Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback For the love of Eilistraee, PLEASE fix the inventory UI, here is a list, PLEASE!!

Really, while the game is wonderful and great, the inventory feels like "straight out of hell", it's unwieldy, hard to use and doesn't match the quality of the rest of the game.

As a software engineer in a team lead role who also works with UI / UX experts, I can give you a few things that I PERSONALLY would request for the inventory, but please, everybody, feel free to add to the list.

I will also add the reasoning / the problem(s) solved for each point.

--- PART A: The easily explained stuff ---

1. PLEASE give us "summed holding capacity"

This is what PF:WotR does, too. It is ultra-extremely annoying and feels like a chore to shift stuff around all the time to avoid the "encumbered" state. The current implementation doesn't have even the slightest positive contribution to fun or engagement, it only serves to annoy the hell out of players.

I would even go as far as having a single inventory, forget the repercussions in case of "somebody leaves the party", even that would be 90% less annoying than the micromanagement that is necessary currently.

2. Please auto-send non-double-use camp supplies to camp automatically

I mean, currently you can't even pick up camp supplies from outside of containers and have them being sent to camp. Leads to characters being encumbered all the effing time and all that, this is just painful.

3. Please mark "vendor trash" as "vendor trash" automatically

Micromanagement. Needless clicking. Wares is wares, game knows what stuff is useful and what not.

4. Please prevent us effectively from selling quest items AND un-questitem questitems if they are not needed anymore

Should be obvious. I would even go as far as having a separate tab in inventory for quest items.

5. Item type for filtering: camp outfits (PLEASE)

Obvious, too. For filtering, etc... but also read below, please.

6. Let us equip items in camp to characters not currently in the party AND include (as an option) items in camp stash to selectable options while in camp

Obvious, I guess.

7. Please let us filter out, not only filter in - AND make "currently equipped" out-filter-able as well

Sometimes we want to see everything except "x".

8. Search function for stuff in inventory

"Hey, where are my Fireball scrolls?"

--- PART B: The more complicated stuff ---

So, this is where things get juicy and this is often also for advanced players in some cases, therefore I will explain what the use case would be.

1. Give us ability to custom-tag items by type (example: "tags for all arrows", "tags for all explodey bottles", "tags for all Arrows of Fire") and search for them

So, here's a few use cases:

a) I may want to tag all high end scrolls with "s***_hits_the_fan"
b) Someone may want to tag all "morning routing preparatory stuff" with "coffee" (example: potion of speaking to animals)

2. Give us ability to send all items with a certain tag automatically to camp, to "vendor trash" category, etc...

Example use cases:

a) I may want to send all the infernal iron I may ever find to a certain character (lets keep the spoilers at bay, shall we)
b) I may want to keep "arrows of displacement" for later

3. Tags as tabs, with multiple tags in a single tab

Yes, this is Excel-like, but trust me, I use software in my daytime job with similar functionality and it helps A LOT.

---

Conclusion:

Dear Larian Studios, your games are wonderful and amazing and I love you very much, but inventory management needs a lot of love. It would help your great Divinity Engine a lot for future games, too, if you would improve the (currently) abysmal inventory managment and bring it to a really ergonomic, 2023 style, standard.

<3

I agree with most of these suggestions (they aren't exactly new, after all), but let me tell you in all honesty that the formatting makes this kinda painful to read.

Also, YES, I would ABSOLUTELY prefer an unified inventory for the entire party rather than this multi-bag oriented mess that scales even more poorly with a party above four characters.
Not as a "if worse comes to worse" fallback option, as you imply, but as a PREFERENTIAL one.

I'm not even sure what's the point of having separate character bags when everyone can still access everything almost all the times, even in combat.
If multiplayer is the reason of this POOR design choice, just make the inventory separate for PLAYERS rather than characters.

When I read these things, I have the impression I'm the only player who actually uses pouches and bags and such to sort items into usable piles and for easy access in combat. And on a 10 strength character to boot.

I have all exploding barrels sorted into separate barrels in camp as well, just I case I want to start throwing those around.

You have all the tools you need to manage your inventory, in my opinion.

I'm sure you are not the only one who uses them.

