Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Patch6, recuding hotbar real-estate

There is a way to get Mage Armor level 1 on hotbar and i missed it???
Tell me, tell me, tell me! Please.

I was pretty sure you could have additional "rows" like in D:OS. It's been a while since I played DA:O so I must have been confused (won't be reinstalling the game to check it out, but it doesn't seem to be the case). Eitherway - game had limited enough repertoire that one hotbar was enough.



And? I do remember chain system already being a minor issue in that instance (companions triggering traps the rogue was told to disarm). BG3, beind designed around 4 coop players you will have to switch constantly between characters, set them up move them around, engage in conversation with the right character (or more importantly not engage in conversation with a wrong character), loot things with a right character (that one mostly has to do with garbage hotbar, and need to constantly manage it manually), and many others. Since I was introduced to strangely hidded "group/ungroup all" shortcut it became much better, but still behind competition even using the same system (see Wasteland3, which proper selection and grouping). General unresponsiveness of controlls and lack of action cueing still remains an issue though.



And once again:

See Pillars of Eternity1&2 - as far as I know an unlimited amount of shortcuts for any unassigned keyboard keys. There I always assign QWERTY to skills and spells I would use most in encouters (and they are nicely visually listed if I want to use a mouse - and near portratis too for quick character/skill selection!). Well designed and functional UI on top of that giving all information you need (for that given game - obviosly due to the differences in the system stealing design wouldn't result in perfect UI for BG3)



All you do here is argue why the currect design sucks, not why it is better. Yes, you want to know what resource the spell will be using - that is kind of organization I want Larian to make. Yes I want spells to be organised in a helpful way, not just thrown into a box at random (like hotbar). And no, I don't argue for removal of hotbar entirely - it is a helpful feature for hotskills (like eldrich blast, like mage armor, or false life if those are spell you expect to use often). Personally, hotbar doesn't even work as a shortcut to me. It would be nice to have a shortcut for eldrichlife and false life and hex for Wyll in my current playthrough - but as I am organising skills by type (per short rest, per long rest, cantrips, level1 spells etc) skills that I want to use often don't line up with shortcuts. Even if I went to the effort of replicating a janky version of a system I would like to see (create "organised" list, AND an actual hotbar with the most commonly used stuff on different hotbars) it will still not work, with skills like Hex which spawn new skills which you will have to find somewhere on your hotbar.

Most of us aren't asking for the removal of a hotbar. We just want a proper UI in addition to the hotbar. Hotbars are a great idea, but they should be the optional location to put abilities we use often, not the default location for every single ability/spell/item.

E.g., there should be a single window dedicated entirely - and only - to spells, that automatically sorts them by level and whether they're prepared or not. In Larian's current mess of a UI, it'd be a hotbar icon that brings up a pop-up for all prepared spells, itself divided into pages of spell level. If you want, you can then drag spells from that popup onto your hotbar for easy use! But, if you want the hotbar to remain less cluttered, you also can not do that, because you can cast spells directly from that dedicated spell pop-up.

Level 10 wizards will know something like 30 spells, and be able to prepare like 20 of them including cantrips. Every time you prepare spells, some of these icons will be removed from the hotbar and others added. Combined with icons for items/abilities you gain, this will be an absolute mess to deal with without a better UI system.

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.

You could not ... unless you downloaded mod.
And it was not enough...

I dunno how long it was since you played the game, but i played it whole last week and i never managed to squeeze all my spells there.
(And yes, i play it on high resolution ... so its not problem of small monitor )

Ok, lets play it your way ...
you claim its not ... i claim it is ...

My argument is: If it wasnt suppose to work as bar of everything ... why would the game add everything there?
Your argument is: ???

Bcs it does.
And its now "all i do" ... if you read it whole, i also repeated there one of frequently repeated suggestion (yes, mostly by myself) that could satisfy both sides.

Bcs it isnt.
Also, that is kinda point, when you criticize (do not misstake with writing rewiev) something ... to point out its errors.

+1

And i want spells to be organised the way i organise them ...
I never find any system that would organise things exactly the way as everyone wants (i believe its statisticaly impossible) ...

Hotbar allows me to do that, therefore i want hotbar.
Easy as that.

"you" dont ... great.
But you are one person, there is plenty of us around. (imagine Tiefling woman circling her finger around)

Then you should probably remap shortcuts? O_o
I believe it should be possible.

Or try different order.

Actualy there allread was one (in my opinion Brilliant) solution for this ... sadly i cant take credit for it, since it was not from my head ...

The suggestion was:
If you get re-cast of some spell (in matters, where the recast cause exactly the same, just without costing Spellslot ... like Hex, Speal with Dead, Hunter's Mark, etc.) why not simply let that recast icon to replace your orignal spell icon while its possible to recast ?
That way if we put Hex on our position 1 ... and we kill our enemy, and wish to recast Hex, wich just become possible ... we dont have to search for it, bcs its on position 1, exactly where we put our Hex to be easily found!

