OK, I finally took the plunge on Baldur’s Gate 3, and, coming from playing several hundreds of hours of Solasta recently, the first thing I noticed is the lack of a combat grid.
Going back a bit further, my son and I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. We were super pumped for the sequel, but when it finally came out, it kind of fell flat for both of us. Whether or not it’s down to this, I don’t know, but they also removed the grid.
That game, of course, was an XCom-like. XCom used a grid, but a more recent Firaxis game, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, got rid of the grid as well.
To me, all these gridless iterations of classic strategy games just aren’t as engaging. I guess they’re going for a more immersive rpg type of feel? But to me it seems to sacrifice the strategy aspect, and ultimately, judging based on my hours played, that always ends up being too great a sacrifice. My play time on Marvel’s Midnight Suns is less than 10% of Xcom 2, and the same is true for Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope.
I’m sure BG3 is a great game, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy the campaign, but so far it’s not giving me the ‘feels’.
Do you miss grids? Or did they only slow you down?
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I think your just playing games that don’t have a grid. I still play a lot of games with a grid. If you want a strategy game that has a grid, my dad has been playing a lot of jagged alliance 3 and has been saying very positive things about it.
I know I’m late to respond, but I did check out jagged alliance 3,and it looks awesome. Thanks for the recommendation!
I play a lot of strategy games and absolutely hate the grid. Always feels super basic and limiting to strategy.
Think it’s just a personal taste thing/what you grew up with playing.
Same and I agree.
Don’t know why. Because XCOM is full of flexibility. But It’s like a feeling like once you see those boxes, it feels like you’re playing by their rulebook.
Which is weird because BG3 is literally about rulebooks.
I’vealways seen grids as a way to simplify what is otherwise a challenging mechanic to track and utilize. They function as something of a “good enough” for when you are willing to sacrifice accuracy for simplicity. And there’s something to be said for the way that simplicity can be appealing to the player, as it get some of the more fiddily mechanics out of the way and frees you up to focus on more substantial or engaging mechanics like character builds and team comps.
So, do I miss then when they’re replaced with the more intricate measurement systems that they were designed to simplify? Not really. But I can certainly see why some would feel that way.
I do not miss the grid at all, I hate being conformed to grids instead of more fluid real movement. It’s just more immersive to order my troops to move as a real person could move, not slide on a rail and stand there in this open space like a chess piece
Your comment doesn’t make sense. There’s no relation between a grid and standing out in the open. With free movement, if you order the character to finish their movement in the open, they’re going to be out in the open.
And I also don’t see the relation between grids and “sliding”.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure in X-com there wasn’t any sliding? It was all very fluid movement, but you could easily see where you troops could move to.
Jagged Alliance 3 has grid, but the movements are more fluid than I’ve seen in a while. It’s all about polish and execution.
@anakin78z Also the DnD Grid kinda break when you put it in an actual 3D world. It work by convention on a TTRPG but the work around to do it are just not really sensible when you step away from the table. Diagonal movement, sphere, angled line,… All of that kinda gets more messy to apply if you are representing a 3D world.
Huh, I’m not sure I agree. It’s fairly straightforward to represent any volume as a 3D grid, and depending on how the game system does the math, it’s easy to count cells on any diagonal. I think the controls are a bit messy, but Solasta has a totally usable 3D grid for things like flying, and also shows how area effects like spheres or such affect surfaces on different levels.
I’ve been playing Solasta the past few weeks, great game with a grid system that makes real good use of 3d and height :)
I’m currently in two different D&D campaigns. One plays combats on the regular 5ft grid, the other is “theatre of mind” where where everything is just described. Both are fine, I don’t really feel like I lose anything with either method, it’s just two different abstractions for the same ideas.
Larian’s previous game, Divinity Original Sin: 2, was still highly tactical despite its lack of grid-based positioning or targeting. The game used its mechanics of skills, freer movement, and surfaces/clouds to really shake up each battle and make them unique. Each combat was like a little puzzle. For me, who usually bounces off the likes of XCOM, it was absolutely brilliant. BG3 is much the same, just with a different ruleset (and I’m glad I was familiar with it beforehand. It must be daunting to be thrown into 5e without having a book thrown at you).
Being a nerd now, there is actually a grid in these games, but it’s only used for navmeshes and the surfaces. The game doesn’t expose either of these to you in-game. Visually, the edges of surfaces are messy and extend/retract from where they technically are according to the engine. I suppose you can kind of see the navmesh grid by clicking all around the edges of walkable areas, but other than walking up to edges, the navmesh has little impact on anything else.
Oh I mean I never thought of it. I kinda like a grid. But I think that a grid would severely limit bg3
Grids rule, free movement drools
Grids certainly don’t slow me down, though they do reduce the spectacle and I suppose lower immersion. They certainly make me more aware that I am playing a game rather than taking actions in a world that actually exists. I’d say this is a feature rather than a bug though as they are often used in games that I want to be handling in that analytic piece moving fashion.
