Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Years later, the complete lack of formation control is still incredibly grating.

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).

The shuffling, I hate the shuffling so much. I am less concerned about the way it looks in the formation, but since patch 7, if you ungroup the group while having the slot 3 or 4 companion selected, they are automatically promoted to the slot 2 position. I am not sure if this is a bug or has purpose, but it is so annoying if you split your group often - for sneaking or positioning - and then have to rearrange it again because you accidentally had the wrong person selected.

The Action Bar and the atrocious nature of skills ceasing to exist (Thus being removed from hotbars entirely) the second they are not currently available would be my number 1... Though party control and inventory (Especially a system for selling mass items without it being a ball ache) are definitely up there.


The best I can imagine is it being something to do with how they implemented movement. Since formation generally works by simply giving everyone in the party a "Move to location" order simultaneously, while this chain system is based around giving a single character a "Move to location" order and everyone else just has a "Follow currently active character" behaviour.

With the main scenario for why this might be the case being Jumping. Following characters can jump where appropriate to reach your active character. While simply trying to give a move order to a character that has a gap in the way won't work with a "Cannot reach destination" error.

This was not necessary in Divinity, because you used teleportation to cross gaps and had to specifically teleport every character individually regardless.

Though having said that, there's at least some sort of intelligence with pathing implemented. As noted by things like characters walking around surfaces such as fire surfaces, acid surfaces (Despite them being completely harmless) and difficult terrain even when giving a direct move order (Fun fact; it's possible to bypass this pathing by doing things like entering the level up screen after giving a move order. Your character will gladly walk the shortest direct path even through hazards like fires while other companions with their "Follow" AI will avoid it like normal).

So perhaps this behaviour can extend to enabling a character to use jumps in its pathing, so that you can select a location across some gaps and the game will figure out how and where to jump to make it possible to access (That is if they continue to facilitate the Jump function and don't just go back to handing out teleportation like candy such as in Divinity)

Also while we're at it, the above mentioned "Hazard avoidance" behaviour should REALLY be added for traps that have been detected. It's so stupid that characters will literally yell out "Watch out, there's a trap!" then 2 seconds later go walk into the damn thing and get blowd up.

Chain system and shuffling is an annoyance, but the hotbar is what stops me from coming back to the game. Just now I was considering reinstalling BG3 and finally doing an honour difficulty playthrough, but I know having to constantly organise and reshuffle hotbar is annoy me to no end. Is Wildshape still removing every ability from the hotbar and than redistributing it randomly after turning back into human form?

No, but Wildshape itself resets its hotbar every time you shift.

Which is even more problematic if you use mods to improve Wild Shapes (There's one that I use that overhauls shapes so that they get actually useful skills so there's a reason to use anything other than Owlbear).

But outside that there's still a bunch of annoying things... Like Lae'zel in camp unequips her off-hand weapon while she fights the target dummy... So Offhand Attack and any abilities associated with her off-hand weapon get reset constantly.

Spell Sniper constantly resets by doing things like... Loading a save.

All the temporary abilities you might use frequently that you just cannot put onto the singular keybindable hotbar (Monk Bonus Unarmed Attack, Reactivations for spells like Witch Bolt/Lightning Storm/Hex/Hunter's Mark, Tempestuous Flight)

Thrown weapons (Also, being disarmed)...

I haven't checked to see if Multiclass casters are still borked yet... I know it used to be that everytime you leveled up the game would re-prepare random spells for no reason and thus mess up your enitre hotbar. But I haven't done a multi-caster for a while so I'm not sure if this is still the case (I know that stat modifiers like Headband of Intellect still break your hotbar because during level up it considers you having your base stat score and thus Wizards with 8 Int get 1 spell slot meaning you have to re-prepare all the rest of the spell slots that you have because of actually having 17 Int)

It is dreadful, and I fully expect it to be replicated verbatim in the next Larian game.

Totally agree - the toilet chain is not great and pacing is difficult sometimes. Not to mention, that companions get stuck a lot.