inconsistant).

(And this is not new behavior in the series.)

It is? In the series monsters didn't wander around, they popped up when you stepped on them.

[Gizmo]

Are you a time traveler?

Wait and see.

(which was a weakness of WL2 btw, especially how after combat you had a real-timer going if a party member was down, so you needed to fix him in however many seconds or he dies, which was a much criticized feature which made the game feel inconsistant).

I thought the time limit was too brief; but very easy to understand; and the concept was mentioned in my earlier post about timers & elapsed time. During combat the PC bleeds out over each turn, while out of combat the PC bleeds out at the regular rate. There was nothing wrong with that. What was [insanely] wrong, was to make competent surgeons helpless without a packet of band-aids.

(And this is not new behavior in the series.)

It is? In the series monsters didn't wander around, they popped up when you stepped on them.

You are wrong. If you played enough of it, you can see that the monsters move from tile to tile in the dungeon. You can very easily run from a fight, and bump into the same groups again a few tiles away.

Lacking the source code, one cannot prove this empirically, but the behavior in the game suggests that ~even were the mechanics to turn out to be 100% random per step. Becky Heineman said that the engine could not support the color pallets for monsters [and the dungeon ~at the same time], in order to depict them on the FPP screen... but it does not seem like the rest of the game has any problem supporting wandering mobs.

[_noblesse_oblige_]

(And this is not new behavior in the series.)

It is? In the series monsters didn't wander around, they popped up when you stepped on them.

You are wrong. If you played enough of it, you can see that the monsters move from tile to tile in the dungeon. You can very easily run from a fight, and bump into the same groups again a few tiles away.

I have logged many, many hours with BT and have never seen the behavior you describe.

Also, given the memory and CPU constraints of the era, it is very unlikely that what you describe is true.

[Crosmando]

No, he's right, I've experienced fleeing an enemy group in BT, but then have them attack me again (strangely enough, Devil Whiskey had this exact same thing, it's interesting how minutely that game went out emulating BT). Though I'm almost certain that enemy groups only "spawn" when you walk on them and trigger the encounter, they don't wander around around in maps before you encounter them.

That said, I cannot be sure that the spawned monsters are actually wandering in the map, BT could've had a mechanic under the hood whereby if you flee an enemy group, that same group might attack you again.

The reason I didn't mention it is because it rarely if ever affected gameplay in BT (except at the beginning if you were fleeing encounters at night-time before you have decent gear), you could play through the whole game and not notice it.

[meganothing]

There is only one Fallout.

That joke gets really old.

If you wanted to propose the excellent solution Crosmando just talked about, ....

Not at all. BT was realtime until combat ensued, and was realtime again after combat. I see nothing wrong with realtime ~time when not in combat.

So what? Real-time movement was for comfort, to speed up the game . Nothing important *depended* on quick reflexes of the player (at least in turn-based blobbers like wizardy, if I remember correctly). You had infinite time to react to dangers or challenges.

Think back... Did the light spell expire eventually, or did it only expire after a certain number of steps?

I can't think back, I have never played BT1-3, so you tell me. But if you want to convince me that BT had any need for quick reflexes (which is the only thing I really do not want to have in BT4), the expiring light spell is not a good example.

[_noblesse_oblige_]

No, he's right, I've experienced fleeing an enemy group in BT, but then have them attack me again (strangely enough, Devil Whiskey had this exact same thing, it's interesting how minutely that game went out emulating BT). Though I'm almost certain that enemy groups only "spawn" when you walk on them and trigger the encounter, they don't wander around around in maps before you encounter them.

Was this in BT1 or in the later games? I never saw this in BT1 (where nearly all of my BT playing time has been). Yes, there would be times during which my party would be attacked by the same kind of monster a second time shortly after the first, but the number of monsters was almost always different. I would simply chalk that up to the random number generator.