Is it just me or is the pathfinding really bad?

amyae

I don't know if the 2.0 update changed something or if it's just been so long since I played EE last that I forgot about it... I remember pathfinding in the original BG2 engine not being brilliant, but characters generally figured out that they needed to walk around obstacles, even if they took the long way around. But I've noticed playing BGEE recently that characters keep trying to make a beeline for wherever you click, and if they run into an obstacle, or a wall, or another character, they'll just keep stubbornly ramming into it and jittering until it moves or you redirect them.

The two places it's stuck out the most were the ice caves in TotSC, where my characters couldn't figure out how to go through the corridors instead of trying to walk through the walls (although oddly enough, they managed the corridors in Firewine just fine), and the Friendly Arm Inn, where short characters keep getting stuck behind tables (which is actually kind of funny, ngl). I've also run into some problems in combat where melee fighters will get stuck behind each other trying to attack the same enemy, instead of moving around the other side.

Obviously for the most part this is solvable with Ctrl+J and a little micromanagement of my front line fighters, but it's still rather suboptimal.

Sharguild

Always been bad but lately it does seem a bit worse. I've had party members get "stuck" in the streets of Beregost unable to navigate around a townsfolk and a barrel. A bit sad that.

killerrabbit

It's not just you. Something changed for the worse. Also, the PCs ability to 'push' has been scaled back for some reason. I had to enable to cheats to get down one of the staircases -- couldn't push one of the nobles out of the way.

dradam

Same here. It's also very visible when a character is equipped with the boots of speed, and the entire group is directed toward a location with the speed boot character behind someone else in the party. Instead of going around and whizzing by, he will spastically ram into one of the slower characters repeatedly until directed to go around, or the slow character demands an end to the constant butt bumping.

BillyYank

I haven't seen this in my game yet, but I prefer the bad pathfinding you all are describing to the old bad pathfinding. Stuttering and stopping while following the path I told my party to use is much better than trying to find an alternate route that leads through a bunch of traps and trash mobs (and it's always the squishy mage, isn't it.)

Edit: One thing I have noticed is a party member occasionally stopping in the middle of a move. I don't think that's pathfinding since it's happened in clear town streets like Beregost. I think that's an advanced AI problem.

BelgarathMTH

I've seen this behavior.

I believe it's an occasional symptom of a change that's been made to prevent party members in the rear from turning around and walking in the opposite direction than where they're supposed to go, often pulling enemies or walking into traps in the process. (They were trying to walk all the way around the map, because the direct route was blocked for two seconds by the party members in front.)

Believe me, the old behavior of party members wandering off into parts unknown was much more irritating and dangerous than this new problem. I think most people who lived for years with the awful pathfinding in the old vanilla game can see the new pathfinding as a welcome improvement over how things used to be, or at least I can.

The pathfinding AI has always had trouble getting melee combatants to walk around each other to concentrate attacks on a single target, often getting one person stuck behind another trying to attack, and requiring the player to manually walk them around into attack position. So, there's no gain or loss either way on that with the newer pathfinding.

amyae

@BelgarathMTH Fair enough. I honestly don't remember running into the melee combat issue before, and probably the old "wander all the way around the map" pathfinding didn't bug me because I was more used to it. Hopefully Beamdog can find a nice middle ground for the next update, where characters can better recognize the difference between things that will move out of your path if you wait a second (e.g. other characters) and things that you actually need to walk around (e.g. walls).