Baldur's Gate 3 takes a step closer to real-time with pause combat thanks to "very rough" early mod
But you'll have to wait for the "pause" bit.
If you're a traditionalist who kind of wishes Baldur's Gate 3 had stuck to the series' classic real-time-with-pause combat roots instead of taking a swerve into new-fangled turn-based territory, there's now - as they say - a mod for that. Sort of.
Modder tinybike has just released (thanks PC Gamer) what they call a "very very very rough draft" of a real-time combat mod for Baldur's Gate 3. Which is to say, the real-time part of the equation is now there, but the critical "with pause" bit currently isn't implemented, meaning players are likely to get wiped off the face of Faerûn before making much progress.
Still, tinybike doesn't think adding pause functionality should be especially difficult. "I think because of the way I'm doing combat, which is basically by forcing everything to remain technically out-of-combat," they explained in a comment beneath a video of the mod in action, "pausing should actually be pretty simple."
"I think it's just a matter of clicking the button to drop into turn-based mode," they continued. "Not 100 percent sure this actually behaves the way you'd expect a NWN-style RTwP system to behave though, I will have to mess with it and see."
And if that's not enough to dissuade from giving the "VERY barebones" mod a go, tinybike has an additional warning, noting there's a very good reason players should avoid attempting the campaign with it installed right now: it doesn't play particularly nice with Baldur's Gate 3's reams of chatter. "You will get butchered in real-time," they explain, "while the dialogue is happening."
Nevertheless, it's a promising start to a mod that just might warm the nostalgia-hued hearts of Baldur's Gate purists. And you can expect plenty more where that came from, now that Baldur's Gate 3 has official mod support - not that its absence stopped eager modders from getting stuck in before then.