Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Inventory Management is still bad

God help me please no. Don't. Items being put automatically in the Hotbar is one of the most important features Larian ever implemented in my opinion. I'm 100% serious.


I'm preparing a NASA petition to start an interception mission on Sun orbit for that piece of UI. Landing area: BG3.

Hyperboles and jokes aside: I can see why you feel this way. I can understand someone wanting to have full control over the item bar.
However, the way I play I simply grab everything I find and just sort my inventory from time to time/before larger fights like bosses. I would really hate it if I had to go through my items to see if there are some consumables to use and equip.

Different playstyles == Different needs.

For the sake of an understanding: Why not both? Like it's already done?

We genually didn't play the same BG2

Yeah. No. I do have to disagree. BG2 and its brothers and sisters had horrible item management. I was CONSTANTLY juggling items from one character to another, and it was 1 item at a time clunky. If I accidentally gave a character too many items, I'd have to drop some in the drop slots and shuffle things around. Lots of different containers for different things - Missile containers, scroll cases, potion cases, gem bags... Ugh!

BUT... that said, you didn't pick up forks and knives and spoons and fish and crackers and animal heads and tomatoes and potatoes...

I don't mind all the mundane loot and food IF it is easy to get rid of like in Pathfinder. I go to the seller and click a button and BOOM. It's gone. I agree that the opposite extreme - ahem Solasta - is boring. You wander through a level and find a treasure chest. Surprise! There's valuable loot in it. There's absolutely no hunting and searching rooms. It's literally just "There's a chest. Loot." or "There's a glowing book. Guess it must be important. Oh! What a surprise [sarcasm]! It's important and leads to a secret passage or something." There's absolutely no reward to that extreme.

But do I have to sift through tons and tons and tons of stuff to determine what's valuable and what I can flipping sell? Do I have to sell each item 1 at a time?

If you're going to make me collect tons of food for immersion, that's fine, but make the differing foods valuable and have something more to it. Give me reasons to carry it as opposed to selling it or storing in the bag of holding chest at camp. Have it spoil or something, or have it not in such great abundance that it might as well simply be a number in the top corner of my screen. If all food is going to be is a number in the top corner and yet it clutters up my inventory tremendously - like 95% of my intentory is useless junk and food - then no. Just turn it into a number in the corner as soon as I pick it up and don't make me waste so much time trying to sort through all my junk to try to figure out what to sell and what to store and such. Junk can be converted to gold easily enough and food can be converted to Camping Supplies number in the corner. I shouldn't be spending 30 minutes at a time for every 5 to 10 minutes of collecting stuff and adventuring trying to mess with my inventory sifting through all of it and Sending to Camp or whatever.

+1 for basically everything

#1-3: We don't need so much food, and once picked up all food could be translated into rations and immediately sent to camp. We should be able to use such food directly from storage, because why not? You have to be in camp--with access to the food chest--to LR anyway... The exceptions to the above are:
- If Larian implements some type of cooking where each LR you choose a meal with specific ingredients that gives you bonuses for the next day
- If Larian implements dungeons where you can't fast travel and thus need to bring food with you in order to LR inside the dungeon

#The rest: Yes. Having so many containers in the world wouldn't be such a pain if the highlight system and/or the inventory UI was better (e.g., keyring, auto mark trash as wares). And if we have magic pockets anyway, then just give us a unified inventory.

I think its a problem of <trying to building roads after designing a super dense town > instead of the opposite. So they create a crap load of items and junk, and the only way to control all of that is to have an infinite dull confusing inventory with <search> parameters. lol.

IMHO Food stuff and barrels should go away, asap. Just have <camp supplies> for that camp mechanic. Barrels should just be heavy movable objects. This isnt a survival game. Same for crafting...bloaded with items. Get rid of those. IF you want to craft stuff, go to a smithy and specialty store that can craft/upgrade items for a fee, or a unique rare material.
Also WAY less common magical items, MORE unique magical ones.

