Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides BG3 Party Movement Mechanic

full agree with OP, the current movement system is bad for party management.

- if you want to jump across something as a party, need to unlink every character, and let them jump one at a time over, then link them again
- no drag select or click on screen to select characters
- when selecting another character as 'active', the other 3 starts moving around like idiots to position them for following the new active character
- bad pathing...characters on follow that run through surface damage effects while following.

- i miss a system where you can put waypoints for moving your characters around surface effects when in combat -> is that in the game or not? couldn't find anything - if not, it should be added.

Yeah, this is something i started to look for during real time movement as well when my characters kept running through vines and fire

Food for thoughts:
there have been like TWO attempts to defend Larian's system so far in the entire thread (and its clones I posted on other forums) and both of them in the end boil down to "It wouldn't be so atrociously bad IF..."
followed by a list of convoluted changes and compromises that would allegedly make the system somewhat palatable. Maybe. To a limited extent.

Woah, what a glowing endorsement.

So I unchained my characters, which put them out of order. Then when I reconnected them, the game did NOT want my PC as the main character at the front of the stack. I literally spent minutes fiddling with this until my character would go back to the front of the stack. So annoying.

Also, I'm constantly trying to select a party member (which should work by clicking on them) only to initiate a dialogue. Which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't a cut scene style conversation. Very frustrating when I just want to click the character, then have to exit a conversation and try again.

What's this? Another person having a terrible experience trying to get used to these controls?
Color me shocked.
Also, bump.

The chain system is irritating for so many reasons, just get rid of it and give us marquee select.

while not much can be done about the jumping since the characters cant all stand in the same spot, you realize a simple "chain/unchain all" button would solve most of this pretty well

what do you expect them to do when you choose a character to lead? do you want to command a line of characters from the middle right?

the game isn't done, models cant even move their fingers yet. Divinity 2 had a great pathing system where every character knew to avoid dangers if they could, why wouldnt this one get it too?

With the marquee select you can also do formations correctly from the looks of it. I hated their "formation" system they implemented in OS2. Half the time it didn't work and was really wonky.

Sure there can be. Select all characters -> click the jump button -> click the spot to jump to. The character pathing can reorganize them as/before/after they jump. Like, maybe there'd have to be enough space on the place you're jumping to for all companions to stand next to each other. But only maybe. I've seen characters run through other characters, so just allow that to happen while in the party jumping process and sort it out after everyone lands.

The AI already take each other in consideration when pathing, shouldn't be too hard to extend that to jumping as well.

Apparently the forum swallowed a good half dozens of the last posts during its maintenance (including a painfully long answer to Dr. Not So Fast).

Quick repost of where things started.
______________________


I was watching this minutes ago and I started laughing.
Guess who else noticed that party control is garbage?

https://youtu.be/RoynYvZSFus?t=1177

From a guy who's trying his hardest to say positive things about the game, I might add.

P.S. In case timed linking doesn't work properly for you just go at 19:37 and listen for a minute or two.

The movement currently turns the game into a grounds-keeper sim. Because your chars will randomly run through vines or fire, I feel obligated to burn all the vines I see (but that leaves fire, so I then have to freeze the burning vines). It's like I have to maintenance the environment just to run back and forth exploring an area. Not fun.

As I see it, the UI system to select which characters are grouped is a separate issue to the movement of the group.

If the selected character is in a group chained together, the character movement can work exactly the same as if all those characters were selected together. The fact that one character gets ahead before anyone else starts moving seems to be more about how the pathfinding works through the 3D world than the user interface. Compare with original BG which could just stack 2D sprites on top of each other on a flat background with far fewer obstacles in the way.

Another difference to consider is that in DOS2 and BG3 you can do things like initiate conversations with any character, so if you’ve selected everyone to move together, who speaks when you click on an NPC? You’d either need to select a single character to speak and then reselect the group to move on, or have an additional control to designate the speaker. That’s not a particularly big deal, but there maybe other similar things I’ve not thought of yet. Using teleport pyramids in DOS games is slightly different, but would be a similar issue.

