Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Searching and inventory management are boring

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?

Less crap that is worth 300gp that only sells for 15 so you arent trying to be the garbage lady from the Labyrinth just to scrape enough coin to get one thing. As a DM, I usually just give people a bag of holding that holds 300 pounds and they empty their inventories into. 5 people with EVERYTHING in a bag that holds 300. Its not until later when they find 3000sp in a hoard do they go himm...Wooden chests worth, actually worth 400gp, that weight 50 pounds, they take until something else is better value to weight. But you certainly not picking up 50sp plates and crap.

There are too many lootable things that are empty or garbage, and what is mildly "worth" it is worthLESS at a vendor because the numbers dont correlate even remotely at a neutral reputation. A chest in a room should be exciting. An "opulent chest" shouldnt have a fork and a carrot. Loot is exciting, searching bodies is a crapshoot and the DM chooses the amount based on investigation score, typically. But if there is a chest or a box or something, people should be excited about it. Something you can use like a bomb, flask, scroll, or a lot of money. D&D has 2,000 gold rings. A ring of spell storing can cost up to 25,000gp. Its a system that is infrequent but bountiful.

This is the first thing I noticed in the game... to much clutter and too many lootables. At least, dont have empty containers. If a container contains notning, dont let us interact with it - and have all containers show up when holding down alt.

I would rather have a system with a bit more gold (or gems/jewlery), and no clutter at all.

If the goal is to challenge the party on encumbrance, either reduce the capacity, add weigh to coins, increase weight of usefull consumables, or all of the above.

For me it boils down to what kind of fun I want from this game: Great story, fun encounters and discovering interesting locals and people (and i dont mean discovering a sweetroll a fat trunk). I think BG3 can deliver on all, but I spend more time on everything else - clutter being the biggest sink right now.

The crazy part is that someone had to actually create the art assets for all those carrots and potatoes, random cutlery and bowls.

It'd be one thing if we were making the most epic Rock Soup ever, to distract an Ogre or whatever, but if its just gold in the end not sure why we need so much of the junk. I'd rather the zots be spent on another set of chainmail or alt look for the longsword.

My first thought was that all these empty chests are some poor sobs job to fill before it goes out of EA and into Full release. Maybe surprising us each update with another chest filled? But damn, that dude's got his work cut out for him if that's the case, and probably by the time its done I'll be too tired of searching about anyway.

I think a solution like the one proposed by the OP is solid idea. A general "loot area" button, possibly with a downside. Perhaps Astarion is skimming off the top and keeping a separate bag of holding we don't know about? lol. Or something like the cost/benefit schemes suggested above. Clumsy grave robber pitfalls or the like, sounds fun! But yeah, I like the idea of just simplifying it considerably and focusing on what's interesting to find/use over what isn't.

I don't know maybe they have some as yet unannounced plan to go all Breath of the Wild with a cooking system, but that's not exactly why I'm here. Monty's going to throw it all in the bag, so it might was well be worthwhile.

This is an area where regular clothing/armor aesthetics could come into play. How about instead of another carrot its a pair of red boots. You know just regular boots, but red. A quarter staff or robe that looks different from the last one I picked up, stuff of that sort.

I agree that finding a chest especially an ornate one should be a pretty big deal and cause for excitement. BG had this same sort of thing going on with a fuckton of barrels everywhere, but at least when you saw a big cold chest with chains and padlocks, it gave you a reason to wish you had a thief around heheh

I'm with you.

Inventory management is a pain, there are way too many useless containers to interract with, too useless items and it is really hard to know which items are usefull and which are useless.

Please stop with the knife, cup, plate, fork, bones,..... Why are we able to take that in our inventory ? To throw them in our ennemie's faces ....?

Made a thread about this as well, right now its just frustrating to change between party members and manage their inventories.

And please make a Junk tab with the option to sell all of them at once on vendors, or just add every cup, bone and plate automatically to wares.

Some of what now appears as junk may end up as crafting materials e.g. some of the food items may be used to make dishes that provide more healing etc. Certainly that's one of the things they did in DOS but whether they plan to here or this is just a leftover from their previous systems is another matter.

But yeah too many containers and if its not of use in crafting or some other function I'd rather not see junk like forks in chests or any container for that matter. As people have said takes too long organising inventory and the hoarding items that only sell for 1 gold but still apply weight in your inventory is just wrong.

Honestly, I'd rather they just didn't have a crafting system. The point of crafting, for me, is to combine random items in totally unexpected ways to solve unique problems. It works great in a tabletop game where you can talk through what you want to do with the DM. It's incredibly dull in a video game because you can never do anything that's unexpected - it has to be programmed in first and at that point, you're just collecting a bunch of things so you can follow a formula so you can make a better widget. Either:
1) Get rid of all of the random junk and let me buy the better widget from the widget guy in town; or
2) Still get rid of all of the random junk. Instead, when I would find random junk, let me accrue some generic "materials" and I'll have crafting formulae that just require and use up some amount of that "materials".