Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General UI needs a major overhaul.

This. I don't understand why basically every other game in this entire subgenre of RPG uses a common, functional, liked control scheme, and only Larian has to use something weird and bad for their games. Chain/unchain is just objectively worse than individual select/marquee select.

This

You should stop using Nostalgic glasses. How can a 20+ years game do something better than Larian?

Every game in this subgenre, except for Larian games, uses more or less the same selection and control scheme. Including ones made quite recently.

Well, actually to my amazement, BG1 has better party UI than BG3. And that game is ancient.

The BG3 style chained party UI could be be a stand-alone minigame. Just not in BG3. Using it feels like a full time job. Has no pros at all, just cons.

Let's compare with BG1 party UI:

Character select by clicking on portrait: In BG1 one single click is enough vs. in BG3 need to click it multiple times until reacts (most of the times), it's like the mouse cursor struggles to detect the portrait
Character order in party (both in UI and formation): in BG1 drag portraits easily, there will stay forever vs. in BG3 every resting at camp resets it to some weird default (can't even specify which to be that default, same with inventory screens)
Select multiple characters: in BG1 click and drag above just 3 out of 6 (or any number) and issue orders to move or attack or anything and works instantly vs. BG3, where you need to unchain them, create new chained sub-groups
Give orders just to a single character, any of them: in BG1 click portrait, give orders, done, nobody follows the selected character vs. BG3 where you must unchain that character, otherwise the rest will start following it
BG1 can select whole party with a single key and even move them in formations vs. BG3 where all must be chained to do it, then unchain again to issue orders to each, without breaking the others

Welcome to 2020 where we have nice graphics but the ancient knowledge of party UI management was lost.

Easily. BG3 looks very much like D:OS2, and D:OS2 UI and controls simply aren’t good enough for a party based RPG. Issues with their control system has been pointed out multiple times.

On another thread people pointed to KOTOR or Dragon Age as originators of this control scheme, and that’s right. And that control worked for those titles - except KOTOR and Dragon Age had no, or almost no environment interactions. Controlling single character, and having others blindly follow was fine for those games Larian uses a lot environment interaction, and control scheme they implimented is too clunky, too unreliable and too tedious to be good. I agree, that having a proper RTS controls would pretty much solve everything.

A simple test for a good UI is: how many clicks and how far I have to move my mouse cursor to get things done. In case of D:OS2 or BG3 the answer is: way too many clicks, and too much portrait dragging.

Truly, I don't understand why Larian is so obstinate on this issue. People weren't exactly heaping praise on this chain/unchain shit back in Original Sin 2.

That's a very short and useful way to explain the issue

I'm going to assume that this was meant as troll/parody post and you didn't actually try to make this your argument.

P.S. For everyone else who cares about this issue, I'll remember that the thread in my signature is currently the closest thing to an "official topic" on the matter, at least until Isaac Springsong will post the new summary he's been writing down/tweaking for a while in the "megathread/guide subforum".