Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback So, the reaction system...

Well, “forbid manual reactions in online sections” would be a great way to make sure I’d never bother with one.

And personally I feel that making the system automated by default (forcing the player to look for the option and manually activate it) is precisely the thing that Larian got the most wrong in this partial implementation.
There's arguably no worse way to get feedback on a large scale for a feature than burying it and telling your players "Yeah, you'll have to go looking for it".

Doing the opposite would have worked wonders, on the other hand: everyone comes in contact with the new feature and gets a chance to try it and get the pulse of the system, while anyone who doesn't like it can disable it with few clicks.

Sounds one of these fringe cases that never actually happen. A reaction is a "yes/no" binary choice. It would take a special kind of mental impairment to drag it past two or three additional seconds and it's going to be even less typically.
One may as well ignore a turn-based game entirely with this mindset, because "What if the other guy goes to the bathroom or takes phone calls between turns".

Which incidentally applies also to real-time games where you can hit pause (DOTA 2, most RTS, etc).

I have this whole thing we go through before we start multiplayer where I simply ask people to try to keep their turn to under 20 seconds out of consideration for other people and to think about what they want to do before their turn comes up. I have never had anyone disagree with that because it really makes the game go faster. Complex situations are always excepted and it doesn't apply to New Player Runs that we host.

A lot of the cultivating I have done is to find people who are - not just good at the game - but good at multiplayer in general, which means good inter-personal skills and teamwork/consideration for others. It's just selfish to take 2-3 minutes to run a turn because you have to narrate EVERY single one of your options to everyone in discord and then proceed to fail to accomplish anything anyway.

What I am saying is that if you have a player taking too long per turn then you should talk to them or not play with them. The system itself isn't the problem.

Could be something to consider for online session settings (for example allow or forbit manual reactions, set per turn timer etc.).

Hello Tuco

Seconds add up

It's been few months since its (very partial) first implementation in the game, with Patch 9 in early December.

Weirdly enough I expected a lot of discussion about how much people liked or disliked it, but the topic vanished from this forum (and other public spaces where the game is discussed) almost entirely.
I've read almost ZERO feedback about it.

I guess a starting point would be: does anyone here think its addition to the game was *detrimental* to the quality of the combat?
I remember a certain number of people at the time being fairly vocal about the fact that they did NOT wanted a Solasta-like system with confirmation prompts, but in the end that's exactly the solution Larian chose to implement.

Do these people still think the game was better just with automated reactions and before this current implementation? And on the opposite side, is there anyone here who wanted a reaction system but over time came to regret asking for it because they don't like how it works now?

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Personally I'm still of the opinion that its inclusion was a NET Improvement to the combat system and if anything what worries me is that:

- It's an incomplete implementation with a lot of possible uses of a reaction not implemented yet (starting with the basic AoO)
- it was buried in the game's options so it's not clear how many people in a more "casual" audience even realized the system exists to begin with
- the UI felt a lot like a "first draft" and with no more patches coming until release I'm a bit concerned about how (or IF) Larian will reiterate on the system to make it look or feel better.