Debate: Is turn-based or real-time-with-pause better for CRPGs?

A whopping six years ago, former features producer Andy Kelly and I had a big ol’ fight. It was a respectful one, though, taking place exclusively in our respective articles regarding the news that Baldur’s Gate 3 would feature turn-based battles. Andy thought this sucked, wishing Larian had stuck with real-time-with-pause. I, meanwhile, was over the moon.

With turn-based battles increasingly the norm for modern CRPGs, though, I thought it was time to relitigate this topic and find out what you, our wise readers, thought. I know you’ll pick the right one.

The Fraser of six years ago was very smart and I still agree with him. TB is the superior choice. RTWP isn’t a terrible system, but it feels like an unnecessary one—like it’s trying to make real-time scrums more tactical and smarter when the solution is already obvious: make them turn-based.

It was a worthwhile experiment, though. An attempt to show what a tabletop game could be like if you adapted it for PC—where everything can play out in real-time instead of the incredibly slow progress made around a table. But TB fights are already much faster when you’ve got a game engine handling all the fiddly rules, and considerably less messy than RTWP.

So many RTWP scraps feel like throwaway brawls, while TB fights are more meticulously set up—or at least they can be. A TB system lets developers craft more distinct, noteworthy challenges, or fights that play out more like puzzles that take into account lots of additional factors, like the battlefield geography or other environmental quirks. In the chaotic RTWP scrum, this isn’t nearly as feasible. A TB system, simply put, allows for better fight setups.

I think it’s noteworthy that most of the great RPGs with TB systems get significant praise for their fights, while games that go down the RTWP path are rarely held up as examples of brilliantly implemented combat. All the adjacent stuff might be celebrated—the spells, skills, character progression. But the brawls themselves? Nah.

When folks do have nice things to say about RTWP, I’m convinced they are victims of nostalgia. And I’ve been there myself. I was a diehard RTWP boy. But between the controlled elemental chaos of Original Sin and Baldur’s Gate 3, and the elegant tabletop-inspired text-based battles of RPGs like Esoteric Ebb, I’ve seen the light.

And plenty of developers seem to agree. Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer, for instance, prefers TB, despite Pillars of Eternity being RTWP, which seemed to largely be down to players expecting it, and wanting that nostalgic thrill of playing something that felt like an old Infinity Engine game. “It seemed like more fans would have been upset by its exclusion if we had not had real-time-with-pause [in Pillars of Eternity],” Sawyer said last year.

But then Obsidian added a TB mode in its sequel, Deadfire. “I always have preferred turn-based to real-time-with-pause,” said Sawyer. “Especially with Deadfire⁠, I think we did a really good job making [RTWP] more accessible, but I am glad that turn-based seems to be winning out. I would like to hopefully one day work on a turn-based game.”

CRPG studio Owlcat has taken things even further. Its original Pathfinder CRPG was RTWP, the sequel Wrath of the Righteous then included a TB mode, and Rogue Trader went full TB. Its follow-up, Dark Heresy, is also exclusively TB.

Despite this, I’d like to think there’s room for both. This industry is too homogenised as it is, and I know RTWP still has its fans. But if I have a choice between RTWP and TB, I’m always going to pick the latter.