Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback User Experience and User Interface Feedback

Hello,

I am a Divinity 1 and 2 player and D&D 5E player / DM. By trade, I am a software developer.

The purpose of this post is to communicate some feedback in regards to the UX/UI of the game and some concerns I have for the future of this game.

For those unaware, the user experience and user interface of a piece of software are near equal importance to the actual functionality of that software. Some would argue that the UX/UI is a software feature in itself, increasing the importance of getting it right.

After playing Divinity 1 and 2 for some time, and now playing early access to BG3, I have started to notice similar issues between the games that I'm afraid are being missed in the development cycle of the game. Here are a few:



This takes the UX/UI from D2, where many of the potential things one could do on their turn used a similar resource, and places it into a system that NEEDS separation. Take a look at DnDbeyond.com. On a character sheet, you have tabs seperating your actions from bonus actions, reactions, different tabs for every spell level, a tab for your class abilities, and race abilities. This is super important at early levels, to have this distinction, but my God. What would throwing up every action, spell, abilities, and feature on the same bar at higher levels look like? It actually triggers a bit of PTSD.



It is still an issue to accidentally cast a spell, take an action, or move when you didn't intend to. This is because of a couple of reasons: One; there aren't any confirmation popups that protect you from situations like this, and two; there aren't enough visual queues to let the player know what action they are currently "queued" to take during the selection of their next move/action/spell.



I understand completely how the Sneak Attack feature works in Fifth edition. For those who do not, Sneak attack is a feature that allows you to add damage to an attack if you have advantage on their attack role. An key understanding is that you can add this damage ONCE PER TURN and you choose to do so on a succesful hit. In BG3, Sneak attack is its own box so someone like myself, who expected to see some type of prompt on an atttack role would be confused to find out that they had to use the very specific Sneak Attack box to apply that extra damage.



This is probably merely an issue with the current interface. The interface in general really needs some polish and specific direction for the player to know what is happening to his character and the party at any given time.



It looks like a cluster of character boxes without meaning and is very hard to read.


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Those are just a few of the issues that I see with the UX/UI. These bits of feedback do NOT regard gameplay issues or things I'd like to see polished up regarding fifth edition ruleset versus BG3, but that is a list in and of itself.

Cheers,

Zuun

I have been struggling with this quite a bit.

In order to see a hit percentage or determine if I'm in range to do something, I have to click first from the hotbar... but often just doing that seems to lock me into the action and I can't toggle back out once the icon has been clicked. Even at it's most basic, say a melee vs ranged attack, the UI doesn't respond very well to a last minute change of plan.

Because there is no confirmation prompt, I waste a lot spells/actions/turns just from clicking to get information then regretting my click.

Range is kind of like that in general, where you almost always have to click cursor and start moving before you can determine all the possible movement paths or see how far you can actually reach on the ground. Also the game doesn't have a way to set up an action for the subsequent turn, so if I want to make a basic attack but the enemy is out range, it just kinda stalls out until I deselect the sword or spell icon and just cursor to the ground to move instead. I wish I could issue the command and have it queued into the next turn if need be, so I don't have to click around so many times just to do the simple stuff like hack and slash.

I find the hourglass and party rotation a little confusing too, how you can select a char who's already moved out of order. It has this effect of making me feel unsure whether I'm about to accidentally skip a turn with somebody.

Obviously would be nice to target from the portraits.

It'd also be sweet if I could customize the UI elements, in terms of position on the screen and such. Move the mini map, separate hotbars or change their orientation from horizontal to vertical and do things like that.

Lastly, and I don't know if this if really a UI thing, but it just feel like the range of char movement in general is too low. I mean the real distances in the game environment relative to how far the average character can move before their action bar is spent. Its pretty unforgiving right now, which makes every cursor click click there even more critical. One goofed click and you might have to waste another turn just getting in range again, cause of some weird accidental juke move or a randon curve in the movement path that didn't become clear until after issuing the command.

To ballpark I'd say that what reads as 10 meters on the ground currently, should probably be closer to 5 meters at this scale.

Basically everyone moving twice as far on a given turn. Which would be chill if the cam wasn't zoomed in so tight by default. I mean just based on how the environments are designed and how far most enemies can move. It'd probably make bows feel a little more realistic at that distance/scale too. Certainly playing a Melee type would be more fun, since right now they spend most of their time running around rather than swinging like mad hehe.

Anyhow, good post!
Just wanted to give it some love before it slipped under the pile.

+1