I went to one of his talks at an NZGDC ages ago and it was super great.
Not only did he cover that they wrote the whole damn thing in assembly, but also exactly as you say: everyone else there thought that making it real-time instead of turn-based was a great idea, but David wasn't convinced.
So he instead spent a weekend (I think it was less than one day even) changing it so that it ran a "turn" per "tick" of time to experiment and I remember him saying something along the lines of "after I finished making the change, that first time I clicked on a skeleton and my character just walked over and smashed his sword into the skeleton I was convinced".
Not only did he cover that they wrote the whole damn thing in assembly, but also exactly as you say: everyone else there thought that making it real-time instead of turn-based was a great idea, but David wasn't convinced.
So he instead spent a weekend (I think it was less than one day even) changing it so that it ran a "turn" per "tick" of time to experiment and I remember him saying something along the lines of "after I finished making the change, that first time I clicked on a skeleton and my character just walked over and smashed his sword into the skeleton I was convinced".