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

The people who want 6 characters are pretty much all for a better group movement too.

I'm part of both groups, incidentally. Yes.

And it's not a coincidence, either. I'll let you guess why one change would help the other.

+1

Glad you fixed that!

Some time ago I was talking elsewhere about the potential "quality of life IMPROVEMENTS" BG3 could introduce if they really tried and for a distraction I didn't notice my phone auto-corrected it as "IMPRISONMENT".

A friend joked that that "Quality of life imprisonment" is incidentally a perfect description for the chain system. I've been thinking about it since then.

It's both amusing how true it is and jarring to think that somehow this went unaddressed for years.

Haha Amen to that!

I'm sure that this has been covered in this thread already, but if so I can't find it.

Does anyone have any examples of games that do a party movement mechanic really well?

Just having played Pathfinder WotR and now playing BG1, I'm being reminded of a variety of ways to do it wrong, but can't recall a positive example. I probably have come across one, but it's the kind of thing that I could easily not even think about if it were seamless and effective!

I'll admit, since the improvements to auto follow over jumps and auto-pathing around hazards and getting the ability group/ungroup our party with one click, I now find BG3 less frustrating than either of the two games just mentioned. Though that's probably at least partly because I've just played so much I've got used to it, and because it's only managing a party of four not six. And because it's turn-based so formation (and who the enemies see first) doesn't matter quite as much. And because one of the things that annoys me most when it comes to party movement is when squishy characters get ahead of my armoured ones and get killed as a result, and I find there's much less risk of that with the single file approach in BG3 than with the WotR and especially BG1 approach, particularly in tight spaces and when not travelling consistently in one direction.

The things that now bother me most about party movement in BG3 are mainly bugs (such as party members failing to follow or those bloody ladders), the fact that animal companions and followers like Glut just tag along with the character they're attached to even when they want some private time, plus the clunky feel to the method for grouping and ungrouping one or two party members (at the very least I feel I need to drag the portrait too far in order to break the chain). But I really missed in WotR (and BG1) the ability to specify subgroups of my party that I could easily swap between to do different things without having to manually reselect, so clunky as the BG3 approach is I am still glad we have that option.

Which is not to say that BG3 is good, only that I've just been forcibly reminded it could be worse! Is there a game that could remind me of how much better it could be instead?

(Btw, to be fair to WotR it's way better than BG1, but still occasionally drove me up the wall, especially the way it kept mixing up my custom formation.)

Interesting. Yes, I found the WotR mixing of custom formation frustrating. You need to remind yourself to put it back into place each time you switch out party members but Bhall-save-me it's so, so much better than BG3. To my mind that's a minor annoyance. In a gajillion hours of gameplay I've had to do it maybe 5 times?

Positive examples would be WotR, PoE2 and Solasta

For me BG3 is just a constant fight "no! I want you here. now. move. no, not that way! Stop. Come back. No, not that way!"

I've learned to adjust but it's like driving a large truck that wants to pull to one side. A continual struggle that takes away from my ability to enjoy the drive.

BG3 is thus far the only crpg I've ever played where I notice dthe controls and the controls were unpleasant. WotR? Never even gave the controls a second thought in that game,they were if not good, then unobtrusive enough that I just never noticed them. Maybe it's just because of how low I like my difficulty so custom formations have never actually mattered. But BG3? It's just clunky and unintuitive. And I think the thing that most bothers me about the mechanic is the fact that I CONSTANTLY end up in a situation where my caster is right up front and the rest of my party lags behind to the point where I need to waste at least one turn to get the frontliners in position. It's so frustrating. I don't have to worry about that in other games and can just put my casters at the back becausethe games let me, plus the games always let my character talk in every dialouge because of course they talk and take the lead. They're the main character, I shouldn't have to worry about it.

Well, the two you just mentioned may do it "wrong" and still be lightyears better than DOS 1-2 and BG3, for a start.
So weird premise to begin with.





I'd have to wonder what type of formation you typically use, because especially WOTR gave me very little to complain about (as far as control schemes go... On the other hand I kinda hate its hotbars/cascade menus, but that would be a different topic entirely).


I would also say that there's a lot that feel primitive about BG1' Ui at this point (mostly scaling-related) but party control wasn't really part of it, and BG2 already addressed a lot of these other shortcomings.
Anyway, I'd say that Pillars of Eternity 2 is one of the better and most modern examples. The only thing it's really lacking is an option to rotate the camera... Which obviously comes from not having actual 3D backgrounds.

