Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Playing through Grymforge highlights so many problems with Ui and controls.

Well, I guess the title gives you a solid hint of what direction this will take.
I'll also throw a bit of generic feedback about minor things I noticed in the process.

As a premise, after an initial attempt I mostly ignored Patch 6 until just days before Patch 7 launched (I just wasn't interested enough to the stuff it introduced) and as a consequence I experienced Grymforge for the first time through both patches in the span of the last few days.

Let's start with the good: it's a gorgeous, very well made new area with plenty to explore.

Now the bad: the way some of the key areas (and the "final boss fight") are designed is an almost tragic mismatch between how much micro-management and party-splitting is generally required (or let's say "strongly advised") and how utterly painful the game tries to make that playstyle in practice.
Move characters through trapped environment (where they may also get ambushed by enemies at any given moment, so be ready to move others too when needed) split your group to operate levers and mobile catwalks, jump, climb, use featherfall or misty step, etc, etc.

The final boss in particular (that I have to admit I liked in principle, despise not being exactly the most standard "D&D-like experience" out there) highlights how terrible the current reaction system can be, not to mention it makes the absence of ready actions more annoying than ever.
Before finally dispatching said boss for good I experienced several cases where an autoattack/reaction triggered when I was trying to lure the golem in a specific direction, usually with consequent outcomes that forced me to a reload.
It's also worth noting that one downside of "new shiny UI" introduced in Patch 7 is that it makes circling between ALL your characters, selecting the "Passive" submenu and disabling their Attacks of Opportunity even more cumbersome than before.
And it's not even a "one and done" thing, since there are moments during the same battle where you DO want to take these juicy AoO, while in others you definitely don't, so it's a constant "cycling and switching toggles" that becomes annoying fairly quickly and makes me chuckle a bit when I think about the people (a minority, admittedly) that in the past months said "they would hate a Solasta-like reaction system with quick case-by-case confirmations because it would slow down the combat".

In one of my attempts, I also experienced a fight where I won but I had my party wiped seconds later, since the game went back to real time and every companion had the SPLENDID idea to improvise a cheerful stroll in a pool of lava in an attempt to RUSH toward the character I had selected in the moment the boss died. I had to reload once again and remember to UNCHAIN the goddamn entire party as soon as the fight started, so "Thanks again, toilet chain" I guess?


And now a passing comment on a minor detail I noticed across the entire build:
what the hell is going on with a lot of NPCs now having these random-ass and not-particularly-lore-friendly shitty facial tattoos as if every one of them was designed by a bunch of DeviantArt rejects?
Can we go back to designing NPCs that have a sensible and well-put together look, fitting with their role in the story, status, class and race?
Adding arbitrary details on top doesn't make them better, it just makes them more "busy". Leave the weird abominations to the players in these "Post your own character" threads all over the internet.

I suspect that at some point reactions will get much needed overhaul. Seeing how completely sidelined reactions got in this UI update, not even getting featured on any of the main "decks" only reinforces this expectation.

Agreeing that chain system is garbage feels like a litany at this point. Words slowely loose all their meaning due to the repetition.

So they said ("muttered" more than anything, really) at some point, but we have yet to see anything and it's not clear in WHAT direction exactly they are moving, so I can't really be satisfied just with the idea "Oh well, they are overhauling it. Probably. Somehow.".
Given their tendency to be, uh, let's say "fanciful" with their implementations and to go regularly out of their way to do ANYTHING but what the core rules say, I'm more than a bit worried about this.

Ouch. That is terrible design. So players no basically have to either just unchain every battle, or 'predict' when they'll need to, to save their party.

There should at least be a delay system where they stay put until you click away. Though even that doesn't solve the issue, but makes combat end auto deaths at least not a thing.

Still a year to go - at least we got a button that actually makes all four party members regroup rather than the soul destroying patch six nuisance that meant at least once per game session I hit a point where it literally took 5 mins to try and chain my party….

I think we will see sone big changes in the next few patches ….maybe reactions and similar ..

Loving the fact they toned jump noise down so you don’t sound like the in credible hulk landing from space

Yeah, every bit as bad as it sounds, and I'm not sure if a delay would have solved anything other than delaying the crime-against-the-player for a few seconds.
Aside for the fact that characters in that circumstance just SHOULD NOT move unless told so, it's also weird that their typical ability to avoid "dangerous surfaces" automatically would constantly prove to be so unreliable (same when around traps etc. Sometime they sidestep them, sometimes it feels they rush on them ON PURPOSE, for some reason).

On a side note, I was having this shower thought that is somewhat amusing how most of the "gameplay improvement" this Early Access introduced so far in its entire first year or so consisted essentially in reverting a lot of very questionable Larian homebrew stuff (advantage for high ground, backstab advantage obtained just walking slowly around people, etc) or implementing missing D&D features.

so it seems the toilet chain potentially caused alot more frustration. so which one would larian choose to address? 1) remove toilet chain or 2) ensure party don't run into lava?. seeing that larian loved their toilet chain so much i very much bet then will work on the 2nd option rather than the first.

i'm not a fan of tattoo personally. it's great to have options. even if i have character that has tattoo i usually have that very light toned and minimal. is the tattoo thing really in accordance to the dnd lore? if so then there's nothing much i can fret about. otherwise i really like larian see toning down the facial tattoo that you mentioned.

