Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Complete Inventory/Items Overhaul

Dear Larian,

I have played almost 300+ hours now of BG3. Love the game. Lots of replayability. Great game so far.

This said, and I really hope you read this, the Items/Inventory Management aspect of the game is probably one of its biggest negatives right now. So tedious and clunky and frustrating.

Suggested fixes (as I am not writing this to open up a window for negative griping comments about the inventory. If you don't have a workable solution, don't just gripe here about how you hate the inventory, please):

1. Select Multiple Items at Once - Moving 1 item at a time from one place to another is absolutely slow and tedious and probably the most boring aspect of this game. Instead of the Wares functionality, let me select multiple items at once and send all selected items to another character, or drag and drop multiple items into a bag or out of a bag or into a merchant's shop for selling, etc. You absolutely need to implement something like this so that players can move lots of items around quicker. I don't even mind hunting around and picking up a bunch of useless items like spoons and forks if I can sell them all quickly without much effort. Right now, selecting and moving only 1 item at a time makes picking up lots of useless dinnerware REALLY tedious. This one is absolutely critical. I can even live without all the others.

2. Dumb down the graphics on Inventory; especially Shopping Inventories. I am able to run this game pretty well on High Graphics setting, but whenever I'm shopping my PC slows down tremendously. It makes the clunky inventory/items management even more painful. Whatever you have to do to dumb down the graphics on the buying/selling and inventory management screens would make a world of difference to players who don't have super high end computers. Mine isn't even that low grade, and it struggles. I'd totally get it if the whole game was slow on High graphics, but Inventory/Selling screens shouldn't be where my PC slows down.

3. Loot All - A button to Loot All. Players can either search through all items in a room manually, as they do today, or they can Loot All. Allow players to set a value limit for Loot All. Default is 5 gp. Any items of that value or higher are automatically picked up if the player hits Loot All except for story items. Story items require Perception checks, and Larian would decide what the difficulty is for each Perception check. If the characters succeed in the Perception check, the important/story item is found. If not, it remains hidden amongst the barrels, crates, etc. in the area. These items could still be found if the player wants to go searching manually through the room, but they are not discovered by Loot All. To ensure players don't suspect something valuable is hidden in the room, have this Perception roll made whether important/story items are in the room or not. It's fine to still allow the player to see that all their characters failed the roll too, so that if they fail the roll for everyone they know that if they really want to ensure they've found everything they can still search manually throughout the room. So it's kind of like a Quick Search button versus a Thorough Search (Thorough Search being a manual search around the room).

4. Importance of Bags - Bags right now are pointless. I just sell them. They're useless to me because I can sort items in my regular inventory in any way I want. Moving items back and forth between bags is tedious. To make bags important, set a percentage of weight that they offer depending on the quality of the bag, like in other cRPGs. Some bags make it so items in the bag are 20% less weight. Others 40%. Others 60%, etc. Then bags are worth having around. If you are going to do this, though, every bag should have a limit to the number of items they can hold, like in other cRPGs. You can't just put an endless number of items in a bag. This makes it so that picking up more than one bag is important to inventory management. Otherwise, why have so many bags around the world? The more valuable the bag, the more items they can hold and the higher the percentage of weight reduction.

NOOOOPE.

I don’t care what happens to bags, if BG3’s hot bar design would be replaced with something sensible. For now, bags are the only way to make hotbar somewhat close to usable. (Sort certain items type into different bags, assign those bags to hotbar - quick and easy access to all items of the type from one shortcut).

Point 1 is most important. Then 2. Then 3. Then 4. If they don't fix 1, forget fixing 4.

1) YES

2) Make it a graphics option. Customization is always king I feel.

3) Depends on how it was implemented.

4) Mileage with bags varies, it is useful for uncluttering the inventory with keys and scrolls and such though I'd like more dedicated bags like in the older games and the addition of magical bags.

