Not to pat myself in the back, but four full pages of thread in and this must be possibly the LEAST divisive topic on this board and the one suggestion where I think every single reply so far agrees with. I posted the same summary of the issue on Steam as well and even there I have yet to see a single reply of someone disagreeing that these controls are bad and traditional RTS.like ones would be a significant improvement.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying this to compliment myself, but just to stress a thing to Larian: when even in a forum like this you can hardly find a single person willing to defend the system you are using, there must be something genuinely weak about it that NEEDS to be addressed.
Not so fast, sunshine.
First off, I fully agree that it’s currently quite wonky, and even in DOS2 it was a bit cumbersome.
However, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the whole linking party members system in principle, it just needs some refinement. There’s certainly some advantages to a system where you can separate one or more characters and leave the rest moving as a group. Particularly in a game where you can send one character off to the other end of the map to do things separate from from the rest of the party. I imagine it’s pretty useful for multiplayer, so for instance 2 players can have 2 teams of 2 moving together, without having to constantly select 2 characters to move.
There’s certainly big issues with pathfinding, using stealth, and even the dragging to link and unlink characters (which really should have been improved 2 games ago), but the basic system isn’t bad at all. If they fix things like the pathfinding and the amount your lead character gets ahead, and add some shortcuts for linking and unlinking party members (eg shift-click to unlink and move) then it could be a better system than other games.
I’m not sure why some want to drag a selection box around characters they want to move in 3D game with so much height variation. It works well for infinity engine and similar games, but that doesn’t mean it would work well for this one.
If the party was ever split up and drag selecting wasn't handy, you could just shift or control click portraits, or directly on the characters. You know, like Baldur's Gate. When the party was together, drag selecting would be faster and you could use that. The basic control scheme in DoS and BG3 IS bad. It's slower and more cumbersome than traditional BG controls in every way.
