Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback What are you doing guys? Looting is terrible

I uninstalled your early access about 6 months or so ago, and reinstalled just the other day to see what progress you have been making. You broke it even more?? Your opening cinematics are broken and jumble up with your in game action sequences. You have accomplished zero optimization as the file is not only ginormous but load times are a complete disaster and often break the momentum or cinema. You guys did make melee a bit better but your percent's and hits are way off, way to often. Love the new dice system. Spells are still underwhelming and adding the Sorc should have fixed that, but it seems you feel it's ok, but i promise its not. the loot system is horrific, i cleared a goblin camp and had to spend 10 min just looting, only the insane and hopeless want to spend their time looting and sorting though bodies. You need a end scenario loot page appear pause the game and allow for the player to quickly sift and select loot they wish to keep, toss and send to Camp. Other wise this game is going to get boring super fast. No one wants to see me stream 10 mins of looting, seriously. You have numerous terrible camera angles and busted character animation that seem to get worse the more i play...and this is just the first level?? I am seriously worried about mid and end game content at this point. Also what's up with the disrespect towards the Bard woman in the druid camp?? Seriously a beautiful sad story and song and you have a crotch camera shot and a crappy tree?? This is one of those moments where emotion in cameras position and what's in frame are paramount! seriously what are you doing?? Don't add more systems and crap. fix what you have and polish it then add crap over the years, and fix those disrespectful camera shots. Seriously I could do better blindfolded. I really hope my money and faith you guys will deliver is not misplaced, but do not release this year or the next you still have way to much to fix in the opening scene. You should see what techland and fromsoftware are doing to be able to manage covid and deliver polished amazing content, learn from the best or die like the rest.

What loot has to do with game getting bored? I think it has a minor effect, especially its 2022. Items were massive like 15 year ago. I would fully focus on Characters. Good Music, especially rhythmic and beat kind of stuff. This game is dark and dramatic, how about big war bass drum?

Also I think the camera system is worth to look into. You gotta keep exploring with WSAD all the time. How about if you could zoom out and get a glance whats ahead?

How are the hit percentages off? They're working exactly as they should in D&D.

What's off is representing every non-damaging attack as a clean miss. I.e. people in heavy armor do not dodge more. They soak the damage. That's what needs to be fixed.

Agree that the game has way too much trash loot.

Best part about that is that you dont "need" to loot any of them.

Yeah, you don't need to loot any of them, but I think most players are gonna at least check all the boxes to make sure they don't miss anything important, because if you're experienced with CRPGs, you'll have been trained to check everything in case there's something useful, and even if you aren't familiar and this is your first one, why wouldn't you check all the boxes for useful stuff? I mean, you need food for resting, and that right there is a reason to constantly be checking boxes.

They could make them account-wide. If you dont get all from your first play-through, get them from second one. I generally hate design what forces player to do something, like in DOS2, there was billion places to loot and check.

I like the idea of replaying the game. Sure theres enough depth/stuff to play it again. Play the game, take what you want, if it feels you wanna go for another play-through, you get the rest. Thats why I would sell another Character Pack, btw. They could add somekind of vision-mode, for all lootables. Or Detect Item spell?

Dunno ... i had so many Supply Bags so i didnt even used them all, therefore i also never needed even single piece of regular food.

But yeah, i get the urge to at least look everywhere ...
I have this condition asweel, but i also dont mind doing that at all.

I mean this is what we asked for isnt it? :P
We wanted immersion ... there is immersion, enjoy.

Nobody needs to do anything, of course. After my second playthrough, I realized 99.9% of lootable containers are either empty or contain vendor trash worth 5 gold, so I stopped checking them altogether unless they looked important. My playing experience improved considerably, since I didn't spend upwards of 5 minutes monotonously clicking through every pile of boxes and barrels in case one of them had something good.

This begs the question, what purpose do all the containers serve? Aside from looting, what are the interactions? You can move some of them around – to no particular end. There is no cover system in the game, so you can't construct makeshift cover from boxes, for example. You can, perhaps, stack them to reach some places – except the game provides much better, quicker options for terrain traversal. I was able to use them once to block a side entrance to prevent enemies from flanking me, which was interesting, but with most maps being wide or open spaces, it's not a common application, and doesn't require the boxes to be lootable besides. You can put things in them – to no particular end, again, since you can send loot to camp from anywhere with no restrictions in 2 clicks. You can break them – for no benefit whatsoever. So what are they here for?

