It feels like the world has passed me by on this one.  I have always held Baldur’s Gate up as being basically exactly what I want in the feel of a party-based RPG, and yet every discussion online I’ve seen has been the opposite.  When Pillars of Eternity 2 came out, it sold terribly.  I have my own opinions on that but one explanation that was making the rounds was “turn based is a far more tactical feel for an RPG, real time with pause is outdated, that’s why Divinity 2 sold so well and Pillars 2 sold so poorly.”  The devs even seemed to believe this, as after I left Pillars 2, they patched in a turn-based mode for the game.  Well I played some of Divinity 2 and I have to say I truly truly wish this were real-time with pause.

Divinity’s system relies a lot on the minute positioning of spells.  One pixel off can mean the difference between incinerating your enemies vs your allies.  The maps contain plenty of pillars and Line-of-sight blockers to force you to consider positioning, and yet I feel like the positioning is just not fun to engage with.  There are two archers and a warrior at the end of the hall,I want to hide my mage so they can hit the warrior but not get hit by the archers.  How far behind the pillar do I need to be?  I sit in a spot that looks good and… nope.  A little off, I cannot hit the warrior.  Well now I have to spend more AP in order to finagle my positioning just right.  In Real time (Pillars), this would take about a second, which is nothing in the timescale of the battle.  I unpause, move a bit, check, and yep it’s fine.  But here that 1 AP is 25% or 20% of my total for this turn, which can easily mean the difference between getting the spell off or not.  The worst is how intuitive it can sometimes be, a lot of iron stuff lying around has big gaping holes in it (think like the iron bars of a cell).  Can I fire stuff through or does this count as solid so I should instead hide behind it?  Infuriatingly it depends.

So while position matters a whole lot, I generally ignore it because it’s not fun to engage with.  When you’re trying to get something just right, the difference between success and failure is very minuscule, and the AP system means those minute adjustments cost action points, so while a mistake in positioning in Pillars costs me a couple of seconds to fix, a mistake in positioning in Divinity can cost me my entire turn.  And because the mistakes are so punishing, the system is opaque, and I’m not yet feeling any situations where a perfectly executed fireball won the battle, I feel no compulsion to “get good” at this system, and I don’t have much fun trying.