Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Character Creation UI...

I haven't started the game yet. I'm still messing with the character creation, fleshing out my character. I'm finding the character creation quite frustrating in places. You did a good job in the appearance customization screens, but the Abilities screen could use some improvement.

I'm somewhat familiar with D&D 5e, so I know each skill gets a bonus from an associated attribute. I don't have those memorized, and the only way I found to see what attribute was associated with the skill was to hover over the skill. The attributes and skills should all be on one screen so when adjusting your attributes you can see the effect it has on your skills.

I think there is also a bug on the skill screen too. I don't know if it was the specific combo I put together or something else. I had proficiency with WIS and CHA, but the skills I could pick from were INT and CHA based. So I dropped WIS two points and put those in INT. This boosted the INT skills by 1, but the WIS skills didn't decrease like they should have. When I noticed this, I messed around with the attributes, and no matter if my WIS was 8 or 17, the WIS skill bonus stayed the same. I don't know if it's a visual bug and it's not displaying the correct bonus on that screen or if it's actually not adjusting them.

I wish I could see a class's future progression in the character creation screen. Pretty much every modern CRPG has this (and some older ones). If someone not familiar with D&D is playing this and they're wanting to play a spell caster, they might wonder why go with a sorcerer or warlock when the wizard gets more spells. Based on what I know of D&D, I know that warlocks and sorcerers have other advantages to make up for having fewer spells, but there is no where in the character creation to find this out.

I found a lot of the spell and ability descriptions lacking important information. Things like how long it lasts, how many times you can use it before having to rest, is it an AOE, how big is the AOE, etc.

Speaking of the hover over pop-ups, some it will have a [...] on it, and you have to press T to pin it and see the full text. I don't see why the full text can't be displayed without having to press T.
I discovered there is a setting in options to always show the full text.

It should also be mentioned on the character background screen that the character background you pick is more than just a way to get a couple of skill proficiencies. I wanted to pick Noble as it was a better fit what I had in mind for my character, but I also wanted the Insight skill, so I chose Guild Artisan instead.

And finally, I wish I could create characters and save them without having to start a game. I tend to play around with a few builds before settling on one. I started this up last night hoping to get my character created and ready to start today, but it took longer than I expected. I needed to go to bed and didn't want to start the game, but that was the only way to save the character I created. That was how I discovered that there is more to your character background than it giving you two skill proficiencies. Now knowing this, I'm going to have to redo the character from scratch. If only I could have saved the character, then loaded it up to tweak it, then restart.

You know what they say about first impressions. Character creation is an RPG's first impression. I think with the hype this game is seeing, it may bring in new players to CRPGs and this could frustrate them and give them a bad impression of CRPGs and turn them off. I've been playing CRPGs since Pool of Radiance, and we've had a nice surge of proper CRPGs lately and I'd love for that trend continue.

Also, the font is very tiny and there is a ton of blank space in the panels!

I just saw in the options that you can set it to always display the full tool tips, so this removes the need to press T to view them. That's nice to have.

I'm re-creating my character now. I see now that the whole UI is designed around your character being visible at all times. The only time the character needs to always be visible is when editing the appearance. It wouldn't bother me if a panel covered up the character, and there is one place where a panel does cover the character; on the class selection when you click Details. They could do similar pop out panels when you click race where the sub-race panel can pop out to the right. The same for class and sub-class, and the abilities screen and skills can fit side by side like the way the details pop out works on the class selection.

There is definitely a bug with the skill screen though. I had two skills that I'm not proficient in higher than they should be. I dumped all attributes to 8 and these two skills stayed the same. It seems to be tied to the background. I was going back and forth between different backgrounds, and it seems like the background skills sometimes stick. Again, I don't know if this is just the UI not updating properly or if the skills are actually stuck. I guess this needs to be reported in the bugs forum.

The font seems fine to me. I'm running 1440p on a 27" display. Do the font settings in the options not change the font on the character creation screen?