As far as I can tell, both in the DOS games and in BG3, this is an attempt to make the world more "interactable". You can look into every box, move every thing, pick up every useless bauble – interactivity! Except not really, because these interactions have no practical application 9 times out of 10. In games with highly interactive worlds, like Arx Fatalis, the interactions have a function, they serve a purpose. In BG3, they don't. Some of the useless loot will become more valuable once the crafting system is in, but most of it? I doubt it. And it won't solve the problem of hundreds of empty boxes you can't do anything with littering the maps. The only thing it does is distract the player from playing the game, as Gray Ghost said, RPG players will naturally try to loot everything. That can't be good.

Account-wide? I don't understand what you mean. The implication of what you're saying is-I think-that at some point after you've replayed the game enough, you'll run out of loot and there won't be any in the containers anymore, which seems like a bad idea. Even assuming someone only ever plays two playthroughs, what if they just loot everything or basically everything in their first playthrough and then are left with basically nothing after that for their second? And what's a Character Pack? Is it literally a pack that characters carry, or is it something that directly effects the play of the game?



I approached the game by getting as much singular pieces of food as possible because I didn't want tospend money on supply packs unless I really couldn't avoid it, since I wanted to have money saved for weapons and potions and stuff. Somehow i'm always hard-up for gold in my playthroughs, or at least it feels that way. Furthermore, I've been trained by games to be paranoid and to think that any container could contain something that might be useful or interesting somewhere down the line. Frankly BG3 feels like exactly the sort of game where finding an innocuous item turns out to impact something later down the road, so that's all the more reason for me to continually rummage. I would not put it past them to plant some "old stick" somewhere and then reveal later if we picked it up that it's actually some kind of wand or artifact. There's nothing like that in the game now, but we only know that because we've played through this section over and over again. On a first-time playthrough, you have no idea what to expect.

I think MrToucan really hits the nail on the head when he asks what purpose the containers serve. Does having all these containers actually make the game more fun? If a feature in the game world is more likely to detract from the fun of playng the game and ignoring that feature is the reccomended way to enjoy the game, then that feature's inclusion is a detriment, and the game continues to be enjoyable in spite of its presence rather than because of it.

Im quite sure you can ... will try next time i will be in and will have enough boxes around.

Same here ... i never buyed it either.
I simply dont long rest too often.

Yeah, know the feeling ... the problem is that looting most of things in this game will not help you much.
Sure there are some +1 magical items (Grymforge is a goldmine ) that are actualy worth something, but besides that? Mostly trash for barely few coins.

Really ... all you need to do to keep your pockets full it keep an eye for hostile Vendor NPCs and make sure you knock them out instead of killing them ... you can finish them off after looting tho.
Most regular mobs have litteraly nothing interesting in their pockets (maybe except Crusher ... but im not quite sure if he is conciderable "regular") ... unless you want vials of acid, bottles of grease and simmilar stuff ... same goes with objects (except few skeleton remains), even tho there are often lockpicks, but honestly if you miss like 70% of them, you still will have enough.

I believe that is the problem here ... we are using rules we learned from single game to another game.

But as we can easily see, they dont aply here:
Looting is tedious, our inventory gets full very soon, it takes lot of micromanagement ...

What does it say to us?
A) Looting is wrong and should be re-created so we can enjoy our hamster disorder.
B) We are not suppose to take every single bone we find, nor to search through every single body we find.

Choice is ours.

Well, as far as i know every single interesting item have implemented some comentary either from your character, or from your followers, when picked up.
The Stool of Hill Giant Strength is great example.

But as far as i know, Detect Magic is part of PHB, so i dare to presume this problem will be solved by that.
Personaly i will certainly take that spell once possible, especialy if it will highlight boxes and bodies with interesting loot.

Well ... yes.
It does make the game more fun.

You see the containers have much more uses than just being looted ... for example:
- Some can be thrown. (Or they use to ... i didnt do that in a while. :D)
- In some cases they can ensure you safety. (Once i blocked the metal latter by Ragzlin, wich were made indestructible so NPCs have allways option to get close to player ... well, they didnt. )
- You can use them to create provisory stairs and jump to higher places.
- You can stack them and climb on to get instant high ground.
- As i said on start of this post, im quite sure you can stack enough crates together to create provisory wall and hide behind it.

You just need to start thinking outside the box.
Wich is exactly what Larian keeps pushing us to. :P

Why not? its video game after all, and no-one has ever done it.

None of these is a reason for them to be containers.

Because people are already now complaining that the in-game world feels static. Especially after you completed the quests in an area, the world is effectively static, if you would then even remove loot you already found on a previous playthrough, you would make the world even more static and uninteresting right from the start from your second play through. Also, part of the loot is randomized from what I remember, e.g. random crates will have x probability of certain items, in your suggestion, say first time we loot 2 bottles of wine, next time however, the crate would contain a slightly better random generated loot (say 1 potion of healing), but in your suggestion it would just be empty because we already looted (a consumable moreover) this crate in a previous play-through.