I still dont undestad how does this suggestion differs from allowing casting from spellbook (concidering spells there starts to sort themselves by some ... actualy any key). :-/
In that it would be smaller window? True, but that is i would say the only difference.


Lets not be dramatic ... shall we?
Hotbar does not cover even 1/10 of screen ... and it would not even if we could spread it to its whole wide.

And Larian certainly should provide us tools to do both ... agreed.

There was many alternatives suggested ...
And usualy taken down by people who was against hotbar for various reasons ... if you search, you should find some of those topics.

Yes i know you are talking about curent situation, and not about suggestions ...
But look at it from the other site, you are developer in Larian ... you see people being unsatisfied with your design, so you search what they want and you see that everything except "just like Solasta" is denyed as insufficient. -_-
Yet you dont want to copy Solasta.

And now imagine that my suggestion of allowing spellcating from spellbook would be accepted and implemented ...

- you no longer need to search for tiny icon below the minimap, since you have hotkey for spellbook ... but even if you dont want to use it, that tiny icon below the minimap was suggested to be draggable to hotbar as regular icon ... so you can put it there anywhere you want.
- fullscreen menu has ben reduced to single charactre spellbook ... yes, its still quite big (question here is if it would still be if developers would count with it as something more action-packed, than just list of things you can drag to your hotbar) ... but certainly not fullscreen big, hardly 1/4 screen big (yet i repeat).
- you dont have to drag anything ... spells are right there and read for your click > cast action.
note that in spellbook spells are allready sorted by used resource and spell level ... so this part is also resolved ... it would still need some sorting in certain spell levels tho (i would suggest Alphabetical ... since right now its a mess)
- you dont have to close anything, since once you cast your spell and end your turn ... spellbook will dissapear

I really cant see the reason why people hated it so much.

I drink to that!

The perfect system for me would be having the current hotbar (extendable to the old size) on which we could have the most commonly used things and also have buttons to click for grouped things (one for spells, one for potions, etc.) These buttons should then have the option to turn into pinnable hotbars for those of us who want everything on the screen all the time. Ideally they should be able to be resized and pinned in different places around the screen. For people that don't like hotbars, they could use the option to open the spells button and have everything there instead, perhaps like a spellbook which some people seem to want. Would be similar for things like potions and whatever else.

An example of my ideal setup, which I expect some of you to have nightmares about
Spellcaster
Main hotbar: Top row most used damage spells, bottom row most used utility spells.
Second hotbar: Potions (probably only opened to allow for 2-4 slots) Pinned vertically to right side of screen
Third hotbar: Pinned under potions bar. and also vertical. Special class actions and other sometimes useful stuff that isn't a spell.
Fourth hotbar: Scrolls, probably pinned vertically next to second and third
All other hotbars would be spells rarely used and grouped by level. Probably these would be pinned vertically and off to the side. Some of these may not be on the hotbars since I play like a proper DnD game and don't rest every 5 minutes, and because of this I hold back on using super powerful spells until absolutely needed. Fiddling around opening different button popups to get to these wouldn't be as much of an issue.

Would be less hotbars playing a partial caster or martial, but would still have one for ranged stuff, one for melee, one for potions and one for most used spells if applicable.

+ <3

It is an overexaggeration, but hate for hotbar doesn't come from what is in EA, it's for what it means for lvl +10 spellcasters. In D:OS2 you pretty much stop gaining new abilities at the beginning of act2. BG3 is just getting started, and even with it's most generous setting the hotbar was barely enough. For the hotbat to be able to contain all spells, all skills and many desirable items, it would have to be a chunky hotbar indeed. It would be a shame if the main similarity between BG1&2 vs BG3 was covering the screen in excessive UI.

Sounds sensible. Personally, I did like the hidable/expandable Pathfinder design. If only the expandable "spellbook" was easier accessable, didn't require clicks to expand and was better organized.

I hate the stupid hotbar. Rogue, level 2, had to rearrange everything to put Sneak Attack and off hand attack even on the same row, along with bonus dash and disengage. I was throwing scrolls off my list to make it happen. Yes, you can deactivate the auto to put things on the hotbar, but then you still have to manually play around with it just to put basic class abilities on it.

Sorry, but it is still in need of a major overhaul

So the current hot bar set up can be extended to 2 rows of 10 slots, and there are 5 pages of hot bars, I just checked. This means that we have 100 slots to work with. So for a wizard, I can organize my bar with spell levels assigned to a specific page. Since I won't know 20 spells of each level, this means I'll have multiple levels of spells per page. I can assign the more commonly used spells/potions/scrolls/weapon abilities to page 1, and go nuts from there on the other pages. I didn't check, but there's probably a hotkey to change the pages, but even if not, there's a click button on the hot bar itself to do that. In the options menu, under UI, you can turn on and off adding and removing spells, and other items, to/from the hot bar. So once you sort the bars to your liking, you will have to manually add them to the hot bar, in the location of your choice.

