Feedback from someone who played:
- Throughout early access several times on Mac using keyboard and mouse
- Solo (good custom character) play-through on a handheld pc
- Splitscreen (good dark urge) play-through on PS5
- Solo (evil dark urge) play-though on MacOS using a controller
Some of the issues mentioned in my feedback may have already been fixed, but I’ve taken out any feedback that I know to be fixed as of October 8, 2023. This is probably my favorite game of all time, but I'm mostly focused on what I think could be improved below. Points are in no particular order.
—— FEEDBACK ——
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Inventory management is a pain, especially with a controller. There really needs to be an auto sort option for controllers than will organize your arrows into an arrow bag, potions in a potion bag, and so on. It’s far too tedious organizing the inventory with a controller. I’m not even sure how to manually place items in a pouch with a controller.
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Choosing +1 / +2 ability scores in character creation isn’t working with controller. It won’t let me use left / right to change what attribute gets +1 or +2, its just stuck with the default values though they’re not greyed out or anything, so I have to use my touch screen on my handheld PC to change these values before switching back to controller mode.
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I personally really want some kind of post-game content. I understand that Wyll has lost his power and so on but I still want to even just be able to hangout in camp with whoever remains, maybe get married, maybe it says “six months later” and we get get to hang around a rebuilt Baldur’s Gate. Maybe you can buy a house. I personally just find it to be a huge bummer when I can only load a previous save after beating the game. Maybe it could be like the Witcher 3, where it carries on as if you hadn’t defeated the final boss yet, although you have.
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An arena where we could battle repeatedly for fun would be amazing. This would also make for great post-game content. No experience needs to be given for combat. We spend the game getting better and better spells and gear but barely get to enjoy our characters’ final builds. After getting the Duellist’s Prerogative or Lae’zel’s sword I want to use them somewhere other than just the final mission and maybe a couple side quests. Maybe it could be like a tower structure where it’s a matter of seeing how far you can get by fighting progressively harder enemies, or maybe it’s just randomly generated. Either way, this would make getting all of those legendary items feel much more rewarding and give people something to do other than restart from the beginning.
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I felt like there weren’t enough good rings and cloaks to go around. -
I would like the option to hide cloaks. -
A transmog system would be a huge improvement. -
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.
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It would be nice to have the option to return to Act 1 / 2. Maybe you forgot to pick up the Necromancy of Thay until Act 3 or you just want to see the healed shadow-cursed lands. I know these places will be quite bare, but so was the Act 1 area after entering Act 2 and it kind of sucks to be completely locked out.
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Please make the object highlighting / labelling a toggle. 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.
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There are issues when auto-selecting camp supplies for a long rest. When long-resting, if there was a stack of supply packs (or whatever its called), it would use the entire stack by default forcing me to manually split the stack. A couple of times I used a stack of lets say 4 supply packs so I spent 160/40 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 quadruple the necessary food right?”
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It would be nice to have more depth, rather than breadth, to the romance. Instead of being propositioned by several characters in a single play through, it would be nice to have an option to get married, have intimate moments multiple times, or having kids / adoption would also be awesome.
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You should be able to preview the looks of clothing/armor, dyes, 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.
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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.
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Lady Jannath’s Estate has improved since launch but is still my least favorite place in the game. The skulls are just annoying, the ghosts turning invisible and not getting detected is annoying, if you don’t already have the torch to solve the issue then you need to go across the lower city to deal with some other quest line / combat encounter to go get it then come back, but if you long rest at any point then one of them might be dead.
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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 lines of dialogue with them. It takes multiple minutes just to take a ring from someone in your camp and give it to someone in your party.
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When dismissing a party member who had their helmet / hat hidden, they should still have their hat hidden in camp. It’s frustrating to send Astarian to camp only to see him there with the shapeshifter helmet on looking crazy.
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You should also be able to see approval ratings of all companions, not just those in your party. -
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.