Yea, the games I mentioned are all turn based, so I’m not sure that immersion is really what I’m looking for. I will say that the opening combats in BG3 felt very chaotic, and I guess more immersive, but I also felt like I made a lot of dumb mistakes because I was treating it more like a shooter/hack & slash, rather than thinking my moves through.
I prefer grids myself, I’ve never gotten very far in gridless strategy games I’ve played (Mario+Rabbids, Valkyria Chronicles) because I just have too hard a time keeping track of what I can do with any given unit when I don’t have the grid for reference. That said, I can understand the appeal to some as an immersion enhancement, as others have said, and as something of a “modernization” of turn-based strategy allowing for more freedom of movement. Cool if you enjoy that kind of thing in strategy, but just not my jam. I was raised on Fire Emblem in the genre, lol.
They could just make an option to unable/disable it. I like grids :)
I feel like a lot of design decisions downstream are dependent on that choice. You could absolutely lock gridless combat to a grid, but I don’t think it’d feel the same.
I’m trying to remember a game that has done that, because I’m pretty sure there’s at least one.
Grids definitely make a different type of game. I think BG3 makes sense gridless, but I also enjoy Into the Breach which is very chess-like.
I like both, frankly. I get going with free positioning in BG3, mostly because that’s how it is in both BG1&2 and Divinity OS 1&2, so it’d be a weird change. But also, it makes sense on CRPGs where you’re trying to depict very fluid, dynamic “do what you want” situations more than tactical precision.
I do hate in BG3 when I accidentally step on something or a command to do something places a character on top of a hazard first, but… you know, table top jank captured, I suppose.
I will say that I’m not sure “immersion” is what the grid triggers for me one way or the other, though. Mostly grid tactical games are about optimization and precision while free roaming is about looser, fluid improvisation. If it’s a full-on tactics game I’d prefer a grid for that reason, for narrative RPGs I can go either way.
I did like Midnight Suns quite a bit, although that’s because I’m also a CCG guy and a superhero nerd, so that angle works for me. Weirdly, it was XCOM 2 that didn’t quite do it for me compared to the first.
BG1&2 weren’t turn based, so I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. I did enjoy both of those games though, in their own right. What’s CCG?
Hah, yeah, I guess they technically weren’t. Could have fooled me, because if you didn’t play those by pausing, queuing up every action and then only unpausing until you can queue up the next I don’t know how your brain works. BG3 is basically a Divinity sequel, though, and it goes for that same improvised feel where you’re supposed to go through the game chucking bags full of rotten fish at enemies instead of engaging with the actual combat rules. I agree that it’s a very different feel in both, though.
CCG is “Collectible card games”. I look at Midnight Suns as a card game with some positioning mechanics, more than a tactics game. It makes a lot more sense like that, in terms of the small puzzle-like encounters and the turn optimization and so on.
Oh gosh, I vaguely remember the pausing & queueing up action thing. I usually played 2 player, and I’m trying to remember if that paused everyone or not.
Yea, I saw Midnight Suns as a mashup between something like XCom and a CCG. I haven’t played too many CCGs, though I did enjoy Slay the Spire. I see the cards as adding some randomness to the game, but as far as the tactical positioning it doesn’t really change things for me. I remember the environment actually factoring in quite a bit… pushing people into things, or throwing things. I guess the lack of grid didn’t really hurt that, but I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if the grid had been there. Ultimately I don’t know if it’s the grid itself, or just a fundamental shift in style of gameplay that leads to me not enjoying these games as much.
Yeah, in Midnight Suns specifically I don’t think the grid would have worked, because that game is built on grinding extra turns and extra damage from interactions, so you need to be able to line up things with each other. Like, you don’t just want to hit, you want to hit so that the guy goes flying into an explosive that topples a thing that then falls on another guy. It’s more of a puzzle game than anythign else sometimes. They even have a challenge mode in there with those sorts of setups.
I think it’s perfectly fair to be mostly into grid tactics, it’s almost a different genre. I don’t think you can legitimately look at BG3 or Midnight Suns and suggest it’s the same type of thing as Final Fantasy Tactics or even XCOM. There’s connective tissue there, but it’s like comparing, say, Devil May Cry and Tekken.
Bg3 it’s not an strategy game, it’s and RPG, in fact based in the trrpg rules of d&d 5
Also BG1 and 2, weren’t grided, so it’s not like they doing it to “modernize” the game.
I really enjoyed all xcoms (from the msdos first games, so many hours wasted with xcom apocalypse…) But also enjoyed al bg (including not MMO Neverwinter, icewind Dale, etc)
Simply, it’s not one of these games.
5e rules explicitly refer to spaces on a grid and had to be changed in several ways to work in a gridless setting.
Right? I only played like a campaign and a half of 5e, but I specifically remember the 5’ spaced grids.
I believe that’s officially a variant rule. The system itself works fine without a grid. It can be done completely in the theater of the mind.
The grid is just commonly used because it simplifies movement and positioning greatly.
The assertion is plain wrong. Some games don’t use grid, some do. There is no trend that I can see.
Solasta released an expansion this year and aow4 dropped in April iirc. There certainly are many others.
