"Turn-based games are obsolete and a product of past gaming limitations"

Risewild

Risewild

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"Turn-based games are obsolete and a product of past gaming limitations", I have seen people over the years parroting this as if it was ever true (just because they don't like turn-based games).

Well, over the years we have had plenty of proof that turn-based games are not because of any "limitation" but it's because they are genuine gaming genres. From Tactical to Grand Strategy games, from 4X to RPGs, from card games and deckbuilders to other tabletop-style games (or entire digital adaptations of TTGs), etc. etc. etc. Turn-based games have always been popular in one way or another.

But why am I writing this now? Because I want to point out as definitive proof that turn-based games are still popular today:
Baldur's Gate 3 just dominated the game Awards this year. And while I don't usually care about the Game Awards, what I did notice is that Baldur's Gate 3 also won the popular vote, it won the GoTY vote from the players.

So players voted BG3 as the game of the year, in the year 2023. This is real proof that turn-based games are not obsolete like some people wish they were.

Turn-based games have had plenty of success and popularity over the years:
Game series like the classic Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior/Quest have made jRPGs very popular outside of Japan.
Pokemon is one of the biggest IPs in gaming, having the best-selling games in several years, since its first Gen (back in 1996).
Sid Meier's Civilization games have been very popular and successful since the first one was released back in 1991.
X-COM was a popular tactical game series (first released in 1994) that later saw a "reboot" named XCOM in 2012 that became quite popular and successful.
Divinity Original Sin became a quite popular and successful wRPG series since its first game's release back in 2014.
Digital (and non-digital) card games like Magic the Gathering games, Heartstone, Yugioh games, etc. have been popular for decades.
Heroes of Might and Magic game series (later re-named Might and Magic: Heroes) has always been quite popular and gave birth to an entire game genre, inspiring several other game series like Disciples and Kings Bounty for example.

Tabletop games have also seen a big increase in popularity in recent years and even Fallout has its own Tabletop game that is played in turns.

Anyway, this was just a rant I decided to type since I was bored and had 15 minutes of spare time today. Congrats to Baldur's Gate 3 and Larian for proving once and for all that players still enjoy turn-based games.

EDIT: Not even 10 minutes after I typed this thread I was reading a thread someone posted somewhere about how Fallout should go back to Isometric turn-based and I see this posted just a bit less than 3 months ago:
6H8Z3Ne.jpg

At least they seem to think Isometric, turn-based fits the Fallout games.
 
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Turn based being considered outdated has been always considered a load of crap, all you have to do is make a quality title out of one, market it properly and it will sell well and be well received.
 
I haven't really heard people saying this recently.
It feels like it was constant back in the day, now it's very rare, or maybe I just don't frequent the places where people don't like turnbased games.
 
Risewild said:
There's never more than one person throwing the die in a "turn"
Click to expand...

Very good comeback :) You can't roll a 20 critical playing craps though.
Staying on topic even the likes of " Total War " are turn based games. To play a lot of RTS games unless you hit pause, take a breath then bang in a few moves/decisions/builds whatever, the computer wipes the floor with you.
The opposite is a lot of FPS are geared to multiplayer or have micro transactions to bleed gullible players, aka kids.
So the FPS genre bores me shitless now tbh
 
It hasn't been dated for a decade now, it has been outdated since 2006. Bethesda, even if by accident, figured out the dopamine rush gameplay loop of "kill, loot, return" early on and that was enough to satisfy the normies.

Now that much better made games in the same vein have come out, their simplistic gameplay loop no longer satisfies those people.
 
Did you see this exchange on X/Twitter? Especially the posts by Trent oster and David Gaider are interesting:

Trent Oster said:
There was a perception that 2D iso games were a dead end from a tech investment standpoint. I was a huge critic of 2D games, mostly on the choppy nature of sprite-based animation vs the potential of 3d-spherical linear interpolation. The render pipelines were also very heavy
Click to expand...

David Gaider said:
It's interesting you list ToEE, as - at BioWare, at least - that game's failure was really what caused the nail to be put into the proverbial coffin, as I recall. Suddenly, iso and turn-based both were simply... off the table
Click to expand...

 
The limitation of turnbased IS hardware, though not in the way you think.

In the old days, hardware can only support so many sprites (characters) on screen at one time. So TB is okay for smallish battles, with few-ish effects (spells, booms).

But once hardware advance to a point where it can support much more sprites on screen at one time, either characters or spells, TB suddenly become underpowered. It can not make full use of new hardware to support new demands. take Fallout 2 for example: with new hardware it can expand the screen to the whole map, but the battlefield's action can only limit to a smallish square. They dare not expand the battlefield to the whole map because it would lead to flashing jump from one idle character to the next.
+++ The best and latest application of TB with modern hardware would be Silent Storm, Silent Storm Sentinels, and Hammer Sickle. Each battle is a major session with at least 30 minutes invested, not because too much action, but because you need to wait to manipulate each character on your side and wait for opponents. The bigger map, the longer the wait.

Real Time With Pause make use of that by all characters acting in that timeframe, and you can pause and check each of them. Sure, resource demands go way up, but hardware can support it. So now you can have battles happen with areage double that of TB battles, more characters, more spells.
+++ Illustration: Icewind Dale 2 for battle with twenty sprites (MC 6 + 8 tough opponents, and +6 summons, and a bunch of spell effect throwing around). UFO Aftershock, UFO Afterlight with nearly that much actors but 3D battlefield...

Fallout 3/ Fallout New Vegas for battles with nearly that amount of actors but more effects (energy bolts, explosions). But the hardware is now invested in art asset rendering and 3D terrain rendering. Battles of 2nd Hoover Dam (final battles) are a testament of this: Hardware too weak would create so many problems. In Fallout 3, that would be the assault of Liberty Prime on Jefferson Memorial, though this is less on terrain and more on explosions.
 
Realtime video games came first. Turn based video games came afterward; much later they were seen by many (who were probably new to computers) as having been superseded by real-time games. The conflated assumption (presumably) being that old computers are slow, and that turn based games were all that you could run on them.

People forget that Diablo and Tomb Raider were contemporaries that came before Fallout.

*These three were mid/late 90's games; the real-time games I mentioned before them were 70's and 80's games.
_______________

Before starting Fallout, Tim Cain worked on (did some audio/sound code IIRC on) Stonekeep; a real-time FPS dungeon crawler released by Interplay in 1995.
D00M released in 1993; Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, and Bethesda's licensed Terminator FPS—with an explorable scale map of LA was released in 1991.

the-terminator-dos.jpg
 
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Baldur's Gate 3 wins 5 more awards on the DICE awards, including GOTY.

In their speeches, Larian people take jabs at the state of the gaming industry and monetization in games. Then they get barred from the DICE awards afterparty because it was "already at max capacity":

https://www.thegamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-win-dice-goty-award-acceptance-speech/

Anyway. This is more proof that turn-based games are not outdated and that there's a market for them.
 
I was always turned off by the turn-based gameplay in Sid Meier's Civilization. I played the third and fourth games of that franchise. Not my cup of tea. Maybe it's because I came to strategy games through Age of Empires instead.

The turn-based mechanic does, however, work better in JRPGs such as Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Final Fantasy? That's one series I have a love-hate relationship with, but more because the random battles turned me off than anything else.
 
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