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

He was already warned, no need to necro.

Was that quoted post written by booboo? O_o
Personaly i doubt it ... and while i understand that some people like to repeat the same over and over again, it gives me nothing new ... that is the reason i was asking for his opinion ... bcs i wanted to know what *HE* concidered "overly-complicated" ...

I allready read what was written "20+ pages ago", aproximately when there was 20+ less pages.

What does this even matter for?
He claimed that specific examples were made aplenty across the thread, not that he signed them himself.

So, let me get this straight.
Basically people would need to keep making new shit up to make you happy and interested, because things mentioned 20 pages ago (and never actually solved) don't count anymore for some reason...
While conversely you reserve yourself the right to make the sneaky implication that specific examples were never mentioned.

Also, if you are really not interested in the same problems mentioned in the past pages of the thread it's not really clear why you keep posting in it. It's not like we are going to suddenly start about something else HERE.

Gladly ... do you want me to answer, or did you created your own version allready as usualy and dont really care?

Well, anyway ...
I never said that specific example were never mentioned and if you want to read it that way, its your prolem not mine ... i dare to say that i know you allready well enough to claim that you will not stop just bcs its not truth. -_-
What i actualy said was that to provide specific examples of things that he finds done bad (and i add now that preffereably with explanation why does he thinks that they are bad, or how he thinks they should be done better) is much more usefull than to simply state that "something is bad".

And even that is for several reasons ...
1) If i would be developer reading this feedback, seeing several people complaining about for example that they find it tedious to drag portaits to unchaing them ... will help me much more to figure out that this specific thing (draging portaits) is bad ... than if one say that this specific thing (draging portraits) is bad, and everyone else will simply say that they want something better (what are they adressing? I can only guess here.).
2) Statisticaly this kind of behaviour also helps to find out how many people actualy dislike that particular mechanic game ... i mean sure, people still can simply quote someone else entire post and add +1 ... wich isnt much helpfull ... but if that person coments on specific problems, even that is still more helpfull than "something is bad" :-/
3) consequences ... personaly i dislike what happened with spell upcasting (popup window for every single shit, no matter if that is even usefull) i would hate to see this happening with yet another aspect of this game that i like ... so if someone say that he hates "party movement" in general there isnt much for me to catch for some counterargument and any discusion is impossible
4) I cherish individuality, so when i want to talk with someone about his opinions, i allways prefer if that person gives me his opinions instead of quoting someone else ...
5) I also admit that im a lazy person, so when i want to talk with someone and his opinions ... i prefer for him to tell me them, instead of need to search in countless pages (sometimes even other topic) to find them myself. :P

Also ...
Have you ever heard expression 100 people, 100 tastes?

I could ask you the same question.
Since you are really not interested in anything i answered to you ... why do you keep asking me? :P

Just create the whole conversation in your head and then send me the results ... it would not be much different, and we both save lot of time.

No, you couldn't, because I AM interested in this specific issue and I've been championing it for over a year at this point (if we are going to consider just BG3 and not how many times I pointed how crappy it was even in DOS 1 and 2).

I see no relation to the question i was asking.

Please gentle Larian overlords, consider adding click and drag selection on M/K, party formations, better pathing of companions to avoid surfaces, better camera and selection for jumping/reaching places which are impossible to select atm (alternatively consider a kind of overlay letting us see where we can and can not jump on the map) as well as enabling friendly characters to pass trough eachothers position without making weird detours. Amen

This is definitely a pain point for me. I would play unchained all the time with the current system if there was a way to select all party members and issue group commands. As it is, I have to unchain and then issue individual commands before every battle and it's quite tedious.

So I recently started playing Encased. And lo and behold! The tiolet chain control scheme has infected that game as well. And what do you know, one of the first things that happens after I've picked up the first companion is that said companion casually decide to stroll in to a mine that I just right clicked right on to disarm with my main character.
So now everytime I want to disarm a mine (and there are quite a few of them) I have to remember to unchain my companions from my main character first.

Wow, some people in this thread could do with a chill pill, LOL. It's a video game y'all. Anyway.

The tone and delivery of the criticism aside, I agree with the content of it. Well, in the original opening post and first pages there's lots of talk about companions randomly walking through fire which I *mostly* can't observe in the current version, so I assume that's mostly fixed, with few remaining glitches. (In about 100h play time, it happened to me maybe about a dozen times that companions ran through health hazards, and one or two times where someone fell down from a high place.)

But the example above that Tuco quoted definitely still holds and is a perfect example of the issues with the current system. It's way too cumbersome to unlink/relink characters from/to the group when you need individual control. There's actually a few ways that involve no dragging around of character portraits:

1. Stealthing only some of your characters makes the stealthed ones and the unstealthed ones behave like two separate groups without needing to unchain them. Oftentimes, a single stealthed character separating from the group is all you want, in which you case you select them, press 'C', and move them around. Easy.

2. You can set up a keyboard shortcut to unlink/relink the entire group. (Don't remember if it has a default setting, I put it to Alt+G.) Only problem with it is that it messes up the order of the companions. (I use number keys 1 through 4 for selection, so changed order is annoying.) Oh and to relink, they have to be in proximity I think. (Or is the keyboard shortcut special-handled? Will have to test later.)

So it's all not *that* terrible most of the time, but still leaves much to be desired.

