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

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.)