I like all these suggestions and the overall sentiment. This really encapsulates most of my frustrations with the current game, in that it doesn't feel like it's prioritizing the single player experience the way it should. Beyond that, it's like BG3 was almost designed to somehow infuriate the single-player, or at least that's my overall impression during this EA. Everything seems to be in service of a multi-player mode that to my mind doesn't really belong to the Baldur's Gate franchise or the lineage of CRPGs that it grew out of. Granted MP certainly existed in BG1/2, but who really played it that way? For me MP was just a backdoor way to create a full party of 6 custom characters like many of the old gold box games. I certainly never had a local/LAN option when I was 17 lol. It was just like a gimmick. A nod to some remote possibility that it couldn't actually execute in a very satisfying way. The idea that some friend or rando could drop in for an hour I guess if we allowed it, but probably wasn't sticking around until 5 a.m. until the sun came up for the whole Saga, like I'd be planning to do haha. BG1/2 were single player games with an MP option to scratch an itch I never really had. BG3 feels like the mirror opposite of that.
I really wonder if the developers are just always playing this thing as a team, or in small groups in-house? So perhaps it doesn't occur to them that Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 really were single-player games at bedrock, and how different BG3 'feels' by comparison, such that players coming to this game from those older BG games are having a weird time with it. I don't know, perhaps BG3 Co-op is awesome with great flow, but it's just not something that interests me, and I'm unlikely to ever play this game that way. I just want it to be a really great single-player game, like it's predecessors.
I think it's worth recalling that there are a bunch of ways into D&D. The CRPG was a pretty different avenue into D&D than the table top. I didn't come to D&D from the table top or the group play angle, I came into it from the art books, the pewters, and the more hermetic CRPG angle where a single-player controlled an entire party and didn't require anyone else to still have fun with it. Only much later in life did I become interested in D&D as a social thing. People like me, who come into it like that, may have a very different set of fixations and desires for what this game should/could be, but there are many things about the interface and mechanics that seem to suggest this one just isn't headed that direction at all and doesn't really care for it. Alas
But yeah, anything to improve the SP game in terms of UI would be very welcome here. I hope they can still fix it! Hehe
Last edited by Black_Elk; 02/08/22 01:27 AM.