Oh, I agree wrong doesn’t necessarily mean worse, and my point wasn’t really about comparing BG1, WotR and BG3 (I don’t have any memories of movement in D:OS or D:OS2), but that neither BG1 nor WotR nor BG3 seem to me to be shining examples of how to do party movement well, and I was wondering if there was a game that was.

I’ll have to reflect on the way PoE2 and Solasta manage it, given suggestions here. Both are games I played but didn’t finish, and I don’t recall anything about the movement specifically. Which might be a positive sign that it was unproblematic, or just another indication that my memory is crap.

I also wanted to highlight that for me there are some things I like about BG3 party movement, for all its bugginess and issues, and that the changes made in EA did make it much less frustrating for me.

In fact, I’ll try again and put it more positively and make it about BG3. I blame the Firewine Ruins for making me grumpy about BG1 movement just before my previous post!

So, things I like about BG3 movement (or at least have potential), that I wouldn’t want to lose. Though I of course recognise that other folks’ preferences might be different:

• The ability to specify subgroups of your team and easily swap between them, rather than having to manually select the subset of specific party members each time.
• Auto-pathing around traps and hazards once these have been spotted by the party (though still doesn’t always work properly).
• The ability to ungroup your party members (and group all party members within a specific range) with one click: this often is all I need to do when taking control of party members other than as a group.
• Follow-my-leader single file-ish movement, so the character we have selected stays in front even in tighter quarters or if we change directions.

Things I agree are (still) bad:

• Buggy ladders, etc. I don’t think I need to say more there!
• Handling of animal companions, summons, temporary members by just attaching them to one of our party who then can’t move independently of them. Should work more like Lae’zel, Us and SH in the prologue.
• UI for reordering or configuring the party into subgroups (rather than just grouping/ungrouping them all) feels clunky. I think it would immediately feel better if we didn’t need to drag the portrait quite so far to break the chain, but I’m also sure folk are right there’s a better, chainless option for accomplishing the same functionality.
• Companions get stuck, especially when a jump is needed. (As an aside, I think I’d prefer it if our controlled character also auto jumped when not in turn-based mode.)
• Pathing isn’t great - I’ve seen worse but could definitely be improved.
• As Gray Ghost says we should absolutely be able to specify that auto-triggered conversations are with our PC rather than whoever in the party an NPC reaches first or who we’re controlling (or rather, as this option was added for patch 9 but is broken, it should be fixed). I also think we should be able to swap party members in the course of conversations but that’s a whole different topic.
• It’s not possible to map a key to move forward (click and hold left mouse is slow to respond and unreliable given other left mouse functions).
• It’s not possible to specify a formation for our characters to arrange themselves into when they come to rest. I’m not sure how much this really matters given turn-based combat, but I still feel it as a lack. Plus it just looks a bit messy, with everyone just standing around looking in different directions, though that’s a small problem compared to the others.

Which I guess is a really long way of saying that I still have lots of issues with party movement as of patch 9, but none of them feel unfixable or to require a complete overhaul of Larian’s party movement design philosophy. I reckon if I get fixes to the issues mentioned above, and I think there’s a decent chance we’ll get improvements to most of them at least, then I think I personally will be perfectly happy with BG3 movement. Though I recognise I might be in the minority there!

You can't really "specify subgroups" in DOS or BG3. You can specify A subgroup (i.e. leaving a certain number of characters chained) and everyone else has to stay unlinked. The alternative option is having more players controlling a subgroup each... Which in practical term is not really better than just having two players using a more traditional control scheme.
In fact, if there is a thing that a traditional RTS-like UI can do far better, is precisely to make it trivial to select (through click and drag or click + Shift) and separate different portions of even a larger group.


Pathing is a different issue than direct control, but even then I wouldn't really consider BG3 a particularly virtuous example of it.


Well, it's not what *I* need, on the other hand. And even here the alternate option is far better because "selecting and separating party members" just involves clicking on them and moving them individually, without any preamble like linking and unlinking.

I personally have a fierce dislike for any sort of "auto-follow" type of control, but even then these have been an option in the genre since Fallout and Planescape Torment (just to name two notable examples) without ever needing any sort of chaining. And while I can't exactly speaking flattering words of the first, the second is basically the traditional Baldur's Gate control type, just with the auto-follow as an OPTIONAL toggle.
Dragon Age Origins did the same: it offered an auto-follow as an optional toggle, for the masochists who liked it.


Admittedly terrible, but that's not part of the control scheme, strictly speaking. Just a pathing bug.

