Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Pause game / Pause button+ other thoughts of mine.

Just started playing EA.

One think that bugs me over any other is inability to pause game.

Sometimes we need to pause not only action during turn based mode but also dialogue or whatever.
Simple, we should be able to press esc and pause whatever, so we can go to toilet/attend to cooking dinner, crying baby, or whatever in IRL.
Please include this feature in game.

Curiously I found a huge discussion on this on Reddit, but not on this forum.

Please add item sorting option to inventory? By weight, price, recent etc?

Also, how to scroll quest list. Impossible. Ridicculous. Please fix?
edit: Can csroll, with tiny arrow symbols, but still can hardly see or touch the last quest on the bottom of creen.
conclusion resolved badly atm.

Sorting button is there, is in top - right part of screen when you have inventory opened.
Image is from older version ... but its on pretty much same spot, just bigger now.
https://preview.redd.it/2f4gyt4au3s...0609989e7bab6ecb233a86b260212a744a72c70d

But i really wonder what for do you need pause. O_o
Quite many people is demanding it around here, but nobody so far was able to tell why. O_o
There is no timer on litteraly anything, the world is waiting for you eternaly and nothing is happening without your presence, you could say that this world is permanently paused unles you came around and start acting. O_o

Hah that's so true

The situation that comes to mind immediately is if you are sneaking around and need to step away in a hurry; the world may be static and lifeless when you aren't around, but NPCs and enemies near you still walk around a bit and there's a risk that you get spotted when you wouldn't otherwise.

The other reason to have the game pause when you hit Esc, absent a compelling reason that it shouldn't pause, is that this is what people expect. When you are designing something, it is generally good practice to have it behave intuitively whenever possible. It was jarring for me the first time I hit Esc, expecting the game to pause and it didn't. I spent several minutes looking for a way to pause the game after that and only found turn-based mode, which doesn't really do what I'm looking for.

My question is, is there a reason that players shouldn't be able to pause the game?

Even if time passing in the game doesn't have a consequence and combat is turn-based, sometimes you get interrupted in the middle of a cutscene or dialogue by something that can't wait (e.g. a pot is boiling over on the stove, front door buzzer for a delivery, etc.). Since you don't want to miss the narrative and you can't wait for the end of the cutscene, that is when pause would be helpful. I've seen a few games that allow you to pause anywhere, and it's a very thoughtful feature. I agree it would be helpful to have that option.

I also agree about the journal. I can't read my bottom one or even two companion entries because of how it's cut off, even when scrolled right to the bottom. I've submitted it as feedback through the game, so hopefully they fix that.

For inventory, I like picking up bags/pouches and using them to keep my inventory organized. That way I can keep things in there that I don't plan to sell but may need later (like a quest item). You can sort those as well (although it doesn't seem to keep the sort the next time you open it).

My main concern considering pausing the game is during cinematics and dialogue.
A long dialogue/cinematic starts and immediately I need to go afk for reasons: toilet, food, baby etc...

Thank heavens for replying, now I can finally sort items. Was so fustrating!

I agree. Although you can enter Turn mode anywhere at any time, which essentially pauses the game, it is still very clunky and doesn't always work right. Some characters, for whatever reason, decide not to enter turn mode and wind up springing traps or something stupid and I have to reload.

I do fond myself looking for a dialogue to pause the game, but even that doesn't always work.

One time, fighting the hag, beat her and was talking to her corpse. Wyll suddenly started making noises. I noticed him running on the background with a cloud over his head. While I was talking to the hag, he had run through a poison cloud and was dying. I had to switch to a character not in the dialogue and hurry them over to him to aid him because he had collapsed and was dying. I had sold my Revive scrolls so luckily I had noticed him dying in time. It is not cool that the game doesn't even really pause for cutscenes and in this case it was almost a reload moment.

True, you can't pause conversations, but there is a button in the bottom left for dialogue history. If you need to pee and don't mind missing hearing the dialogue, you can always get caught up with the dialogue history.

That there is a mediocre way to half-fix one of the issues caused by lack of pause is not a good reason to not include a relatively universal feature.