BUT I can only HOPE you may be the only one who thinks it's a cool solution to the problem, rather than a part of the problem itself.

I DON'T WANT to play the "Busy Little Sorter" moving things in and out of bags and pouches constantly. That's as far as possible from my ideal of inventory management as I can think.

This.

Inventory management is 1987s style, not what it should be.

Proper logistics requires automation of as much as possible, not inventory management being a horrible minigame in itself.

Pouches and bags. Lol. Yes, we had something like that in D:OS2, too, as a gift bag, which made things worse by about 10x when activated.

What we need is tags, tabs and automation, for Eilistraees sake. And unified inventory, not the garbage "ah wait, need to swap stuff around, before I can get back to actually playing the game" system that annoyed the hell out of me in D:OS2 already.

I really wonder how no one @ Larian Studios actually sees (or talks about?) the glaring issues with the "item dumpster" style inventory system. Even gaming "journalists" are writing about it. I can only imagine groupthink being at work here, as harsh as this may sound. Invest a few thousand Euros into an UX consultant and things will be great.

I already said this in other threads in the past weeks, but since this is the "currently active" one on the topic...

My ideal compromise would be:

1- Unified inventory for all party members under your control (which makes for two or more separate inventories in multiplayer, so a one-fits-all solution that gets two birds with a stone).
2- Every character having a total of, say, five to eight slots as a personal "utility belt" where you can place their selected throwable/consumables
3- Everyone can access more or less everything out of combat, while in combat characters would have access only on the stuff they put on their personal utility belt.

Admittedly step 2 and 3 would be additional ones for "simulation's sake" -and probably more divisive between the users that just want some convenience and some that would like to replicate some tabletop mechanics- and at a fundamental level I would be happy even just if we got the first one.

Also, for the love of everything that is holy, PLEASE, make the auto-sorting filters currently active refresh in real time. I shouldn't need to re-activate them manually every time I move a single thing.

You're not obligated to hoard everything you come across. Take what you want/need and leave the rest behind.

I think no inventory system is going to satisfy you. You have the tools to manage it how you like it, if you don't want to use them, then replacing them with arbitrary different tools is not going to be any more satisfying.


Please no. I don't want to play a game that plays itself, I hope they don't implement that kind of convenience spiral to monotony and apathy.

Yeah, an empty inventory is not hard to manage. You got me there.


PLENTY of games I played, even specifically in this very same genre, had inventories good enough to satisfy me.
BG3 is not even in line with the most unremarkable ones but actively one of the worst in the genre.

Go and attempt these poor excuses on someone else.

Is that really the direction you want this to go in?

Not "play itself" but "remove the tedium and the annoyance".

Inventory should not act as a minigame, especially not as the tedious micromanagement nonsense it is now.

I've been an advocate against "convenience at expenses of challenge or immersion" in games for years, so I'm typically not exactly fond of most features that plague this genre these days (i.e. getting rid of any form or resource management, making fast travel exceedingly convenient to use, etc)...

but still, claiming that the game "would play itself" if the inventory isn't a pain in the ass to sort and utilize on a moment-to-moment basis has to be one of the weirdest things I've read in a while.

I think rather my point is that it's not a pain in the ass to use, and the way it exists now makes my experience better while autosorting and the other suggestions would make it significantly worse.

To give an example: I have no idea what's in my alchemical pouch, because it gets autosorted in there. What's it for? No idea, it's all handled automatically. Sometimes I get to craft new useful potions/elixirs/oils for little apparent reason. This also means I can't go hunting for useful crafting materials because I don't know what I need, it's obfuscated. Well, that's not entirely true, I know what hyena ears are for because I wanted to know how to get more speed potions. But that's the point, because of automation, I know next to nothing how the alchemy system works. For all I care, it could roll a die once per long rest to determine if you can craft a certain potion or not, it would make no difference. But someone put time and effort into making the system that exists.

For the rest of my inventory it's different. I care about what items get in my inventory. Which ones stay in there and where the others go. Who gets oils? Who gets bombs? Where do I go with heavy armor? I decided all that, I solved those issues for my party of characters, and I care about what all of these things are and what they are for. It is satisfying setting up a manageable system and organizing my party to be effective and to get the right things in the right place to be used.

