numonex said:
ATB = Automated Turn Based. I could walk away from the game for hours and the game plays itself. Just like WOW leave the game on and just walk away and the game plays itself and your character levels up by you not doing anything. |
Simply no.
ATB=Active Time Battle, it is the system that ties the turn progression with the filling of a time gauge similar to the cooldowns of skills in many western RPG or MMORPG, or the cooldown of weapons and special powers in RTSs.
It has nothing to do with automation at all. Nor does a game being turn based, since we're at that. RTSs are examples of games where most of the unit actions are automated, but are not turn based. FFXII allowed you to automate actions in a much more complex way or to perform them by hand. You could always run around in real time, but your actions were still tied to an ATB-like gauge, except that it was different for each action.
It looks like in FFXIII instead of the time cost being continuous like in FFXII, it comes in multiples of a fixed slot amount.
The important thing that they kept from XII anyway, is that they got rid of the random encounters.
