The long and short of it is: there was a tremendous amount of depth and strategy that the murky waters of RTWP obscured. Give it a nice scour to wipe off the grime, and Pillars of Eternity 2's combat system emerges as a titan of the genre, every bit as good as its more celebrated peers.
So, why is this so much of an improvement over the RTWP mode? Well, the game kind of feels designed around it, which is strange, I know, but hear me out. Way back in RTWP's heyday, you were probably playing 2nd edition or 3rd edition D&D. That was where the six party members, RTWP formula came from. But the thing is, most of the martial classes in D&D, maybe half of your party, weren't designed to be that interesting to manage in combat, at least on a purely mechanical level. Tabletop fighters could do all sorts of stunts and maneuvers with the DM's permission... but translated to the computer screen, it just meant you attacked over and over again. That was fine - and you'd need to use skill to correctly position them, especially if you wanted them to tank for your casters - but they just didn't require that much maintenance.
Here's a screenshot of a Baldur's Gate fighter. The hotbar at the bottom are all the actions available to you - talk, attack, cancel. Yeah, it was simple.
So you did definitely have casters, and those required a lot of active management, but you'd only ever have 2-4 of them in your party on any given playthrough. But the thing is, modern D&D emphasizes giving everyone interesting decisions in combat, especially 4e, which was the most recent version when PoE was being developed. They followed wotc's lead, and made Fighters way more interesting to play. Here's what a plain jane, early-to-mid level Fighter hot bar looks like in Pillars of Eternity 2.
Some of this stuff we can either ignore, or is also present in BG. You've got weapon swapping, potion pouch, and talk on the left, all standard. But then you get to empower - a once per encounter, three times per day resource that one must shepard carefully to be effective. You've got a 5 there - that's because all classes now have some resource management mechanic or other. Three abilities, which can be a pain in the butt to manage efficiently. Most notably, that middle ability, which lets Fighters buff themselves for one of their resource points for 2 rounds. This thing runs out quite quickly - just 2 rounds - and making sure it's up at all times like my build mostly wants it to be requires a lot of concentration. You've also got a second wind, which is a once-per-encounter heal, a stance that can be swapped at will between three options, and a modal ability on your weapon that slightly changes how it functions. You have to manage all of this for one character... and you have five of them! Pillars 1 actually had six! This was a big enough problem that they just reduced the party size in PoE2, and it still solve it. Meanwhile, your average Baldur's Gate party just... didn't have this problem. (AN: yes, I used auto pauses and the pause bar frequently. It wasn't a complete solution to the problem).
So what do you do to fix this? Well, if you're like me, you ignore the concentration tax abilities as best as you can. Take abilities that are easier to manage and leave micromanagement of some stuff either undone or up to the AI. And if you're playing it on normal difficulty, this should be fine. PoE2 was in my top 5 last year, I'm not knocking the original experience. But this is so much better.
I used the phrase "concentration tax" earlier. That's just another way of saying that it presents a choice that I have to think about. Which means it's an interesting decision, to borrow terminology from Sid Meier. And that's just kind of perverse, right? The more interesting a decision, the more concentration it takes, the worse it becomes in RTWP.
So, what, exactly, do you do about this? Well, if you're Obsidian, you say "fuck it," load the thing to the gills with interesting decisions and trust that players who ignore some or most of the systems can beat it on a lower difficulty level.
But then you stick it into turn-based mode and it all clicks.
All of a sudden all of those little fiddly bits are within your grasp, and you have all the time in the world to think about them. And with the pace slowed down, you notice just how many interesting decisions you were missing out on. It's an interesting decision to determine whether I should keep that temporary Fighter buff up or save it for other abilities. I can switch between stances based on the situation without a hassle. Positioning, spellcasting time, when to charge at enemies and when to let them come at you... it all gets so much more interesting.in the turn-based mode.
So it's not just good, in relation to the RTWP version. It's just fantastic, period, because without RTWP all of the depth can surface. It probably won't surprise you to know that it's my favorite battle system in this new RPG revival, and possibly my favorite of all time. There's so much going on I'm rolling new characters every few levels to test builds and planning out what challenge runs I'll do once I've beaten it on the hardest difficulty. I knew a lot of people back in the day who were super into Final Fantasy Tactics - doing single class runs and solo runs and other ridiculous challenges, because the game was flexible enough that you could do them, if you knew the system well enough. I'll probably do something similar with PoE2, as many are already doing. Oh, the setting is unique and the writing is good, too, and it has the best character creation in the business, mechanics-wise.
I'll address a few of the common criticisms: there were some news outlets that complained it took multiple turns for enemies to actually get near enough to battle, taking up a bunch of time in the process. I'm not sure whether they were relying on a beta build, or if Obsidian later patched the live version, but that's not an issue anymore. You always start the fight near enemies.
People have complained that it's slow - and in terms of just literal time spent to beat the game, it does slow you down. But it never felt slow, at least not to me. Cleanup's usually easy enough if you go on autopilot, and at every point before that the density of choices is such that it doesn't feel like you're just twiddling your thumbs. In particular, animations resolve pretty quickly - just make sure you're on max battle/animation speed.
In Conclusion:
Pillars of Eternity 2's turn based mode is the yardstick by which all subsequent TBS should be measured. It's so wonderful to see Obsidian back at the top of their game and making waves with their mechanics, in addition to their storytelling. And I can't wait to see what Larian and other competitors learn from it. If you're at all a fan of TBS, don't let this pass you by.
