Things that are awesome:
• Active roll is even better than I thought it would be after I saw the video. This feature is absolutely amazing! I want more of this please!!!! Can you please add an option to have a similar active roll dialog pop up for my characters in combat? Once I select an action I would love the active roll screen to pop up, show me the die, show me all currently applied bonuses, and give me the option to apply other buffs just like for a dialog. This would look awesome, make it feel more like a tabletop, and also serves as a tutorial of sorts for folks who do not play a ton of D&D. New users may not know one of their other characters who are in the same initiative group as them could use a bonus action to buff their another character's roll. This would be super helpful in combat.
• I love being able to save Shadowheart. Thank you for adding that to the game. I saved her on my playthrough this morning and I was really happy with how it changed the beginning of the story. Well done!
Things that need some improvement:
• In the active rolls screen it would be great if you could put a highlighted border which is color coded around skills as they are selected, so users know what will be "consumed" by applying it. If you highlighted Actions as green and Bonus Actions as Red or put the little dots showing Actions, Bonus Actions, and Spell Slots on the icon when it is selected it would be helpful. When you move across skills in the action bar on the left you get to see what will be consumed. It would be nice to have this in the Active Rolls screen as well. I would love to see similar highlighting as I select skills on the action bar as well. I know it shows it on the information pane to the right, but having it highlighted I know immediately without having to glance to the side.
• Controller sensitivity option
○ Stadia has no built-in controller sensitivity and the both the D-pad and analog stick moves way too fast when I try and move across menus. Can you please add vertical and horizontal sensitivity to the options menu for controller play?
Things that are broken:
• When I arrived at the Druid camp gates I killed all the goblins, but then I could not enter the camp. It got stuck on the screen below. I talked to everyone and walked out of the area and came back in with my other characters, but it still would not progress the story and let me in.
Features I still feel are needed:
• DoS 2 style search/loot system. It is still way too difficult to try and walk over to each individual item with a controller to search it. The DoS2 system of putting all searchable things into a menu you can choose from to search worked great. Please bring that to BG3 when using a controller.
• Party hide/unhide & group/ungroup on controller
I play on Stadia and there are 2 things you do all the time in BG3 which are excruciating to do on a controller.
To put all my characters into hide or unhide all my characters it takes over 20+ button presses. This is a lot for something you do all the time. The character screen currently has many buttons which are not used when on that screen. Can you please add something like:
- Double-click on Y: Hide/unhide all party.
- Hold Y and select one character's portrait with the stick: Hide/unhide this character.
And something similar for group/ungroup entire party
• Optional rewind last action button in combat
○ I want to experiment in combat and try the variety of skills/spells my characters have, but I shy away from this because it can very easily lead to a party wipe and a save reload if a spell/skill does not act the way I thought it would. The difficulty of the encounters is turned up pretty hide and I always need to follow the same formula…. barrels, sneak, high ground, attack with my most powerful combination. I don’t bother doing a lot of experimentation because the cost of something not working out is so high. Combat encounters can last a long time. It isn’t like a typical action game where if you mess up you respawn right where you left off. If you are at the tail end of a fight that you already spend 30 minutes on you don’t want to experiment and have to restart the whole encounter. This really discourages experimentation. It would be great to have an option, which is disabled by default, that users could choose to enable which would allow you to rewind to just before your last player character’s combat turn, so if something goes really wrong you can try it again. It has the same end effect of reloading a save except you don’t have to re-do a 30 minute combat encounter to try new skills. Yes, you can before any of your characters takes their turn, so you can reload but this is a pain in the neck, easily forgotten, and reloading can take more than a full minute. I think having a rewind option would be super helpful for new users and even for those of us who have beaten the game a couple of times and just want to try new things. It should be optional and it should be a combat only feature, so story related items you are still at the mercy of RNG, so your adventure can take you down different paths. Having this also makes the current bugs in the game less painful. When the game flakes out and skips my characters turn for no reason or fires an arrow instead of the spell I selected I can just rewind that. Again, I think it should be optional, so folks who do not like save scumming don’t need to use the feature. It could even be something you only have for a single act and is not allowed in multi-player games. But, I would love to experiment more with the cool things which exist in the game.
• Loadouts or macros
There are a ton of button clicks associated with a long rest. Because of the way the game is balanced you can't just walk around with your party. If you do and combat starts you are at a significant disadvantage. Because of this I need to do the following anytime I take a long rest:
1. Re-summon my familiar(s)
2. Re-apply my mage armor
3. Re-apply my dark vision to characters or equip my torches (if you enter a dark area without this you are at a significant disadvantage)
4. Hide all my party members
If you add all this up, on a controller it takes several minutes just to get ready to start walking around. Maybe it is less painful with a keyboard and mouse, but with a controller this is a real bummer. Would it be possible to add some type of a loadout which puts your party in their default state (assuming you have enough slots to execute these steps) or maybe have a macro you can record to quickly cycle through the steps? Since a short rest is pretty much useless because it does not restore all your abilities I usually take a long rest after a big battle and having to do this preparation every time really takes away a lot of the fun and makes the game more work that it needs to be.
