Peeps have been harping on this one for a while. There's a megathread like 100 pages long from EA, with much grumbling about ambushes and the how group/ungroup function works in BG3.
A similar example would be when Non-Hostiles or whatever 3rd faction will drop out of initiative, even when directly attacked, if say some guard observes, and then the neutrals will all start auto-healing with no way to stop the clock on that.
Another situation would be like when the player re-groups after pre-positioning or pre-buffing at the very last second, in the hopes that everyone will get pulled into initiative at the same time, say for a boss fight, but half the time that doesn't work either. Or again, being unable to halt the stopwatch in order to cancel AoE concentration spells before all the other characters start running towards the selected character and taking damage right as combat concludes.
Solution would have been some sort of Auto-pause/Auto-save for the active party, when combat begins, and then again when combat concludes. If the game would just remain in turn based mode instead of dropping out of initiative the second the last enemy falls, that would have solved many headaches/reloads.
I agree that the knock on effect of all this is to encourage players to skip cutscenes as rapidly as possible, because the clock will still be ticking during those dialogues.
There are lots of combats triggered by conversations, or conversations that trigger when a combat is resolved, and the jump from TB to back to Real-Time is super awkward. For buffs with a limited duration, say something like Haste that only works for a couple rounds, by the time some NPC finishes talking, you're probably already dazed. Spacebar slamming can also result in undesirable convo choices, since spacebar is both the confirm dialog choice and the skip. I think it would have worked just as well as the way we enter/exit Turn Based mode or a pause. There are many situations where it feels like the game just can't provide a real sense of danger/threat to the players without resorting to stuff like this, which seems unfortunate. What I mean is that, if the only way I can get the Characters to trigger traps, or make accidents happen on the fly, is by forcing the characters to amble around recklessly outside of initiative or with wonky formations/pathing, I feel like that's a miss. My solution lately has just been to avoid using the Ungroup feature altogether, and trying to always have the party enter initiative together, but then you can still run into situations where a character is in Stealth and throws a wrench in that.
There are mods to adjust the initiative from D4 to D20, for feats like Alert and such, which I think might make ambushes more interesting, but it doesn't really get at the underlying problem, which is that the game lacks any sort of global pause. Even bringing up the main menu or save game screen won't stop the clock. It's pretty oddball. I think what I would want is maybe some sort of ambush phase/round that could get a similar sort of flavor to the ungroup pre-buff/position, but I don't know. it works if you're like an assassin running solo and always gaming in and out of initiative by yourself, but breaks down at the level of the full party. I feel like being grouped or linked into groups of 1-3, 2-2, 3-1 might be a way to tell the game who should be linked together in time. Not sure though, it seems like an MP thing that crept into the SP game, but I don't know that it really works the way I want in either case hehe. There have been modest improvements along the way, stuff ironed out, but the main kinks sorta remain. For me at least. It's only panic inducing sometimes hehe
ps. for me Necromite spawns were also pretty buggy. But yeah the scariest is when it's NPCs that need to be rescued! Poor Rolan, the shadows were too fast! lol
Last edited by Black_Elk; 12/01/25 06:20 AM.