Yes, that means that some organizing will be required, but that's part of gameplay in most cRPGs, right along with the dreaded inventory management, a staple of most RPGs. So I'm left wondering "why add more UI elements to the screen if they're not strictly needed". I'm betting at level 10 I'd have empty pages, let alone slots per page under the current system.

Two versions from steam forum:

https://ibb.co/yNtNqC1

https://ibb.co/cxkncxn

I'm more for spell submenus one for each level of spells, but at least we would have more space.

Since Larian refuse to improve the UI just as they refuse to improve the awful party controls, one can only hope that modders will fix the issue for them (or rather for us) once the game goes live.
I'm guessing that the architect at Larian that came up with the UI is the same person that came up with, and refuses to acknowledge that, the current party controls is one of the worst to ever be conceived in a video game. And that someone seems to have some real influence and control over the development of the game unfortunately.

No, not having good UI is not a staple of an RPG. UI has been better or worse, but as far as I played (and played most of them) this is exceptionally bad. In any other RPG I can start playing without tedious management. Any kind of management in other RPGs is conveniece, not mandatory downtime. Also unlike inventory, hotbar is not a mechanic. It's an interface for interacting with mechanics. And it should be as slick and convenient as possible.

If nothing changes, I will have to use system like you describe. But it's still shit. Shortcuts are there, but didn't manage to make them work. Even if they will work - WTF? That's supposed be more convenient then traditional UI? You can't even go straight to page 7 or 8, without scrolling through other pages. How is that supposed to save you amount of clicks? Buttons on the far right side are tiny, and in the part of the screen you have no reason to have your mouse around. It's bad UI. It's BAAAAD.

https://imgur.com/BDK6LJK

Horror

EDIT: That said, both are undeniably better then what we have, of course.

Im in love.

It was just copy pasted so the icons repeat and look ugly it's like having untidy inventory.

The idea was to be customizable so you can move things around. Hide stuff or extend them.

I would add submenus for spells like i said. It would give you more space and you could have shorter bar if so desired.

Those images are very instructive. Thanks Lastman!

From a functionality standpoint, of course I prefer the second screen to the first. But in all honesty, I find them both to be like the visual equivalent of leaving one's Christmas lights up the whole year round lol.

I like the bright rainbow lights In-Season, when the time is right - i.e. when I open my Spellbook bar to survey my spells, or my potion or scroll case. But not forever and always there. Just like perma glowing the whole neighborhood, to the point where I can't avoid looking at them, no matter how much they might clash with the overall ambiance in a particular situation, or out of season context.

This is what I meant by there also being strong aesthetic preferences at play here. It's like they spend all this effort and energy to create visual atmosphere within the game's environments, but then upend or undermine that, by putting up a neon display in front of it like this a Las Vegas casino or something.

Do I hate it every single thing about it? Well, no, not exactly, it does have a certain charm I suppose. I might love Lisa Frank for some things, but not to design my D&D portfolio binder hehe. That's all I'm saying dude. When people criticize the entire game for looking glossy and flashy or somehow plasticky (and I've heard this bandied about here and elsewhere), my first thought is that some of that impression is probably coming from the UI hotbar and the arrangement of all these multi colored tiny squares in the always up display. The fact that they must present at all times for the game to work properly. Some people don't dig it. I guess I'm one of those.

But then I hear you say 'I'm in love' and I realize that, of course this is down to differing aesthetic sensibilities. I don't begrudge you the thing that you love. or want to take it away from you. But it's very different than the thing I love and it's going to take a bit more options than that + an extra shortcut icon to make me swoon over it hehe. I think it really is a matter of taste though, as much as function or scale. To me both images appear very much like an extension of inventory management, but even more brightly conveyed. However unlike the inventory, I can't choose to close it, at at least not if this is going to be the central organizing feature of the UI.

I was planning to take a little break, just to actually play the game more and enjoy it, rather than kicking around on the Boards, but I guess these forums pull me back in like a black hole sometimes that I can't quite escape lol. I didn't even make it 3 hours. Too much intrigue here, and I just want this BG3 game to be as cool as humanly possible when it is finally completed, for all involved. So when I see a strong point of contrast to my own impressions, I have to chime in. Just for balance, not single combat. Given where things are have been and we're they've been going I think it will be easier to satisfy your tastes than mine. Though I still hope for a little equity from the dev team to accommodate both our wishes and loves.

Yes this is extremely messy. I prefer the minimalist approach (something like PoE2).

In the end, they will have to let us customize the UI so those that want a hotbar taking all of their screen feel happy.

It gets messy only if you let it. -_-
Its not fault of tool, that you dont use it properly. :-/