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

I don't know what you're all talking about, the way party movement works is such a great way to get your companions to blithely set off every trap in the room before you can get your designated trap disarmer where he needs to be. Really speeds up the process.

In terms of the complaint about party members blocking each other, the real problem is that this is a turn-based game that doesn't want you to see some really important informational elements of a traditional turn-based UI. In this case. Compare how movement works in BG3 with how it works in XCOM or the classic Fallouts or those Shadowrun games or even Civilization for that matter. It's all built around tiles. Different games parse that in different ways: in Fallout and Civ you're sharing a general action point pool for movement and combat; in XCOM movement and other actions are mostly separated; and in Shadowrun any movement at all, of any distance, uses up a full action point, of which you only get two per turn. There's also some difference in how the tiles themselves are visually represented: in Fallout, you don't see any tile but the one you're hovering over with your mouse cursor, and the game shows you a number representing how many tiles of movement that will be; in Civ, every tile is visibly demarcated from every other tile unless; in XCOM and Shadowrun you only see outlines representing how far you can move, but the tiles within that outline aren't visible. But it all still comes down to tiles.

Now does this make a game look a little less cinematic? Yes. Does it make movement a little more wooden and the routes characters take more hard-angled? Also yes, although they often end up taking pretty hard-angled routes anyway. But it also means you never have to wonder if this character can get to that location or not. You never have that situation where the game seems to be telling you that you can move somewhere or Charge somewhere or jump somewhere, only for it to suddenly realize that actually you can't do that, or to just not execute the command when you click, or to somehow waste all your movement points on a jump that it turns out you can't make, but you still lose all the movement points for it. For my money, "less cinematic but also less frustrating to play" is a better user experience than the reverse.

The only other turn-based game I can think of that does it the way Larian does it is Pillars of Eternity 2, which isn't a turn-based game. Obsidian added a turn-based mode well after the game released in the traditional RTwP format, and I'm pretty sure that mode never officially left beta. It was just this kind of funky little thing they added in case you wanted to experience the game a different way. I think it's pretty telling that the only other turn-based game that does movement this way is the one that wasn't designed to be a turn-based game at all.

I doubt that's why they do it this way, but if it is, they should really have known there's already a way to do that: make traps (and hidden objects, for that matter) much harder to detect, and only detectable in sneak mode. Isn't that how it always was in the old CRPGs?

In Pillars of Eternity you can set it up so that the game auto-pauses as soon as a trap is detected. I don't know if you could do that for the old Baldur's Gate games, it's been awhile since I played them. But PoE was even a game that used rigid party formations. It was much easier to avoid traps once they'd been detected even without the autopause setting. The autopause was a nice addition, but not necessary at all. In a game like this where there are no rigid formations and characters like to wander around, you really need a setting like that.