Jagged Alliance: Back in Action coming out next month

[Vympel]

According to Steam. Who wants to bet that its not going to be a horribly buggy alpha build? Any takers?

[Steel]

The release was originally slated for Q3 last year, but then about 5 months before that they bumped it to now (or at least some time in Q1 2012).

This delay could either mean they had craploads of basic work still to do and realised there was no way to get a game anywhere done, or they had something and really wanted to polish it up to the standard of the original... I don't think the smart money ever goes on the latter.

I really hope this is at least as well made as the original JA:2, otherwise it would be yet another episode in the long chain of modern games that failed to improve on or even replicate the successes of 10 year old games. It better be worth more than the £13.99 that JA2 Gold is selling for.

The real time pausable gameplay could be pretty cool if it is done well. In JA:2 combat could easily devolve into just getting interrupts and killing everyone without ever being shot at as you had sun goggles/NV and could see 1 square further than them. That and turn based combat with more than ~5 people just takes ages to resolve.

[Stark]

Interrupt handling is definitely where most turn based games fall down. I don't think JA2 even locks inventory so you can do ridiculous shit while a guy is paused mid-stride.

The release totally blindsided me do I'm pretty interested to hear how it goes. If it works, there's a lot of hope XCOM will too.

[Steel]

Interrupt handling is definitely where most turn based games fall down. I don't think JA2 even locks inventory so you can do ridiculous shit while a guy is paused mid-stride.

The release totally blindsided me do I'm pretty interested to hear how it goes. If it works, there's a lot of hope XCOM will too.

JA2 is one of the few that does lock the inventory. If your character is running they'll be put back to standing, and everything in the inventory costs the right number of action points. Another cool thing was that if characters were close, you could pass things between people (costing a bit of AP on each) and if they were further away you could throw small items and the recipient would try and catch it (but normally drop it somewhere nearby).

Interrupt handling is really tricky to get right. It is the best attempt to correct to one of the fundamental problems of turn based combat, but if interrupts are too easy then you end up with an advantage to defenders where they can just sit back and pick off attackers one by one, and if interrupts are too difficult to get then the attackers can munchkin around popping out of cover, firing and popping back without reprisal. The best implementation I've seen is the balance in JA v1.13, but even then its still pretty easy with a group of elite mercs to pick everyone off before they see you. I think a way of improving things would be to not have a hard cutoff of normal sight range, so that it would be possible to see things significantly before you could reliably shoot them. This would mean that there could be a meaningful exchanging of fire and suppression in order to move close enough to get some good shots in when fighting open engagements. Of course this means spending significantly longer in turn based mode, which does kill the pace quite a bit and also has the risk of making the only worthwhile weapons sniper rifles.

The steam version is currently 15% off, but I'm not nearly confident enough in the devs to even think about preordering the game.

[Stark]

I think that interrupts should either be 'you get xyz time to do stuff, based on the result of your initiative roll', so you might not have time to do anything but aim if your interrupt is 'low' or whatever, or it should be simultaneous, in that you can want to dig around in your bag for a gun, aim, and fire, but as you use time units so does the originally moving unit, so it can leave view/finish its action/shoot first/etc.

Both of these, I think, make weapon diversity more useful, and that's something that a lot of these games struggle with, since low-damage weapons are basically totally useless - whoever shoots first wins, or save/load.

[Steel]

I think the simultaneous action thing is a really interesting concept. It could be a neat way of finding a middle ground between real time pauseable and turn based. In this the 'interrupt' would be like a reaction time check, and then you plan your next action, then when the enemy resumes their turn both your moves play out at the same rate as the enemy uses action points. It could create an actually meaningful tactical choice as you have to plan ahead how much time to spend aiming, as at any point the enemy might get the first shot off or get back behind cover. Much better than the current "spotted you rounding the corner, so I have enough time to go prone and line up with my sniper rifle before you get your next step".

Another alternative is to have no manual control of interrupts, and have them entirely for snap shooting, but where you decided how twitchy your guys were going to be beforehand. If you were watching too large an area or wanted too much confirmation of a target then you could miss opportunities, but alternatively if you were too twitchy then your guys would fire at shadows and waste their chances if something came along later.

The latter option would probably require lots of slider tweaking and kill pace a bit, while not really solving the main issue. I really like the simultaneous action idea though, it kind of blends the two turns into one, with each actor going through phases of proactive/reactive play. The simultaneous action one also incorporates the bad interrupt roll giving less time implicitly, as if you get your interrupt later in the enemy turn then you start reacting later and can get less done.

[Stark]

I think some older games had the uncontrolled interrupt stuff - but I think doing it that way loses too much of the interrupt possibilities. The game I'm thinking of let you reserve points for reaction fire, but you couldn't do anything else and the shots were automatic, so you couldn't see a guy coming and run away or close a door or whatever.

In JA2 in particular I often see situations where actions and weapons could be differentiated with the simultaneous system; I mean, people would actually use pistols if their shorter ready/aim time meant they could beat guys to the first shot. JA2 1.13 definately tries to make more distinction here, with the very wide variation in aiming time, aiming time efficiency, time to raise, etc, and it'd be bosso if a guy running around a corner with a shotgun could get interrupted by a guy with a pistol and lose because he's just too slow.

