The game is effectively asking that the player make a roll call at the beginning of every combat, under penalty of lost turns.
This is not true tho ...
Sure, if you simply "walk into the fight" you loose your first turn, but if you enter combat by attacking its all benefits ... unless you notice too late, but as i said abowe that is on you, not game.
The expression "it's on me" may be ambiguous, because it can refer to responsibility (I need to do this thing) or blame (I'm the cause of this thing).
Yes, it's my responsibility to make sure the whole party gets involved in combat. It's also my responsibility to select equipment, pick spells and abilities, think about placement and targets. Those things are on me even if the game makes me do all of these things. The core design decision to include those things in BG3 is on the game.
My issue here is that this is the only information provided by that side of the screen. There's no other reason to look there unless the player is actively thinking about who might have been left out of combat.
I would argue that main and certainly not the only purpose of that part of UI is to control wich characters will follow your controled unit, or wich unit you will control.
My point was this part of the screen has exactly one piece of info relevant to combat. Between battlefield configurations, status effects, toggle positions (god forbid you have a bard) that's a lot to take in from several different zones and tabs. So yeah, I should just add the left panel to the mental checklist, even though it's not always relevant. But dang! how much admin do I need to do before I can cast my cool spell?
Since the only 2 ways to even have someone who didnt join the combat with rest of the party is curently to:
A) Separate him from the rest of the party ... therefore interact with this part of UI.
B) Contolling him and go to stealth with him specificaly ... therefore interact with this part of UI.
C) Have an invisible PC
D) Suffer a random bug
Im talking about "enter turn based" wich becomes "end turn" button ... wich gets shiny blue outline representing your movement ... quite noticeable change in my opinion.
And "short/long rest" wich become "flee combat" button ... wich gets red instead of gold ... also quite significant change imho. :-/
Those things are only visible when you select the character that's out of combat. By then, yeah, I'd have noticed they were missing. But if I just cycle through combat by clicking End Turn, I never get to see the change in buttons you mention.
That and the combat log usually get more of my attention than anything else.
Would that take enough atention to notice wich of your characters are fighting?
Who's fighting and who's
not fighting are different pieces of information. I'd settle for a line in the combat log : "Combat start! Gale isn't in initiative."
By the same logic its useful (also most likely just as useful) to let Larian know that some of us like it this way and dont want to click several "this character is not in combat, was that intentional y/n" before every encounter.
That's fair. Again, a line in the combat log shouldn't be too intrusive.
