Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Let chain order control who comments?

In the past I requested that all NPCs who have a comment on the way a particular situation was handled be allowed to comment in turn/and or interject. For example the way we handle the Nettie situation, etc... That is still my primary wish.

However, barring that, It would be nice to have control over which of my NPC companions comment. Basically I am suggesting that the chaining order dictate who gets the explanation point over their head or interjects, etc... I can simulate this today by effectively dismissing everyone but the person I want to comment, but that is a lot of work. I would prefer a simple checkbox/option somewhere that has the game always go with the first non-player controlled NPC in the lineup.

I think we should remain "ambitious", and keep asking for a party-based RPG that feels somewhat-decently like it is a party-based RPG. (And not like a game designed for a single adventurer, but in which the option to have followers/companions for us to use during combats was later added.)

If our companions are there during a cutscene and can interject, they should do so.

If our companions are there during a cutscene and can comment on it afterwards (yellow exclamation mark on their head), we should be able to discuss what happened in that scene with each of them afterwards.

(And while I'm at it, I guess it's hard not to mention that if our companions are there during a cutscene and can make an Ability Check better than we can, we should be able to have them do it. Though this is starting to drift away from the original topic.)


Also, I hope that the toilet chain will go away entirely. If that terrible system is to remain in the game, I'd much rather have the particular order of companions in the chain not matter at all.

... Unless we can have party formations. But then I'd want the order to matter only for party formation, and not have to switch order when I want to explore story/dialogue content.

All in all, I feel that this idea of using the chain order would be essentially trying to pile up bad ideas on fundamentally-bad systems in order to try to smooth things out a bit, instead of actually addressing the fundamental problems. And I'd vote for making the fundamentals better.

I too would prefer an all-inclusive solution. I made a number of suggestions a year ago and most were ignored, so I figure maybe smaller, less ambitious suggestions might be better?

In regards to interjections (adding to a conversation underway while it is happening), it is possible that non-binary conversations use animation data recorded using a set number of actors/actresses that have a hard coded place for 1 NPC to speak up. If that was true, adding additional NPCs/camera angles, etc.. would be too much work. I've have ran into those types of hurdles before when modding other games. So, assuming a compelling reason like that, I was thinking they could still give me some way of controlling who the 1 character is that gets pulled into the scene and interjects.

Now post-dialogue comments where the explanation point appears over an NPC's head, I can't think of a good technical reason they wouldn't be able to just flag everyone as having something to say. Even in a worst case scenario: they are using a global variable to indicate the id of the companion who has a comment to say. Even then, they could still treat the int as a bitset so that it could indicate more than 1 companion simultaneously... or just make independent variables for each companion. It isn't like there are hundreds of them or anything.



So to fine tune the suggestion a bit: Please Let us control who interjects through some mechanism such as chaining order if there is a compelling technical reason for the current limit, and please allow everyone to interject otherwise. Also please allow everyone to offer post-dialogue commentary who is traveling with the player when the conversations happen.