Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback My issues with looting in BG3 and suggestions for improvements

(I know there is another topic about looting here on the first page, but that guy raised about 765 other points in the topic and the discussion there is too messy for my tastes. In this topic I want to focus on one issue only: looting.)

So, to summarise my issues with looting, I'll raise my points:

• Just for future reference, when I talk about looting, my personal way to loot in the overworld is to hold the button that shows the tooltips of all lootable objects, and then I click on those tooltips to loot the items. This means that I don't actually look where the item I am looting is placed, because I can just see the tooltip. And often times I can't see where the items are placed, because the tooltips cover them.
• Looting corpses is relatively OK, but there is an issue where SOME corpses say they are "empty" in their tooltip after you loot them and some don't. This makes you check the same corpses repeatedly unless you explicitly remember that you looted that corpse, which can be hard to remember in a pile of bodies.
• Looting items that are just placed in the world is very slow and there is a huge issue with clutter. It is a common occurence that you encounter a big pile of food, which is all actually useful and you may want to loot it. So, you try to pick it all up, and it takes ages. Especially when, while the tooltips look like they are all very close together, my in game characters apparently need to move and shimmy around a lot to reach the item before they pick it up. I have had several piles of loot in which my characters needed to make a movement before looting every single item, which can feel like an excruciating amount of time when looting like 10 items that appear to be on a single large pile.
• Take the previous issue and imagine how it feels when the pile of 10 useful items is also mixed into 10 useless clutter items like spoons and plates. You need to read all the tooltips. Decide which items to pick and click on those. It takes a while. Every once in a while the tooltips rearrange when you pick something up so you need to check them all again. This takes so very long. But that's not all!
• Containers! I am mentioning them last but make no mistake, containers are the worst. Like DOS 1 and 2, BG3 is currently a container opening simulator first, fantasy roleplaying game second. You have built your assets in a way that they are always containers and they always have a chance to generate random items and some of those items can always be useful. So the optimal way to play it is to... check every container. Some containers say that they are empty after you loot them and some don't. Some containers don't even appear as tooltips when you highlight lootable objects.
• You might think something along the lines of: "But Throrface, in Skyrim (or a bunch of other games) you also had to open all containers, so didn't you mind opening containers there?" So to that I would say: Yes, I did, but in Skyrim an open shelf wasn't a container, while in BG3 it always is. In Skyrim, you can immediately see that an open shelf is empty. In Baldur's Gate 3, in the overworld, you can see a big rack full of potion bottles that is a container that you need to open and after opening it you find out it contains 2 empty bottles and 1 spoon. There are many things that aren't containers in other games that are containers in BG3, so there is on average a lot less containers in other games than there is in BG3. Heck, a big wooden shelf with 3 shelves filled with potions - how many containers would you expect that to be? Because in BG3 it's 4, four separate containers. One for the shelf, and one for each line of potions.
• A little anecdote at the end. In a game that isn't BG3 (Deus Ex: Manking Divided, for example), when I enter a room that is full of clutter and looks like it has actually been lived in, my reaction is: "Cool, the level designers really made a good job here and I feel immersed in the game world." In BG3, when I enter a room that is similarly full as the previous one, my reaction is: "Fuck, this is gonna take ages to loot and there is like 65 containers again." I think this is a problem. It creates a bad gameplay experience and it even does a huge disservice to your level designers. I actually think you have great level designers who can make beautiful environments! But the gameplay experience of those environments ends up being shit so the aesthetical value is lost in translation.

Alright, the complaining is over. I would like to make a few suggestions on how I would like you to improve things.

• It would greatly improve readability and accesibility if all loot tooltips were color coded to tell me what kind of item I am seeing. Camp supplies are yellow. Clutter items are grey. Weapons and armor are green. Containers are white. Corpses are red. That kind of thing. We already have corpses differentiated like this and it's good.
• It would be a big help if "highlighting lootable objects" was somehow improved too. Imagine a setting in the options like this: "Only highlight clutter (grey) objects when their value is 2 or greater." This would filter out SO MUCH useless stuff and make it so much better to read. Why not just filter out all clutter items? Because diamond rings and golden plates are technically clutter items too. Of course if valuable loot items were differentiated from low value clutter items, it would be OK if the option was just to filter out all clutter items.
• Containers need Jesus, man. I am pretty sure you have already built a ton of levels with them as they are and making a change to how they fundamentally work is practically impossible.
• Container improvement 1: Fix the issue where some containers do not say they are "empty" after they have been emptied.
• Container improvement 2: Implement a tag that says "opened". The opened tag would be assigned to containers that I have opened but did not empty. This happens often when containers contain useless clutter items like plates and spoons.
• Container improvement 3: Add a setting to the options like: "Do not highlight containers which are <empty>." and "Do not highlight containers which are "opened.". I would always play with both of these options on.
• Container improvement 4: Imagine if you will, that if you have a character with a passive perception of 15 or higher in your party, all containers that contain anything other than clutter are somehow highlighted and all containers that contain only clutter are not. The design intent behind this is that I don't want to ever feel like I must check all containers in the room. I know this is a problematic thing to implement because you roll the contents of random containers when they are opened.

Right, so that's my feedback on looting and containers. I am sorry if my tone was a bit rough, I tend to be passionate when giving feedback about things I care about. I know my suggestions may be completely off or impossible to implement and I accept it, but nevertheless I would appreciate some improvements on the overall looting experience. I colored the bolded text because I didn't feel like bold text in this format is sufficiently distinguishable from normal text.

I would like to coment on suggestions ... but there isnt much to tell, i like them all.
+1!

Just few notes:
When you take your mouse over container you didnt check yet (bodies included) the chest it turn to is gold with small * (or is it +?)
When you take your mouse over container you did check allready (bodies included) the chest it turn to is silver (or grey) without anything else.

I have noticed this just few days back ... it really is much more usefull than you would guess.

Besides the first note ...
There was some time ago quite nice (in my opinion at least) suggestion for AoE loot ... simply click on container and get loot window with EVERYTHING from all containers in 5m (for example) radius ...

Either that, or make single container that will look as 5 Barrells/crates/piles of books/etc ...
I just recently come in contact with this in Witcher 3, and even tho it was a litle confusing at first ... i find out its actualy quite ellegant solution.

Ya, there still is a problem with corpses mismarked, been like that since launch of EA, fix would be nice. An reach for items would be nice also so character isn't running around corners and what not just to pick up one item.

Color coded items, no thx & looting is fine.

Yeah they put AoE loot in DOS2 on consoles, it’s great. Hopefully they can put it in here. There was also the Luck stat which meant you could find random loot, making looting more worthwhile. I don’t mind players being rewarded for doing the extra work, but this is way too tedious how it is currently.