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

Can it be fixed easily? I have no idea how hard it would be to change the control scheme. I want it to be changed, but maybe it's actually really difficult for some reason?

Well, if its' difficult they better start working on it immediately, because it's desperately needed regardless of its ease of implementation.

I could forgive them for that UI and play the game despite that problem, if it's really that hardcoded or something and the coder left the company and nobody can fix it or something... but if it's not, they would help themselves, in the long run, by removing CONS to this game. Or just make another UI as well and and allow us to choose, maybe this fancy UI will be preferred by some as well (because it's fun playing with those chains 2-3 times, I enjoyed it -- but not anymore

Even if it's hard they have to do something.

I was trying something Yesterday in the game (because I'm not really playing anymore atm) and hell... I wanted to climb a ladder....

Ok the first climb the ladder. I didn't move him too much because it was on a small platform so no one followed. So I had to click the others companions and I forget to "disband"... The first one go down, then everyone finally climb that ladder...

This is really cheap party mouvement management.
If this game is really ambitious, they have to change this even worse mechanics than 20yo mechanics.

My 2c:

1) Managing the Chain

Like so many other people in this thread, I think managing the chained party order is a pain in the butt.

When I want to change the party's march order, I spend far more time fighting the interface than such a simple task should take. If I want to move the character in position 3 to position 2 (say), it should be as easy as putting the mouse pointer over the 3rd character tile and rolling the scroll wheel up one click, or pressing "2".

I want a single one-click command to ungroup everyone. Have one button just above the party tiles that toggles between "Group" / "Ungroup". When the party groups, it should be to the location of the currently selected character, making the other 3 walk to him.

If I want to ungroup just one character, I should be able to do so easily. It bewilders me that when I'm processing a character's turn, e.g. having him cast a spell then move away, and when I get to the movement part and I need to ungroup him, when I right-click his tile "ungroup" isn't an option (why the hell not?). I have to select any other character, right click the one whose move I want to finish, ungroup him, reselect him, then move him the way I want. (I know I could also drag his tile to the right to 'break' his chain, but nonetheless, WTF are Larian thinking?)

2) Characters Moving in a Chain

So many annoying effects...

I click a location for the party to walk to, on the way the lead character walks into a trap, he keeps walking and the other three members of the party keep walking into the same trap. Even if I'd rolled "3" for all their Intelligence stats, they should've been smarter than this!

If one character enters "sneak" mode, and he sets off to do rogue things, and something happens that takes him out of sneak mode (e.g. he sets off a trap), the other three characters immediately start walking to his location (sometimes walking into the same trap too), usually kicking off a combat when I was absolutely not prepared for it.

At the end of a battle, the ground can have some dangerous patches (e.g. pools of acid, burning oil, etc.). When a character kills the final enemy, the 3 non-selected characters immediately walk to the selected character's location, often taking damage and even being killed by it. This is particularly stupid because they could have easily walked around the dangerous patches, but the path-choosing code had them take the shortest route regardless of how damaging it'd be. At the least, when combat ends have the characters stand still where they are, leaving it to the player to tell them where to move. (Characters choosing damage-dealing routes when safe routes are available is a frequent event, e.g. if I want to jump Asterion over running water, and ask him to jump to the far side of the stream, instead of walking to a dry place that's in range for him to jump from, he'll walk straight toward the destination -- often into the water -- and then jump as soon as he gets within jump range).

The annoyance of unintelligent chained movement is made even worse by Larian's determination to make 'clever' terrains, so we get things like the utterly stupid, poison-gas traps on the way to the Hag's room. I like my D&D games to have at least some degree of reasonableness ("Could the hag and her servants, visitors, suppliers, etc. operate out of a lair that had those traps?"), but in DOS and BG3 Larian often design 'interesting' environments that are unbelievable even in a magical milieu. Having a chain of characters walk unintelligently through areas of terrain that are rigged with incredibly inconvenient traps is a combination that makes for very annoying game play.

