Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General I hate inventory!

Managing inventory in RPGs is a chore. I end up with a ton of items, most of which I will never use, and it takes me forever to decide which item should be used by which character at any given time.
What can be done to mitigate this?

If it's a chore *because* you hoard tons of stuff most of which you "will never use", then that's on you. Believe it or not, hoarding stuff is a player choice. What can be done? Refrain from hoarding, or accept that it is your decision. It may feel "necessary" that you hold on to this and that so you can do this and that in the future, but it's a decision you make. Especially when it really turns out that most of the stuff you hold on never gets used.

If inventory design is so bad that managing it is a PITA then that's on the devs. What can we do? Nothing much. Maybe learn how to mod then make a mod to deal with the problem. Complain to them and hopefully they'll listen and make changes.

As for the devs, what can *they* do? First and foremost, they can play the game. Thoroughly. Like a real consumer of the product. Then they can see for themselves what is good and what is bad and what they can do to make things better. Then what *we* can do is hope that they are detail-oriented and have good judgement on what is good and what is bad.

An option to sort inventory is very common in most modern rpg games. And the use of very few and almost indistict icons for items died with DAI in PC games. DoS games had a simple and effective UI to sort your items and crafting. And the only RPG games that do not allow to store items outside your inventory I know are mostly mobile and "console-ported ones"
Since BG3 is going to be PC and stadia first, I do not think this is going to be a problem in this game.(And I do not want to start an interminable pc master race vs console ratkids here, I care about games, not platforms).

There are games with the "equip best" option to gear up your characters automatically, but most of the time it chooses plain stupid choices(Underrail, Fire emblem, old fallout games, etc). The options of "level up automatically" and "equip best" could suit people who like that kind of thing.

I mean, thats just a feature of RPGs, DnD generally has far less of it because items arent replaced nearly as ofthen as in other systems.
but idk why you would even want to mitigate this.
Having no inventory system just means you have less of an RPG

Speaking as someone who was a bit of a latecomer to RPGs, finally realising they were her real "comfort zone" sort of genre, I wasted too many years playing shooters that I found somehow unfulfilling. Not a criticism, just not really my cup of tea. Having spent years catching up and playing nothing but RPGs (or at least stuff with a significant overlap for the genre pedants, e.g. the Stalker series) it felt incredibly odd going back to a pure shooter and thinking "but where's my inventory?" Especially that confusion of simply running over a resource to pick it up. *shudder*

Though I suspect the OP's message isn't so much about having an inventory but how it's presented to the player, which can make all the difference. Talking of shuddering, Skyrim's was one of the worst I encountered: even with a fairly frugal amount of stuff, it was a pain to manage. User-made mods were slow to come about thanks to Bethsoft's inexplicable decision to make menus use Flash, but they ameliorated the awfulness a bit. It was still horrible, though. I guess it's subjective, at least to some degree; I rather liked Oblivion's with the Darnified UI added on, but it was quite easy to mod in all sorts of ways thanks to its much more sensible use of XML.

Still playing Kingdoms of Amalur at present, a game I really like but its inventory system is one of its weak points; especially trying to find stuff when crafting or selling, as a whole bunch of stuff is jumbled together and has no sort options. I guess subjective or not, that isn't the way to do it.

Overall, it's one of those things that really needs careful consideration as a quality-of-life thing. I'm somewhat reminded of my job as a sysadmin, where as a newbie I'd take offence at people demanding to know what it was I did because they couldn't really figure it out. As I got older and more scarred by various problems I began to realise that the hallmark of me doing a good job was that people didn't really notice the computer infrastructure, it was just a thing that did its job. It took a lot of work to keep it that invisible. I guess stuff like inventory management is similar: a lot of effort and a thankless task for something that works, but don't put in the effort and the complaints will come as a torrent.

I think most issues will be solved by: easy sorting. Placing items in diff "bags" and/or diff tag (Stuff to sell. Crafting. Quest.). Share inventory with party. Sell All buttom with trader. When buying: only search for items you can equip/use. Only show certain items (only ranged weapons). Only items "better than current items".
Sort by when item was found. Where item was found.

These are just mechanical stuff. The role playing with interesting merchants. Listening to their story etc should also be present.