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You go to the Sharess’ Caress (I think it was called) and talk to the drow twins, you pay 1000 gold coins for both you and your partner, you walk quite a while, then finally you get to the room and then its a fade to black and read a bunch of text situation? What a scam. -
After using heightened spell, it remains selected in subsequent turns even if you can’t use it again (e.g. you’re out of sorcery points). Since you can’t use it, it’s greyed out and so you can’t toggle it off. Spells like slow and hypnotic pattern won’t let you cast them with heightened spell without sufficient sorcery points. So basically I was unable to cast certain spells at all since I was stuck with heightened spell activated every turn of a battle with no way to turn it off.
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Item descriptions will often disappear if both players are managing their inventory at the same time. -
The traveller’s chest for player 2 does not always persist across multiple sessions. Only player 1 can access player 2’s previous chest. By the end of our split-screen play-through, I think there were four chests instead of 2.
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Party members will sometimes not jump across a gap to reach the rest of the party even if their strength is high enough to do so. Instead, you’ll have to switch to the left behind party member and have them jump across before switching back. It becomes really frustrating when your first party member then jumps back across while you’re controlling the second character, forcing you to split the party then jump both characters across individually.
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Please don’t nerf anything unless it’s not working correctly. This isn’t an online game, so if you want to go through the hassle of getting an overpowered spell, gear, etc. then you should be able to.
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The dialogue around getting the legendary githyanki sword early needs to be fixed. I got it at the end of act 1, which I’m glad about and don’t want this possibility taken away. But getting it caused Lae’zel to start talking in camp about act 2/3 stuff that we hadn’t experienced yet since the game assumes you will be much further into it before getting the sword. Despite some feedback from others in the forums, I think that if the player wants to get this sword early, they’re not going to do it on accident so they should remain free to do so. But maybe collecting the sword alone shouldn’t trigger Lae’zel’s spoiler-filled dialogue.
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Scrolls/grenades/potions/etc should each be a single option in the radial menu. I would prefer that, rather than filling the radial menu with 10 pages of scrolls, potions, and grenades all mixed up, we would select “scrolls” from the radial menu and then get to see only scrolls in a new radial menu. Basically it would work the same as selecting a spell that has variants and then getting a new radial menu with only those variants. This way of organizing things would actually save clicks and make it much easier to find what you’re looking for.
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Guidance should be available from the other player during dialogue when in split-screen. You can’t even manually give it to the other player once they’re already in dialogue, let alone have it automatically provided as an option.
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It is sometimes difficult to wrangle everyone onto an elevator platform. Often times I have to move to just the right spot or walk back and forth a couple times to get everyone onto an elevator, such as the one in the druid’s grove by the sleeping bear.
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We experienced lines of dialogue getting cut off early. At the beginning of act 3, one character was saying some important information but the last second or so was getting skipped. It would also hitch a bit when a line of dialogue started. This issue seemed to get worse since launch. As an example, instead of “the quick brown fox jumped over the log”, we would hear “th-the quick brown fox jumped over the” before moving on to the next line.
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For many companions, their dialogue options aren’t being removed after selecting them once. Every time you talk to them, you can keep asking / talking to them about the same thing as if it were the first time.
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Occasionally Scratch would slide around the camp without moving his legs. - As of October 6th,
Gale still thinks you took Raphael’s deal even if you didn’t and potentially have never even talked to Raphael in Act 3. -
The “Awakened” passive from the Zath’isk should be toggle-able. For example, if you haste and have used an elixir of bloodlust, you could use up to 3 illithid powers in one turn, but with Awakened, you can only cast one. So in some situations this is actually a downgrade. It says in the description that you “can” use them as a bonus action, not that you must.
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There are not enough good piercing options. The ones that exist should be made more modular, e.g. just the earrings not the eyebrow piercings.
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When leaving camp teleports you to the Stormshore Tabernacle, characters seem to end up on the roof. -
Pact of the blade weapon binding should persist across long rests. It becomes a hassle trying to remember every day to re-bind the weapon, and you can’t do it in combat, so this can be needlessly frustrating. I get un-binding the weapon if it’s unequipped, but presumably they still want their same weapon bound until they bind a new weapon.
