Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback How to improve the resting and the fast travel system + a few other things. Detailed suggestion

agree, as it is now, camping could be completely replaced with a much more QoL enjoyable menu to manage inventory, some vendors and party management. The (bugged) cutscenes could simply be triggered by pushing the rest button while having the "camp mechanics" in an optional menu for when needed. As it is now, the camp is super boring random place with no physical or logical relation to the game world and it functioning as a kind of forced story progression bottleneck feels very artificial and unnecessary (e.g. why can't our companions have these conversations while we're simply doing our stuff ? Why would this weird undead tomb dude hang around my camp instead of saying something like: 'hey btw if you ever need some resurrection scrolls, I have plenty laying around here at the dank tomb, so feel free to come by if you wanna buy some."
If our camp wont be a real reachable location in the released game I will be utterly disappointed, it feels like a forced and badly designed and written "quick fix" to properly trigger cinematics and story stuff while forcing you to lose time because stuff that could better be managed by menu's (party management, camp inventory, etc) needs to be done "in person" (e.g. walking up to an NPC to tell them to stay in camp or join) making those tasks tedious and slow. The fact that the story progression atm is a bugged mess, all tying in to a not credible camp further increases the feeling that camp is simply there for the convenience of the game devs. That it is being badly executed on top of that makes it all the less convincing and all the more immersion breaking.

Totally different game (and budget) but if camps really need to be a thing tied into the story that also forces players to 'simulate' physical tasks representing mundane game mechanics (rest, inventory management, etc) perhaps Larian could have a look at how RDR2 implemented them. Here too, your camp is a hub with important NPC's where you need to go for stuff like inventory management and which is tied to story progression. HOWEVER:
- the camp is a physical location on the world map
- the story is not simply tied to camp merely mechanically, it also figures prominently in the story and even linked to the start or end of the game's chapters. Hence, the story of where and why our camp is what it is and where it is are an integral part of the main story, not just a convenient effortless way to 'not explain' stuff and group all cinematics.
- the camp and NPC's feel real, these are (storywise and visually) real camps where NPC's are "living life" in camp, meaning they cook, sleep, argue, have fun etc. in camp. They are not just standing there, frozen in time, waiting for you to click on them - expressing their sudden need for interaction with the player character by conjuring a floating exclamation symbol.

So I would argue that camp needs to be a living place where stuff happens independently of you (admittedly, this is one of those things where BG3 in general, is not even trying) , not a bug ridden abstraction which although evidently designed to streamline the game's story progression, exists totally independent from this story in a parallel universe totally detached from the game world. The immersion breaking and unsatisfactory execution of our camp as a location and narrative elements is further augmented by how actually nothing happens in camp except triggered animations and conversations, as well as by how little actually 'is' in our camp that actually has a purpose (basically only the sleeping rolls you click to rest, all the rest is simply a weird and inconsistent collection of cosmetics like that cage or the ruin).

Suggestions:
- make a physical location on the map as camp and integrate it into the story: why do we end making camp there and not somewhere else ?

- try to avoid having NPC's being frozen statues in our camp for our convenience. I actually don't give a fuck about what Volo has to say when he becomes a decorative camp element, instead put him in a tavern or around our campfire and let him shine by annoying everyone with his story telling (e.g. the way we meet him in the goblin camp) rather than just giving up on his life to simply stand and await orders indefinitely at our camp.

Story wise, I can't imagine none of the current camp dwellers having a reason to put up with this, yeah sure, a long visit to our camp, why not. But Halsin sticking around in camp instead of doing something about the shit that happened to him ? Really ? An undead creature awoken from his tomb to open a small resurrection scroll shop in our camp ? A tad-polled NPC we just met who goes on rants about how urgent our common issue is but which is fine with just waiting forever when ordered so by a random stranger ?

Instead it would be much better to find alternative locations for many of these, that also tie into the story: e.g. Astarion joins the absolute and can be found/recruited/fought in the goblin camp when not recruited or left outside of party for too long, the dank crypt dude taking care of his temple, Halsin doing something about the grove or meeting you somewhere on his way to the harpers, Lazeal looking for or having joined the patrol, etc etc.

- add directly accessible menu's or buttons for recurrent camp functions like party management and inventory. If we should suspend our disbelief regarding the pocket plane camp in the eternal sunshine realms of abstract geography, then we can for sure also suspend our disbelief sufficiently to have a party management, camp inventory menu, and simply sleep/rest button rather than having to move/click our PC.

- if you don't explain it , then don't show it and if you explain it try to not give us the cheapest excuse of an explanation imaginable. Main questions for me atm regarding camp: What is our camp and where is located and why so ? Why do we always go to camp when it is dark ? Why are those people we just met or seem to have very pressing reasons to do different stuff simply standing in our camp, doing nothing, saying nothing ... ?

EDIT: sorry, no time to edit so probably some mistakes and repetition left but at this point i don't see why I should make an effort posting to this forum when Larian themselves can't be bothered to even give us any response in two years of EA...