A Brief History of RPG Combat
Turn-based Combat
Roleplaying video games (CRPGs) began their existence as a genre in the mid 1970s on mainframe computers, inspired by pen & paper roleplaying games (TTRPGS) such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Examples include “Dungeon”, “pedit5” and “dnd”. In 1980 the hugely influential dungeon crawler “Rogue” was released. All those games, both TTRPGs as well as those early CRPGs were technically turn-based, even if for the computer games of this era, this often took the very rudamentary form of: whenever the player takes an action, every other entity in the dungeon does as well (which still counts as turn-based).
The genre reached great popularity in the early 1980s, through the Ultima and Wizardry series of games. The latter was hugely influential in Japan as well, leading to the birth of eastern roleplaying games (JRPGs) as their own distinct genre. There was a lot of creativity and experimentation happening in those early JRPGs, which among many other things, included the first attempts of action combat (ARPGs). Dragon Slayer (released in 1984) laid a lot of the groundwork of real-time hack&slash combat (and took a lot of inspiration from non-RPG arcade games). Via game consoles (and ARPG games like Zelda) those innovations would be re-imported and cross-influence western RPGs in return.
Action Combat
It was Times of Lore (released in 1988) that would first introduce the JRPG-pioneered action combat to western CRPGs. And while both turn-based and action combat games then happily co-existed for the following years, during this golden age of CRPGs, turn-based was still the dominant style in the west. This led - among other things - to a decline in popularity of western CRPGs during the mid-1990s. Western CRPGs then became known as a dull, stagnating genre. New genres such as first person shooters appeared and quickly rose in popularity, and console-run eastern ARPGs became way more popular in the west, than the western turn-based CPRGs of the time were.
Right in the midst of those stagnant RPG times, Diablo was released to huge success and cemented the hack&slash ARPG as it’s own genre - but that did nothing to stop the decline of turn-based CRPG games. But in the late 1990s, a number of hugely influential, award-winning turn-based CRPGs would be released: Fallout, Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment. This should prove the last hurrah for turn-based CRPGs.
On the heels of these big successes, the RPG genre would see a great resurgence in the early 2000s - but with one significant shift happening: Diablo clones and ARPGs in general did great, but turn-based games were not able to escape that stigma of being slow, dull and boring. That reputation they had attracted during the mid-90s stagnation, would not wash off. And in between ARPGs selling like crazy, and game reviewers openly marking down review scores for being turn-based, there was a huge pressure (often even force from publishers) to switch to real-time combat.
Hybrid Combat
And for many of those D&D inspired (or even outright D&D licensed) games, that was not something you could do that easily: the rules and systems for calculating hits, damage, crits, effects and everything, were inherently turn-based. Developers forced to switch to real-time often had only one desparate chance: fake it. Let the game do all it’s internal calculations fully turnbased… but fix each turn to be exactly X seconds long, and advance to the next turn automatically.
This led to the loss of tactical decisions in combat and so developers added in “pause-play” (where you can issue or even queue up attack and action commands while the game is paused), including the option to have the game auto-pause at the start of every turn. This basically added a fake-turn-based mode back into the fake-real-time mode.
The result was a rather clunky, bastardized combat system that had neither the strengths of true turn-based, nor the strengths of true real-time, but combined the downsides of both. The games still were often great, because of their worlds and characters and stories - but the combat suffered greatly. This style of combat would eventually die out completely (but not without creating an off-shoot first) - being either replaced by true real-time combat - or by going back to true turn-based combat, like Baldurs Gate 3 did. And what an improvement that was!
Tab Target
And that finally brings us to MMORPGs, which during their early days had to deal with some very unique requirements and constraints: Online combat, all calculations done on a central server (on quite limited hardware), with actions/commands sent in from remote clients over slow internet with greatly variable latency. Impossible? Not quite - there’s a rather simple solution: have the server do it’s internal calculations at fixed time-intervalls, called “ticks”. As long as the players actions come in in time for the next tick, everything is fine.
Now, if those ticks are as slow as they technically had to be back then - things come down to one attack being one tick, and some slower abilities like spells maybe needing multiple ticks to cast. The ticks effectively become perfectly identical to turns in turn-based combat. If you make them very short and fast though, you can achieve fluid, real-time combat with that. But in the early days, ticks had to be slow, and therefore combat practically was turn-based.
To reduce the load on the server and the amount of needed updates even further - make attackers lock on to a target, and turn on auto-attack using the default-attack, so that only special attacks or target-changes have to ever be submitted at all. Also make it so, that moving around breaks casting - forcing players to just stand completely still while they attack. And indeed, you get a result that feels extremely similar to the hybrid combat outlined above, when played without ever pausing. And while playing only one character, instead of an entire party, pausing is less needed anyway.
Conclusion + Personal Opinion
Turn-based has made a huge come-back in recent years, with turn-based games like XCOM and BG3 winning various game of the year awards. I don’t see the same ever happening for hybrid combat and pause play. Maybe some nostalgia projects will temporarily revive it… but I personally don’t see that ever taking off again.
Turn-based and Action combat are both good, solid and elegant solutions - and that’s why I think they are going to stay relevant, basically forever. There may be highs and lows - but these aren’t gonna just disappear.
But hybrid combat with pause play - that was a stop-gap solution, a band-aid, and always clunky and cumbersome. It was born of desperation. RPGs forcibly had to be realtime - but were still running on turn-based rule-systems. The good solution for that would of course be, to either stay turn-based entirely - or to make rule-system realtime based. And that’s what we ultimately see happening.
And tab-target is basically the same thing. It too was born out of desparation - because of the technical constraints and latency issues larger scale online games had to cope with. The similarity to hybrid combat making it somewhat familiar to gamers of the day may have helped it’s popularity - but I strongly believe tab-target would have been a lot more short-live, if it hadn’t been for the massive success of WoW pushing so many WoW-clones down the road of copying it’s combat system. But despite this greatly extended life-span, it’s eventually going to disappear, just like pause-based combat did.