Mighty Mouse said:
Picture this:
The hero is facing a opponent of equal stats.
Both have 10HP, with 50% chance of each winning initiative.
They can attack with a 80% chance to-hit and can do 5-10 points of damage each.
If the hero dies, he will have to reload, if the hero wins, he can save game and fight the next 200 battles exactly like this.
There is nothing the player can do to influence the combat, except drink a potion that heals 5HP.
Is this fun? Challenging?
Getting back to the original post, it's instructive to look at how Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup handles this.
There are many opponents like you describe, where you'll have a chance of death if you just walk up to them and trade attacks. Since there is no reloading and huge numbers of opponents, doing this too often will end your game sooner or later.
In order to survive the player has to either
a) evade the opponents who are too risky to fight, using either cautious play or a variety of scrolls, potions, wands and character abilities available for evasion, most of which are limited use and all of which drain resources
or
b) use additional abilities or items to gain an advantage and win the fight, out of a huge number character abilities or consumables that may or may not be available, many of which are limited use and all of which drain some resource.
If you waste too many of your resources, you can end up in a situation where you don't have enough left for a given challenge and you're likely to die and end your game.
Thus, the player is constantly thinking about which ability to use to minimize the risk of death, but also about making sure he saves some of his resources for later. This creates an incentive to use a broad spectrum of abilities and forces the player to constantly think about his moves.
Thus creating something we call "gameplay", something that many RPGs lack.
Zomg said:
Vanilla JA2 is grossly inferior to X-Com;
Strongly disagree, although I'll grant that reasonable people could prefer X-com. I found X-com a bit too samey due to the limited variety of missions and their random nature. It was fun but after a while it turned into a bit of a slog.
X-com didn't necessarily suffer from not being a full RPG, but at the same time I felt like almost all of the RPG elements that JA2 added in were improvements. The characters, the dialog, the slight focus on a story, the additional detail on character skills and equipment, the exploration and adventure elements.
Although I guess there was at least one downside to JA2 going full RPG... having to search all those damn cupboards.