Larian Banner: Baldur's Gate Patch 9
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As stated in the title, I'm the kind of player who will investigate every corner of every room. I will pick up every knife, fork and spoon I can fit in my backpack in case that 1 extra gold piece turns out to be useful. I will scour every map for hidden chests, caves, secret passages and will enjoy every second of it. And I will ALT search for every openable container and look inside it. Every. Single. One.

Empty...

Empty...

Empty...

Empty...

I just picked up EA and there is so much to love already, but the volume of empty interactables is maddening. And often senseless; I've yet to find a single bookshelf with a book in it, but I've found books on piers, in caves, under beds etc.

The amount of loot is pretty spot on, but the amount of time spent opening things with nothing in is crazy for the return you get. Honestly it just feels sloppy; like it was too much effort to decorate areas properly so they are just littered with copy/paste assets no-one took the time to revisit and make relevant.

It feels like the fraction of containers with anything inside is about 1/5, when really it ought to be at LEAST double that. And to emphasize, I'm not talking about adding more things, just making a large portion of the empty things into things you can't open. I mean, I can't be the only one, right? Right...?

OH GOD PLEASE TELL ME I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE!

Last edited by Elessaria666; 22/02/21 01:24 AM.
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I agree completely. I especially hate the rooms where every container is empty. On repeated play throughs I KNOW they are empty. But I still... Feel... The need... And I just open them all. Every time. Knowing they'll be empty if only because MAYBE it won't be this time!

I need help.

I think it'd be alleviated with a "mass search" button. Your characters stop, maybe do a 3-5 second animation of everyone fanning out and looking through things, and then you get the loot from ALL the containers and bodies in the immediate area around your party. Saves you the time from opening 30+ containers just to find 3 gold. It'd also feel a bit more organic since it makes no sense that only your active character is ever searching for loot.

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Yeah love to just have an empty tooltip when hovering over.

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Containers and interactable seem rushed and probably will be fixed eventually. EA over all seemed pushed out the door when it first went live.

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I get realism, but I will say that it is true. Solasta makes it so almost nothing is hidden. BG3 has too many items to painstakingly sift through. We need an in between. I like Loot All features where I hit Loot All and I instantly pick up all valuable items. Fork's, spoons, plates...not necessary.

But for those who like immersion, it certainly is immersion.

For me, though, I'd rather have Loot All and immersion being with real time clock and day/night cycled, random encounters and limited fast travel where if you try to fast travel in a goblin camp you might have a random encounters...plus short rest random counter chance if not at camp. Oh, and food not being eaten as a bonus action in combat.

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Originally Posted by SaurianDruid
I agree completely. I especially hate the rooms where every container is empty. On repeated play throughs I KNOW they are empty. But I still... Feel... The need... And I just open them all. Every time. Knowing they'll be empty if only because MAYBE it won't be this time!

I need help.

I think it'd be alleviated with a "mass search" button. Your characters stop, maybe do a 3-5 second animation of everyone fanning out and looking through things, and then you get the loot from ALL the containers and bodies in the immediate area around your party. Saves you the time from opening 30+ containers just to find 3 gold. It'd also feel a bit more organic since it makes no sense that only your active character is ever searching for loot.

Please, yes. Please.

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Originally Posted by SaurianDruid
I agree completely. I especially hate the rooms where every container is empty. On repeated play throughs I KNOW they are empty. But I still... Feel... The need... And I just open them all. Every time. Knowing they'll be empty if only because MAYBE it won't be this time!

I need help.

I think it'd be alleviated with a "mass search" button. Your characters stop, maybe do a 3-5 second animation of everyone fanning out and looking through things, and then you get the loot from ALL the containers and bodies in the immediate area around your party. Saves you the time from opening 30+ containers just to find 3 gold. It'd also feel a bit more organic since it makes no sense that only your active character is ever searching for loot.

Believe it or not, there is already a mod for that.

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Originally Posted by Pandemonica
Originally Posted by SaurianDruid
I agree completely. I especially hate the rooms where every container is empty. On repeated play throughs I KNOW they are empty. But I still... Feel... The need... And I just open them all. Every time. Knowing they'll be empty if only because MAYBE it won't be this time!

I need help.

I think it'd be alleviated with a "mass search" button. Your characters stop, maybe do a 3-5 second animation of everyone fanning out and looking through things, and then you get the loot from ALL the containers and bodies in the immediate area around your party. Saves you the time from opening 30+ containers just to find 3 gold. It'd also feel a bit more organic since it makes no sense that only your active character is ever searching for loot.

Believe it or not, there is already a mod for that.

I'm not a big fan of mods, so I do hope Larian does something.

If not, oh well. I still love the game.

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I became very quickly annoyed with all the useless containers, I simply stopped checking anything.

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+1


French Speaking Youtube Channel with a lot of BG3 videos : https://www.youtube.com/c/maximuuus
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For conversation and consideration:

There massive amount of empty containers in this game is a hold-over from Larian's Divinity games.

In D:OS2, there was a skill called lucky find (I think), that had a chance of spontaneously spawning a magic item in any container you searched. In order to justify the existence of the skill, the game was completely flooded with containers, so that people who put a lot of points in the skill would see it sparkle for them moderately regularly. The vast majority of the time, the containers were all empty, but it was mitigated by having a high lucky find skill and knowing that maybe one in ten, you'd pull something new and shiny, and even in the higher levels it had a decent chance of being something that could actually replace some of your equipment. It was (debatably, perhaps, but even so) worth while. The lucky find skill was the Reason that all those empty containers existed.