For graphics, I mean that if the game runs fine on high except for inventory, maybe inventory should be dumbed down a bit on high so it isn't so glitchy. Something like that.

As for Loot All, anything to speed up searching would be nice. It doesn't have to be what I recommended. Some sort of Loot All, even just a loot all bodies would be better than what we have now.

And bags, I get the uncluttering, but still. Not much use really. I've used them and not used them. Found it less tedious to not. Just seems like they could be SO much more valuable than they are right now, and should be.

- Definitely +1 for point 1.
- I don't have issues you talked about in point 2 but if players have it, that's important.
- I disagree with point 3. Less containers and empty containers impossible to open is what I'd like.

- about point 4 i'd li'e specific bags.
Quiver, potions bags, Scrolls cases... Those could really be equipment with more or less slots and it could be a part of some kind of "quickslot" (hotbar mess auto fix).

I agree with probably most of what's been said. In fact I've probably made the same requests in various other threads. I especially agree about this thread existing.


Yes. Actually, what is certainly one of the biggest negative aspects is the entire UI and controls. And this across the whole game, from character creation to world exploration to inventory screens. In fact, when I wrote my first feedback reports, I hesitated between putting "UI, controls and QoL" or "Roleplay, Story, Immersion" first, as most important. I think UI and control are first because if they are not good, then it doesn't matter how good or bad the roleplay and story are, or how interesting or cheesy the combats are. I don't want to have to wrestle with the UI to merely be in-game.



I have a different view on this. One section of this GMTK video (at 7:50) articulates the idea that game designers listening to player feedback should identify problems, not solutions.

Ultimately, video game is entertainment. The aim of the designers is to create an experience that players find fun. Whether it's making people think and puzzle, act skillfully and react fast, play as another character in an imaginary world, the goal is creating good time. Thus, the emotional response of the players is important.

Of course, players saying "I don't like X" isn't particularly more useful than "please change X to XX". I think that saying "system X and feature Y combine to create negative experience Z" is more useful (though not always easy or possible). If the designers intend to create experience Z, then alright, maybe the players are just not the intended audience of the game. If experience Z isn't at all what designers want, then they can probably find solutions. Our suggestions won't hurt, but I think they're not necessary. And not as useful as pin-pointing the problem.

So allow me to propose no solution :

Larian, your UI and controls are horrible (or dreadful, if you don't mind me keeping a near-meme alive). We have to do way too many clicks for simple things, clicks don't always get registered, options are not well organised ... the UI is clumsy, clunky, cumbersome, tedious and the cause of regular frustration. I'm not saying you have purposefully made everything UI/control-related more complicated than it should be, but you certainly haven't done enough make the experience smooth (yet ?). Please remove the unnecessary obstacles between the players and the actual game.

To me, it might be points 2 and 3 that I would rate as more important, among 1--4.

For 2, I don't know about "how", but I'd like not to have a slow-down every time I open a management screen.

For 3, so many people have requested this so many times : there isn't a lot of interesting gameplay in tediously checking all the bodies. Just meaningless clicks. Tabletop experience : "we loot the bodies and search the room". BG3 experience "I inspect body 1. I inspect body 2. I inspect body 3. Now I inspect container 1 ...". Of course, this is not incompatible with a reflexion on the number of containers, their emptiness, or the amount of garbage/clutter they contain. There will always be bodies.

But I feel the most important point would be :

5. Register our clicks. If I click on an item to drag it from one character's inventory to another, I too often find out that the item wasn't dragged. This issue with sensitivity/registration of clicks also affects selecting a different character, especially in world-exploration mode.

To your point 5, I discovered dumbing down graphics helps, which then goes back to my point 2.

So fine. The problem is inventory/items management is slow and boring and needs to be simpler with less graphics issues. I've crashed more times in shops than anywhere else in the game. SHOPS! It just happened to me and now I have to play an entire area again because I forgot to save before the shop.

Larian fix it.