Sorry this is such a long post but I've been mulling it over awhile now and the comment below finally made me crack
I have a pretty darn good idea how much work, time, and money such an implementation would cost. And compared to the overall project it's essentially insignificant. I could easily do the whole system singlehandedly in a couple weeks or a month.
Before I go on, I'm not saying I don't want them to implement a second gunplay system based on pausing and issuing commands but I have to disagree with any claim that it's easy and wouldn't take much time.
My jaw hit the floor when I read that comment but you're a retired programmer (among
many other things) and I'm just a guy who did a bit at college so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
However, the coding is probably the least of a game designers worries. It's all about how it feels, how it's designed. CDPR would want turn based gunplay to be of very high quality and for that they'd have try a multitude of designs, with all the balancing, skill calculations, playtesting and endless iteration that it necessitates until it was worthy. That's a huge amount of work, this is a huge AAA game. Imho, simply making the game pause and then choosing enemies to shoot, would stick out like a sore thumb compared to the quality of the other elements of the game.
I went back to the demo and looked at the main firefight. I was trying to imagine how a pause based, auto combat system would work. How often would we pause? Would we queue up actions?
If we don't queue, then we are going to be pausing almost constantly, nearly as much as in Baldur's Gate, I would imagine. You pause, choose to shoot someone, unpause. 2 seconds later you've missed and taken damage so you pause in order to use an inhaler. Unpause, resume shooting, 2 seconds go by, you do some damage but a grenade goes off so the damage you healed is already gone. You pause, spin the view about to look for new cover, choose your cover, unpause. You move to cover, wait for health regen cos your inhaler is dry, pause, look around to see where enemies are now, choose one, unpause and around and around it goes. We haven't even killed one of the 5+ enemies yet!
Now that was just for the most basic actions. What about jumping? Double jumping? Sliding into a room and turning to blow someones legs off? Wall climbing?
What percentage of players are going to need/enjoy this amount of pausing? Don't get me wrong, I MYSELF would enjoy it if it was well crafted but I know I'm in a small minority and luckily I enjoy lots of combat systems. I loved Valkyria Chronicles for example.
If, on the other hand, we queue actions then how will we 'guide the character' through them, given that it's a large FPP world with verticality? Some kind of ghost that you move around in a photo mode kind of way? A change to a top down view like they tried in Dragon Age Inquisition? That'd be possible but as you can see the work required to implement this system is already started to creep upwards and, more importantly, so is the challenge of actually making it with QUALITY. Queuing actions while standing still and not needing to move is fine (think KotOR and the small combat areas) but it looks like this game has been structured around quite a bit of fluidity with regards to the battleground.
Who knows? They might surprise us all and include an option like 5 or 7 but I doubt it for the reasons listed above.
Speaking of the poll, this forum is probably one of the best places to get 'pro turn based/paused combat' sentiment going and yet look at the results, even here.
We can disregard 6's 11% (though it seems probably they don't NEED a turn based system or else they would have said so since non-paused melee would require player skill too) and look at 5 and 7. 7 still requires a certain amount of player input/skill so I could argue that even those players don't desire turn based/VATS and that leaves us with 5 (turns/VATS) on 6.5%. That's, amazingly, smaller than the group who want the complete opposite, i.e Doom.
Yeah, it's only 108 voters but still, this is a cRPG forum with many people here having actually played, and loved, the pnp game so 6.5% shows a distinct lack of demand, imho. If it's like this here, what's it like in more mainstream areas of the gaming community?
If we are generous and include 5 and 7 together we have around 25% compared to the 64% who want some type of gunplay which allows player input. Otherwise it's 6% roughly vs 82%. If I were CDPR, I wouldn't go to the trouble of turn based as an additional gunplay mode. Too much work, too much risk, too little demand and therefore too little to gain...but hey, I'm not CDPR so there's still hope
I'll make it up to you somehow. Maybe I'll say something positive about the game.
Whoa there, I don't want to drive you to such crazy extremes my friend! It's ok, really, forget I mentioned it