Community Update #4: A Little About...unity Update#4: About Combat and Stealth"We invested heavily into what drives our animation pipeline, and specifically made tweaks to improve the feel and motion in combat. The increased brevity and flow is down to many, many changes shaving off microseconds (and sometimes entire seconds). For example, another character’s turn will begin - behind the scenes - as the previous character is ending their animation. Even things as simple as combining move animations with the hit of a melee strike shaves seconds off combat.
BG3’s combat is now set so that each combatant takes a turn at a time but there’s a twist. If multiple combatants of the same faction follow one another in the turn order, then you can simultaneously command each of them.
That means that based on the results of the initiative roll, you’ll experience a different tactical puzzle in each combat that really mixes everything up but still allows you to react to the “cards” you’re “dealt”, so to speak. (There aren’t literally any cards, sorry MTG fans!) Between the RNG of initiative, and the planning, you should be able to have a fresh experience with every combat while still being able to predict and plan with friends how to combine spells and abilities, and ultimately win the fight.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a party-based game that you can play alone, controlling each character, or as a party of up to four where each person rolls their own character. (It’s of course possible to also play as 2, or 3 people, with AI, etc).
In multiplayer, when your avatars and companions are next to each other in the turn order players can simultaneously control characters. This allows you to communicate with your friends and combine spells and abilities to take advantage of more brains on the battlefield, and more hands on the keyboard. This, compared with Divinity: Original Sin 2, drastically reduces the amount of time each player would have to wait between turns, since they’re able to move together."
"Our stealth mechanics now also take light and darkness into account. You can be obscured or heavily obscured so that even when you are caught in the visibility cones of the enemy, you still have a chance to slip through unseen. Of course, that is if your enemies don’t have darkvision. Here’s a little table that summarizes how light, darkness and darkvision affect stealth.
Clear area = always visible.
Lightly obscured = stealth check.
Lightly obscured + enemy has darkvision = visible.
Heavily obscured = undetected.
Heavily obscured + enemy has darkvision = stealth check.
Things get even more interesting when you discover you can manipulate light by using spells or throwing water at a torch, as lighting is dynamic, and thus shadows are also."