I think the following system might be superior:

- Introduce the concept of multi-selection of characters, like in the Infinity Engine games. Important: this is for outside of combat only.
- Multi-selection can be done via keyboard shortcuts like in the old games. So not only a shortcut for select all, but also for 1+2, 3+4, and maybe more.
- Multi-selection can also be done by dragging a box with the mouse as per tradition, though not sure how well that works in 3D?
- Multi-selection can also be done via mouse-based actions like e.g. Ctrl+Click for "add to selection." (Or right-click, or middle-click. Configurable.)
- Optional: Configurable shortcuts for selecting specific characters as one group, like 1+3+4 or 2+3 or 2+3+4. Maybe overkill but neat for powergamers.
- The selected group of characters move as one group, the same way they do in the current implementation. (AI just needs a little more polish.)
- Optional: But maybe add some formation options so that in certain terrains you can have your backliners keep more distance from the frontline.
- The stealth action applies to the whole currently selected group of characters, not just one.

I find this proposal pretty obvious so I'm probably not the first to make it in this thread...

IMO the behavior of such movement were designed by Larian with a simple rule where game can be played by a controller controlling just 1 character while the remaining party characters follow suit. It's not that they could not design the old way. It's simply because design were to cater for consoles and controller.

Controller does not have mouse precision. So to click and drag with a controller i'm not really sure how it can be made better. The way i see it Larian doesn't want to make a different control scheme for the Keyboard and Mouse so PC gamer will be forced to follow the "controller" way. That is why Pathfinder is a more superior game since it's quite obvious that Larian designed the game for consoles in mind.

Yeah, but we already addressed this multiple times.
Other games already achieved this way more competently. What this is at its core is just an "auto-follow the controlled character" as plenty of other titles already used it.
The problem is that Larian made it the ONLY control scheme available, and it's a tragically poor fit for a CRPG played on M&KB.
It doesn't allow for multiple selection no matter how you look at it and especially it doesn't allow for generic group commands.

There was nothing stopping Larian from using this shitty system (because it never worked well, anyway) just on consoles, while giving to PC players a competent control scheme (which is incidentally exactly what Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous do, to name two) AND eventually a toggle to enable/disable auto-follow for the fringe minority who really, REALLY wanted it for some form of self-harming fetish (i.e. Dragon Age Origins does something similar).


P.S. I basically ignored Patch 6 for months because I wasn't too thrilled about how much it introduced (it didn't feel like it added enough variety to warrant another playthrough).
Still, with my interest mildly reinvigorated by the recent announcement of an upcoming update I just recently dragged my feet to the new area, Grymforce, while skipping a lot.

Well, turns out I like the new area far more than I expected, but it's tragically hilarious the mismatch between how Larian went out of its way to make it micro-management intensive and how fucking painful micro-management currently is to make an actual use of.

Scarily enough it seems like I'm crossing more and more people (mostly on reddit, but occasionally even on Steam) willing to defend or even praise the chain system.

It reminds me when years ago I went to watch an Emilio Salgado gallery and I read one of his comments about how one of the most unsettling traits he noticed traveling across the world was the "ability" for people in dire situations to get used (to the point of indifference) to any form of hardship, pain and abuse.

I was about a hundred hours in before I discovered you can hold down the left mouse button to run your character around, and it’s actually the best way to keep the camera from going wonky. I wonder if Larian mostly plays it that way? It does save a lot of clicks but there is some fatigue from having the mouse down continually.

Let's be real, the way this EA has been run has basically distilled the playerbase to a trickle of players who outright worship the game as is. Even the dataminers have seemingly lost interest, or at least don't consider the game enough of a priority to publish their findings earlier than a month after release.

Everyone else is waiting for something far more substantial to jump back in, something that would dramatically change everyone's playthroughs instead of a specific faction of players (as in, this patch is only really interesting to people who have any interest in playing a Barbarian). Something like reactions, level 5, or a new companion. It's been a year and a half at this point, why do we not at least have one new companion introduced after all this time? Especially when considering there are probably people out there who want to try out the new classes through the companions but would never consider touching said classes for their main character? It kind of worries me that the absent companions may end up being an afterthought compared to the five that have received extensive testing and feedback. A new companion could justify a patch on their own, probably even more than a new class would.

Conversations at the subreddit and even this place have become rather circular and banal. There's really not much to discuss that hasn't already been talked over anymore, and as you just discovered on Reddit, most of the people that remain are all basically apologists who equate any criticism with being a hater.

Dont want to speak for everyone else ...
But as far as i know, Chubblot for example, send out a statement that Larian started to clean their patches much more thoroughly ... so there isnt enough content to datamine and talk about. :-/

It actually seems that the chain system is getting worse if anything. Following the early fight where you take out two of the mobs by shooting the rope and dropping the block on them, breaking open another entrance to the chamber below, I walked over to loot bodies and Gale literally fell in the hole despite the party leader not being directed to do so. In many other playthroughs I had yet to see this happen.

I had a similar accident once, but that was several patches ago. As of now, the muppets seem to avoid these kinds of hazard a bit more reliably.

if i may add, the chain system also make it more inconvenient and annoying if you were have more party characters (via a mod?). of course i would like to have an official method of playing the game with 6 party characters only if larian permits it.

For what is worth this was already said several times since the first pages (but it doesn't hurt repeating at this point, since no one is going through 40 pages or more of reiteration of the same arguments).

Honestly right now between the group/ungroup shortcut and the group stealth toggle is not even AS BAD as it used to be.
Still FAR from ideal, though. But it feels more and more we are on the losing side of history here.