Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Have something to read during loading

Here is an idea: In the course of the game you come across many books. They have little stories that give some extra background and atmosphere to the problems at hand. But while it is good to read them, many times there are more urgent matters to attend to. So how about being able to build a library of books that you can read during load times? It takes quite a while for the game to load; the single line play tips take far less time to read. Wouldn´t it be nice to be able to pick book titles from your library to do some reading during load time, and get into the spirit of the game at the same time? It could turn buildng an interesting library into some sort of mini game. In-game the library could be a special chest or book shelf in your camp.

I like the idea, but it would definitely need a 'continue' button when the loading is done. I don't want to find myself reading an interesting text and then be interrupted because the loading is finished.

Agreed. Such a button is good to have anyway. The long load times encourage leaving your screen for a while to take a walk, grab something to eat or drink, answer other calls of nature, perhaps grab a book or read the newspaper... It would be a pity to see a (supposedly) timed quest having proceeded significantly when you return.

It's time to join the present and buy an SSD, people.

The main challenge I could think of from a technical perspective, is save-game loading. If you discover a book, but want to load an earlier save, then your ongoing compiled process needs to retroactively determine which books you have in a previous file, which might pose a whole lot of new issues and bugs. There is an easy solution, perhaps an only solution, but that'd mean significantly longer loading times, and larger save-file sizes. Personally I'd think either of those two issues aren't worth the trade-off, at least not in Larian's recent games where there really aren't that many loading screens unless you're save-scumming, or play frequent but short play-sessions.

Exactly. But it may be a good idea to add some common knowledge about Faerun to loading screens. Like "Tyr is the God of Justice...". It may help people, who are totally new to DnD, get in touch with the world.

That'd be fun yeah. You're thinking about the typical random phrases that often hovers near the loading bar right? That could certainly be more doable.

Yeah you're probably right. I hadn't considered it, mostly due to the fact that I have nothing to do with programming/computer technology, neither in my personal nor in my professional life^^


I do have an SSD, although i will say that not everyone may able to purchase one. They can be quite expensive. But back to topic, I think having interesting stuff to read during load times can be enjoyable in general no matter how long your loading times are.

Right. But that also could be slightly longer text closer to the middle of the screen. Like Skyrim had it with both image and related lore text.

Got one! And it made less tolerant of long wait times, I'm afraid.

To solve the save game loading issue stated by composer, I think I'd just have it that the information in a book is unlocked permanently for the sake of loading screens, so if you did a previous playthrough you have a very large selection to read. But idk how that'd affect load times.

There are ways around that. For example, an index of discovered books could be stored separately and be associated with a save file. The index could be very small. The book texts themselves take up very little space too. Presenting your library could be made to require just a few extra miliseconds during load time, I believe.

I have had to reload the game quite a few times because of missclicks and accidently having given equipment to the wrong character. But that will probably become less when the UI gets improved and/or I grow more accustomed to it.

I wrote about it to Larian as well, but SSD is not part of the system requirements. Maybe by now they added them but they weren't when the game came out

Still has to query the indexes, assimilate the handles from the individual indexes that points to the English.xml (or equivalent translation) and load the individual handles from the localization file, then load a GUI/system to present those texts in a formatted way, which is a totally new thing for the loading screen, just for the loading screen, and probably a bunch of other things I can't think of. How much that matters for the actual loading speed, I'm not sure. It's a decent amount of work both from a UX design, programming and design to implement though, for a small quality of life addition for a portion of a playerbase that might not even engage with it, and go get a drink while it loads instead. Could be a hard sell to convince leads to put into the pipeline. I talked with someone a while ago, where they used the word "Expensive". I was confused at first, but it wasn't as much of an economical use of the word, as the amount of effort, time, workpower etc that something would cost, vs what it would give.

But that's the point.
With a SSD this is definitely NOT a game with "long waiting times". Most loads are over in a matter of few seconds.


They were actually getting dirty cheap over time.
They are on the rise again now (like pretty much anything hardware-related, really) but that's just a byproduct of the weird times we are living in.