Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Conversations should use the entire party

As just an average gamer I don't have access to specific information about Larian Studios' development team and their resources. However and like you said, implementing a party-based conversation system in a complex RPG game like Baldur's Gate 3 could be a significant undertaking and likely require a considerable amount of time and resources.

Developing a party-based conversation system would involve designing new UI elements, implementing new dialogue logic to support multiple characters, and potentially revising existing dialogue content to accommodate new party-based interactions. Additionally, implementing this feature for both single and multiplayer modes could further increase the complexity and time required for development.

Based on similar features in other RPG games, and assuming a team of experienced developers with sufficient resources, it could take several months to a year or more to implement a party-based conversation system in Baldur's Gate 3. However, without knowing the specifics of Larian Studios' development process and resources, it's difficult to provide a more accurate estimate.

That being said, if this has indeed been a requested feature for many months in a row, perhaps even since the beginning of the beta in October 2020, they could, in theory, have been working on it in secret since then. Fingers crossed

I am doubtful of that, as throughout the early access the system got couple upgrades which I assume were aimed to address the complaints - skill check screen got revamp to allow for companion support, companions in the background got added behaviours to act more naturally, you can set so NPCs engage the avatar in the conversation rather than one of the companions (worked for me, but from what I understand the system still isn’t perfect).

As I see it, Larian has been addressing the complaints, though within the system they already build.

One can always hope though, and we will see how things are in August.

It's not the end of the world if they don't and I'm sure the game will still be immersive enough to enjoy, but I`ll allow myself to potentially be pleasantly surprised with the end result.

I think curent system would work well enough. O_o

First the game needs to check whos in our party ... wich i just realized it allready do.

Then you would need your companion specific dialogues ... question is if they allready are in same packet as regular options ... or if game would be abke to reach them in different packet ... or if they would need to be moved ...
Some work would be needed to explain the game that its supposed to take companions stats for dicerolls ...
There is question at hand: If our Tab is a Wizard ... and Gale is in party ... should we get only our [Wizard] taged option ... only the better stat option ... or both? I would say both.

But since our protagonist is silent ... and so are companions if they are talkers ... i dont think this would require any adjustments ...
Camera can still be focused on Tav as NPC react on whatever our companions said. It will return to us anyway.

Problem come with Multiplayer, bcs this way person who starts the conversation would be talking with as other ppl characters. :-/

---

Potentialy expensive part come with passive checks ...
Since as our companions would suceed in those checks, they would need to tell us somehow.
Cheap, lazy solution would be to just let Narrator tell that *XY* shares his/her memory trough our connected minds ... and then just replay the same as when our character remembers.
But that would be weird, especialy in later parts as conpanions are against using tadpole.
So expensive solution would be record every companion saying those things out loud.

---

Personaly i think the other system would be much better ...

//Edit:
That would just require to add option to click on conversating party ... and take over as a speaker, when you switch between your party members.
Big plus of such feature is that it can easily work in multiplayer aswell, it would only require adding single popup message, where speaker would need to confirm that he wants other player to lead conversation from now on.
Minor minus is that passive checks would still be rolled only by curently speaking character, just as they are now ... so its not too big loss.

My first question would be, are you just taking the same stock options and assigning them to different characters, or are those options locked to specific characters? Cause...

1. If the same options are available, no matter the characters - then what if players don't want that character to say it? Are you going to give them EVERY option? (i.e. "Ship full of monsters" 4 times?)

2. If you're locking them to particular characters - that means party selection is going to potentially seriously restrict dialog options, so in order to keep the idea that "any party combination is viable" you'd have to drastically increase the number of options.... in EVERY conversation.

I could almost see a workaround wherein you could switch characters during a conversation, but keep the same dialog options.... but then you're eliminating all of the gameplay possibilities that require a character (or several) not to be involved in the conversation (ex. maybe the convo triggered while you had one character scouting ahead on their own, or one character is talking to somebody while another sneaks around behind them to steal something.) Do those character's dialog options just not show up?

So yeah I can see why this would be highly requested, I'm just not sure how feasible it is.

It depends how it’s done, I think. If we’re merely talking about being able to swap in other party members in the course of the conversation then they would already need to have the vast majority of required dialogue just because they could have been the controlled character at the start. So the only problematic lines would be transitions where we’re swapping them in when the previous line spoken by the NPC was specific to a different character (eg a class specific line) and therefore wouldn’t necessarily appear as a branch in their dialogue tree. I wouldn’t want to trivialise even that, given how complex the dialogue scripting already is, but it doesn’t feel like it would require prohibitive amounts of extra dialogue.

More sophisticated (and probably more satisfying) solutions that have the whole party participating rather than tag-teaming would no doubt lead to more work than is feasible, but I think it should be possible to at least do better than we’ve seen in EA.

i agree it should be the entire party much like in TTRPGs where everyone is involved , right now im running in to a bug no matter who is talking its always Tav..

Check your settings, there is now setting that is supposed* to revert all conversations back to main character. Don’t remember what it’s called.

* still fails on ALOT in my games.