I never made a secret of my dislike for the now-traditional Larian control scheme, aka the "chain system" (companions in auto-follow by default, convoluted methods to divide the party, lack of "drag and select", etc, etc), but after genuinely hating on it in DOS 1, hating it even more in DOS 2 and then having to deal with it for years of pre and post release familiarity with BG3, I kinda grew resigned to deal with it and all its grating shortcomings.
STILL, I have no idea why the studio decided that a feature (no matter how poorly implemented) that was a staple of their previous games - the control of your party formation, how the characters are disposed around you when following your protagonist- was to be completely removed from this game.
For a start I hate the standard shape of the formation. It's a rhomboid by default, which is already bad enough, but the more characters you add (through modding ,summons or what else), the more it starts to look like a WIDELY spread piramidal formation with your character ahead of it. It's ugly to look at, impractical to use and it causes all sorts of problems in narrow places, where characters start moving around and running into each other like headless chickens.
Not only you can't control what SHAPE the formation takes around the main character, it's also virtually impossible to control reliably which character takes which spot in the formation, as the character order of the portraits seems to be completely inconsequential (i.e. the characters on top of the list are not in the frontline, as one would think, but may end in any random spot of the formation). Also grouping and ungrouping the characters (with G, by default) keeps shuffling up their position in the formation.
For a while I kinda hoped modders would solve the issue, since Larian ignored any feedback about it, but now it's becoming clear that most modders either don't care (if so, shame on them) or have absolutely no clue of how to address this issue with the tools currently available.
At this point in time, with other issues partially covered by the modding community and other, this remains arguably the worst "quality of life" omission in the game (aside maybe from a better inventory, which is another lost battle).
If nothing else, seeing this addressed would be encouraging in the optics of future Larian games (assuming whatever they are working on is supposed to resemble DOS and Baldur's Gate 3 to a sufficient degree).
