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

BG3's a PC only game right now. More importantly, Larian claims BG3 is a AAA game with a AAA budget, and they staffed up to build it. If their tech has been weak for two previous games now, and those projects were too small to afford improving it, now's their chance. If the tiny dev team building Solasta can figure out controls and UI that work way better than BG3's, there's really no excuse for Larian to continue using this awkward, clunky system they've stuck with for over six years now. And there's definitely no excuse for them to hamstring their primary launch platform for the sake of ports that may come later.

The chain/unchain thing is painfully awful. It's like they're stuck together with duct tape and you have to aggressively rip them apart because the mechanic itself feels so unfinished. It's a nightmare to change the character order, it's like trying to stack magnets with their poles reversed. And it did that throughout D:OS as well, so it's not something I expect to change post-EA. I vastly prefer having a 'select all' hotkey like in the IE games. It's so much smoother and doesn't require constant fiddling around.

I have to say this a fitting description. That's exactly how it feels.
Then again, "party order" is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to issues tied to this control scheme, so it's not like solving this would make it overall particularly likable anyway.

I truly hope they are though

Even not having read the whole thread, i have to agree. I was trying to hide a character before a fight to make him sneak attack from stealth. So i unchained him from the party to move and hide him. He did not even join the fight and when i sneaked in he joined the fight but was no longer stealthed.
The party/character management in and out of combat needs some serious work.

+1

Yeah, miss the formation thing that DOS 2 had

Yeah... Well. No.
Of all the formation systems I experienced across several games, the one used in DOS 2 is the one I "miss" the least.

I was hoping to hear something, anything from Larian about this when I read the patch notes today. But alas...

Yeah this week's Larian update was underwhelming. It's good to see bug fixes, but I'm much more interested in the team's plans to fix their game and make it better than I am on seeing demographics for who's banging who.

An improvement could include several steps,
- Remove this magnetic chain system, which is awkward, and replace it with the proved system that is describe earlier and which is used everywhere else.
- More than one sub-group is not necessary, really.
- Each character should see where the next destination is, and wait until the character who should be in front, is in front, before starting to move (instead of moving back and forths to stay behind the character who should be in front, that's what generates those cahotic situations).
- Decide whether characters that are not in the group spawn spontaneously back into it when entering a new area, or are left behind.
- Possibly add a formation option like in Pathfinder, to allow different group formations depending on the situation (V, column, abreast, ...). But it's rare I'm using it, I don't think it's necessary.


I must say I don't care much about all this romance stuff, it's really overdone, and it feels artificial and unnecessary. It's nice there are many (other) interactions between the party members though, that adds to the story which is not much developed otherwise. Other RPGs like PoE put more accent on the story itself, to each its own I guess. As long as there's something else than fights (and banging), it's nice to have variety and some depth to the game.

Maybe I'm missing some nuance here, because your explanation is a bit convoluted, but... aren't you essentially re-proposing what most of us have been asking since the beginning of the thread (and before)?

Isn't everyone re-proposing what was said before? As you said elsewhere, that's what forums do I had already proposed that in another thread a few weeks ago, and so did others. Since Larian doesn't respond or even tag the threads, and since we don't know whether they read them or not, I guess this repeating will go on for a while.

But yes, just trying to summarize the different points in one post, really (and responding to your original question in the first post). It's not convoluted.

Yeah, but they didn't come in the thread saying basically something among the lines of "What if we do this instead?" just to list the exact same thing.
Which is the part that had me confused.


I think you misunderstood me there.
What I found a bit... convoluted was some of the wording you chose to describe the controls, not the idea in itself.
Like, your last two points for instance could be summarized with "the party should move in formation", which once again is exactly what any other RTS or game of this type does.

Only the last point is about formation, and by that I mean the relative position of each character within the group. Some games allow to change it (V, column, and so on are the examples I gave, and are typical combat formations). So yes, the party should move in formation, that's for granted, no need to mention it. Should we be able to change the formation, I'm not sure.

The point before last is not about formation, it's about the group, I thought the description was clear but to elaborate: in some games, when one of the group changes area, or even passes some trigger, the other characters respawn too and the group counts all the characters again. For example in Kingmaker, when you don't select everyone and enter a cave, everyone spawns in the cave nevertheless. I'm not sure how Larian does that in BG3 anymore, in D:OS2 it wasn't the case, sub-groups remained at their respective locations, it feels more realistic.

The third item is about how characters move. When you select another character in Larian games, he/she becomes the "leader of formation" and all other characters do crazy stuff, running all over the place to fall back into the new formation. Doing so usually have them walk into fire, trigger traps and all sort of nonsense, it's obviously not what the player wants. So they should stay still when the selection changes.


Anyway, scratch that. To keep it simple, I just hate how they do it right now with the chain gizmo because it's not easy to manipulate, it's unnecessary, and leads to side-effects like the characters running in all directions when the group leader changes. With the shift-select all other games offer, it's simple, there's no "leader", and it's intuitive.

You were pretty spot on with your tittle

There does need to be a formation system, but certainly not one like DOS2. It would be nice to be able to select how my characters run along, in a straight line or some other formation (of course that is not a solution to pathing by itself).

Sometimes a character takes a random path and I have to quickly try to select the correct F key, and sometimes the character just doesn't respond and is dead set on running right at an enemy to start combat or run into a trap.

It doesn't help that Larian decided to put traps/vines/poison clouds on a lot of locations. The vines so far have been the worst for me.

The worst instance by far was at the wet lands were Kagha was suppose to have a meeting by the tree with Astarion in my party, trying to keep him away from vines and water at the same time. Absolutely dreadful.

Well, typo aside.
But by the time I noticed it it was already too late to edit it.

By the way, I just finished play the hag questline again and I swear that passing that idiotic part with the poison traps and platforms, with your companions running back and forth over the poison clouds every time you try to swap control between them (or in alternative asking you to pass the entire section with one character at the time) never stops being absolutely fucking annoying at best, when not downright infuriating.

Agree to agree. Chain/unchain is the worst system in any party-based RPG. Just do it like every other game, please?

Yes, I agree to all that was said before... even if you managed to unchain your party members, you have a chance to accidently give silly orders while picking one ore the other. Had the case e.g., that I made my group jump one after the other over a fire and three were done already. While trying to pick the remaining member, the 3rd in row turn round to walk back and die... Or you jump with the leading character and the others pick a detour instead of a jump and run into the next group or trap.

Anyway... just try once to position three characters in favourable positions before kicking of the fight with the last remaining member. There is a more than big chance that you either mess up the positioning because of the complicated handling or that you realize that you're to far of to join the fight in reasonable time in the end.

Body blocking by party members needs to go.

I would like to see them use the ghost animation (like currently appears now with movement preview) if characters have to pass through each other.

This would be preferable to showing PCs walk through each other with clipping of the full models and such.

When a PC enters another PC's space for movement, it would be cool if the active selected PC had their normal animations and the inactive PC who's space is being passed-through went ghost animation.

This would eliminate a lot of pathing problems and jump fails right there just by ditching the body block within the party.

Blocking for hostiles and neutrals is fine, but friendlies it would be good to handle the same way as PCs. As long as we aren't ending the turn inside another characters circle of space, they should just kinda phase through to the spot where we want them if its within movement range.

Probably the top QoL feature for me, along with targeting from portraits, and better spellcasting/hotbar UI.