I'm in the WoW Beta Test!

[A Black Falcon]

Yep, you nailed it, that's exactly what I implied. And yes, I agree, strategy games and RPGs do have something in common. On that note, I first got into turn based strategy because the first one I played tricked me into thinking it WAS an RPG (Final Fantasy Tactics). It wasn't a hard thing to "fake" though, because FFT is more of a strategy/RPG, but that's how I got sucked in there.

Strategy games and RPGs have a LOT in common. RPG elements like inventories and levelling up characters are extremely common, and actually pretty much mandatory, in fantasy strategy games (from Disciples, Heroes of Might & Magic, Master of Magic, etc, etc, to Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics to Warcraft III, it's the norm in a large number of fantasy-based strategy games... especially the TBSes where I can't think of many without it. Fantasy General I guess but that's a fantasy wargame, not strategy title...)


Autopathing... what game are you talking about? Diablo? That's pretty minor you know... and as you say not too hard to solve. In Baldur's Gate the only minor issue I can think of with view is what I said -- sometimes you can kind of see through walls. Not enough to tell people to move to the other side (to somewhere they shouldn't be able to know how to get to) normally... as I said it's much more a 'suspension of disbelief' issue than it is a issue about what you are talking about. Irritiating because of how it forces you to remember that this is a game and definitely hurts immersion... oh well, it's not a big thing. Doesn't take long to get immersed again. :)

Ya know, in Fire Emblem, or in the first two Warcraft games, or Starcraft, or Advance Wars, yes, the overhead perspective is similar to what a tactician would see looking at a board and deciding on commands. However, what about Final Fantasy Tactics games, or Wacraft 3, where there is no "tactician" you could possibly be seeing this from? You are merely a disembodied entity there, and the strategies, as far as the story goes, just seem to be coming from the heroes... or something... which have no top-down perspective on things. You, the player, aren't an actual character in those games. Actually, come to think of it, Fire Emblem 7 (that's the number of the latest one, the one we have, right?) is the first to actually give the player an identity in the story.

As I said, strategy games are an offshoot of wargames which come from an 19th century thing of (nobility) playing war (or depicting a war in progress) with lead figures and sculpted terrain... that became wargames in the mid 20th century I believe and strategy games spun off once computer games got going (note how early games we'd now call strategy games, like Empire, were at the time called 'Wargames'). So strategy games are based on the idea of you being the tactitican looking down from on high as well. The only thing is that as time passed strategy games started to move away from that... as you say, with things like Warcraft III where "you" are the people on the ground, not a general telling them what to do.

Fire Emblem the only game to have you in the story? Huh? Uh.. depends on what you mean. If you mean a specific name, perhaps. But I'd certainly say that in most RTSes "you" are in the story as a commander. Perhaps not in Warcraft III as you said, but it certainly is that way in Starcraft... 'you' are a commander in the story. Or at least that's certainly how I remember it!

So in short I'd say that even in the strategy genre the vast majority of titles are still centered around the idea of a person looking at a map and commanding troops like in wargames. It's not stated directly as such in many games, but it can be easily inferred I'd say... it just becomes a problem when you move titles more towards RPGs like Warcraft III because "you" don't really have an identity at all in that game... "you" don't exist actually. As you say, a disembodied spirit... :) But games like that are in the minority of the genre.