What videogames are you playing in 2026?

Problem with turn-based in the Pillars games is that the encounter design and frequency are still geared toward RTwP, which really aggravates the pacing problems in those games (which were bad enough in RTwP). And unlike Wrath of the Righteous, where you can at least keep it in RTwP for those filler trash mobs (which that game STILL has way too many of, mind) and then change to turn-based for the actual battles that are worth anything, in Pillars you can't even change between the two on the fly.
The mode they're adding to the first game does allow changing between the two on your own.

Anyway, if a game is going to have trash mobs I actually even more prefer a turn-based mode than RTwP, because then I can still have fun playing them out tactically even if they don't pose any real difficulty. Meanwhile, dealing with trash mobs with RTwP is basically a speed bump to your exploration. Boring.

Of course, ideally your game shouldn't have trash mobs at all, but if you're going to make me fight them at least let me make a few interesting decisions while I'm doing it.
 

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Anyway, if a game is going to have trash mobs I actually even more prefer a turn-based mode than RTwP, because then I can still have fun playing them out tactically even if they don't pose any real difficulty.
I would politely suggest that like, the vast majority of RPG players do not feel that way after they've been playing a very encounter-heavy game on a turn-based mode for say, 20+ hours. That you are quite unusual in this. I mean, it's not only not posing "any real difficulty", it's that fundamentally they are designed to be dealt with with RtwP, so they're not tactically interesting - enemies tend not to have powerful attacks that must be stopped or avoided with the appropriate actions, nuanced defences that need to be defeated, nor complex abilities you might want to think about how to deal with - all lynchpins of actual turn-based game design.

I think a lot of gamers say "I want turn-based", and sure, they mean it, but just retrofitting turn-based on to a basically RtwP game doesn't make it good, and PoE2, and both Owlcat D&D games show that very clearly. I mean, sure, Wrath of the Righteous launched with turn-based, but it has RtwP encounter frequency, size, and design, which mean it increasingly sucked on turn-based the further you got into it.

Of course, ideally your game shouldn't have trash mobs at all, but if you're going to make me fight them at least let me make a few interesting decisions while I'm doing it.
That's what RtwP is designed to do - allow you to pause and make "a few interesting decisions". Whereas turn-based forces you to make every single tiny decision, no matter how completely meaningless or repetitive, so warrants a fundamentally different design style, where each choice is more impactful, fights are shorter and deadlier, and enemies have more significant and complex abilities, not just Big Numbers like RtwP tends to favour.

And let's be clear, it's not a slight increase in time consumed. I've played PoE2 on RtwP and turn-based, and I would say, conservatively, the game took 2-3x as long to get through on turn-based, and that was basically giving up.

Better to design for the mode you actually want the game to be played in, I would strongly suggest. And that means turn-based these days because it sells multiple times more copies (according to various industry people, including JE Sawyer) now.

(I feel like there might well be a kind of in-between mode that would be better than either for a lot of genres and styles, but I've not seen that attempted much. Whoever nails it will do well though.)

EDIT - Thinking about a hybrid, you could do something with side-based initiative, where every character you controlled came up with their own course of action (using basic game logic, maybe you could modify that logic like DAO/2, FFXII, PoE1/2, etc.), and then you could choose to just press a big GO button to make them all act, or you could go in and modify each course of action manually.
 
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