Yes, Agent. It's this man. Please take him in custody and don't let your guard down.

Hey, but you didn't comment on the screenshot. Like what you want is kinda already in the game.

Also, containers and people being hard to click on is a huge pain point. I'm trying to click on the dead goblin to loot his corpse, but for some reason if I hover my cursor over him, I'm actually not able to access his loot. I have to click on his foot or something. OR, I need to hold down the Highlight key to make the goblin's tag show up and then click on the tag. It just makes it a bit worse.

But ultimately, RPGs have been known for picking up lots of stuff and selling it. I had the same issues with NWN 1 and 2 and BG1 and 2 and IWD and pretty much all of them. Regardless, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have a better system with BG3 - something where you AREN'T constantly shifting equipment around between characters and trying to decipher what is important and what isn't.

I LOVE the Wares Auto-Tag concept. Just boom. It's a fork or spoon. Auto-Tag as Ware and move it to the Ware's tab. Clean inventory. Pick up food? Auto-Tag as Food. Move it to Food tab. Clean inventory. Pick up crafting ingredient? Auto-Tag as ingredient and move to Ingredient tab.

Then, at a merchant, you can click Sell All on each tab in case you just want to sell everything in each particular tab's inventory. Sell All Wares. Gone. Sell All Food in your personal inventory. Quick and easy.

Eh. No, it's not.
That's just to stop the auto-filling-harassment, but it doesn't change the core principle of how an hotbar-based UI works, which I'm decidedly not a fan of.

I don't want to play the little laborious re-arranger when using an UI.
I want things to have their proper place (like a spell button giving me access to all spells, the quickbelt button giving me access to selected items of my choice and so on) and a good "live hotkey" system (i.e. something like "mouseover + CTRL + Key to bind") as a shortcut for my most used shit.

Fair enough,thx for clarifying. Personally, I'm 100% content with the " modulable" version of the UI they have right now + the interface options to adjust some of the behavior. But well to each their own.

Just for the sake of comparison there are a lot of things of the two Owlcat Games' Pathfinder UI that I find very well made, both in terms of style and usability... But I think their hotbar system is garbage as well.
Conversely I'm somewhat of a fan of both Solasta or Pillars of Eternity 2 when it comes to 1) making quick and intuitive to reach for abilities even without learning to memory where they are placed 2) creating quick and convenient shortcuts for their recurring use.

Anyway, we are moving a bit away from the core topic (inventory management) and going into general UI usability here.

When it comes to hotbars, I think of Final Fantasy 14. You can have like 10 hotbars if you want, something like that, and you can customize them however you want. All buttons on the hotbars and they are all the same size and squares, etc. 12 slots per hotbar. And then, you can place them wherever you want on the screen. Very bottom, on the sides, etc. Get's the entire UI out of your way.

Sounds great, at first. However, the more abilities you can do, the more those hotbars become SUPER confusing. Now, when I play the game, I have my core 6 or 7 moves and when I have to do others I have to try to remember where I put them and what the buttons looked like. I've got real time monsters killing my companions and I'm trying to find Raise spell and Swiftcast so I can just bring 1 back to life. VERY frustrating when you've forgotten where you put it.

So I must agree with Tuco in that the thing I LOVE about Solasta's UI isn't its appearance but the fact that everything is exactly where I want it to be every time. Once I get familiar with the UI in the first 10 minutes of gameplay, I know where to find whatever I'm looking for every time. Need a spell? Click spell and pull up your spell's menu. Want to use a Special Ability like Action Surge? Click Powers and there's a small menu of all my fighter's special abilities. Do I want to know what bonus actions I can do? Look to the right on the main UI. Actions on the left, Bonus on the right. All laid out for you. No hunting. No trying to remember what the button looks like. Nothing. Well labeled and in the same spot constantly.

