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

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!