Mechanaut

@(Unverified)
Also... Akalebeth shipped even before 'Dungeons of Daggorath'.
see it on Youtube *** watch?v=nKAlDUu7zko ***

@(Unverified)
"And what major RPGs were using real-time combat prior to Dungeon Master? "

What can you call 'Major' before Dungeon Master, or Bard's Tale?

*But "Dungeons of Daggorath" comes to mind, and it did have Character building, Magic, realtime combat ~in a First Person view. You could get knocked out in that game and the monsters would still roam the dungeon. Look it up on Youtube... It shipped in 1982.
**********YouTube >> watch?v=sQKQHKdWTRs **********

@(Unverified)
That is your entitled opinion, but Fallout was designed from the ground up as a GURPS based RPG and the combat engine came first.

In the end they lost GURPS (and had to had to change the internal rules) over the course of a few weeks, but the gameplay experience didn't really change, and was free exploration and conversation, broken up by tactical turnbased battles; and so was Fallout 2. Black Ilse's FO3 would have held to the same. Bethesda's game was a cosmetically revised Oblivion to sell to their ElderScrolls fan base.

IMO Fallout 3 was a fantastic spin off, but it was a pathetic sequel in all things except for art design, and landscaping the of the areas. Gutting the series combat mechanics and replacing them with modified ElderScrolls combat was pretty vile in my opinion; but that was hardly the half of it. The game looks and feels (and reads) like it was designed after a casual glance at some Fallout 'Let's Play' videos, by developers who had never played the games. (It was admitted on their forums, that most of the team had never played Fallout; and IMO it shows.)

With Wasteland 2, most of the team created Wasteland, and I think this will show in the sequel. No one expects it to be a WL clone, but many hope that it will have more fidelity with the first one and feel like an authentic sequel than Fallout 3 did to Fallout.

@I2oy
Indeed... This can be seen at the Wasteland 2 forums, when backers from the Kickstarter page leave uninformed posts about the game's design.

It should not matter about someone being unhappy about the choice of combat mechanics. If they dislike it, or wanted something else... it is that they dislike the series and want something else; that's as it should be no?

My disagreement with the article is only its [IMO falsely] implying of linear origins of combat mechanics where one naturally lead to another as the hardware became able to support it. It didn't happen that way. As the hardware improved, the designs for each style improved.

@(Unverified)
I don't necessarily like the system. In my case I don't dislike it.
I identify it with the series though, and the series (the original Wasteland), did not incorporate protracted tactical battles; they had sporadic skirmishing.

It does not matter if I liked it or not. Changing the system outright as opposed to expanding and improving upon it, is creating an unrelated work from a previous one ~just as was done with Fallout 3. :(

The "technological constraints" argument is crap. They had text based MUDS with real time combat.
They cite Dungeon master as revolutionary, but there were first person realtime games before it, and the TB games came afterward.

Combat systems are for conflict resolution and all that is needed is for them to suit the style of the game as the designer intends. It could be as simple comparing character levels and declaring a winner if that's sufficient for their needs; and not matter if the game uses DX11 and wants a quad core cpu.

I say the game is already fully funded and they can go about making their vision of a series faithful sequel (with series faithful combat if they choose), and without any consideration at all for the current crop of gamers; that's not who it's for. They are welcome, but not to be fawned over and catered to, if they don't like it, they don't like it, that's what having separate series and genres in games is for.