As I walk around this world, I find all sorts of things that I can pick up. I have no idea which things are going to be useful, so I just pick up everything. I look in every container. How badly am I going to need gold? I don't know, so I'll just grab everything and try to sell it all to this merchant that for whatever reason is willing to give me money for these spears, a raw chicken, and these totally mundane rocks that I found on the side of the road.
Then there's the little mini-game of figuring out how much stuff I can carry at once without being over-encumbered. Trade things back and forth between characters. Put things in backpacks and try to keep the maelstrom of mostly useless garbage that I've been picking up in some resembling an organized state. It doesn't help that the interface for actually dragging things around in inventory seems to be extremely picky and possibly a little buggy? Why, when I'm dragging something into a backpack, does it scroll up to the top of the backpack every single time?
Suffice it to say, dealing with the multitude of mostly useless minutiae lying around the world takes up a lot of time and is fairly boring and frustrating. It's not the fun part of the game, but it feels like not doing it is going to result in you either not finding the important thing that you need to advance the story or not have enough income to buy the things that you need later on. Can't we find a way to abstract this boring bit away and focus on the fun parts?
One idea for how to do this:
Individual containers are not loot-able. A player can click a button to have a character search the room/area that they are in and you get all of the results for every container/corpse/desktop/etc. in that area. This could be based on a perception or investigation roll. The actual useful stuff (maybe 10% of what you find), you can drag into your inventory. The text of books you find gets put into some kind of journal that you can look through whenever you want - there aren't actual book objects. The rest gets converted to gold on the spot - let's just assume that you take it back to the merchant and sell it to them.
Maybe each character (or the entire party together) can do this search once per area. Maybe you can do it more times, but there's some price to pay: e.g. consuming some kind of endurance resource or there's a chance to gain levels of exhaustion or a chance to get clumsy and destroy the things that you might find or one character gets bored and picks a fight with another character. Obviously, this would require a little work to balance.
Dramatically reducing the amount of consumables (food, potions, scrolls, bombs) would be nice, too, but that's a different (if related) issue.
I'm sure that some people enjoy the accounting of all of the stuff that you find along the way. To me, it just feels tedious. Can we simplify the boring parts?