Imagine if I knew which plants are used to craft poisons and I had a party that doesn't care about poisons, I wouldn't have to bother with those plants while exploring. This would allow me to further emphasize/role play my party's decisions in the world.

Automation just makes you gobble up everything only to be confronted with an inventory where nothing makes sense to you, which helps make it feel like a mess. A system where you understand what things are for which helps you avoid hoarding and making a mess is a thousand times more enjoyable, and you make such a system by not automatically putting everything away for convenience.

Yes, inventory should serve the game.

Its a utility, that people use to solve the actual problems they are confronted with (example: "hm, I need a AOE damage spell"), not be a problem to use.

Still, I keep wondering why Larian Studios doesn't do anything about it. There are examples out there and Larian Studios usually goes far beyond anything everyone else does.

Except when it comes to UX. Your example of toilet chain is a similar example.

And... UX experts as an external ressource are not THAT expensive either.

You can get a whole year of UX expertise for 100k, which this game doesn't need, it would be more like 1-2 months of consultation with some mockups and discussions with the UI team.

+1 especially for the Part A requests. Not a big fan of manually tagging though. Also, would be a pain on the consoles.

Why can you send everything directly to the camp but then have to manually sort all the items? It is just cumbersome.

And why is the inventory just 2 pixels to the right from my equipped items? There is so much wrong with the current implementation that I am curious why this hasn't been addressed during years of EA.

Tagging would only be done once for a whole category of items with my idea, I also think that there should be "preset" tags.

Let me give you four examples:

* So if you like the Fire Arrows: right click a Fire Arrow, select "set tag for Fire Arrow" (other options will be "set tag for all arrows", etc...) and then either choose a predefined tag or create a new one - from now on all Fire Arrows will be tagged properly

* If you want all scrolls to be tagged: right click a scroll, select "set tag for scrolls" and same as above from here

* If you want all potions of speaking to animals go to camp, put a tag on them and set the tag itself to "goes to camp automatically"

* If you want all the shrooms to be sold automatically: set tag for all shrooms, and edit tag to make it "goes to wares automatically"

Let's add to that:

When sorting inventory, alcohol food should not be sorted into potions when sorted by type.

Random junk, food, alchemy ingredients, and some combat expendables like grease bottles should not be sorted together when sorting by type.

Since we are adding: auto-sorting pouches and bags are not the greatest design to begin with, but they could AT LEAST work properly.
No idea why alchemical reagents -just to name one example- go into the alchemical pouch automatically when picked up from ground (uh, 85% of the time, at least) BUT they DO not when passed from one inventory to the other or into the camp chest.

Also, stacking items could make at least an effort in stacking consistently rather than being a coin toss "Sometime we stack, sometime we require a separate inventory slot".

Not clear why there are these weird limitations on how much one can widen the camp chest window.

Really, there's SO MUCH wrong with how this UI works, at times, it's baffling a major studio with hundreds of developers can't spot these issues.

BONUS - It would be great if the game acknowledged stuff inside bags as something contained into your inventory, for quest purposes and so on. Which is often not the case.



Point entirely rejected, then, for overwhelming evidence of the contrary.
Try to have some standards.

I would like to have a 'send to alchemy pouch' option.

Yes, I agree, the categorization and metadata for items ("stackable", etc...) looks like it was knitted with a very hot needle.

Problem here is probably that fixing this big amount of data (remember: game has tons of distinct items, I'd say its on the order of hundreds) would require a whole team that coordinates what goes where and then do all the changes. Not a very creative and inspiring line of work, people hate this in other fields of software engineering, too (thats why ERP software still looks like it was done back in the 90s, etc...).

"Have some standards" is the right advice here in my most honest opinion - not only us, the players, but also when it comes to approaching itemization details.

A good practice in software engineering for such things is to have a general set of guidelines which are flexible enough (withing boundaries) to allow for addition of new categories (or metadata fields), but still expressively spell out what defines a "category" or a "metadata field" justifies.

This should happen automatically when you sort items. Right now it only puts new items in the corresponding container but if you somehow prevent this or take them out manually, they stay out. Needs a fix.