As I see it, the UI system to select which characters are grouped is a separate issue to the movement of the group.
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.
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.
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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.
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".
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.
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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.
Not really. Not to mention we have more modern examples than BG1 among modern 3D games.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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Chaining and unchaining characters by dragging their portraits is a bit of a pain
And yet you decided for yourself this role of Devil's Advocate, defending a bad and inefficient system just for the sake of it.
Just telling you what I think.
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I think if Larian can fix those issues, there are some advantages to the chaining and unchaining thing.
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".
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.
