Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General THE HAUL: 84,694 Gold In Treasure (Is there TOO MUCH loot in the game?)

Thank you for this post. It's looking like another game that I'll need to use cheats or mods for basic inventory management.

I don't think their is anything wrong with the way it is now. For me I don't check every single container or take everything from things laying around or take everything from dead bodies.

I do think there's too much loot in the game, not necessarily in terms of volume (noone's forced to pick up cutlery) but in sheer quality. Halfway through act 1 I'll have all magic items on every character unless I deliberately refrain from using them. It really doesn't feel very special. The early stages of a DnD campaign are supposed to be about making the best of what little you've got. Peppering the game with magic items from the very beginning just makes it so it isn't exciting to find one. The goblin camp alone has, what, fifteen pieces of green+ loot? Coupled with the incredible abundance of potions ands crolls, it feels cheesy.

Kudos to the original poster for taking the time to highlight an issue that the roleplayer in me finds detracts from the focus on the characters.

The problem is on many levels; quantity and quality are both bloated to an extreme degree. The party is incentivised to become pack-mules ala Fallout 4, looting everything not nailed down. The sheer power of some of these items are character defining and incentivises cookie-cutter builds/class selection based on metagaming knowledge.

There surely must be someone at Larian with an out of control crush on the Wizard class in particular. Universally recognized as the strongest D&D 5e class, yet favored by implementations such as unlimited "Magical Secrets" (one of the best features of the Bard class), needlessly buffed ray of frost/fire bolt cantrips (made even stronger by the elemental shenanigans), and items such as:

1. Warped Headband of Intellect sets intelligence to 18 - allowing metagaming Wizards to turn Int into a dump stat.
2. Staff of Arcane Blessing has a permanent superpowered Bless-spell providing +1-4 saves, +2-8 on spell attack rolls.
3. The Sapphire Spark nearly doubles the damage of the Magic Missile spell. Will benefit from the Evocation level 10 that adds Int mod dmg to each missile. Now made the best spell in D&D for upcasting and add 2 levels of fighter for Action Surge to add to the madness. This alone makes me think Larian really doesn't understand D&D/balance.

I thought the original games went pretty nuts with the high magic setting, but even in the era of Diablo they held back the crazed loot bonanza much more than Larian.

Incredible work OP.
I do find the randomized loot pretty interesting, because in my 2 (somewhat finished) playthroughs so far the amount of (useful) loot I've gathered is vastly different. Maybe it's something that was fixed in a patch or hotfix but in my first run of the game I found barely anything useful, while I've been much luckier in my current run, at least when it comes to gold.

It isn't just that there is too much loot, its that there is nowhere to spend your money either so it feels completely worthless. I was nowhere near as compulsive as the OP when I played through, I ended up with ~10,000 gold just randomly picking up and selling things and at no point did I feel pressured into spending that, or like I wanted to save up to buy something. This was something that older games pulled off much better, Dragon Age Origins for example, where there was always some really expensive item sold by a vendor you were saving up for. It made currency feel like it had value.

This highlights just another problem with Larian game design though. Pickpocketing the ultimate skill that throws a fireball to even the slightest hint of risk vs reward mechanic in their games. Every trader in the game is in reality a loot/money piñata as once you know how to steal, it is guaranteed, quicker and more rewarding than fighting ancient red dragons for their hoards.

Stacking thieving potions and stealing from
merchants was probably one of the most common exploits of the original games. I do hope that Larian takes note of this thread, though.

FWIW, people may feel more incentivised to read your comments if you didn't start them with e.g. the following which might be viewed as inflammatory and/or dismissive.

My next run I'm gonna try to do in half the time of this one, and NOT search the nooks and crannies, and NOT loot most of the containers, and then see how much stuff I have at the end. I gotta do it so I can make the comparison, for science.

Like, most of the actual gear I don't have much of a problem with. (A few items should probably be in Act 2 instead of Act 1 though, looking at you Sapphire Spark.) Mostly I'm alarmed by the sheer mind-boggling quantity of consumables. I'm pretty sure you could make a whole party of commoners with 10s in all stats and NO class abilities, and still clear the content just by using scrolls, potions, bombs, poisons, special arrows, food, etc. Because there's SO MUCH of it.

It's not just "someone". It's Swen. The big boss. In a recent interview he said that wizards are his favorite class, and that he "always plays a wizard". I mean, when you look at the choices they've made in this game, it all starts to make sense...

Yeah I was just thinking of Dragon Age Origins in this respect. I remember there being a lot of expensive items for sale and not really enough currency available to buy them all. So you had to make CHOICES. And I loved that.

What?! Where is the count of tongs, plates, ropes, and most importantly (because they actually have good value) paintings?

I thought I had it bad, checking every container and hating myself for doing it, ending up with 50 hours. I never even bothered to consider grabbing every barrel

Seriously though, great post, really echoes how I feel both about the sheer volume of clutter / time wasted looking in empty containers to the feeling that none of this matters because look a billion unused scrolls and potions.

I'm planning on waiting a month or so from my first playthrough before I do another, and this time I'm considering some kind of rule for myself that I only loot "chest" type containers or things required by a quest. I've had this compulsion to pick up everything keep me from finishing several games, but it's hard to fight.

Jesus that page filled with barrels.

Paintings I learnt about previously; and also learnt to take careful note of, because some were ridiculously heavy!

And tongs... I'm just reminded of M'aiq the Liar who used to race around Cyrodiil obsessively collecting them for reasons he wasn't inclined to share.

I think the game needs the following to make items feel valuable.

• Merchants only trade in goods they are interested in. The food vendor does not by weapons, the weapons vendor does not buy oil barrels, etc. That, or if they do buy it, they buy it at a significantly reduced rate.
• Reduce the value of many items within the game.
• Vendor gold is not replenished on rest. Either tie replenishing gold to quest progression, or some other metric.
• Vendors have 1 or 2 "high value" items, which are incredibly strong relative to the power of the campaign (so say a +2 item in the terms of this campaign), which sells for a large percentage of the gold you could possibly acquire (say 20-40% for a single item).
• Vendors do not store their entire stock on their person. It could be contained within a chest somewhere and the chest should be something you can lockpick, but it should be difficult to steal their high value items.

These measures would go a long way to making items in Faerun feel more valuable.

This is a far more sensible solution than gutting a chunk of the available items in the game to deter a handful of people who will collect every last fork and make thousands of gold.

Strong agree with #s 3 and 4. A natural replenishment point would be after you deal with the Grove. When you actually get to BG, this could be different as the shopkeepers could go to the bank and withdraw more money. But in the wilderness..??? And magic items sold by shopkeepers (why do refugees have numerous magic weapons??) should be rarer and more expensive.

The others are eh, I could take or leave. #1 kind of sounds like more of a hassle than it's worth, #2 is ~solved by #s 3 and 4, #5 doesn't seem any different than having it on their person.

Yeah, exactly. I'm planning to do MUCH less searching and looting on my next playthrough. Even though that will pain me. But I need to have a comparison, to see what you end up with if you only "casually explore" the game rather than "obsessively explore" it.