Gizmo wrote: ↑January 17th, 2018, 10:19 am
thebruce wrote: ↑January 17th, 2018, 8:39 am
Yes but again the vision cone is a 'live' environment mechanic. You're now actively tiptoeing around a changing circumstance. That "live" element is what was essentially missing from the classics. Apart from day/night, and some stat restoration mechanics, and snares in BT2, the core gameplay elements were all turn(or phase)-based; passive.
I disagree.
I understand your point, and description, but I don't consider them turn based—at all; and phased-based only in combat. Exploration in the BT series is live; but the depiction of it is abstracted to the essentials. The party is in a town, and can know roughly where they are in the town, but the party is not in a turn or phase; they can be attacked at random, while loitering, or wandering the town. IRRC, they regenerate points in realtime. (One could—but need not, mention the realtime snares found in BT2.)
...which is what I said above. And that's why I was describing the mechanics, trying to stay away from labels. BT is almost entirely passive, save for the few mechanics mentioned. The live interaction primarily pops out with NPC and enemy encounters. Grimrock's encounters are extremely live and literal with graphic in-world representation of the creatures and non-passive activity. BT's encounters are entirely abstracted and passive (turn/phase/whatever based).
NewlyObsessedFan wrote:Specifically, in the fight, they engage in the 'living world' a single creature patrol - but that single creature was an abstract representation of a group of 3. Than in middle of combat, they had an intrusion by a 4th enemy - one which in this case turned out to be hostile to both player and initial enemy.
I didn't catch that a single creature represented anything more than a single creature... maybe I missed that. And there was a reinforcement, which appeared before combat began (per the commentary video), which does aid toward being flexible for extensive combat... if it can happen during combat and we don't have to visually observe every creature lumbering in to fill an empty spot; especially not 495 times :P
Ok thinking over your comment... what happened was, there was one creature that was spotted, which began the combat intro - that then lead to 3 more creatures 'reinforcing' the first. I'm guessing you meant that one creature 'represented' the 4 of them, since the intended combat was for 4, not just the one wandering. However the additional creature at the end was described as a 'special event', not a typical combat event. Even so, yes the graphic and game mechanic does allow for more flexible encounters than merely facing off what you meet immediately wandering the dungeon. That itself is good... from a gameplay standpoint, if they can keep the flexibility up there, that's a good step towards the classics. But ugh, if we have to watch every animation, every movement, every modification to the combat rounds because it's a "living world" we're watching, the game is going to get stale very quickly with impatience. Remember in the classics, we walk into a square already filled with 496 berserkers and begin the combat mechanic. They're all there already, there's no waiting for more to arrive.
Within 5 seconds of committing to the fight you'd be launching off a MIBL zapping every one of the 496 enemies.
Now again, that was possible because of the very very basic graphic and technical makeup of the BT engine (encounters were designed around the capability of the game engine). BT4 is beautiful, and has a lot more graphic capability - so again, I'm not against pretty graphics; I just don't want to see the graphic engine glorified at the expense of gameplay. I'm not going to expect a 496 creature quick encounter in BT4 (but would welcome it! :)), but that's the far extreme end of the scale from where we're sitting now, IMO.
Ultimately, I'd still like to see some more combat encounters in the engine they've got, see what kind of flexbility to the the engine they're building in; toggles, optimizing. Just as we should be able to skip cutscenes if we've seen them or don't want to watch, will we be able to skip past lumbering character animations, especially in combat, or will we be forced to wait? That's part of the "literal" graphic mechanic I'm not a huge fan of, at least when it comes to BT.