Some good suggestions here.

I obviously don't want there to be NO inventory, of course you have to carry SOME stuff around and equip different weapons and whatnot. But thinking back to some recent games I played like Divinity Original Sin 2, Pillars of Eternity 2 and Pathfinder Kingmaker, I remember the inventory being a big drain on my time. Sorting and equipping items just distracts from the fun of adventuring. I do like having awesome gear and being ready for any possible scenario I might run into, but not at the cost of enjoying the game.

Something that can help choosing items to equip might be restricting which are usable by your class or whatever, so you don't have to compare all the endless possibilities available. Maybe make the best options for a character blatantly obvious, so I only really have to choose between 2 or 3 options at most. As for consumables like potions, etc. maybe make a "rot" timer on each one, so you either use them or lose them, which will prevent the endless hoarding I keep experiencing.

A major issue with inventory for me is managing items across all of my companions. I like recruiting every available companion, even ones I may never/rarely use in my active party. Then, I like equipping all of those companions optimally with my available equipment rather than saving my "best" equipment for just my active party. This is a major roleplaying element for me. As such, having an inventory UI screen where I can access the equipment of all of my companions simultaneously is critical to make it easy to move items around across all those companions. NwN2 is a good example of a game that did this right. By contrast, in the DA games and PoE, you have to swap companions in and out of your active party to move items around, which is such a huge pain.

Inventories generally are boring.

Best is something like oldschool FPSes (Half Life 2, Serious Sam...): you have what you have and have a key-binding to pull it out when you want. TF2 has had the most impactful itemsets of any game I have played. Some items completely change how a character plays (like Charge'n Targe making a defensive, lane-closing Demoman into an offensive, charging frontliner).

In terms of RPGs, some good elements from games included
1. 2 Weapon loadouts to switch between. Diablo, The Sith Lords, etc. have this. Removes some of the tedium of swapping loadouts. Would be better if you could save multiple loadouts as templates, see them with their name on top in the character-viewer as a tab, and switch between them as desired. Like TF2's ABCD preloads.
2. Filters and columns. Morrowind's grid with keywords you could select and auto-organize options was much, much better than Skyrim's graphic's art's major object art gallery. It's more important to convey information than to showoff the model of an art asset.
3. Mod focus. Spiders series of games tend to have fewer main item pieces but more modular sub-parts per item which you as the player can customize. I like this approach as it emphasizes the player as a co-author in the functionality of an item. Want a certain build? You can probably make it. It's lame in games where you have these fixed, pre-assigned designs which may not combine the tradeoffs you want to optimize.
4. Mod impact. Mass Effect did well with letting the player reduce cooldown, add poison affects, stabilize, etc. weapons so you could make them perform how you wanted. ME did poorly by not stacking identical items in the original game, making trading agony.
5. Auto-equip patterns. Dragon Quest and other jrpgs let you set, "offense, defense, mp" and other specialties so when you get a new, better item the character immediately equips it according to their stat-schema. This eliminates the tedium of having to manually open the equipment menu every time you get something, equip it, and leave. It helps with gameflow.

Way too many rpgs have this grind-tastic focus on randomly-generated, marginally-different weapons. It turns the whole game into a Skinner Box. Many of the entries in the hack'n slash genre, mmos, borderlands, fallout 4, etc. have adopted this approach where you don't engage in combat as a fun end-unto-itself but as a means to roll the slot-machine of a loot drop and see your stat numbers go up...even though you don't need higher stats to win combat so they are meaningless. Inevitably your inventory maxes out and the gameplay becomes a cyclical chore of re-organizing your inventory, selling off items, breaking them down to components, crafting, trying to max-out every stat, etc. You spend more time faffing about with items than you do fighting or talking. Inventory/item management de facto becomes the main gameplay loop.

So please no weight limit or grid space limit.

Yep, what that person said, no encumbrance limit. It's just annoying.

Solasta has an amazing solution. Instead of having to pick up every piece of crap you find worth a few copper pieces, you just pick up choice magic items, and then hire a faction to loot the place for you for a fee, then they give you the gold. So you have like 20 spots in your inventory and what your wearing/using, but none of it's filled with Vendor trash, just choice items, keeping it extremely manageable.