Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion Optional third-person/WASD mode — feedback from someone who needed a mod to enjoy BG3

Hi Larian,

I want to share a bit of player feedback in the hope it's useful this early in Divinity's development.

I bounced off Baldur's Gate 3 completely at first. I'd been curious about it for a long time but couldn't get into it — the isometric perspective just didn't work for me. I put it down thinking it wasn't my kind of game.

Then I installed the third-person WASD movement mod, started over, and fell in love with it. Same combat, same writing, same classes — nothing about the game changed except how I moved through it and where the camera sat. I played it all the way through and it's now one of my favourite games ever. Without that mod I would never have seen any of it.

I'm not asking you to abandon the isometric view — it's clearly core to what you make, and plenty of people love it. But an optional third-person/WASD mode would open the game to a whole group of players who currently need a mod to get past the front door. The mod I used (Ch4nKyy's "WASD Character Movement", paired with Ershin's "Native Camera Tweaks") sits at over 25,000 endorsements on Nexus, has nearly 5,000 comments, and is still being patched three years after release — the last update was June 2026, for Hotfix 34. Endorsements are only a fraction of actual users, so I'm clearly far from the only one who plays this way.

Since Divinity is still in production and in your own engine, this feels like the moment when it could be designed in rather than retrofitted.

Thanks for BG3 either way — once I could actually play it, it was extraordinary.

Considering the way that Console support works, where this is how console players play, it should be possible to make it an option for PC.

Could even try to implement controller support for PC too, using the console UI instead of the PC one.

You're right that console support proves it's possible — more than that, it's already half-shipped. BG3 on PC switches to the console UI the moment you connect a controller, so the engine clearly handles two different control and camera setups side by side.

The problem is that they come as one package. Plugging in a controller gets you direct movement and the closer camera, but it also takes away the PC interface — and I find the PC UI vastly better. The hotbar, the inventory, the tooltips, the sheer amount of information on screen at once: it's built for a mouse, and it's a much better way to play a game this dense. The console UI is a well-made compromise for a gamepad, but on PC it's a downgrade I don't want to accept just to get a different camera.

So the controller route isn't really an answer for me. That's exactly why the mod exists and why it has the numbers it does: it gives you WASD movement and the third-person camera while keeping the full PC interface and mouse control. Nothing else does.

For Divinity, that's all I'm asking for — let input, camera and UI be chosen separately instead of bundled into 'PC mode' and 'console mode'.

Given the popularity of the WASD mod for BG3 (coupled with a better camera mod) and the great improvement it brings as option I'm really baffled why Larian (or better, one of the developers) had announced not to integrate WASD into Divinity. I hope they'll change their minds.

There is a really great third person camera mod, if you are into it:
https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/23959

Personally, it didn't work for me. It becomes very clear to me that game wasn't designed with that in mind. IMO it plays and looks far better with slightly zoomed up default look.

However, I strongly agree with the WASDa. Now, conceptually I shouldn't. If done correctly (see other cRPGs or any decent RTS) mouse control should provide better accuracy and efficiency of controlling a party of characters. However, clunky chain-system, characters abandoning their current action as soon as you switch, and general clumsiness and unresponsiveness of this control system leaves traditional mouse control feel fairly terrible. THEN there are some genuine issues with hazards - this game doesn't have automatic pause, or autostop when detecting traps, which means characters are highly likely to walk into hazards even if they detect them. And even if by luck I am fast enough to order move order away from a detected traps, it will make the lead character turn back and face the other direction, which may result in party members running behind him and stepping into the hazard anyway. I HATED traps in my first playthrough.

With WASDa though - you press W to move forward, something happens you stop pressing forward and the character stops in its tracks. IMO in general it looks and feels better in BG3 as well. In my first playthrough I ended up sometimes switching between gamepad and keyboard to achieve this effect, but that was very clunky. WASDa mode works really really well.