A Pendulum, Not A Funeral
Turn-based tactics might be riding high after Baldur's Gate 3 dropped the old D&D-style pausing, but one of the genre's loudest boosters isn't ready to bury realtime-with-pause. "Realtime-with-pause is not dead," said Star Wars Zero Company lead designer James Brawley, arguing the format's best days could still be ahead. "It will have its day. Someone will make something wonderful in that space, and it'll take the world by storm again."
Brawley shared the perspective during a recent hands-on preview with PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield, offering a counterpoint to the idea that turn-based has won a permanent victory. He's building a team-based, turn-based tactics game in the Star Wars universe, yet he's not interested in picking sides. Instead, he frames it as a cycle. "It's like everything, these genres oscillate up and down over time," he said.
That swing, in his view, explains why turn-based combat is so prominent right now. Brawley credits recent design tweaks for broadening the audience. "Part of the reason why we see a resurgence of this kind of turn-based games recently is that there's been a lot of innovations in how we pace the action and the camera work, and the immersion that goes into the game has made these games feel a little bit more approachable and easier to play."
What Made Turn-Based Click Again
Brawley points to presentation as the quiet star of this revival. Firaxis helped set the tone with XCOM's roving, mobile camera and glass-shattering sprints that sold every move as a moment. A genre that once looked like chess with health bars started to feel immediate and tactile.
"Part of the reason why I think this kind of turn-based format, team turn-based format, was able to make a resurgence is because of innovations in presentation and pacing that keep it from feeling too sluggish or too menu-driven," Brawley said. Tight camera work, faster transitions, and clearer feedback all helped turn-based shed its reputation for molasses slow play.
The Slow Years And Their Lessons
Older PC tactics games, especially in the early 2000s, often demanded extreme patience. Long animations, fussy input flows, and dense UIs stacked friction on top of depth. "If you rewind back to the early 2000s, a lot of older games that were in this space... they tended to get very slow, very sluggish. They required a lot of patience to play," Brawley recalled. Rewards were there for dedicated players, but the on-ramp could be steep for anyone coming from RTS or traditional JRPGs.
He was frank about how that felt. "You just ended in a space where just things took a very, very long time to play," he said, adding that these games "required a great deal of patience" and appealed to a specific slice of players. The fix didn’t require gutting depth. It required meeting players halfway with pacing, clarity, and stronger audiovisual cues.
What An RTwP Revival Could Look Like
If presentation and pacing helped turn-based break through, the same ideas could refresh realtime-with-pause. Brawley isn't prescribing a blueprint, but his comments point to a path: embrace readability and flow without sanding off tactical nuance.
That likely means upgrades in a few familiar pain points for RTwP fans—smarter and more transparent pause triggers, cleaner command queues that minimize micro, and a camera that explains chaos instead of amplifying it. Presentation can't just be flashy; it has to support decision-making. When those pieces click, RTwP stops feeling like a compromise and starts feeling like its own confident rhythm.
Brawley sounds eager to see someone take that swing. "I wouldn't say that more realtime or realtime-with-pause-type tactical games are dead on arrival," he said. "I mean, they'll be back. Somebody will come up with something really cool that will bring those same kinds of innovations back, bring that back into the forefront. It's only a matter of time, I think, before that happens." Coming from a designer currently championing turn-based with Star Wars Zero Company, that's not mixed messaging—it’s a vote for variety. If XCOM and Baldur's Gate 3 could reframe turn-based for a bigger audience, a sharp RTwP pitch could do the same. The first studio to nail it might not just win an argument. It could win a crowd.
