Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Radial menus - consider Temple of Elemental Evil's method as an alternative

Can we please have a non-customizable, fixed order radial menu that auto-adds items/spells/abilities to sub-menus like in Temple of Elemental Evil? That game completely solved the design problems of radial menus in a DnD game where there are lots of dynamic options, so using it as the basis would be fantastic.

The customizable radial menus we already have are very useful - I just did two 4+ hour flights playing this game on a Steam Deck and it was amazing! But they have some serious downsides too over the long haul, mostly from the auto-adding being a bit too uncontrolled and thus making manual set up a requirement.

Some problems:
- Spells and items are dynamic in nature, so if you put them in a slot and they are either not prepared or you have none of that item, they disappear and other items can take their place.
- They require a lot of manual tweaking to get right, which is a lot of effort across all these characters.
- They are not consistent in positioning across characters except for the last but one menu which is fixed. Trying to make them consistent so the same actions are in the same place across characters is again a lot of effort given all the NPCs.
- Setting them up well requires some serious design and anticipation from the player - I don't know what's coming.
- Trying to re-order them consistently means repeated work across all characters.

ToEE's fixed menus are fantastic. People have even written articles over the years dissecting their design and why it's so good. Please consider implementing them in this game!

Controller support is huge on the Steam Deck and the current set up, while functional and good at early levels, doesn't scale well.

This is a good article on the subject: https://champicky.com/2022/01/21/radial-menus-in-video-games/

The author suggests NWN:EE method as an improvement over ToEE.

Regardless of approach, the game would benefit from auto-generated, hierarchical radial menus.

We absolutely need consistent, auto-generated radial menus, and it honestly needs to happen BEFORE the game releases on consoles.

I've been using controller on PC because I like the more immersive UI and movement, but it's literally taken HOURS of time to try and enforce some semblance of a standard layout across all the party members.

Additionally, we need a better method of approaching the dozens of interactable containers, traps, objects that one finds when exploring a given site. One method would be to long-pressing a stick to search for items in a given radius, and then present a menu showing all the items and containers we've found so we can interact with them: white text to items we can freely take or open, red text for items we can try to steal, bold/caps/orange for traps we've found, etc.

Once we've checked a given container, the text should be italicized, and/or faded out so we know not to re-check it. If something is locked/trapped, clicking on it should present the dice roll menu for picking the lock or disarming the trap (if we pass the perception check to spot the trap).

This exists almost exactly as you describe, but only in the controller UI. Long press the A button on an Xbox or the X button on the PS controller to do a scan in a smallish area around you. The scan radius is big enough to pick up a bunch of objects but small enough you have to move around and rescan. It works well enough to pick up the objects that only reveal themselves when moused over in the keyboard UI.

Only works on the controller UI, there's no keyboard UI equivalent I'm aware of. I mostly prefer the look and usability of the controller UI. A few more improvements would be nice to have though.

Really? Well I'll have to try this tomorrow. I spent today resetting my tutorials to learn the keyboard interface just so I could be proficient in both. I'm kind of irate that several of the sub-menus we've been asking for re: spellcasting, weapons, are already implemented in the M&K interface. It boggles the mind why they didn't think to do the same with the radial menus.

I love ToEE and it's UI, but doesn't something like this need to be built in the game from the start?

It needs code changes. But those can be done at any time, not necessarily prior to the release.

The more I use the radial menus, the more I wish for automated population but with actual categorization and sub-menus as in other games like ToEE or NWN. Dumpling everything into a flat menu structure makes it really hard to find the thing you need.

@v1ld I did go back today and tried the long-press A function you mentioned, and it does work, though it could use some improvement -- namely I still have a hard time discerning which containers I have already looked-thru.

And yes, the long list to scroll thru when trying to manually assign radial slots is a real nuisance. Even at 1920x1080 there should still be plenty of screen real estate to list more than the current narrow box with it's loooong vertical scrollbar.

It's a pity the autoscan function doesn't show you if a container is empty or has already been searched/not searched, yes. It's also annoying that if you empty a container using the autoscan function then it won't be marked as empty in the normal UI until you re-open it there. Small but concerning UI issues that I hope get worked out over time.