Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Useless items - Keep, Improve or Kill?

BG3 has plenty of seemingly useless items lying around that can be picked up.

I like it, it helps with immersion, but I would love to be able to cast some version of Detect Magic to reduce fomo and be able to improve RP, while still not missing out on cool magical items lying around.

And you? Do you like useless items as it is? Would you like improvements? Or simply you would like to get rid of useless items all together?

I'd like they get rid of all these useless items.

I don't understand why we're able to pick most things.
Item/inventory management/information processing is unnecessary slow and complicated.

I don't like it. It's way too much, and it ends up wasting my time.

As a rule of thumb, if an item has an actual use it will most likely show up when you press the key to highlight lootable objects (I think the default keybind for this is Alt)
Some random miscellaneous items will still show up when you do this, but at least you won't have to concern yourself with picking up random decor items such as plates and forks.

It's easy to get carried away and just pick up every item you come across, but after some time I learned to just mentally block out all the loot able items that were unlikely to be used for anything but decoration. I feel it does add some liveliness to the room though, at least when compared to other games' generic static backgrounds that you can't interact with.
That being said I do wish the game would tell you if a container such as a crate was empty before you opened it.

You mean forks, cups and stuff, general misc items? I tend to like them as vendor trash, as many also do not weigh much. Some things might also be used in crafting later. Like I have not figured out what to do with the bottle with "sticky liquid of unknown origin" or whatever it says.
What I would like however is a cleanup of the inventory so it does not feel so tight. So I can immediately send all misc items to camp and when I am at a vendor I can also access my camp inventory to sell these things. Just on a slightly related note. Also some form of area loot, if they insist to keep the ridiculous amount of crates and barrels. This would help greatly with the issues many people have with the loot of this game. It would also reduce the fear of not seeing magic or useful items.

This. Would also like to loot groups of containers rather than every one.

Man that would be really good.

I don't like it too
the problem is that not just Larian do it
a lot of big studios keep doing it
I found a fork! a plate! and don't forget about the spoon!
What I am gonna do with these things?
it is so annoying
+

the funny thing about looting group of containers is that Larian have something like that in DOS and DOS2 but if you play with a controller and not with M+KB lol
it is not exactly like PoE or PK, but it is close enough to know that they can implement it

Thinking about it more, not only I would like the items issue to be resolved with the Detect Magic mechanic, in fact it could be developed in a series of passive checks. A check on Arcana highlights scrolls just to name one, a check on Nature potentially useful herbs and other natural ingredients (if ever a crafting system will be introduced) etc. etc.

This is one of the reasons why I never finished D:OS2, the other ones were inflating numbers, totally random equipment and shops getting new stuff every hour.

I am a completeonist and I hate leaving stuff behind, though I learned this with BG1+2, were most rooms had only 1 or 2 "boxes" with loot and inventory slots were limited (and half of them were filled with ammo until you find weapons with infinite ammo). So in D:OS2 it was like: pick up stuff, have a battle, go to shops, pick up stuff, have a battle, oh I gained a level, back to shop. Half of the time I was running from one shop to the other and when I was done the shops almost got new stuff again.

I hope the DnD rules prevent stat inflation and totally random items and I hope that magic items are actually rare and feel special.
In BG1 finding your first magic weapon felt special and when you found unique equipment you kept it for a long time.
In D:OS2 you do not care about stuff because whatever you may find, the next enemy may drop something better and next level your stuff is useless anyway.

They do. There's no exponential scaling like in DOS2

I'll collect every skull and place it around my campfire.

The other useless items - they're good to throw. I think throwing items is a very underused action and it could have some interesting effects. thrown plates should go further. those bottles with resin at the bottom should have random effects (I was hopeful - but so far they just deal 2 damage).

I like mundane items for immersion and messing around with them, but I think some measures should be taken to clearly communicate "this is trash, you can leave it if you don't want to play the 'construct a spoon shrine' minigame".

I've suggested it before, but I think containers should be tagged appropriately to contents, for example: "Barrel" - contains something of use; "Barrel (mundane)" - contains junk; "Barrel (empty)" - contains nothing.

In addition, items that have no apparent use but aren't trash (obscure quest items, maybe future crafting items) should have a description that hints at their potential usefulness. "This broken pot appears completely uninteresting, though there is some odd scratching on the bottom."

One thought about labeling thing as trash:
In Numenera many items were labelled as useless (called oddeties) so at least I did not look at them and just sold them.
PST had some items where you do not know what they are good for and some of them are used for quests, e.g. modron cube.
PST was the better game, among other reasons because you had to find out many things yourself.

The gem for the twisted rune in BG2 may be another example.

But it makes a difference if we talk about games with relatively few items and the use of some of them is not clear which could make you miss a side quest
OR if we talk about games that are littered with tons of useless items. Collecting 1000 spoons and glasses and selling them is not really fun.

Collecting 1000 spons and glasses and selling them is an optional choice that you choose to take.
You're free to ignore the items if you feel that they are junk. Most of them even have an extremely low vendor value precisely to not make you feel encouraged (or as you probably feel, forced) to pick them up for the sole purpose of selling them to the nearest NPC.

The problem is that it is actually very hard to know what is usefull and what is not... especially when you don't play the game many times.
Craft ? Quest ? Cash ? Nothing ?

Ok for spoon but what about everything else ?
How can you notice it's usefull or not ?

I'm one of those that don't want to miss things so I don't pick forks and plates, but my inventory is still full of things that finally looks totally useless.

And this is without taking item descriptions into account. Usually reading the descriptions of some random miscellaneous non-consumable item is enough to know whether or not it serves an actual purpose. Quest items and other items of value or interest tend to have a short description that most people will be able to identify as the game's way of telling you that it's probably a good idea to hold onto the item.

Gotta say I hated this system with a passion. The "level of gear" spam drove me barmy and the enemy level forced linear progression though the maps. By the end if felt like less of an RPG and more like an arcade game.

Thankfully there's none of the scaling gear nonsense this time around. The equipment in the game seems to mostly adhere to the standard DND formats, so you won't have to replace your entire wardrobe every time you level up.

Slightly related - its really annoying when you move items between your inventory and another characters or shop. If you drag and drop you have to make sure the item falls exactly within the empty square otherwise it won't be transferred - can't they just make it snap to?