If someone likes a big giant hotbar up at all times, expanded to 68 squares or even 136, all the better. Go for it. I just don't want to have to look at that massive grid taking up like a quarter of my screen the entire time I'm playing.

If others can expand the hotbar to their heart's content, I'm totally fine with that, but then I should be able to collapse it down just as easily - to only the bare essentials - and yet still have the game function and not completely fall apart.

Some people are going to be maximalist and very hands on desiring the big hotbar like Rag, others will be minimalists and prefer to only open their "spells inventory" when they actually want to cast a spell like me lol. Still others won't really know what's going on at all, and will likely need some kind of guard rails to prevent a decent into complete chaos.

Right now, there is no general spell casting icon, just individual spells pinned in my hotbar. We have attack and action buttons galore, but if I want to cast a spell it's hotbar or bust, with no alternative.

Either spells are added to the hotbar automatically, in whatever position has the next open slot, in which case I can cast, or else I have to do a bunch of stuff first. I have to open the spellbook from that tiny little icon below the minimap or hit a hotkey to pull that up. Then go into a full screen menu that fully obstructs my view of whatever is currently happening in the game. I have to drag the spell I want down to the hotbar and choose a spot for it. Then close the full screen spell menu, so I can get back to the regular gameplay GUI. Only then can I actually cast the prepared spell. That's like a nightmare of extra clicks and delays and unnecessary hoops to jump through, just to try and build a spellcasting interface out of a giant anything goes hotbar.

If I can add a spellcasting icon (one that opens my spellbook/prepared spells interface so I can actually cast spells from it) to just 1 of those 68 squares on a big wish hotbar, ok cool. I mean I'm probably going to have a main hotbar that is predominantly empty after that. In which case, awesome, cause now I can use it for all the other things. Or perhaps I'd prefer to just minimize the hotbar down at that point. But if I can't do that, then it really does feel like a zero sum thing, when it doesn't need to be.

I don't want to eliminate the hotbar entirely or shrink it out of existence, I just want it to be less intrusive - to collapse it down.

To me the essence of a hotbar is that it's not strictly necessary to play the game. That's what makes it a hotbar rather than just an essential core part of the GUI.

A general interface and a hotbar of the sort we see on display here are two rather different things in my view, but right now the BG3 hotbar essentially is the interface, for like half of everything. That's why they're catching these gripes. I only brought up MMOs, because that's the clearest example I could think of where a hotbar scheme was tasked with doing this much all at once, like in a single display. And even there, we typically have far fewer "things" to manage from our hotbar, than there are "things" on offer in the Dungeons and Dragons system. Even if Larian only includes a small fraction, add up all the spells and scrolls and potions and bombs and crazy weapons abilities etc. and there's never going to be enough space for all that in one display. Not even if they made that hotbar like 272 squares lol. At some point they need to compress this stuff down, and present it in a more sensible and streamlined way, so our players don't just see a big wall of colored icons madness at the bottom of their screen and get intimidated and confused by it. Not everyone will have that reaction, but I suspect some will. I do, at any rate.

I know we could say that maybe this is just early days still, and they don't have all these UI features built out just yet. The hotbar spellbook is just a stopgap etc. But they haven't given us much else to go on thus far, and this is a long time to go without that spellcasting icon, so the feedback coming in is like "well, ok this is pretty rough already at lower levels, so how's it meant to work down the road when this stuff creeps up by orders of magnitude?"

I think ultimately we want rather similar things, but talking past each other for some reason hehe. Probably because I've been up half the night playing and then typing and being an insomniac. I don't want anyone else to lose on this one, just that I can win. A real win would be a game that can service both camps well. Right now it seems like we're both getting short shrift, and short hotbars, that aren't exactly doing what we want them to. So fingers crossed that someone can figure all this out for us eventually so we can all enjoy the game a bit more. One square at time, or a hundred hehe.

Last edited by Black_Elk; 16/10/21 04:46 PM.