Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback UI Game desired improvement

Whilst as of Patch 4 the User Interface does look nicer, in terms of functionality it still leaves a lot to be desired. So here is my categorical list of everything that I find wrong with the UI.

#1 Hotbar.
The Hotbar is very clunky. Whilst you can disable it automatically adding items and powers to the bar, it still suffers from many problems. There are (broadly speaking) 2 ways to do spell selection in an RPG. The first is to provide a hotbar which can be expanded as needed by the player, the second is to use radial menus. BG3 tries to do the first, but you cannot expand it nearly enough in order to make it passably functional. If they want to go this route, it should look more like this.
As you can see, there is enough space there to reasonably assign almost everything you could want to. With that being said, I dislike this approach because it looks messy and prefer something akin to the second option more. NWN 2 and Pillars of Eternity both do this well, with Pillar's UI being the example I will give.
As you can see in the picture, each spell level is represented by an icon and hovering over the icon proceeds to reveal the abilities available. For non caster classes, you could have all the abilities hidden behind a single icon. You then have the option to assign abilities that you use frequently to keybinds by simply hovering over the icon and pressing the key you would like to assign to it, which works quite nicely. A hybridization of the 2 systems could do quite well, where character abilities (spells etc) are all buried within radial menus and you could then have a hotbar for consumables only.

#2 Journal.
This problem is left over from Divinity 1 and 2. The Journal is difficult to use because quests are not sorted in a logical manner and with the exception of filtering by completed (which was only added in recently) there aren't any good ways to filter down quests. I recommend once again, using a system for the Journal similar to Pillars of Eternity 2, whereby quests are sorted by the region you acquired them from, or the faction the quest is related to. Here is an example picture.
Give quests some tags, for example [Druid] or [Tiefling Refugees] or [Minthara] so we can tell at a glance which factions are associated with them and have some way to filter down information within the Journal. Give us a text search function as well.

I understand needing to not provide meta knowledge to the player in doing so and I am fully against map markers. I am also perfectly fine with quests giving vague directions or cryptic hints, but the journal should provide a high level of functionality in terms of what the player does know. The player, when they receive the quest, does know who or what they got the quest from and where they were at the time. It should be possible to order the journal by this. Right now the journal functions as if it is the journal of a disorganized person, which is I guess fine if the player is a disorganized person, but for those of us who like a little bit of order in our lives, its really frustrating to use and its functionality is limited.

#3 Inventory.
The inventory is a mess. On the one hand I understand the following.
1. For multiplayer, every character needs to have their own inventory otherwise bickering will arise.
2. For the purposes of realism, it makes more sense for each person to carry stuff than have everything carried around in some homogeneous blob (this is the way its often dealt with in other games).

On the other hand, not every item needs to be something stored personally. There are plenty of junk items which will be sold which could be stored communally. Furthermore, the amount of items which we carry around in the game without a pack mule to do the carrying is already unrealistic, its much more convenient to abstract it away to some shared storage. If the multiplayer component is really essential, you could add ownership tags to items placed into shared storage based on who picks them up and then when the item is sold the gold is placed into the possession of the person who it was tagged to. The way weight could be handled is, the shared stash has a weight limit equal to the sum of the party weight limit, minus the weight of the items on each person's character + personal inventory.

Once again, I would recommend a User Interface similar to Pillars of Eternity for the inventory. Here is an example picture.
In the middle, you have your character with their equipment, on the right, you have their personal inventory and the party stash. Furthermore, the shared stash can then be filtered by item type. When you pick up items, you are faced with the following UI.
You can either click on the portrait of the character you want the item to go into the inventory of, or you can click on the chest icon and it goes into the shared stash.

When it comes to selling items, there should be an option to automatically move all non enchanted items into the barter window, as well as an option to move all junk items. Larian should go through and label certain items as junk to support this functionality. The lack of these features adds a lot of unnecessary busywork which detracts from the overall play experience.

#4 Dialogues.
The key which skips dialogues (spacebar) should not also select a dialogue option (it currently selects the first). This has the unintended side effect where when you are trying to skip through dialogue, you accidentally choose dialogue options you do not wish to choose. This is especially problematic on subsequent playthroughs to the first, which is especially relevant to all of us early access players.

#5 Animations in Combat.
Whilst I understand some people like seeing the fancy animations on a roll of 20 with the big dice stuck in their face (and some of them are even asking for equally fancy animations on a roll of 1 with some spectacular failure), some of us would like the option to not see these animations and not have the dice be shoved on our screen, with combat just playing out as normal. I personally find the dice sticking itself on my screen and the animations played out as a result of it to be quite obnoxious and would like to be able to turn this off.

#6 Camera Controls.
I am not really sure how to fix these, but the way the camera controls currently is really, really bad. I find myself using both the mouse and keyboard while playing the game just to manipulate the camera and babysitting it is something that I have to do all the time. It is a chore and there has to be a better way of doing this. I think the camera in Dragon Age Origins was acceptable and also worked in 3d, so maybe looking at that as a starting point, but the camera as is has got to change.

Bonus Complaints.
These aren't really issues with UI, but they peeve me enough for me to stick them here.

#7 Party Controls.
This is a serious hassle. Please allow for marquee select for single player, the chain really feels bad to use.

#8 Pathfinding.
Astarion goes out of his way to avoid water when you want him to walk through it, but anyone else with any other surface will walk blindly through it when you want them to go around. Please improve the pathfinding in both cases. If the path around is too long, have the companion either jump over if they can or walk through if they can't. If the path around is short enough, have them just walk around the surface.