Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Please revert forced main character conversations introduced in Patch 6

Please revert the "fix" implemented in Patch 6 that makes the game mostly force TAV as the conversationalist for auto-triggered dialog. This penalizes players who do not want to play a high charisma TAV and utilize a companion like Wyll to be the "face" of the party.

The old system was not perfect, but at least players had the ability to manipulate most of the coversations scenes by making sure the character they wanted entered a room first or was the closest one to an NPC at the end of combat for post-combat conversations. The new implementation only further pushes the over-poweredness of 5E an Charisma based classes and class interactions.

Seconded. This will probably sound stupidly dramatic, but I uninstalled the game today because 1) I got sick of save-scumming every conversation on my new ranger, and 2) I felt like was being railroaded into every [Illithid][Wisdom] check.

I realize those checks don't hurt your character (afaik), but it feels counter-immersive to resign yourself to letting the the tadpole take bites out of your brain when other options are - I mean, were - available.

I ABSOLUTELY agree. I almost had specific act 2 encounters ruined by this because the game kept selecting my 10 cha Barbarian Tav (I've made Gale/Astarion my faces depending on the scenario) and had to reload before the encounters SEVERAL times to get the game to FINALLY have one of those two be the faces for those pivotal conversations. Act 2 was already somewhat frustrating enough, this made it even MORE frustrating.

I don't want to feel pigeonholed into playing charisma characters bc my STR based martial tavs with int and cha as my dump stats are always forced to the forefront.

It's so odd. The main character selection still does not seem to work when you might want it to work - when fighting the Gnoll, I had to argue with the Gnoll leader with Lae'zel because Lae landed a melee hit on her, but instead it triggers in situation when you usually do have good control over with whom to start the conversation as in the above examples.

I agree, I’m still frequently getting scenes where the closest character is selected rather than my character. I had a case just tonight where Gale was selected to chat with Auntie Ethel and the brothers at the edge of the swamp, not my character. (Also had multiple cases of this in Act 3.) The promised fix addressing the issue seems to be no fix at all, unfortunately. And it seems to be inconveniencing folks in a disagreeable way, to boot. (Can’t speak to that as my MC is always the party face.) They’ll need to get some more hotfixes out.

I wish I could've had that happen instead. I think I had it happen once with Shadowheart conversing with someone in act 2. Beyond that I'd literally have my Tav out of the group and standing a good ways behind the party to initiate conversation with Gale or Astarion and it'd STILL force my Tav to the forefront for the conversations. I'd reload to reposition Tav and it kept happening but I couldn't yeet them to camp because I needed my Tav present for EXP I think it took. 3 reloads for the first conversation. And 5 for the second, after meticulously finagling where my Tav was.

Hmmm yeah that sucks. I feel like it should be the opposite. If you’re controlling a character and initiated the dialogue, it flips to that character. And if a story cutscene was involuntarily initiated, it would flip to the main character. I think whatever way you slice it, though, the update is going to be a disadvantage to people who use a different party member as their face. Maybe to avoid the inconvenience, you could play a paladin if you still want to play a melee class? Or, those fights are tough, but not impossible. Could just give it a go.

I love the change and don’t want it reverted! I just want the bugs fixed so it works correctly. It was previously very frustrating for me playing sorcerer and not getting dialogue or trying to position my sorcerer at the front in the hope that I might get dialogue! I like my avatar getting dialogue and making the decisions, which is how it is done in other party-based games I have played.

Unfortunately, there’s not really a positive change to revert at the moment. I have personally seen three different cases where a different party member was selected for cutscenes. Two of those cases were just after combat, so I could see the person I was controlling last in combat getting the scene. However, one scene was meeting Auntie Ethel at the edge of the forest, no combat involved there, just the person closest to them got selected.

I agree that I would like the default character for story cutscenes to be my character. I support that. I’m also sensitive to how that is affecting people who don’t want their main character to be the party face. It seems like a more complicated issue than it does at first. Maybe it would help for a player to be able to designate a character who will be prioritized for cutscenes? That way each person’s “face” can go to the front. That may be complicated to implement?

I would emphasize, though, that prioritizing the main character for cutscenes is still not a thing in the game, as far as I can tell. It sucks because I wish it was handled so that they could get to fixing some more bugs.

I 've had the same happening to me in a few instances, so for me the change does not really work either. In one instance the game even chose some random person who was not closest (Act 1, talking to pack leader Flint).

I remember when they put in the little crown in the character pictures to show who the group leader was. First I thought it was a change so you could designate a face, but unfortunately this was not it. I wish you could just choose who the face of the group, but I guess the engine does not support that.