[Steel]

I think some older games had the uncontrolled interrupt stuff - but I think doing it that way loses too much of the interrupt possibilities. The game I'm thinking of let you reserve points for reaction fire, but you couldn't do anything else and the shots were automatic, so you couldn't see a guy coming and run away or close a door or whatever.

In JA2 in particular I often see situations where actions and weapons could be differentiated with the simultaneous system; I mean, people would actually use pistols if their shorter ready/aim time meant they could beat guys to the first shot. JA2 1.13 definately tries to make more distinction here, with the very wide variation in aiming time, aiming time efficiency, time to raise, etc, and it'd be bosso if a guy running around a corner with a shotgun could get interrupted by a guy with a pistol and lose because he's just too slow.

Yeah, JA2 v1.13 certainly makes it a lot better with the way it handles those stats, but its only a partial fix, as we still get the situation where if you have enough AP stored up for your interrupt then you can basically saunter up to someone you're interrupting and stab them in the eye as they sit there frozen mid turn. There comes a stage where you might as well go to pausable realtime if so much of your gameplay is spent in the simultaneous action phase, although I'm sure that it could be incorporated in a way that felt distinct and still offered meaningful input and tactical possibilities.

All this talking about JA2 really makes me hope that this new one at the least lives up to the old one.

[Stark]

Didn't the Heroes of Might and Magic series replace 'turns' with initative-driven queues? You could make a 'turn based' game where there were no hard 'changes of turn', rather just opportunities to give guys orders by interrupting them, but everything happens one AP at a time after orders are given to everyone at the same time, so it's like 'real time turns' or something.

I don't really see the point because I don't hate realtime, but such a slow, turn-ish game would enable interrupts to have really sweet stuff like sweeping slomotion camera faceoffs and shit - developers could really go crazy with the art.

[Steel]

Didn't the Heroes of Might and Magic series replace 'turns' with initative-driven queues? You could make a 'turn based' game where there were no hard 'changes of turn', rather just opportunities to give guys orders by interrupting them, but everything happens one AP at a time after orders are given to everyone at the same time, so it's like 'real time turns' or something.

I don't really see the point because I don't hate realtime, but such a slow, turn-ish game would enable interrupts to have really sweet stuff like sweeping slomotion camera faceoffs and shit - developers could really go crazy with the art.

As everything within an interrupt would be resolved at the moment you commit your actions and go back to playing out the turn, and an interrupt should normally happen at some fairly critical juncture, I can see how it would lead to the potential for some really sweet setups. Kind of like vats, only good and with a better choice of when to go artistic.

I can't believe I forgot to mention individual rather than side turn based earlier. Fallout: Tactics (among others) had the option for that in turn based mode, and it does feel more natural (and balanced- "Oops, my first volley took out half your squad...") than having a whole side go at once. I did, after the first few levels, switch to realtime in FO:T as it was just so slow in turn based. Also it turns out the AI becomes much cleverer (or at least more dynamic) and much more of a reasonable opponent in realtime mode. I think thats just a product of developer effort on the various modes, as it should be far easier to make a cleverer AI in turn based than realtime given the much slacker constraints on computing power.

Interestingly (going back to the new JA game for a bit). Looking at the game forums, it looks like when the devs announced that the game would be in RT the fanbase shit a brick, and after quite a bit of back and forth, the devs stuck with it and the fans cleared out. Whether or not this will affect sales is debatable, as I don't think there were that many die hards left after 10 years, but they would presumably have been quite active in their various communities. I reckon all thats a wash now that the game has been put on the front page, main thingy on steam. (Not that that indicates the game is actually finished, given Stronghold 3...)

[Stark]

That's interesting because even Silent Storm (which was otherwise pretty ready to change things around) used team-based turns. I bet its easier to get the AI to respond to things as they happen with per-character turns rather than make a whole team do stuff, and you definitely avoid the massive downtime that makes multi nearly impossible.

I looked at the preview trailer thing, and the youtube comments were 100% OH EMM GEE WHY YOU CHANGE GAME? I think developers are starting to learn that those people are just going to keep playing JA2 anyway. The videos did make the game look pretty ugly and clunky, though - I sort of expected it to be more polished than Silent Storm, and it didn't seem taht way.

[Steel]

I don't really get a good feel for the game from the trailers. The clips I've seen are all cut very short and don't show much of the overall dynamics of how things play out. A couple of bits stuck out as cringeworthy though with a grenade that flies at approx 0.2m/s through the air towards a couple of guys. It does look like it could essentially be a slightly more stat heavy version of Men of War (albeit with slightly less shiny graphics and less vehicles...).

There are bits in the videos where you can see the player doing some fairly long chains of orders with various icons popping up along the line connecting them all. This may mean you can do some pretty interesting things and have some reasonably complicated things play out with decent numbers of men at your command... or it might just be that there are a bunch of different icons for different mundane things. Too little info to tell.