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

This needs to be added to the feedback compendium.

Interesting. The community seldom agree on things. But the utterly worthless control scheme seems to be something we all can agree on (well, except from the few occasional fanboys in denial)
Surely Larian can't just ignore this topic now. I'm sure they can choose to not change anything, but if so then they at least have to provide some reasoning as to why.




Yes it really needs to be added there

I find it awkward at best. Including the silly system of "chain" to select the group within the party, which is an heritage of D:OS and that I've hated since the beginning for being tedious and clumsy.

I completely agree with the OP. Formations and better selections would be so much better than this.
The amount of times Gale has ambled in front of my character and started fights is frustrating

I've been told that it was being added sometime ago.


It's fascinating, really.I guess that given how much I fiercely dislike this control scheme this shouldn't surprise me as much, but the thing is that when it comes to a community opinions, they always tend to be split, at least to some minimal extent.
You could probably find even people willing to argue in favor of giving Astarion's the Ronald McDonald outfit as a default, and yet it seems almost impossible to cross someone genuinely willing to praise this system.

The closest you'll get is some wishy-washy guy playing devil's advocate about the fact that MAYBE one day, with a certain amount of convoluted workaround, it COULD not suck this much. Eventually.
Bonus points for the defeatist attitude "It sucks but Larian is never going to change it anyway" or the Captain Concern "B-but it could require a certain amount of work to fix it, does anyone think of the poor devs?"

There is nothing wrong with playing devil’s advocate and trying to see things from the other side to at least try and understand.

I like your opinions Tuco, I usually agree with most of your original points, but I equally don’t mind trying to discuss compromises.

Attempting to defend awful design choices without even a decent argument about what could be good about them, just for the sake of "offering an opposing voice", doesn't really do anyone any favor.

I’m not defending anything.
It’s a system that at least on pc doesn’t hold up, I’ve always said as such. However, given I don’t work for Larian and don’t know official reasons, I simply take the stand point of “they must have their reasons, so IF it isn’t going to be scrapped, what else could be done?”

I’ve already given my proper preference, but there’s equally little benefit of filling a thread with “Larian’s current solution sucks EOM.” Over and over.

The point of discussion and debate is to look at small changes through to extreme changes and provide food for thought. There is no one correct answer, even on this topic.

As things stands right now:

-Party movement
SOLASTA x10
-Engaging turnbased detailed 5e gameplay
SOLASTA
-Random generated characters are voice acted and having believable story driven conversations with each other and it works flawlessly and fluidly
SOLASTA
-Day/night cycles, darkness rules, live dice rolls, cool little details from P&P
SOLASTA


-Graphics/UI/Sound effects
BG3...but....
-Character creation/content
BG3...for now...
-Cringy unlikable companions
BG3 (depends how old you are...)
-SHMS [Snowflake hardcore multiracial sex]
BG3
-Epic storyline
BG3 or SOLASTA (both are in EA)

Yeah, Solasta's party movement currently IS better than BG3 (talk about setting the bar low...) but it seems weird to me to point it as a virtuous example when it's actually still quite shitty and there are countless games doing better than both.

You don't even need to stick to RPGs, specifically. I already mentioned Shogun Shadow Tactics and/or Desperados 3 as examples of games that manage multiple characters control leagues better.

I've started playing the Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous alpha. Besides having much more fun with the character creator, it was a relief to play with logical keyboard and mouse controls and party selection. The camera feels much friendlier as well. Solasta isn't the only RPG from a smaller development team doing certain things better than BG3 right now. 😜

I'll ask again, since when another user mentioned I couldn't get an answer: is there currently a way to buy your way into the alpha?

The system would not be so tragic if you could give orders.

Isn't that the same as most CRPG, NWN1/2, Solasta, ...? A simple click to select just one character, SHIFT to add, the mouse can draw a rectange to include what's inside.
It's simple, intuitive, much easier and faster than the Larian's way. No need to make it more complicated




Yeah, found that pretty funny that they'd make pay to help them test. It's even worse than the BG3 deal.

OT


Man, I impulse-bought this anticipating to waste some hours on it but I didn't realize that the turn-based mode wasn't implemented in alpha yet.

I'm not enjoying the RtwP combat a single bit.
Even in Kingmaker the turn-based mod was the thing that made me finally enjoy the game after three failed attempts to get into it.

And now I'll stop dragging my own thread into a prolonged off-topic. Sorry.

Not that I want to defend the system, before Tuco chastises me again ;-) but logical “keyboard” controls (or lack of) are from what I can tell, the crux of the design plan.

All the things I would like to see change all revolve around these very concepts these other games have, but that takes the system further away from being controller friendly.

Thus the proper response in our minds would be to have separate control systems based upon system, but I’m. It convinced Larian want to go down this path. Still, it’s EA let’s hope it changes.

I doubt I can give any contribute at all after 12 pages of posts, but hey, here I am.
I understand the basic reasoning behind this system, it was built thinking of a party of four friends playing the game together, with each one individually controlling ONE character. This system allow the maximum degree of freedom if you control just ONE character but becomes sub-par as soon as even one player is forced to use more that ONE at a time.
Since I suspect the game is going to be played by a full party of four people just a fraction of the times, this means the current system will results flawed most of the them.

It was always awful, both in DOS and DOS2, but at least you didn't have to jump frequently. Now you have to, and it would not be a problem if not for this system.

If I want to jump over a broken section of a bridge I must, in sequence:
1) Taking out of the chain every character, otherwise those linked together will occupy all the avaiable landing space on the other side trying to reach me;
2) Find a valid spot to jump, even more time consuming for low-STR characters;
3) Make the jump;
4) Move away in order to make room for another one to jump;
5) Repeat the above for each character;
6) Link them back together.

It's just tedious, not to mention all the problems related to the stealth mechanic.

I understand Larian wants to innovate the genre, and they did in many aspects, but this doesn't mean to get rid of well established mechanics just for the sake of it. Even because everyone complained about this since DOS, so it shouldn't be news for them!

Lots of PC games handles two different control schemens without problem though. One for mose keyboard and one for controller. Changing the mouse keyboard controls in to something more similar to the old BG games doesnt mean that the control scheme for the controller needs to be changed in to that as well.

Oh it’s totally doable, of course it is.
My point I suppose is more that there is a whole list of improvements on top of just the chain vs select argument. Like handling spell casting, chatting, etc... etc...

Once you start, then I think you would end up with an overhaul just for PC, and for the record, I’m all for that. I’m just not sure Larian are.