I don't even hate that summons are automatically linked to the character that made them... I hate that they automatically move toward that character after being summoned even without being prompted to do so, on the other hand. Which is a side effect of the auto-follow being on by default on them.

Well, there has been one since the dawn of the genre: click and drag to make a multiple selection. Quicker, more intuitive, rearrangeable at will without many preambles.

I don't disagree, but as I said I don't consider pathing strictly a component of the control scheme. Ironically enough BG3 makes it one just by attempting to automate most of the control instead of leaving the player granular control over the party.


Once again, I agreee (and I wrote about this other issue a lot) but I don't consider it strictly control-related.

I'm not sure I would ever need it? Maybe I'm just not seeing what type of use you are arguing for.

I'm still hoping for a formation system to be included, because I genuinely don't like the default one and it's made remarkably worse when you use a mod to expand the party size. Also stuff I already wrote about, even in the past pages of this same thread (fairly recent ones, too).


I mean, yeah, they could come up with a series of convoluted, half-assed partial solutions to a constellation of problems that arguably wouldn't really solve everything nor make everyone happy anyway... OR they could give up to the FUNDAMENTAL design problem that is the root cause of all these issues and few more.

I don't disagree with much of what you said in response to me, Tuco, particularly that other games do some of the same stuff that BG3 manages and do it better.

But just picking up on the point about subgroups, as for me the lack of this is the main shortcoming of more traditional party RPG control systems as seen in WotR and BG1. It's pretty clear that you don't prioritise that, which is of course fine, but I certainly more than once while playing WotR found myself wishing for it. Not all the time or even most of the time, but particularly when scouting or navigating trapped areas or trying to get my party around Alushynirra, whose moving walls were a really cool idea but I don't think the game's pathfinding or movement mechanic was up to actually executing well. In fact, I found myself wanting party subgroups more in WotR than I've ever used it in BG3, I think partly because I'm just dealing with a party of four in BG3 whereas in WotR I had 8 with my two animal companions, but also because of some other features of WotR that BG3 doesn't share.

Anyway, on this point you say ...


I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. I don't know or care about D:OS, but in BG3 I can chain my MC and Astarion together, and Gale and Shadowheart, and then send one pair off one direction and the other in a different one, and toggle quickly and easily between the pairs as I edge them forward to explore or to, eg, to execute a pincer movement on an enemy. I'm clearly missing what you mean when you say you can only have one group, because in my book that's two?

Also, as it's a particular bugbear of mine, I'll just agree that when I said ...

... it's the "can't move independently" bit that's the real problem, and there probably are ways of handling that while still having them attached to the person they're summoned by and I only mentioned the prologue as that looks the easiest way of doing it. Plus it would allow us to chain the summons and guests into different subgroups if we liked, which I'd appreciate though I know you wouldn't .

Finally, as I agree it did seem a bit of a random comment in context ...


Another forum member, I apologise I can't recall who, talked about this a while back better than I could, but it is kind of possible with BG3's approach to achieve a kind of pseudo over-the-shoulder exploration view (a la DA:O, if I'm recalling that correctly which despite the hundreds of hours I played it for I probably am not). I wouldn't want to be stuck in that view, but I find it really fun sometimes to zoom in and explore certain areas that way as it gives me a different perspective and appreciation of the detailed world Larian have created. I think it'll always feel clunky as it's not what the game is prioritising, and rightly so, but there are a couple of things that would make it much better such as a better way to move forwards than simply clicking and holding the left mouse button to get your party to move towards the cursor (which is unresponsive and seems to get interrupted lots) and making the camera home shortcut key just recentre on your controlled character as double-clicking on a portrait does rather than rezoom and reorient. Which is a massive aside, and not really to do with the party movement mechanic at all, but I just mentioned it as it seems a missed opportunity to leverage the follow-my-leader system (which I agree is not specific to Larian games) to get some additional benefit.

Interestingly, I feel the exact opposite about lack of formation/control over the party members' relative positions at all times, and the turn-based vs RTWP gameplay. gameplay.


In RTWP combat, like in BG1, if I come accross enemies on the map, and a squishy character is somehow ahead of my frontliners, that's not too much trouble.

Firstly, I use auto-pause when an enemy is detected, so I don't have to react fast in any way.

