Gargaune
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2020
- Messages
- 3,716
Why, thank you for asking, it's been a while since I've bellyached about this subject! It's like someone at Larian looked at NWN2 and thought "this tried to do roughly the same things we want to do, for the same reasons, how can I make our system much worse?... and came up with a solution.
Character multi-selection is done via a spring-loaded "toilet chain" stack, you have to drag portraits in and out of that stack to a certain range to change the current selection of characters you're commanding. There are no modal Shift+clicks on characters or portraits to add or remove them from your current selection, nor are there any keyboard accelerators or function keys to do it, and don't even dream about click-and-drag marquee selection. The only concession we got was an Unchain All keybind but nothing to let you quickly form subgroups, you must use the toilet chain which is unbelievably tedious for something that you'll be doing very, very often.
My other big gripe with the controls was the camera and the lack of edge turning. When you hit the screen edges, the camera will pan around - which is fine as a mode, but there is no other. You don't have an option to lock to a character and use the screen edges to turn your view, you have to hold down a key (MMB by default) and move the mouse, and with the nature of BG3's levels, you'll be adjusting your camera angle every thirty seconds. Additionally, camera pitch is tied to zoom level - zoom close in to the character, and you'll pitch up to see farther ahead, zoom out and you'll pitch down to "isometric" perspective. It might sound cool, but you don't have any means to control the pitch independently so you can never really settle on a perspective that's comfortable for you for any amount of time.
This might all seem trivial but it's not, there's nothing trivial about party selection and camera controls in a tactical 3D D&D game, these are functions you'll be relying on constantly. When I joke that it's worse than NWN2, I'm not actually joking at all - that's a quantifiable statement and I can hit stride with NWN2's controls, see my guide, but not with BG3's. I thought I'd get used to it but it was the opposite, the longer I played, the worse it got, to the point I couldn't bear it anymore and just gave up on the EA somewhere in the Underdark. Which was made all the easier because BG3 literally killed a mouse for me, the MMB finally gave up the ghost after all that camera turning.
The salt in the wound is that this (the party controls, at least) was a well known complaint throughout EA, not just griping from some random Codex asshole with a NWN avatar, go and ask Tuco Benedicto Pacifico for the link to Larian's own forum thread. And it would've been piss easy to fix, they eventually gave us that Chain All keybind, they just need a couple more modal click listeners or key accelerators for adding/removing characters for the current selection. The camera stuff too would've been peanuts, all of this crap could've been done inside of a lunch break. So yeah, I'm a little butthurt about that.
