Strong +1 to basically everything OP said. You should be able to swap who is speaking, choose who is the default Face of the party, and/or make use of other party members' skills for dialogue checks.
- When your friend starts a conversation (and thus a cutscene), you have to actively opt in to experience it as well. Instead of having to opt out if you don't want to see it. In my view, that's clearly the wrong default setting. I can think of few cooperative games where I have to ask the game "yes please, show me the story as well, I'm not here just for combat and shenanigans".
On top of that, you have to be quick to opt in, otherwise you miss out the beginning of the cutscene. Not really appropriate in a turn-based game.
- When your friend selects a dialogue option in a conversation, you do not see what they selected. You have to either ask your friend constantly "so what did you say" (not an authentic tabletop or coop feel), or overlay the dialogue history (and miss out on the graphics).
Yes. Urghghhhhh. This is the worst aspect of BG3 dialogue to me, because of how severely it affects multiplayer gameplay. Seriously, I have to manually opt in to every dialogue my friend(s) start, AND I'll likely miss the first sentence of dialogue, AND I can't see what my friend chooses??!!!? In order to know, the friend has to
a.) Read aloud what option they choose before picking it, or
b.) Hover over it for long enough--like multiple seconds--that other viewers can read it and identify it as the one being picked, instead of just being hovered over briefly while being considered.
Larian has clearly indicated that multiplayer is the big focus in BG3 and that certain things can't be done because of how they would(n't) work in multiplayer. And yet, we have this absolute travesty of a dialogue system in multiplayer??? Like, c'mon.
