Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Feedback From Handheld PC Playthrough (SPOILERS)

INTRO

Feedback from someone who played throughout early access several times on an M1 Max MacBook Pro and played through the full game solo on a handheld pc. Specifically, I played the full game on the “Ayaneo 2” which is like the steam deck except it runs Windows 11, uses the Ryzen 6800U, and has no trackpads. I also plan to play co-op on both MacOS and Playstation 5 when those release. I have exclusively played with a controller since the full release and plan to continue to do so as it’s by far my preferred way to play. My first full play though took just over 100 hours and was finished just before the release of Patch 1, so some of the bugs mentioned may have already been fixed.

There may be spoilers that are not explicitly marked.



FEEDBACK

- Inventory management is a pain, especially with a controller. There really needs to be an auto sort option for controllers than will organize your grenades into a grenade bag, arrows into an arrow bag, potions in a potion bag, and so on. It’s far too tedious organizing the inventory with a controller. Im not even sure how to manually place items in a pouch with a controller. Maybe I haven’t tried hard enough to figure it out, but it’s not clear to me how I can select an item, or items, then place them in some bag of my choice. Though it would be even easier to just be able to auto sort the entire inventory into bags of varying types. Alternatively, perhaps some rule based system could work for automatically adding items to bags. For example, if Gale has a pouch, maybe this pouch can be set by the player to automatically store scrolls picked up by Gale.

- Please add newer FSR. I was surprised to see only FSR 1.0. I hope that FSR 2.0 or even 3.0 will be added in the future, because I personally felt like FSR 1.0 wasn’t worth using. The loss in visual quality just wasn’t worth it for me.

- Please make the object highlighting / labelling a toggle. I don’t want to try to look around a room post-battle with the right analog stick while trying to keep it pressed in all of the time. Why can’t I just click the right analog stick and have the labels be there until I click it again? Maybe you guys want to prevent people from having the labels up all of the time, but if that’s what they prefer then why not let them? It’s a hassle trying to control the camera while keeping R3 constantly pressed when exploring a room. Also, having the labels up on a small screen like the steam deck or ayaneo is kind of a necessity when exploring areas (at least for the first time) so it would be a huge quality of life improvement to simply make it a toggle.

- The “hold A to search in a circle around you” list items move too much. This feature is decent, but it’s frustrating that objects that appear in the list will fall off the list when you go to search one of the objects. If they are in the list, they should persist in the same order until you close the list. Especially since, if you have to search again, you might not know which objects you’ve already searched.

- I think there should be a way to loot all objects in an area at once. It’s a bit of a pain running around a room searching 10 different mephits or goblins. If you guys feel like that would ruin immersion, maybe it can be an effect from a spell or equipment? It’s not too different from the magic pockets if you ask me. Alternatively, looting in an area could just be a toggle-able setting.

- There are issues when auto-selecting items for a long rest. When long-resting, if there was a stack of supply packs (or whatever its called, I can’t remember off the top of my head), it would use the entire stack forcing me to manually split the stack. A couple of times I used a stack of 3 supply packs so I spent 120/40 by mistake. If I click the button to automatically select the food items, it should automatically split a stack of camp supplies instead of being like “okay so you wanted to burn through triple the necessary food right?”

- There are inconsistencies sending things to camp. Sometimes when I would press X on an object, say a painting on the wall, I couldn’t send it to camp. It gives me the option to pick it up though, and then I can go into my inventory, find the object, press X, and then choose “send to camp”. Why not just let me send it straight to the camp? It wasn’t clear to me why sometimes I could send things straight to camp and other times I had to do the more tedious method.

- The pop-up text when switching regions is very unclear.
- Romancable NPCs should maybe read the room a little better.
- It would be nice to have more depth, rather than breadth, to the romance.
- Lady Jannath’s Estate was the worst.
- I personally really want some kind of post-game content.
- An arena where we could battle repeatedly for fun would be amazing.
- I felt like there weren’t enough good rings and cloaks to go around.

- It should be easier to trade items with people in your camp. You should not have to switch someone out, switch the person with the stuff you want in, send that person’s stuff to someone else in your party, switch that person back out, then finally bring the desired person back in. This is especially true since every time you want someone to leave or join your party to have to go looking for them in the camp and then go through a couple steps of dialogue with them.