Formations never worked that well in DOS2, partly due to the time lag to get into position (although that never seemed as bad as in BG3), but also some other weirdness like the selected character would always move to front even if they are supposed to be at the back. They should definitely improve that for BG3. I believe it was a bit more reliable in DOS1, but I’m not sure.

Chaining and unchaining characters by dragging their portraits is a bit of a pain, but I don’t think it’s the main problem. It should also be the simplest thing to fix. Something like shift-click to quickly unchain and move a character, and another shift-click to chain again should be all the UI really needs, IMO. But other shortcuts could help too.

I think if Larian can fix those issues, there are some advantages to the chaining and unchaining thing. Being able to take one or more characters off somewhere else and then move the others around without having to continually select multiple characters isn’t fundamentally bad. It just needs some tidying up.

It could be, but they relate in the sense that Larian deliberately put in place a system that never let you select more than one unit under the assumption that the auto-follow when chained would be an adequate replacement.
Except there are countless scenarios where it is NOT. Like how bothersome it is to manage stealth for the whole party.



It really doesn't. There is a significant and meaningful difference betwen "I'll click on the ground and rotate and decide where each one of these guys will move with a quick drag" and "I'll click here to decide where ONE character will go and the other will more or less orbit around it stumbling up and down like drunken idiots".

Not really. Not to mention we have more modern examples than BG1 among modern 3D games.



Literally a non-issue, for both the reason that every other game in the genre manages it just fine AND the fact that claiming this to be an issue with "RTS controls" ignores how even more frequently the problem presents itself with the autofollow system.



Yeah, they never worked because the auto-follow made them pointless and unreliable, while the alternative option was to unchain everyone and move each one of them individually. Once again: feasible, but clumsy, slow, inefficient.


And yet you decided for yourself this role of Devil's Advocate, defending a bad and inefficient system just for the sake of it.


I'd love for someone to list at least a couple, possibly based on a real use case, rather than some vague "Who knows, maybe in some special case, with the right star alignment, during a full moon".

Others have suggested that activating stealth whilst chained should activate it for everyone chained. That sounds like a sensible idea. It’s effectively how it would work by multi selecting too, so if there’s any issues with that, it would be the same issues as with what you propose.




If the characters are stumbing “like drunken idiots” then it’s probably because they are trying to arrange themselves without clipping through each other, trying to avoid surfaces and obstacles, all trying to use the same ladder, etc. I doubt it’s anything to do with the minor detail of only having one portrait highlighted in the UI. That’s my main point. If Larian added add icons on the ground for all characters moving and the drag to rotate (or similar), it would be functionally identical to multi-selecting which ones to move, except you’d only need to select one character in a chain to move instead of everyone.



And maybe those games handle the movement better. Examples would be handy, maybe there’s something to learn from them. That doesn’t mean it having characters chained together that’s at fault.



As far as I’m aware, Larian’s games are the only RPGs where any party member can talk to NPCs. In old BG, PoE, DA, etc. it’s always the protagonist talking.

I said it’s probably not a big issue, but it still needs sorting and you’ve not said how you propose to do it. If Larian were to follow your advice they would need to decide how to handle this and probably more consequences that neither of us have even thought of. You can brush it off as a non issue, but they can’t. They’d need to think through everything the player can do in the game and make sure they have a solution for it all that’s easy to use. Thats why it’s not going to happen, btw.




Partly true. The “use formation at start of combat” option kind of works a bit. It’s a poor substitute for individually positioning ranged characters on high ground with clear line of sight and stealthing a rouge behind enemies though. But then it’s hard to conceive a formation system that equals that level of control.



Just telling you what I think.



Seriously? The example I gave was for literally every time you spilt the party and want to move more than one character together. I do it all the time. Don't you ever split your parties? OK, when you send a rouge to scout ahead, when you need to split them to solve a puzzle.

I concur with the original post. Party movement is extremely cumbersome and/or aggravating. Solasta is also about to come out in early access (OCT 20), even in their pre-alpha demo from a year ago, they had party movement done very well.

