Its bugs. Im sure it'll get better. For example, initiative is broken still. Keeps skipping characters and then jumping back to ones that were skipped.
I bet the issue is that they are trying to make it so enemies are smart so that the game is more challenging. In the old games, like Pool of Radiance, they naturally went faster because all they did was go after the closest character.
In BG3, they seem to analyze your actions more. It's broken, so it doesn't really work, but they do think. Well, at least, seems that way to me.
I bet when they're finished it'll be awesome.
Also, the whole asynchronous world makes combat non-deterministic to the AI. If you have a game where every NPC is locked into turns, then the AI can calculate all combat moves, for NPCs, in sequence blocks, between player turns. Portions of such a process could even be parallelized. So there might be a pause at the beginning of a sequence of NPC turns, but the AI wouldn't have to wait for the animations of one NPC to finish before calculating the moves of the next one. When actions, made by players and NPCs, which are not in combat(at least at the beginning of the round), can effect the state of combat at any point, you can't rely on a maintained predictability between player turns to speed up the process.