I greatly dislike save-scumming in any game, and am very reluctant to load a previous save just because something went poorly. Unfortunately I'm now a constant save-scummer in BG3 because my party members keep doing utterly stupid things just because they are 'chained' together (or because Larian built utterly ridiculous terrain). My enjoyment of the game takes a significant hit every time I reload. I go so tired of this in DOSII that I gave up on that game not even a third of the way through. I suspect BG3 will end up annoying me so much I never play it all the way through either. At the end of a hard day's work, I just want some fun entertainment; I don't want to fight the UI to stop it killing my characters in terrain riddled with ridiculous traps.

"Fighting the interface" is the probably the best description of the problem. The game's interface should not be an obstacle to playing the game, yet this is how it feels now.

I liked it, when I clicked on the path in the swamp region and Astarion decided to run around a hill through water (which hurt him) and set of every trap in the way, in order to get to the point he wanted to stand in. Aside of the fact that visually it seemed he could easily just get there the intended way.

Reminds me of BG 1/2, where sometimes characters raced off through the entire dungeon, to get to their position, just because!

At least in this BG 3 is very close to BG 1 and 2.

op can correct me if im wrong, but i wanna say this thread is about party control (ie chain v unchaining, multiple npc 'jumps', etc) of members not necessarily the ai path navigation - in this regard larians bg game is very much different from bg1/2 (more like dos1/2 imo - which admittedly im not a fan of, lol), but i do also think that the pathing could use some tweaking too...so add it to the list of feedback that larian allegedly will 'consider'

Yeah, the pathfinding is a secondary, incident topic, not the main point.

Beside, who the hell let characters run around "across an entire dungeon" because of pathfinding in BG2 when a single click could stop the issue entirely?
Saying that this makes BG2 and BG3 similar is disingenuous at best.

Pathfinding has always been an issue in these types of games.
Heck in the BG series my play through are littered with reloading because my group didn’t follow properly and walked across a deadly trap or two!!

Surfaces just aggravate the situation. I agree it’s a secondary argument here though.

I never found pathfinding a meaningful issue in the old games because I'm never controlling my party in ways that requires an extensive reliance on pathfinding to begin with.

The AI is systematically turned off. Everyone is just supposed to move where I say and /or auto-attack with the default weapon unless I order otherwise and that's pretty much it.
I want my characters to move toward the selected spot in the proximity or to walk across the area together as a party. I'm never sending them half a map away without even checking what's on the path.

It's a different matter in BG3 precisely because characters are neither comfortable to move individually "selecting the exact spot" (once again, because it requires to chain/unchain them or swap to turn-based mode) nor reliable to manage as a party, with their tendency to move on their own and dance around the selected character.

No it certainly wasn’t a big issue in the previous games, but it was there if you weren’t careful.

Obviously here it’s worse precisely because of the stupid chain function and your party constantly rearranging itself and the often large amount of long lasting surface effects or permanent hazards.

It’s definitely fair to say that if you are going to add obstacles and surface hazards, then the controls and pathfinding if the AI better be on point.

Also going to post here saying that I would very much like something like an infinity-engine based party selection and movement tool. Drag-select and formations are perfect for this kind of game.

Yeah, but I try to avoid focusing the discussion around that issue, specifically, because the last thing I'd want is for Larian to look at the feedback, say "Oh, they seem to have issues mostly with characters avoiding surfaces", then throw us a patch that makes characters better at avoiding traps while keeping the same shitty control scheme and say "See? We solved the problem entirely".

Well, no, you fucking didn't.

Lol... agree!

Going to copy/paste a reply I made to a different thread since I believe it highlights just how severely the current control scheme can get out of hand.

I still agree.

I agree with the OP and would like to see a system similar to that in Solasta.
On a side note, this thread is on the first page almost all the time and I beg you to change 'dreaful' into 'dreadful' - please, my brain is freaking out

I agree. There needs to be some fine tuning with party management

Of all the options, Solasta is not really what I'd take as ideal model. Not when whe have PoE or Kingmaker with far better controls (and more suited for this type of game, which is not grid-based).


I started saying in the first page of the thread and repeated more than once that I noticed the typo but I can't edit the title (or anything in the first post, really) anymore.

Unless a moderator comes in and "solves the problem", you'll have to live with your freak out.