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

Interesting. I wonder how you feel about team sports. When the squishy PC starts battle in front of the tank, I don’t feel like I’m witnessing human-like behavior. I feel like I’m coaching a team who refuses to learn the game plan.

Freshly recruited PCs in DOS2 demand to know what their role will be on the team. If a similar discussion happened in BG3, I’d love to say “your role is to shoot arrows from the back, so stay back.”

The thing is, I don't have those issues. I mean, I honestly feel like people are exaggerating sooooooo much. In the current patch, my general experience is that I approach fights in a way that works. I never end up with my tank in the back and my archer nose to nose with the enemy.

I don't know. Again, it's just not an issue for me. I move fine. My characters move fine. We do combat. We do fine in combat.

I'm so not surprised.

You absolutely do.
You may just lack the familiarity with good UI design or understanding with how ergonomics work to identify the issue as present, but it's not going to magically disappear in your copy of the game. It's still there.

"I hate formations" is fundamentally a nonsensical non-argument too.

The game already HAS a default formation. It's just an impractical, incoherent and aesthetically unpleasing one, where your characters dispose themselves in a ridiculous spread-out pyramidal [PONZI] scheme and keep mixing up the characters order because the UI has no concept of memorizing it, rather than giving you the option to have a practical tight formation that can maneuver practically even in scenarios where you don't have a freaking plaza at your disposal.

I already described the issue here:

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=822278#Post822278

Their positioning looks a lot more natural in BG3. I don't like the robotic everybodyinperfectposition precision of formations in games. Looks like a board game, not an rpg. Shrug. That seems like a pretty reasonable dislike of formations. I'd call that a functional argument.

Now, if we want to talk about a fundamentally nonsensical non-argument, I submit:


lol, my denial of having the issue is thus further evidence of me having the issue. I see.

"More natural".

Your denial of having the issue is precisely that: DENIAL. The issue didn't go anywhere.
It's either that you can't grasp what's expected by a flexible control scheme or that you are just fine having barely any meaningful control. Your control over the party is not better than anyone else's in this thread and I'd bet any sum that if you recorded a video of yourself playing the game that would be apparent after a bunch of minutes at most.

if someone enters an empty room and says "In this bedroom the beds are missing", your "I'm comfortable drooling on the stone floor" is not a counter-argument about their observation, only a clarification of your lack of standards.

You put "more natural" in quotes, indicating that the picture you've used is meant to illustrate how the characters actually don't stand in a more natural way in the game. However, the picture you've used has six characters standing in a triangle, which is effectively a way that is not typical of how the characters stand around in an actual game with four characters, without any modding.

It's literally the game's DEFAULT formation. It's just its version with two extra slots filled. Otherwise it's a rhombic shape. Remove Shadowheart and Lei'zel and you have what you are playing with.

I concede that the picture of that thing that was modded to have more characters looks bad because of the positioning of that many characters together.

Thanks for bringing that to the discussion table.

I like my tank up front and my squishy in back. Currently you have to fiddle with the default to even come close to that. Then the EA just randomly decides to reset it.

Also, there is an imput delay. I click a spot to go to and my main PC goes but then after a second or so the others follow, messing up any natural flow to setting up or just moving the group. Group should move as one when chained.

Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m experiencing memory bias, or maybe playing with a low-end computer changes things drasticaly. I’ve been trying to think of a single issue to explain my movement woes; I think avahZ Darkwood stumbled upon the core of the issue.

This is the problem. There are essentially 2 kinds of movements in BG3 :
- long treks between combat arenas where you need the party to move as one, lest 3/4th stays too far behind to meaningfuly do anything on turn 1 of combat;
- snappy movement within arenas to talk to PCs, gather loot and generally interact with the world. In this case, you want the party to give Tav a bunch of leeway. Elsewise, they start running in circles whenever Tav adjusts her position slightly.

All of BG3’s most problematic systems seem to have this in common. They need to function in 2 different situations, but can only be properly calibrated for 1.

I too dislike the formation system used in earlier games.

Bg3's system is working for me.

Having just started replaying Neverwinter Nights 2, I can say the lack of a formation system in it has been frustrating in the extreme.

I'm not sure, but I have a suspicion that the chain system has a stronger automatic follow mode (party leader) than the conventional formation system and that it is precisely because of this that the stupid error with the ladder up and down is conditioned.

I definitely miss the drag'n'drop selection system and that you can send the party to any destination on the map, while you go to the toilet or get a tea.

I never really had serious complaints about the movement mechanic, aside from the occasional hiccup which wasn't really problematic...until I moved from Stadia to GF Now. Now that we're using mouse + keyboard, it's frustrating as hell. In my opinion the game flows so much smoother when using controller over M+K.

Actually I don’t think we need everyone in tight formation moving round the map at all. We only need them in position for the first round of combat.

I’d have thought they could have improved pathfinding round the environment to keep everyone closer by now. If that’s harder to program than it sounds, the simpler solution would probably be for everyone chained together to just move up when combat is initiated instead of suddenly being rooted to the spot.

If they wanted to go one further, there could be an configurable formation where they move to assigned position as best as the terrain allows. Possibly even if you’re controlling a squishy mage, they could take a couple of steps back while your fighters stand in front.

Just a little bit of positioning before the first combat turn.

Just watching this Panel From Hell I couldn't help but notice once again that every time Larian does a public showing of the game they end up ditching the whole party somewhere and trying to to some convoluted shit with a single character.

Goes to show that despise their apparent attachment to this unsalvageable mess of a control scheme, on a more instinctive level they must be aware that controlling a full party feels like garbage.

+1

I stopped watching when all the technical glitches started but prior to that I also noticed that even when controlling a single character they were experiencing many of the annoying limitations that come with the movement mechanic.

I laughed when their players got their arses kicked, both in normal mode and hardcore. Including the guy who had worked on hardcore. In both modes one of the muppets seemed to get injured from jumping or falling off the roof.

I'm trying to be generous about that. Other than Swen and the lady who did the unboxing, nobody on that stage seemed terribly comfortable with presenting to an audience, and I think they were just under-rehearsed and nervous