There is no such skill in BG3.

So why are there so many empty containers everywhere? We don't know. They've built this new world space and filled it with empty containers, knowing that there was no such mechanic in this game... It could be that that was just their design practice for world-building and they simply didn't think about the fact that there as no longer any reason for the flood of empty containers to exist. It could be that Larian had already half build the beginning acts of D:OS3 when they picked up this game and have cribbed it across without really thinking about the ramifications.

The unfortunate truth is that the answer is most likely to contain the phrase "They just didn't think..." somewhere in it.

Last edited by Niara; 22/02/21 07:26 AM.
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To Elessaria666, you're not the only one.

I think the over-abundant empty containers are, ultimately (though indirectly) bad for immersion. What is gained by the presence of shelves (say) and the ability to search them is lost when our behaviour is so ridiculously artificial.

On the amount on loot, I'm rather in favour of less loot (of magical and non-magical and total clutter types). Firesnakearies had a loot survey once, if anybody is interested in looking at what can be found.

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I had same problem in the past ...
Then i learned to move camera to side, so my character is on side or in corner of the screen ... and since containter are opened in middle of the screen, i simply click to open > click to open another > click to open another > click to open another > then move on, wich closes them all.

Now im happy as a flea. :P

Tho i believe some AoE loot, or tooltip "empty" when mouseover are both great ideas. smile
Many people around here demanded removal empty containers, wich sounds like horrible idea. -_-


I still dont understand why cant we change Race for our hirelings. frown
Lets us play Githyanki as racist as they trully are! frown
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Just to mention..... Pathfinder found the middle road here. Containers are not empty though some may contain only trashloot. If you loot a corpse you open and loot ALL corpses within a certain radius of you Character and therefor removing the need to tediously klick on everything to loot.

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If Larian wants to stick to having a lot of containers for world design, perhaps they could implement an invisible feature taking advantage of them? It could be a Lucky Find (with a lower chance) and occasionally we could find something good or unusual in a container. Use a random loot table adjusted by level and there could be variance. You could find a random magic ring in a pot or a piece of silver in a bed table. For some it might be un-immersive to find something valuable randomly by chance, but I'd argue if done right it could be immersive with the fact that people do hide their valuables and sometimes they do it in weird places that people are unlikely to search.

That being said, the ability to perhaps open a circle around the character and loot through all pickup-able objects and open containers would be very convenient.

Last edited by CJMPinger; 22/02/21 09:22 AM.
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The Lucky Find thing, both in DOS and here, feels like a crappy consolation prize for getting stuck doing a bunch of boring busy work when we could be playing a game.

Does anyone actually find going through a room and opening up all the containers to be fun or engaging? (It's not for me; I could see that being someone's jam, but I don't imagine it's particularly common.) If it doesn't make the game better, why do we have it?

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They make it harder for me to maintain situational immersion, if there is such a term. I enter a room, possible dangers or important story characters are present, but first I have to vacuum the room, looking in every box and broken vase, before "getting back into character". It's not something I can help, so it's not a choice. I had it the same way with D:OS, but those games also had way too much loot, BG3 doesn't, it's just all the empty crates.

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Exactly.

I could refrain from searching everything, but then I would probably miss some content. Now, I'm absolutely fine missing on content like a quest (or ways to resolve it) if I didn't find particular areas or NPCs, or simply if I chose a certain way to resolve it (which is not compatible with other ways). But for containers it's different, it's not that I didn't find them, and it has no relation to the story or roleplay.

Fundamentally, this is a UI problem. The game encourages exploration, but the UI for it is a pain.

On tabletop, you'd tell the GM "we search the room", or "we loot the bodies". In BG1-2 Enhanced Edition, you can view all loot on the visible bodies in one click.

In BG3, you have to tediously go through the motion of searching all the containers (or bodies) in the room, before you can resume your adventuring. You have to pause your immersive play, wrestle with the UI, and then resume.

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We should be able to loot groups of containers rather than individually. Or just add an autoloot menu option.

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Originally Posted by grysqrl
Does anyone actually find going through a room and opening up all the containers to be fun or engaging? (It's not for me; I could see that being someone's jam, but I don't imagine it's particularly common.) If it doesn't make the game better, why do we have it?
In this game, no. In the original BG series absolutely. There were GREAT items for your appropriate level all the way through the game. Not in every container, but it was just as useful as finding the merchants in order to equip a full party effectively. And it was doubly rewarding on repeat playthroughs because loot was static, not dynamic. Once you found an item once, all your future playthroughs knew where to find it. And because of that you could put more focus into checking less obvious places without getting bored stiff.

In this game if I want to get, for example, Leather Armour +1 all I need to do is fast travel to the Grove, pickpocket all Aaron's gold, buy the armour, then resteal the gold I just gave him back. Needs 2 dexterity checks with DC of 10. And that gives me the second best light armour in EA that is still slightly worse than just going naked and using a Mage Armour scroll. Compare that to finding a Ring of Protection +1 in the hollow of a tree off the main road on the first map out of Candlekeep in the original game.

Last edited by Elessaria666; 22/02/21 05:41 PM.

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