Secondly, while in paused-mode, I can move the misplaced squishy character backward and move the frontliners forward. Enemies may have initially aggro-ed a squishy character and start running for them. Then two things can happen. If the enemy (especially a melee enemy) keeps wanting to hit the squishy character, they'll have to go around the frontliners who'll be all too happy to hit without the enemy hitting back. We could in theory have a cartoonish situation where I keep running my squishy target around the frontliners, again and again, until the enemy dies most stupidly. But that ideally won't happen. On the other hand, and more likely, if the AI for the enemy wasn't done too poorly, the enemy will switch target to a frontliner, and then we're exactly in the type of situation frontliners are for.

In short, there really isn't any issue here, for me. Because of the real-timeness of movement of units on the battlefield.


In turn-based combat, like in BG3, if a fight breaks out and a squishy character is somehow ahead of my frontliners, I am potentially in trouble.

If the squishy character goes first in initiative order, then cool. No trouble. I'll just drop some spell or range attack and then retreat to the back on the fight, and certainly behind my frontliners.

But if 2-3 enemies go first, then I'm in trouble. Because they have all leisure to attack the squishy character, and possibly even kill that character, before I get to do anything. Not just moving the squishy character away, but also/alternatively (depending on the initiave roll) coming in with some Thunderwave or other technique to insert my frontliner between the enemies and the squishy, backline characters that they are supposed to cover.

In short, there really is a risk here. Because of the turn-based nature of movement of units on the battlefield.



In the end, the party's formation at the start of a fight is a lot more important with a turn-based system.

And BG3 has a turn-based system. But is crap at letting players control the formation.



Here are a couple of actual, negative examples that I experienced in BG3.

• Combat starts. Wait ... Gale, what the hell are you doing this close to the enemies ?!
  
• Combat starts. Wait ... why is my dual-wielding Ranger that far behind ?!
  In good cases, and especially if I'm Wood Elf and have a movement bonus, maybe the actual distance to melee attack the enemies is not an issue. What may be an issue, though, is that Larian decided that I can move across my allies' spaces (unlike in 5E). Or that jumping would cost a BA (unlike in 5E). And you know what I wanted my dual-scimitar wielder to do with a BA ? Yep, being effective in melee. Sure, there are poor choices about the rules of movement during combat, and not due to the general party controls. But those dubious rules wouldn't be such an issue if my party stayed in a decent formation.

In short, I have sometimes the bad surprise of discovering that I'm starting a fight with a random penalty. And that's not cool.

So, I feel it would be quite neat, and in fact necessary, to be able to choose a party formation, and have the party stick to it.

I'm fine with Larian's choice of not doing combat transitions like some some old school JRPGs. But then, make sure that my party stays in a formation that I have chosen.

Larian doesn't seem to think there is any problems with this toilet chain UI system.
30 years of RPG games completely counters that. Its like saying who needs a mouse anymore to play RPGs. Use a Larian Acme broom.

My personal thought on this issue though, and the reason we are here in the first place: blame it on MULTIPLAYER and CONSOLE ports.These two combined goes probably for 90% of sales. And the easy way out to bridge computer players, console players and multiplayer players is the system we currently have.

No, blame the devolepers for their laziness, never the people who need accesability or want to play on a different platform.

I know it's a hot take but stop blaming people on your level and always look up with your blame.

Thruth is all platforms deserve the best possible control system and UI, Each platform should have it's own set with the ability to switch if needed and we are unlikely to get it in BG3, which is a shame.

I didn’t read mr_planescapist as blaming players of multiplayer or console versions, and thought he was just saying that devs are trying to find a UI and systems that work for all, which leads to it being suboptimal for some (or indeed all). I’d be more tempted to put that down to efficiency rather than laziness, but I would agree with you, vitani, that there’s a point at which it should probably be recognised that one size doesn’t fit all and to implement different solutions that are more optimised for different ways to play the game.

As to whether BG3 has reached that point, I’m personally keeping an open mind. I think there’s some stuff in EA that’s probably there for multiplayer or console compatibility that I’m not happy with, but I’m not ruling out that there are ways to fix those issues other than by implementing different controls, systems and UI. Though I also suspect that in some cases different approaches might actually be easier than trying to design something that balances different requirements well enough to leave everyone at least happy-ish.

I much prefer the current chain system. It works fine for me.

In fact, I hate formations. Feels like robots, not people. More like a board game than an rpg.

To be honest, I don't like formations too but still, the chain system is just terrible. If I was forced to pick one, formations all the way, just so I can select my party members by drag'n drop.


It would be nice if you can just drag and drop to select your party members and, once that is done, the camera centers the character corresponding to the first portrait of your party.

This way you can select characters via drag'n drop and have the "chatter" or the "thank" be the first in line while the rest of them follows.