This week I spent some time looking at several different games to help me get a different perspective on what I am planning to create. I started by looking at Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, which were fairly early Strategy RPGs. Both of these games had isometric perspectives and maps with several elevations. This helped to keep the map in view, and also give it a fairly dynamic map. Alongside this, I also looked through the last several Fire Emblem games, with a focus on the last one that was released, Three Houses. Fire Emblem, as opposed to the other two games I had mentioned, typically had flat maps that were viewed from above. Several of the games, specifically Path of Radiance, Radiant Dawn, and Three Houses had a slightly different perspective, due to them using 3D modeled maps and characters. That being said, the maps were still more or less flat, with some occasional stairs and ledges. All of these games utilize a controller, with the D-pad or analog stick selecting units, and then subsequently moving or selecting the actions of the units. Another thing these games have in common is that they all use square-based grids. 

I also looked at a few more games, most of them released fairly recently, but all of them had pretty decent histories. These games that I looked at were primarily PC games, which meant that they were all controlled by mouse and keyboard. I chose these games because I thought they’d be fairly similar to what I was planning on making, but they ended up being fairly different from what I had thought they were, with the exception of one. The first game that I looked at was Divinity: Original Sin 2. It’s part of the Divinity series, which started as an Action RPG series in 2002. Original Sin 2 is an RPG where the player controls several different party members in turn based battles. The battles consist of controlling the party member’s actions and movements on that particular character’s turn. It runs on an Action Points system, where a character can perform a set of actions before their turn ends. Position and movement play an important part because some actions can only be done at certain ranges and positions. While the game itself is very different from what I am planning on making, it did give me a different perspective on what I was planning to do. Alongside this, I looked at PAthfinder: Kingmaker, which is an RPG based on the Pathfinder tabletop RPG by Paizo. I looked at this game because I had assumed that it would be grid and/or turn based, but it ended up being neither. This surprised me, because Pathfinder, like many other table-top RPG’s is turn-based in nature and is typically played using a square-based map or maps. Instead, the game is real-time with a pause function, and free-movement on the map. While these two games weren’t what I was expecting, they did give me ideas for keyboard and mouse controls as well as keyboard shortcuts.  The final game I looked at was the 2012 reboot of the X-COM series, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which mysteriously loses the hyphen. This game was a lot more in line with the first set of games that I looked at, as it was a grid-based strategy game. The game still had a similar control scheme to both Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Divinity: Original Sin 2. The player clicks on their units, or selects them with the shift and tab keys. The player then selects a spot for the character to move to on the grid using the right mouse button. 

The prevalence of the square-based grids as opposed to hex-based grids surprised me at first, but I think I can determine why they seem to be the more common of the two. Most of the games that used square-based grids were either released exclusively to console, or had console ports. For older titles, the analog stick wasn’t really a thing yet. Movement was restricted to eight directions, which meant that hex-based movement couldn’t really be accomodated. Since octagon’s don’t form a proper grid, squares were the best option. Games that are released on PC exclusively don’t have to worry about this, because the mouse can move in any direction. A hex-based grid just isn’t possible using a D-Pad, and would likely be awkward at best when using an analog stick. This is making me question if I want to still do a hex-based grid or not. I personally prefer to play strategy games on a controller, and it would be very difficult to do so with a hex-based game. Additionally, a hex grid doesn’t have clean edges, which might end up making a waste of material for the physical side of the game. I’ll test out a hex-grid with a controller, but at the moment it seems to have more negatives than positives.