Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Combat Slowdown BUG

I have a combat problem/BUG where the game takes upwards of a minute to play out the combat but nothing happens and the AI turns to skip, sometimes not even playing out any moves, this makes it near unplayable nothing works (reloading saves, restarts and full shutdown and restarts)

Same exact problem, just randomly started happening, now if I go back to saves from hours ago where battles played out perfectly fine, those battles are now broken as well... enemy turns will come, there's 4-10 second moments where the camera is on the enemy but they're doing nothing (nothing preventing them from, either). I'm almost 60 hours in now and this has just thrown on wet blanket on this thing

I have the exact same problem, about 50 hours in. Enemies wont move (or allied non companion NPCs) or use any actions. Camera moves to them, waits for 10+ seconds then moves to the next person. Makes fights insanely easy but so boring. Have also tried reloading game and reloading pc to no avail. Happened randomly as well with no warning sign and is happening on all future combat encounters. One thing I found was that if my main custom character dies (properly dies, cant be helped up but needs a revive scroll) then everything goes back to normal. But it only stays normal for as long as my character is dead. The moment he is revived the bug starts again. Have sent a bug report with saves to Larian.

I know we're not alone, because the more I read, the more I see this happens to quite a few people and I even read in one thread the issue existed back in EA 2021 (yikes!). After posting this, I did read one person say that if they had Shadowheart in their party, this would happen and if they took her out, it would be fine... so after exhausting nearly everything else I thought of trying, I went ahead and dropped Shadowheart from the party and the fight I must've tried 40 times while troubleshooting worked without a single hiccup, so it does seem like there are some unknown variables where it may be specific classes, spells, items or any combination of any of those that triggers this behavior.

The fight I started noticing this behavior on was where a few enemies were invisible from the very start, so there was no way for me to actually finish the battle and move on because I didn't have any spells or items to make an invisible enemy visible, so there was no way for me to target them or do anything (tried burning the ground underneath where the camera would pan to and all that, nothing worked)... so for me, it was a definitive game stopper.

Where did you submit a bug report to Larian @ReeceLavellan? I don't remember seeing anything in game.

This is the same situation I'm in and made a new character, and it slowly turned into the same situation. It's so sad because the rest of the game works completely fine for me.

I dunno if I have the exact same problem, but I've found that enemies who can't do anything active (i.e- attack) take a long time to finish their turns. This happens a lot if you slap down a big control spell like Hungry Hungry Hadar (Hunger of Hadar) or Sleet Storm; the enemies try to avoid it but it's like they get stuck trying to figure out how, or they end up dashing but not actually going anywhere.

I even saw an enemy action surge so it could triple dash, then just stayed still for 5-10 seconds and ended its turn because there was some slippy ice in its way that it might have made it over. It massively slows combat down, and actually makes the spells even more powerful because when most/all of the enemies bunch up around the edges rather than trying their luck at crossing it makes them easier to safely hit with Ice Storm and other instant area effects.

However, spells like Spike Growth which have a smaller area just cause enemies to jump past the area; I wonder if it's that jumping behaviour that might be the problem? Like they're trying to find a way to jump past it but can't? It's a super annoying behaviour anyway because it makes Spike Growth worthless against 99% of enemies, and overpowers other control spells while slowing down combat a lot.

The "AI" behaviour in dealing with area effects in general is a bit wonky; I also somewhat recently did the steel watch foundry in Act 3:


Ah the joys of "AI" behaviours.

I know, its worrying how old this bug is, and no mention of fixing it in the hotfixes. I'm hoping it will be sorted in the next big patch, but who knows when that will be.

The fight that it first started on for me was when I first met the Hyenas giving birth to the Gnolls. There was a slight bug when talking to the Hyenas as the birth cutscene played twice (no idea if this would or why this might have anything to do with the AI bug), and then the fight started. One of the Hyenas ran up a hill to some Gnolls to pull them into battle, and after they joined the battle and walked slightly down the hill the bug started properly. From that moment no one outside my my party would move, use an action, or attack at all. When later encountering a fight between some friendly NPCs and some Gnolls I found that the friendly NPCs had the same problem of not being able to do anything.

Thank you for saying about Shadowheart though as I have her in my party, so maybe removing her might be a short term fix for me as well!

I reported the bug to Larian via the Larian website (though haven't heard anything back as they said they are experiencing a high volume of tickets currently). Here's a link to the bug report page if you want to send over one!

https://larian.com/support/faqs/how-to-submit-a-bug-report_85

Thanks for the link @ReeceLavellan, I can't remember exactly when it started happening for me, but I'm ~60 hours in now and still in Act I (I look under every rock ) but I also got really good with crowd control, so often in a fight I would dominate the enemies to where they couldn't get a turn in, but that was of my own doing and not this bug that now plagues my play through. Even though I did do a fight last night where the bug was happening, the one thing I did notice is that the enemies would take their opportunity attack if you crossed paths or moved away and the one main enemy would spawn minions on its turn, but neither the main enemy or the minions did anything on their turns combat-wise... it was all awkward 5-10 second pauses with the camera focused on them and then "Your Turn"... fight was a cakewalk and I'm playing on Tactician... it's just too easy and super boring to play like this without a challenge

I also look under every rock and in every bag etc! Alas I tried removing Shadowheart from my party to see if it fixed it for me like it did for you, but alas it had no effect for me. Its so boring getting into any fights with this bug, so I've been doing my best to avoid them. The hotfix yesterday didn't fix it (though I doubted it would as it wasn't mentioned in the patch notes), so I really don't know what to do now as I want to keep playing but I know the more I do the more likely I am to get into a fight I can't avoid and il have to cheese it!

Literally in the same position as you... I wanna keep playing, but at the same time, I don't wanna play until the issue is resolved... my guess is the "1000 fix patch" may come at the PS5 release (probably/maybe/?)