Game News Jagged Alliance 2 - Reloaded Ditches Turn-Based Combat

Awor Szurkrarz said:

No fog of war? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?

RT can be good with a good AI and planning tools (which the game certainly won't have). But no fog of war? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?

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Well, I really do not mind. This is basically Baldur's Gate I. Getting rid of TB was good 12 years ago and this is no different. The last TB game I played was Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, and I used a hack that could speed up time because it was so dreadfully slow. There's a woman playing the game on youtube. She's up at video 296 now, 10-15 minutes each, and she isn't near the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFG9wzkb__0

I also remember the ages Fallout battles could take when a fight broke out into a town and it could take 5 minutes until you could control your characters again because every frigid civilian had to move one by one.

One of the worst parts with TB is already mentioned, when TB is enabled too early and you have to use the first rounds to simply get your guys in position.
But then you have the people you just do not need, you want them to guard somewhere until needed, but every round you have to click past them, while there are a lot of foes who are just standing somewhere, waiting. You could and should really move them closer to the battle, but you know that would just drain time and would probably not help anyway since the last foe is likely dead before they pop up, then things go bad and you have to do it anyway.

TB was developed for PnP because you can't handle things going on at the same time. It's completely unnecessary for computers. Pause-to-Command is fine. Really. I was close to register to their forum and suggest it myself.

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Andrew said:

Unfortunately a turn-based combat would probably keep the JA line as a niche product for the developer, so I can see the motivation behind this. I personally love turn-based games and appreciate all the subtle nuances that the JA2 combat system had for the sole purpose of enhancing the gameplay experience. Hopefully the developer can capture some of these in the new system so that it is a fun game to play, even if it doesn't provide me with my turn-based fix.

Andrew, JA2 Lead Developer

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GarfunkeL said:

Are they self-publishing? If yes, then it's all their fault for being retards.

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Blackadder said:

Didn't this happen to JA3 until the fans went rampaging so they canned it? Another time I remember someone talking about JA3 being made with the SS engine...confusing.

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Blackadder said:

Didn't this happen to JA3 until the fans went rampaging so they canned it? Another time I remember someone talking about JA3 being made with the SS engine...confusing.

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WhiskeyWolf said:

If you are...


Then take 30 sec. of your precious time and mail those tasteless rapist what you think about all this - info@bit-Composer.com

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my email said:

Dear Bit-Composer,

Having bought Jagged Alliance, Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games and Jagged Alliance 2 and having played all of them to death, I was delighted to hear that you guys got the licence and are going to make a new game in the series. I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of remake, though - as JA2 works perfectly well with modern computers and is pretty much near perfection. Still, it could have been a great opportunity to bring newer gamers into the heavenly goodness of tactical wargaming that the name Jagged Alliance has always represented.

Imagine my surprise then when I recently learned, thanks to your press release, that you people have decided to make a completely different type of game but still call it Jagged Alliance. I mean, if I make a chocolate cake, I don't use strawberries in it - no matter what some retarded "marketing analyst" suit tries to tell me. The combat engine of JA2 was damn near perfect and your given reasons are all invalid:
"It is dynamic, as it allows combat in real time"
-No, real time isn't inherently any more dynamic than turn based. Next I guess you want to call it visceral?
" It introduces timing as a new element: it enables the player to spot and assess enemy movements, so he can either cleverly sneak past, or lie in wait and choose the right moment to attack"
-Which already was an element of the old game but you actually had to plan for it before hand.
"It avoids the situation where you get mixed up in a battle while your mercenaries are some distance from the front. JA2 was very time-consuming in this respect, because players had to lag behind for several turns while they moved all their mercenaries to the front"
-Not true, as the game would switch to real time if you weren't in the vicinity of enemies. The above mention situation would only happen if you had one mercenary on one side of the map and the rest on the other side, which was a very, very rare situation.
"Combat with large numbers of enemies happen more quickly; in JA2 it took ages for the round to finish when numerous mercenaries and enemies were involved in the battle"
-No it didn't, unless you really had huge numbers - town defence missions with lots of militia and civilians. You only need to speed animations for that problem to go away - or go the Temple of Elemental Evil-route and have enemies do their movement animations simultaneously. Best of all, do it as the 1.13 mod-developers did - make animation speeds visible to the player, who can then tweak to the his/her liking. Original X-Com: Ufo Defence did that almost 15 years ago - but you people think that the only answer is to go real-time?
"The new system also allows us to incorporate new AI functions such as cutting off and flanking enemies, that only work when actions are carried out simultaneously and not one after the other"
-This was already in the vanilla game and 1.13 made it much better and the last part is an outright lie.


You, as a company, at least should have the moral courage to tell the old fans that you are making some kind of abomination for the console kiddies, instead of a Jagged Alliance game. And when the game eventually tanks, as the old fans surely won't buy it and no matter what you do, it IS a niche game - not to mention all the bad press and word-of-mouth this will get, what will you do then? Excuse bad design with piracy? Or maybe you'll think it wasn't "streamlined" enough? Or maybe, just maybe, you guys could take a collective look in the mirror and remember when it all went wrong.

Yours sincerely,

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