I wonder if in case of Flint and Auntie Ethel it has something to do with damage. Auntie seems to always pick the person who would have landed the killing blow, for Flint I am not sure. In my case Lae'zel was the first one doing damage to her - but that does not always seem to be the case. I had one run when the conversation didn't trigger for me at all.

Alternatively (and, for me, preferentially), the character who initiates dialogue would be the character who carries the dialogue through. Not sure what to do about cases like Auntie (I don't think I've met Flint yet), but to me it makes some sense that she'd try to strike a deal with the person who's on the verge of ending it.

However, I'm getting the sense that any fix is likely to be complicated, and some of us are going to be left out in the cold.

The problem and this fix isn’t for when you initiate dialogue but instead for when dialogue starts automatically, which happens quite a bit and sometimes has big story or companion choices and conversations. With the old system, if you play a caster (or other ranged character) you either had the choice of never getting the automatic dialogue with your character or standing as close as possible during combat to either the enemy or companion who has dialogue to hopefully get the scene at the end with your character (and hope the enemy doesn’t move last minute).

I wasn't careful with the word "initiate." By that I meant leading the party with my "face" character in cases where automatic dialogue seems like a possibility (e.g., walking towards people I haven't encountered before). However, it looks like a lot of other variables are in play, the Ethel problem not least.

I'm now leaning towards someone's idea of being able to select the "face" once the dialogue starts, but I'm guessing that would involve a whole other layer of coding. Or two. At the end of the day, I'd be content with tactical options or reasonable dialogue options that don't involve the tadpole chewing up the brains of my character or my companions every time I have to talk to a branded Absolutist. Shadowheart's self-disguise trick was great for that, in the first act anyway, but maybe that's evolved from "outside the box" to "obvious cheat" at this point...

I also heavily disagree with this suggestion.

A proper suggestion and solution would be to; have automatic dialogue trigger a pop-up window (similar to reactions) where portraits of all 4 companions show up, thus allowing the player to select which companion will be leading the conversation.

Otherwise asking to revert the change is basically asking to revert THE MOST COMMON ongoing quality of life request by the community from the moment this game went live with Early Access, because players want their avatars to always lead a conversation even if they're not Charisma based.

So I disagree entirely with reverting the change because it would then just anger the other half of the community that's been asking for this all the time. This keeps being a problem because Larian insists on automatically triggering dialogue and even worse not giving the players a choice in who leads it. The solution is quite simple, but whether it gets implemented is another matter because it would not be cinematic to have epic moments pause, instead of just immediately leading into a scene.

Another solution is to just get rid of automated dialogue period and have NPCs stop being hostile during combat so players can talk, something like an MMO. But the epicness of the moment would then be lost even further and it would not feel like DnD at all I believe.

Also
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=935957#Post935957

This is the way, both solutions are vastly superior to the jank we have now. Forced/automatic dialogue is an infuriatingly stupid design choice.

Alternatively, Larian could also follow suit with every other cRPG in existence and allow any member of the active party contribute to dialogue and skill checks. This way, it doesn't matter who the active speaker is, everyone is included. You can enjoy using and seeing your own custom character while the resident Bard makes CHA checks.

Larian even has to audacity to include a load screen tool tip about "balancing a party for combat and conversation" and then disallow any input in said conversation from anyone but the active speaker.

This is the way, both solutions are vastly superior to the jank we have now. Forced/automatic dialogue is an infuriatingly stupid design choice.

Alternatively, Larian could also follow suit with every other cRPG in existence and allow any member of the active party contribute to dialogue and skill checks. This way, it doesn't matter who the active speaker is, everyone is included. You can enjoy using and seeing your own custom character while the resident Bard makes CHA checks.

Larian even has to audacity to include a load screen tool tip about "balancing a party for combat and conversation" and then disallow any input in said conversation from anyone but the active speaker.

This is the way, both solutions are vastly superior to the jank we have now. Forced/automatic dialogue is an infuriatingly stupid design choice.

Alternatively, Larian could also follow suit with every other cRPG in existence and allow any member of the active party contribute to dialogue and skill checks. This way, it doesn't matter who the active speaker is, everyone is included. You can enjoy using and seeing your own custom character while the resident Bard makes CHA checks.

Larian even has to audacity to include a load screen tool tip about "balancing a party for combat and conversation" and then disallow any input in said conversation from anyone but the active speaker.

This is a very good suggestion.

To add to that, If a character is off by a certain radius or not available to converse (Very far away from the area, at camp etc) then they should be excluded from the selection.
To prevent slowing down the game too much, this should be an option to either turn this on/off or give the following options:
- Main Character (Tav) always initiates dialogue (Default)
-First Character to enter scene triggers dialogue. (Pre-patch #6)
-Select which companion opens dialogue (Select from the available companions in the vicinity)