Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Excessive Containers

An issue which has significantly bogged down gameplay is the massive overabundance of containers, which contain enough consequential items that you want to search them but for the most part are empty or contain junk.

If the idea was to make the game more immersive by making all objects interactable, the reality is that it just pollutes otherwise excellent gameplay with an almost constant treadmill of tedious busywork, in a manner which is completely unnecessary.

I don't honestly see a non labour intensive way of correcting this issue after the fact. The best solution would simply to have had far fewer of the items interactable and those that were highlightable with the alt key; the ability to move around or open everything does not do nearly enough to add to immersion or gameplay to justify the persistent and highly detrimental impact this has on gameplay.

But as the game has been made as it is, I think the best solution now would be to have either a hotkey or toggle to highlight any container containing non food supply consumables, crafting, gold, magic items or quest relevant items where such containers do not presently need a perception check to be interactable. That will cut out the large majority of containers currently in the game and allow players to much more quickly filter those containers that they should bother checking and those that are just a waste of time.

The fact that we effectively need a loot filter in a game like this is silly and would be a bit jarring to implement, but honestly, it would be making the best of a bad situation.

In future, Larian just needs to stop making such needless mistakes in the gameplay design. This isn't as bad as the constant treadmill of completely RNG gear combined with level scaling that gave all gear a very short shelf life, but it is nonetheless a serious flaw in gameplay that Larian have actively added into their game for no justifiable reason and which clearly should have been picked up on and corrected in 3 years of early access.

This was a pretty frequent topic of conversation in the course of Early Access. Personally, I find it quite immersive and am perfectly happy to ignore containers and risk missing stuff when I don't fancy crate digging, though I'd like to be able to use spells or perception checks to find good stuff.

Others, I know, are more of your mind.

Yea, it's a common complaint. The only problem I have is that there are very important quest items just randomly sitting in containers that aren't super obvious, so you really need to just check out everything, or risk losing out on something.

It feels absolutely onerous feeling like I have to check every single container to ensure it doesn't have a random magic item or such inside. This is particularly true when using a controller since even using the Left & Right D-pad buttons to cycle thru containers is wonky and you need to reposition and reselect another container after looting one. I have no doubt that console players will be frustrated by this UX.

I think what they were going for is the tabletop feeling of looting absolutely everything, but while players do do that. They don't ask their DM: "Can I loot that container?" "Yes, it has nothing." "Okay what about that container?". They actually just loot the entire room at once and then get an accounting of what they found. I think the game could benefit with something similar. Once a room is clear of hostiles, you should be able to loot everything. They could even throw in a perception check to see how well you did so. This could open a container menu that collates all of the containers in the room or for outside environments, a set area that the button can highlight.

Yes, being able to "loot the room" would be respectful of the players' time and sanity. I hate it when games force me to waste countless hours doing menial, repetitive work instead of actually playing and exploring (glares in the direction of Genshin Impact).

No, this is a common topic before launch. It's just in your head and you don't need to search all containers nor pick up crap loot, not mandatory.

This is Larian 101. I think they did it as a joke in Divinity and then it just became a thing they did in all their games.

What's particularly odd to me is that most containers that are not barrels, crates or dressers never have anything in them. More likely to find potions in a barrel than on a potion rack, for example. Vases are always empty despite being *everywhere*.

The fact that it was a common topic before launch is a point in my favour, not against it. That, as well as the majority of other responses, demonstrates that its a point of frustration for players.

And you dont NEED to do anything. Its a game. But players dont like feeling there are potentially missing out on quest related items or other useful gear, which if they dont check containers, they inevitably will. Obviously, you don't need to pick up trash, but you DO need to open the container to know if it contains trash or something actually useful.

The bottom line is, having this number of interactable containers creates a lot of busywork for no good reason. Its not adding anything to the game.

If your response its not a problem because you yourself just dont open them, then what exactly would your objection be to having those containers you arent opening removed?

Yes please! Make it an area of effect.