On Hunted and the RPG “Detour” Claim

Gamasutra’s interview with inXile Entertainment’s Matt Findley has already been met by some less than agreeing responses so it’s not surprising to see Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Jim Rossignol editorialize on the subject raised.

Findley is basically saying that classic turn-based games were not turn-based by design, necessarily, but because they were constrained from modelling what they intended to model by the technology of the time. The only good way to articulate this kind of fantasy combat, in the 8-bit and 16-bit era, was to break down into turns and statistics, and have the player control the action by making decisions moment by moment. Now that we can show these things in real-time, we do, and we should. It’s an argument that you see flare up in RPS comment threads all the time, and it’s an important one, because it’s about the perception of how games work, and why we value them.

What’s interesting about Findley’s words is that the systems he’s talking about result in quite different experiences for us as players the experience of playing a turn-based RPG against the experience of playing an action RPG and it’s the specific nature of these experiences that we have come to love and value. A turn-based game allows you to set up the parameters of what you want to do based on the skills and statistics of your characters, and then watch that action unfold, while a real-time game means you have to deal with events using at least a modicum of your own abilities to control what is happening on the screen. A cerebral set of decisions, versus a more instinctual, skill-based set of reactions. They are quite distinct user-experiences: as distinct from each other as bouncing a ball is from sitting down to play a boardgame with real-life people.