- I have a few qualms with the character endings.
- The game kind of makes you feel bad for switching party members. I was legitimately concerned that this would cause some negative effect for a while.

- You should be able to preview the looks of clothing/armor and perhaps weapons. Maybe I just didn’t see a better alternative, but to try on different clothes, I had to save the game, buy a bunch of clothes, equip them on each character, write down the ones I liked, load the game, then just buy and equip the clothes I actually liked. It would be so much more convenient if we could preview articles of clothing on ourselves.

- A hairdresser / tattoo artist would be great. I completely understand not being able to change your race, face, etc in the middle of a play though, but it would be great if you could at least make normal modifications such as dying your hair.

- Body tattoos would be appreciated.

- More faces, or perhaps some sliders in character creation, would be a substantial improvement. Right now it seems like a lot of people’s characters look the same, especially because even though there are a few facial options, everyone picks the same one or two options that look the best.

- The “discount” when trading was a bit confusing. It will say something like “Discount: -37%”, which sounds like it could mean that I’m being charged more than the base price and it should be a 37% discount instead. Until I played the game for a bit, I wasn’t quite sure at first if the negative discount just meant I was being charged extra since they had an attitude of 0. Similarly, what happens if they have an extremely negative attitude towards you? Will it say “Discount: +20%”? Because that would tend to make me think the price is reduced from the regular price.

- Extremely underwhelming event at Sharess Caress.


BUGS

- There were instances where an exclamation mark would appear over a characters head, and it would not go away even after exhausting their dialogue options. The exclamation mark seemed to remain there both in and out of camp. This happened for me with Wyll, Gale, and Karlach at various points in my one playthrough.

- There were articles of clothing that would add an incorrect color to the torso of certain characters. I think it was like a slim shirt or something, but my drow’s shoulders were visible and colored pinkish instead of the usual blue-gray.

- Many times, especially with Karlach, the number of actions would be incorrectly displayed (recall I only checked this the controller UI, not sure if this would be true when using keyboard and mouse). Specifically, it would say I had 1 action, I’d use it and it would go down to 0, but I would still have another action that it let me use. So I would just have to try attacking things to see if it would let me attack again, instead of being able to trust the Action counter and circles at the bottom.

- There have been a few instances, both before and after Hotfix 4 I believe, where the game would keep syncing after saving, preventing me from saving again and forcing me to reload my last save. Maybe there should be some kind of timeout feature where, even if you have to delete the save thats syncing, you’ll eventually let users save again so that they can continue without reloading.

- Many times when I would quick save, it would then say at the top left that it’s syncing to the cloud, but wouldn’t actually save the game. Often I would have to quick save twice to actually get it to save.

- Approval information disappeared too quickly. It started to be the case later in the game that “___ disapproves/approves” would only appear at the top-left for less than half a second, so I wouldn’t have time to read it before it disappears. This happened a lot. I’m not sure if I was doing something to cause this, like pressing “skip” in the dialogue after I’ve read ahead, but there should be a minimum duration to all of these little notices.

- Can't use a scroll from the character sheet if it has variants. If you’re using the controller UI, and use select a spell scroll from within the player inventory (as opposed to the radial menu), and the spell scroll has multiple variants, it seems like you can’t get it to work. It’ll just show you text saying that you need to select a variant but I couldn’t find any way to do this. I had to send the scroll to the character that I want to use it, then use it from the radial menu to get it to work.

- Many times the textures would bug out. Characters faces would look rough, almost like they were covered in huge acne scars. People’s legs wouldn’t be visible through the gaps in their armor. During big cut scenes it would seem like higher quality textures would just stop loading in, so I end up up with extremely flat and a few missing textures all over the city.



CLOSING

To be clear, I love the game. After playing through early access a couple times, I played through DOS2, Solasta CotM, and Pathfinder WotR over the next year or two. I also started playing D&D 5th edition weekly for about half a year, though I had never played D&D previously. This game made me want to play games again after not really getting into any games since the Witcher 3, and it opened me up to a new genre. This and WotR are my favorite games from the last few years, and I think I prefer this game in every area except romance. I can't wait to see where Larian and BG3 go from here.