On the side note within the thread :


Oh, I think they improved "gameplay" (in which I include ruleset, mechanics and UI, but exclude graphics, character customisation, etc) in more ways than you give them credit for. From what I can remember :

• Patch 3 introduced the Party-Follows-On-Jump, so we don't need to select each party member and order them to jump (a massive improvement for the handful of players out there who play solo and with a party of 4 characters, instead of with a bunch of friends where everyone controls only one character).
• Patch 4 (or 5, can't remember) introduced a shortcut (perhaps now even a button in Patch 7?) to Group All/Ungroup All.
• Patch 5 introduced a new UI system for Ability Checks in conversation, so we can now buff the speaker without having to get ouf ot conversation, select Shadowheart, cast Guidance, and get back in conversation.
• Patch 5 introduced a new food-for-rest system, which I heard really made the Long Rest not so easy to spam, and didn't introduce additional inventory management.

So, I'd say that we had a really fair share of major gameplay improvements that were not related to the DnD rules and Larian's homebrew.

(And with some luck, Larian can fully give up on many of their very unique UI systems, the way they gave up on some of their homebrew DnD rules. At some point, you've got to stop patching something that doesn't work into something that still isn't great, and build something good from the start.)


Coming back to one of the core topics of the thread :


Sadly, this issue has been there (and reported many times) since the start of EA. It is one of the several ways in which the game can essentially screw players, without any mistake on their part. Also, it is one of the many good reasons why the Larian chain is a bad system for the party control. (Without the "one character selected and the rest of the party follows" paradigm, this would not happen.)

The cheerful stroll of doom happened a few times to me - companions run into fire or acid or just use a big jump to follow the selected character ( and ignoring ladders, stairs etc.) and nearly get themselves killed.

Archaven: about the tattoos: I don't remember reading anything in the rulebooks about tattoos, so I would guess, it is up to the player and what they like about their characters.

I’m hopeful the tattoos are just proof of concept and they’ll rework them for final release. Agree, some of them feel more Suicide Squad than D&D. Some of them are clearly facepaint too

I mean, I was referring strictly to core mechanics (rules of combat, the way skill work, etc, etc), not the occasional UI tweaks.

P.S. The long rest is as easy as ever to spam at will. The food requirement is there only as a pretense, but Icelyn is probably the only person on Earth which gets anxiety issues about it.
Especially given that there's so much food lying around at every goddamn corner that you could probably feed an entire starving continent for months even just with the stuff you'll find before setting foot in the Underdark.

Imagine someone hate Solasta reaction & ready attack....
Good luck finding them in those 5 part of hotbar, if Larian even create them...

Yeah ... given your well-known interests for the toilet chain, which is not a rule of the game, and which saw (marginal) improvements, I kind of assumed that by "gameplay" you actually meant the rules system only. But for me gameplay tends to encompass both UI and ruleset. And ... I guess I was of a sarcastic mood, as your post made think of the wealth of absolutely transformative improvements that Larian has dedicated to the gameplay so far. Oh crap, there I'm being sarcastic again. Well, to compensate, my next post will be more constructive. It will also most probably be worthless and completely futile, given how this Early Access is managed, but at least it will be back to being constructive.

thanks for the highlights. i don't mind if tattoo offered to players as an option and perhaps some NPCs having them. but OP mentioned alot of NPCs having the random facial tattoo will be really immersion breaking if it ain't in accordance to the dnd lore. Hope Larian will address it and tone it down. And certainly hope they remove the chaining system. I believe there have been many similar discussions of it before. Really hope Larian can just dump it and perhaps just allow point and click / drag like the old baldur's gate game.

Wait, what? Where is this button?

Right under the portraits.

And it's default keyboard shortcut (on PC at least) is [G].
Before you ask, for Group Sneak it's Shift + C.

For the record in the patch it was introduced used to be an undocumented change and have no keybinding by default.

On one hand I'd say that is so bizarre that Larian thought people wouldn't appreciate the function.
On the other hand, let's keep in mind that they are the one who came up with the toilet chain system to begin with, so maybe it shouldn't surprise me that much that they have a bad relationship with comfortable UIs.

Correct, there was no default keybind for this function at first, it only appeared in this patch. As soon as I discovered it, I bound it to G, and, I don't know, did Larian snoop at my keybinds, as well? Although, the choice is pretty obvious.

I have a different theory why it was introduced this way, but I don't think it's a good idea to voice it here. This is Larian's own forum, after all.

I think they also changed Q and E to be camera controls this patch, which was usually the first thing I'd rebind with every patch.

There's still work to be done on the Z-axis camera though, no appreciable changes there as far as I can tell.