And do you want to use items? Click Item button. Menu of usable items - in Solasta you get like 1 and maybe if you've equipped some magic item like the crown you might get 2, but it could work just as easily for BG3. They even have something like that for Throw already.

I just don't get the love for all these hotbar buttons. I know... it's probably a ME thing, but I definitely would love a simpler and more consistant UI.

Sounds awfull to me. :-/

Yeah, but it's not a problem of the UI, it's just you.

I mean, you described your ideal Ui here: https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=825596#Post825596

Made out of very long hotbars, with several spells of different levels mishmashed on a single bar according to your individual preferences, "all your items ready to click there", etc.
And there's nothing that I can say except that it sounds like pure UI nightmare fuel to me.
Worst, it's a "build your own UI" set of pieces that needs to be constantly tweaked, updated and refreshed.

It's basically a typical super-busy MMO interface, except worse (as it "even less flexible").
Well, pretty much what we already had, in fact. Except for the recent updates to it that made some of us see some pallid light at the end of the tunnel.

I don't understand why popup menu is so terrible to some. Maybe it's just me and Tuco.

Popup menu, Solasta style

Action
Attack, Powers, Spells, Use Items, Disengage, Dash, Shove, Ready Action

Bonus
Off Hand Attack (if applicable), Rogue Dash (if applicable), Rogue Fast Hands Use Item (if applicable), Bonus Action Spells (if applicable)

Want to cast a level 4 spell? Click on Spells. Menu pops up. All prepared spells listed in Level Order. Only the spells you have prepared are listed. Find spell and click on it. Select target.

This is roughly how ALL of the buttons on the UI work. Powers. Menu pops up. Action Surge and Second wind are listed. Click on Action Surge. Boom. Done. In the same place EVERY time. No moving or shifting anywhere.

With BG3, whenever you switch weapons or get a new weapon or skill, buttons are removed and added and you have to rearrange them to fit your preferences. You may start with Off Hand at the top left slot, but when you put away your melee weapons and switch to ranged, or you equip a new weapon, the Off Hand slot is gone. When or if you use two weapons again, it may be at the bottom right or mixed in with various items you can throw. Same goes for spells and scrolls etc. As you add spells or pick up scrolls or whatever, things shift around and are not in the same place you set them originally depending on your choices. It's a mess. To me, anyway.

And I agree that the tabs are too small. They're not easy to see. And, they act like menus anyway, so why not just do menus? Why not do like Solasta or Pathfinder and have buttons instead of these tabs? You click the button and it takes you to a preorganized popup menu of options rather than you click on the tab and it takes you to a hotbar mess of buttons that are not really in an order but are all jumbled. It's the same principle, but the Solasta/Pathfinder method is cleaner and more organized.

i don't even see as a series of "pop-ups" but as a "dynamic bar that opens the necessary sub-options on a click.

And to be clear I think the way Solasta does it leaves a lot of room for improvement as well, both in terms of general aesthetic and in terms of size/position optimization.

But I surely prefer to click "Spell" and have a sub-bar of all my spells arranged for level over having a mishmash of different abilities, spells, ordinary actions and items overcrowding the same elongated hotbar without rhyme or reason and competing for some real estate on it.

I'm not good with Photoshop otherwise I'd love to make some mock-up of how that would ideally work in BG3, even keeping a lot of the same aesthetic but rearranging entirely how the sub-menu (that fundamentally are already there as "tabs") would present themselves more fluidly.

Paint is already be a good tool for mock-up !
Select / ctrl+C / ctrl+V is the best ! Mock-up doesn't have to be perfect.

I'd love to see what you have in mind.

Or exactly other way around.

"In fact" ... nope, as usualy.
But it seems that you allready decided, so i gues i can save my breath.

"No... U!"
Well, ok.

I also thought Solasta would have benefited greatly from HOTKEYS!!!! But yeah. It needed to not be so huge and taking over a third of the screen. Not necessary at all.