Also please, what the fuck are you suggesting with that 'sell another character pack' suggestion ? That they would monetize origin characters that have as a special ability 'highlight worthwhile loot' ? Not sure were you're coming from but you seem confused as hell. Why ask for basic functionality in the form of monetized bonus content ? What's next, buy long/short rests with some in-game currency ? Please...

Sure random loot is good but the amount of containers, especially empty ones, in this game is not.

The amount of trash loot you need to filter through is not cool. What is it for anyway? It's tedious and time consuming with the spoons, plates, pots, inks and quills and whatnot. What makes it even worse is that some of the plates have some value, so you really need to comb through all the worthless trash you find.

I'm talking about the DnD cover system. Half cover, three quarters cover, total cover; depending on the type, you get bonuses to AC and Dex saving throws, and, in case of total cover, can't be directly targeted. This system isn't implemented in BG3.


What specific purpose does a lootable container serve if it's not meant to be looted? If Larian doesn't want us to look into every container, what is the reason behind filling the maps with so many lootable containers? There are already objects in the game which can be interacted with, moved, and destroyed, but can't be looted. Some of them are even boxes! Yet it's not these objects that fill the maps, it's the lootable versions. This is a deliberate choice the developers made. In the DOS games, the many mostly-empty lootable containers were meant to interact with the Lucky Charm and Telekinesis skills. What are they meant to do in BG3?

Designing a videogame, or any system really, is a deliberate process, especially when working with large teams of professionals. One of the jobs of a game, or systems designer, is to decide how they want the player/user to interact with the systems. Another is to predict how an average player/user, as determined by the target audience, will interact with the systems. This is what things like behavioral diagrams are for. That is to say, Larian are developing an RPG, presumably with RPG players as the target audience. Their designers should very well know what playing habits (such as looting everything in sight) their target audience will have formed by the time they pick up BG3, and design their systems with that in mind. If they want the players to break a particular habit, giving the opportunity to indulge the habit, but making it so boring and unrewarding that the player will stop out of sheer annoyance, is just about the worst way to do it. If Larian truly don't want us to loot everything, I assure you there are many solutions much better than making exploration, one of the fundamental parts of the game, a chore.

I guess it's a really unpopular opinion here, but I have to admit I actually enjoy inventory management and OCD loot hoarding (you never know, this random book might be a quest item, or maybe I will meet an NPC who needs this particular mundane item). For me it's like a mini game ensuring max profitability for my explorations. I also think it's quite nice and real-life-like , imagine being a fantasy world adventurer/grave looter, you enter a long forgotten ancient place. Everything is still there, old furniture, some faded clothing, etc. However, as you're a profit seeking adventurer and no archeologist, your task is to sift trough the findings and deciding what is worth picking up and what not. Hence, the 'dusty napkin' and 'rusty fork' remain where you found them, but the 'premium silverware' , 'decorative ancient silver dagger' and the 'mysteriously glowing flask' go straight into your bag to be taxed and sold to the next trader you meet.

What they could do better, imo, is find a way to indicate quest or unique or otherwise important items which does not immediately spoil this sense of anticipation and puzzling by relying more on the item names and its flavour text. So instead of finding an item named 'NPC ring' with a 'story item' tag, let me find a 'Peculiar golden ring' , with a flavour text saying something like: at first glance this ring seems like any ring you encounter on your journey. Upon closer look , however, the artifact seems to be produced with an exceptional skill and an attention to detail quite rare in the realms. When you hold it in the light, you seem to discern a barely readable inscription: ' (insert clue enabling us to a) understand this item might have significance later, b) relate the inscription to the relevant NPC/quest)'.
If that's too much, simply disable selling quest/story relevant items to traders or give a warning pop-up, if we're going to be spoiled by a story item tag, might as well implement a mechanic to re-assure the OCD hoarders out there that any item not having said pop up can be safely sold.

What makes you believe that those are not planned for BG-3 ?

My main concern is that there is no "sell all junk" button.
I love finding unique items that doesn't have an obvious use at first, that's not the issue. The issue is that we just have a tons of junk in this game and no easy way to filter it.

We have sell all wares ...

Yes, we need to manualy mark every item as wares before ... even tho it takes only single click, it could seem anoying. O_o

But have you concidered that absence of items automaticly marked as "junk" could teoreticaly also mean that every "junk" we loot now, will be somehow useable when crafting will be introduced?

That's the thing - I don't want to manually mark junk as junk. It's not one click if you have 100+ junk items - it's a hundred clicks.

If an item can be used for crafting, it's automatically not junk - it's a crafting material.
Witcher 3 does this in a very nice way.
Quest items / Story items, Weapons, Armor, Crafting Material, Junk

Edit: and there is even a "Sell all junk" button.