Yeah I mean that's a for sure! But I'm just looking at how they might salvage the exploration and general "moving around" experience without totally ash-canning their entire scheme and starting from scratch, since I honestly don't think that is something they would be willing to do at this point.
This thread is currently titled "BG3 Party Movement Mechanic" but we don't actually have a "party movement mechanic" at all, what we have is a single character movement mechanic and that's it.
If chained, then sure, up to 3 other characters can be made to follow the selected character to whom they are chained, but their actual movements while chained are currently completely out of our control. They don't move as a party. Instead their individual pathing is left up to the whims of the AI, which frequently fails by allowing those chained characters to run into hazardous terrain, pointlessly climb up and down stuff, or initiate combats or dialogs when we don't want them to.
This is why I think they should just transform the current Chains into "Marley's Chains."
When chained, the other characters just behave as if they were ghosts. They don't interact with the environment or get drawn into combats or dialogs. Only the currently selected character should be able to do that.
That way we don't need competent AI pathing, which is the primary issue right now. If nobody ever ran into the flames or bled out on the floor or accidentally triggered dialogs or encounters, while we were trying to maneuver someone else, then we wouldn't all be in here grumbling about it. But the fact that the game has been out for more than a year, and the pathing still blows, means that this is probably not an issue they're going to be able to fix. So I think they should just create a mode where the entire party is represented by the single selected character and everyone else only "appears" cosmetically, as ghosts, until the party is expanded out in full due to a dialog, or a combat, or because the player manually presses the Chain/Unchain button to switch them from Ghost mode to Normal mode on the fly.
In a Ghost Chain scheme all those pathing problems would go away, at least while the party is moving as a unit. Unless the player wants them all out at once, in which case they can just click the Unchain toggle to achieve that. Then all they really need is a prompt to select which PC does the talking when dialog or a specific character action is required. It would just feel a lot more streamlined that way I think. More like the old Gold Box games than Baldur's Gate 1/2, but at least it wouldn't be nearly as frustrating as what we have right now.