I am not going to revisit all the reasons for why Larian's party control scheme is terrible, a hundred posts before me already have. If a game currently being developed by an indie team of 17 people can get this right, why is this AAA title sucking the fun out of my gameplay with a terrible implementation?

It may be situationally an improvement, and still garbage in case where you don't want to. Especially given that when chained people are put in stealth they start (once again) to follow the lead, which may not necessarily be what you want at any given moment.
In the end we are back at the usual point that you can either suffer to the inadequacies of the system or circumvent them with incredibly laborious and boring workarounds that in literally NO scenario match in comfort and practicality other control schemes more traditional.
What's best (or worst) is that even if some fringe soul here and there may ACTUALLY be a fan of the auto-follow system, you could still have it as an option on top of a "RTS-like" control.
"Do you hate convenience, precision and practicality in your control scheme? Toggle this little auto-follow button on the UI and you'll have to move just one character like in diablo, with all the other idiots just following you like sheep". There, Everyone happy, even masochists and controller fetishists.


Yeah, well, aside for the fact that they do it every time you rotate the man in control even in the middle of a perfectly flat square, here's the thing: "please just don't", really. Just give me direct control and stay where I put you. I know you guys are trying to help but you aren't clearly good enough at this.






Aaaand that's precisely what we are trying to argue in favor of even here. Because we want a game with better controls. Because it would make the experience better for everyone. Even in face of your useful attitude "No, guys, it may be difficult, let's not even try".


Your awareness is lacking. Even in BG party members could start the conversation in place of the PG. It usually made little difference except when you wanted to make use of some more favorable charisma bonus or so, since the games were not sophisticated enough to have dialogues addressing the NPC like a different character. In games like IWD or ToEE the concept of "main character" doesn't even make much sense.



I had to do to, because I was forced to work with what I had. At no moment using these controls I've ever found myself thinking "Woah, this is such a nice improvement over being able to quickly give a destination to everyone (even in, hear this, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS!) with a couple of well targeted clicks".

That's the $64k question. CRPGs figured this out far better 20 years ago and then kept using Baldur's Gate style controls in nearly every game in the genre since then. WHY does Baldur's Gate 3, in 2020, control so much worse than Baldur's Gate 1 in 1998?

It's weird, isn't it?
Most of the times when you go back to an old game you used to love the feeling can be bittersweet: "Uh, man, I didn't remember this controlling so poorly" or "UI/Controls surely have come a long way in the last 15 years" etc, etc.
Not here. Here you have the old 20 years old game being snappy, quick and intuitive to use, and conversely its modern iteration being a mess where you have to juggle between complications and minor annoyances to get shit done.

Sorry, I’m going to skip the rest, because we can go back and forth on details, which is probably distracting from my point, and this is the key point:



Yes! I agree that the movement should be improved. I’m NOT defending what we have now, and I’m NOT saying they shouldn’t try. I’ve suggested several areas that I think should be improved.

All I’m saying is that you can breakdown the movement control into 2 steps:
1. UI interface where the player indicates where they want the character or characters to go.
2. The scripts/subroutines/whatever the programming term is to move the characters into position.

The only significant thing I disagree with you (and most others apparently) is whether the jankiness is mainly coming from step 1 or 2. So much of the discussion is about the ability to multi-select characters, draw a box around characters, etc like in the good old days. But the assumption seems to be that the ability to do so would mean that characters smoothly move into position together whilst staying in formation. I’m very sceptical that that’s the case.

Try this hypothetical situation- Larian see all the requests to multi select characters, draw boxes, etc. basically copying the old BG movement UI. After they release an update with the new system you try to move a group of characters and they move one after the other just as they do now. Would you think they made a worthwhile change or would you say they spent their time making a system just as broken as before?

What I’m trying to say is that I think the biggest difference between what we have and what everybody wants isn’t the chained/unchained business. There’s no good reason the game can’t treat a group chained together the same way as a multi selected group. I think the issue is tthe code that tells characters how to move from A to B. I suspect the real reason for the following behavior is to avoid characters trying to move into the same space and crashing into each other. If so, that would make the UI difference a red herring.

As I said before, chaining and unchaining characters could really use some shortcuts as well, but that should be the easy part.