For the record, BG3 has completely blown me away and I’m already a huge fan, and I’m only just finishing Act 1. This is my biggest criticism, but it’s a relatively small thing.
So when you enter turn-based mode outside of combat, the environment has its own “turn” in the initiative order. But during regular combat, the environment continues while everyone in combat is “paused.” Any reason they didn’t do the same “environment turn” in combat? I think they sort of did (at the end of initiative is when fire spreads, for example).
For me, it’s a bit immersion-breaking. For example, I sent my rogue to distract and lead away a large group of enemies, so the rest of my party could sneak past. But I didn’t have to lead them far, because once they got a few steps away, I could switch to my other party members (who weren’t in combat) and they easily snuck past the “paused” enemies. I know if they had been seen, they’d have joined initiative, but it was super easy to avoid that because the enemies were frozen in place, so avoiding sightlines was trivial.
It’s for co-op, same as Divinity.
Your friend could be in turn based combat while your somewhere else on the map doing stuff.
The alternative is having tethers which everyone hates. Or real time combat which Larian didn’t want.
I figured co-op would be the primary reason. I’d prefer to have to wait while others are in combat, but I might be the minority there.
What are tethers?
I imagine tethering players to each other. Preventing them from straying too far from each other.
Basically prevent players from moving too far apart. Far Cry coop is notorious for this and a few other games. State of Decay 2, etc.
Couldn’t they pause the immediate vicinity and if another player approaches they get notified that they’re about to enter the pause zone? Or a visual cue
Idk. I remember way back with the DivOS1 Kickstarter they did a video on their channel showing off how turn based worked in co-op and kinda explained why. Though I don’t know which video, sometime like 6+ years ago.