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

+1, my party took the easy way when i wanted them to go back, opening a door and exposing themselves to the enemy - starting a fight i didn't want. Also they sometimes run into fire etc. without me wanting it.

Agree, the effort it takes to set up an ambush is considerable. Party members wandering off and blundering into combat.

Stealth is also weird. If you start a fight with everyone in stealth, you have to manually activate them in the initiative sequence, otherwise they are skipped by default. That's clumsy. Most people are going to want to get the drop on their foes to start a fight if possible. The game makes that very awkward.

this! I had just finished a rough fight and a couple of my characters were low hp. I start moving on and the two walk into the fire and are downed. I then Help them up and they immediately take damage and drop again. repeat ad nauseum, until I let them die and have to rez them and put their bodies on safe ground. Can we at least get a few seconds to get out of the hazard after being helped up? in tabletop you could drag a party member out of danger and then heal.

+1

"The way Larian manages party movement is dreaful." It is.... I wonder why they havent changed this before.... I disliked this in divinity as well.

Yeah, there's that too.
I can sort of guess why they did it from a co-op point of view, but it seems to work more often against you than in your favor.

Even in multiplayer though, all characters should be acting in initiative once a surprise round starts, even if they’re still stealthed. It’s weird that stealthed characters stay out of initiative and can basically do all kinds of weird things while their companions are stuck in a drawn-out six seconds

I agree with the arguments listed in the 1st post.

I requested the same thing in another topic.

So +1

Especially considering that you can pretty much re-stealth every round right now if you are positioned correctly, completely breaking the initiative system...

I probably missed it, but if you have additional arguments to throw on top of the pile feel free to copy-paste your old post here.

I can't quite remember NWN2 control scheme,. But NWN and DA:O weren't really party games - NWN you controlled a single character and in DA it was the same - and I am pretty sure there was a more classical control style when going into tactical view. Either way, none of those games required anything more sophisticated - exploration was very basic and environment irrelevant.

D:OSs (and BG3 from what I have seen) isn't like that - and it requires a fine micromanagement of your party members. Default Larian system simply isn't sufficient for it. Its not that it doesn't allow for fine control, but it far more clumsy when played that way - and I found it far easier to commit errors (classics being stealthing someone and forgetting to decouple him from companions so they rush to him once unstealthed or leaving someone behind).

I've also opened a thread in regard to this http://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=680949#Post680949

I am not going to add much to the conversation, the above points and the initial comments make sense. There are better ways to manage your party's positions and movements out there that could be implemented.

I've found that not attaching party members together works best whenever there is the slightest hint of combat. But indeed having the 4 characters attached is cause for a lot of moments between immersion-breaking things up to rage-enducing TPK. The first time Gale died on me was because of some random move he'd made when attaching-detaching... Which is a shame given the work put into his death narratively. Same thing for poor old Vampire, blindly following me into water at low HP...

This would also come down as a side effect of current camera configurations, which might play a role in how we move around the game... Don't know.

Perhaps the pathfinding AI could be linked to each characters abilities - for example, if they are athletic then take the most direct route over difficult terrain, if they have low wisdom / perception then they blunder straight through the twisting vines etc.

+1

Sadly this is another example of Larian insisting on sticking with what they did in Divinity. It's awful but they won't change it because it is a carryover from divinity. The "chain" thing where you have to pull a portrait away from the others to separate them before you can move one person is so annoying. Then you have to put them back again. Why can't we just click and drag a box around the party to group them back together? Every other game lets you just click on the character and tell them where to go. Also not having formations is frustrating. There are a lot of great things in this game but by far the biggest drawback is that they just built on top of divinity systems good or bad.

I'm not really trying to shit on Larian. There's a lot of good in the "Original Sin DNA".
Some stuff is frankly even a net improvement over anything Baldur's Gate ever did, and I say this as someone who was almost obsessed with the franchise for 20 years.
Party movement is not one of these.

Agreed. Unless I'm missing something, I am unable to see these environmental hot spots to even try avoiding them - and if I could, I would have to split the group into 4 and individually move each one along the desired path, a tedious an unnecessary annoyance. While someone might trip or stumble into a fire or pool of acid during a battle, once battle is finished, they would have enough common sense to walk around these danger zones and not dance through them.

Prolly already been said but anywho, I dislike the whole chain gang thing. we are not criminals!! We are okay some of us may or may not be, but we're not imprisoned the tadpool is.

Keep the whole ability to move characters on the lower left screen, first one is the leader, second is next, third is after that, fourth is the last person. There a simple formation.

Chain gang Moridains beard add a button or ability to right click on a portrait and an option to remove from group. Then when you want to readd them just right click, add to group option.

Formations are not really needed imo, but they will add more to the game then they will detract. You can keep it simple square, line, triangle, or diamond (cause you know there forever). Simple easy to use well maybe not the square. that may require something else like a formation screen to properly position. Though in truth any of them may.

I do like how smart the enemies are avoiding puddles for the most part, attacking my wizard first, trying to put my fighter/cleric to sleep round. It is far and above better then many or perhaps all other games out there. Now if we can only get my group to stop running into random vines, fires and other things. Some of that is on me but still, seriously Fang Elf would you stop!!

The more I think about this topic, the less any possible excuse I can find to justify the solution Larian is currently using stands on its own.

I was thinking about the VERY popular request to expand party size to five or six members (one I'm all in favor of, by the way) and I couldn't help but realize that if they do that, it becomes even more imperative to address how the party as a whole is managed by the player.

It's sort of baffling that the system used here makes controlling FOUR men out of combat more slow and cumbersome than controlling six of them in other games of this genre.

At the very least, even if Larian decides once again to ignore how overwhelmingly against their system the feedback seems to be in both of these areas (flashbacks of the armor system and the botched itemization in DOS 2 come to mind) they should at bare minimum add a quick hotkey that unchains/relinks all party members in one single key press.
I know that "Press Space to turn base" is more or less covering the same function, but not exactly in a practical and quick way.