Originally Posted by Taril
Originally Posted by ThatDarnOwl
What exactly is wrong with the fly spell?
One of the main strategies of flight in DnD is to hover in mid air, so your squishy caster doesn't get beat up (With the risk being ranged attacks breaking your concentration and making you fall)

BG3 only lets you fly between ground locations and as such merely emulates high STR + Leap setups as opposed to being true flight.
There's a variety of reasons they didn't do this. I'll go over them briefly.

#1. The game's engine relies on an AI pathing grid for things like pathfinding. It's the same system that DOS1/2 used.
[Linked Image from docs.larian.game]
One of the main benefits of this system is it makes programming AI and handling game logic around movement significantly easier. It's far less likely for npcs to get stuck on things as a result. The negatives of the system are that the logic of the game operates primarily in the X and Y axis. Similar to a Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game.

#2. It would allow for sequence breaking
There's a lot of segments in the game that would be trivial to sequence break if the player could just fly/teleport anywhere. It's extremely rare games give you this ability outside of sandbox games. A good example is the quest to find the Nightsong in Act 1 stops briefly because the bridge that went there collapsed. Which requires the player to approach it from within the crypt in Act 2. The same goes with Act 3 when the player needs to find a way into the city, it would be trivial to sequence break it if you could just use fly to fly into the city.

This is also something the vast majority of players typically don't question as the game doesn't really portray characters flying in the Z axis outside of Dame Aylin. Who also doesn't do it in combat.

#3. It would be really hard to balance if the player could easily move all their characters out of melee range at any time.
You can imagine a lot of encounters would be straight up broken as a result. Like encounters that are clearly meant to be fought in melee primarily like Ketheric's fight. This would quickly go from "cast fly on the spell caster to move him out of range" to "cast fly on the party at the start of every encounter so the AI is forced to use ranged". Which would cause a core component of the combat system to feel pointless and redundant. And it would feel tedious to have to do this every encounter. It would also make the game feel unbalanced since half of the classes would feel useless because the only thing that matters is ranged. Like why would I bother playing a druid and wildshaping if going 4 wizards is always the best strategy.
Originally Posted by LeeRutland
Dimension Door is supposed to have a 500ft range but I can see how that one might be a bit broken if you can just DD through stuff and bypass like half the game...
This is also the logic with flight but it's even worse as I mentioned above.