- Broadly speaking, I feel like
the camp needs to be more lively. You have all of your crew standing / sitting around waiting to be talked to, but there’s nothing else to do. No trading, crafting, mini-games (such as with scratch), interaction between NPCs, etc. It could also be nice to be able to improve the camp over time, adding more functionality such as random merchants visiting a trading post carrying some unique gear.
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A garden for the camp would be great, and potentially some way to get more hyena ears which are always in short supply.
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The post-game / epilogue feels far too light even after Patch 3. I became the Absolute, but I only get to see myself sit in a chair. I would like see what happens next and even to continue to play in some way with my characters fully optimized.
- 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. -
If you’re using the controller UI, and 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.
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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. Sometimes the walls of entire buildings would be missing.
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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.
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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.
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The pop-up when switching regions is very unclear. In act 1, it gives a warning that you should wrap things up before continuing. Okay, that makes sense. But later it says something like “you’re about to go to a different region, venture forth?” If you try to go back to the act 1 area. This is confusing and stress-inducing because I have no idea what the consequences are. Does this mean I will fail quests in Act 2? I also thought that I have to choose either the mountain pass or going through the Underdark, so I almost skipped the entire githyanki creche area since I originally reached act 2 through the Underdark. I saw a reddit post saying that apparently you can do both so I did eventually ignore the “you’re about to go to a different region” warning and go to the creche, but if not for that post I would’ve skipped it entirely. I really think this pop-up either needs to go away entirely or it needs to be clear with what specifically will happen if I go back to the act 1 area. The same is true when going into Baldur’s gate from Wyrm’s crossing, etc.
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You should be able to directly move your character with WASD. Yes there is a mod for this but the majority of people won’t bother with mods and it seems like a big QoL update to have the option to switch between the standard mode and direct character control mode when using keyboard and mouse.
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It would be nice if you could zoom in closer when using a controller. -
I don’t want to accidentally use the owl bear egg when long resting but it keeps selecting it when I automatically select supplies so I’m stuck manually selecting supplies every time. Not a big issue at all but still not ideal.
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It would be nice to decouple cutscenes and various companion story beats from resting. Ending the day at the wrong time has consequences, and on your first play through, you often don't know when the right time is. Long resting also costs resources. So I'll try to rest only when needed, but then I'll find that I have a queue of 3 cutscenes ready to be played but the game only allows one of these per night. So if I want to clear that queue, I need to keep partial / long resting until I get a night that nothing happens. It feels like the game is pulling me in two different directions when it comes to resting.
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When I played PS5 split-screen around a month ago: (1) Every time one of us switched characters, summoned anything, grouped/ungrouped characters, etc. the entire game would freeze for a brief period. Sometimes up to 30 seconds by the end of Act 2. (2) The cursor would stop working so I couldn’t cast spells, jump, even move sometimes, etc. This would effectively make it so that we would have to restart the game. Not sure if these are still issues. At the time, we actually had to stop split-screen and just pass a controller back and forth.
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Some wishlist items for expansions that I may not have necessarily covered in the feedback:
- Of course I would love to see more playable races and classes. Artificer, Hexblade Warlock, Twilight Cleric, Bladesinger Wizard, Aasimar, Aarakocra, etc.
- Increased level cap with all of the associated spells
- Increased difficulty option (not just a hardcore / honor mode that restricts you to one save file)
- New regions and quests
- Looping end/post-game content like an arena providing something to do with your maxed out character builds.
- Content from popular 5e books such as Tasha’s Cauldron, Xanathar’s Guide, Mordenkainen’s Tome, etc.
- Marriage / adoption
- More to do in camp
- Better decorating camp and/or purchasable upgrades
- Overhauled adding / removing companions from party
- Overhauled trading with dismissed companions at camp
- This could probably become the ultimate 5e simulator if a Game Master mode is added
