Yeah, yeah, not a new topic, but I feel like from time to time the problem needs to be stressed again, because very little has been done in two years about it.
I'll admit that this is not a carefully planned and structured thread, but something that I just compiled on a whim minutes ago inspired from comments I read elsewhere.
Anyway, since a complete re-do of the UI at this point seems to be out of the question (or at very least extremely unlikely), let's try to address minimal changes that could pile up to make a significant difference overall in the game's flow.
Here's a bunch of problems with the current inventory management (I'm going to put numbers on each just to make easy to address each point individually, but they aren't in any particular order of relevance):
1- Why there's SO MUCH food to begin with?
2- Do we really need so many individual types of food, as well?
3- Can't they automatically stack as an unified abstract resource like in, say, Lords of Xulima? If it's about the odd quest involving food and drinks every now and then maybe we could have occasional exceptions.
4- Why there are SO MANY containers everywhere? Yeah, it's "optional" to open and search them, but you are creating a system that actively encourages the players to do so because they are rewarded with wealth for it.
5- Why the already existing "highlight function" with relative mouse cursor is so ineffective? It could at least tell us what containers are or aren't empty from the get go.
6- Why isn't "vendor trash" that exists exclusively to be sold to merchants with no other gameplay purpose not flagged automatically as "Wares"?
7- More types of items should STACK. Do we need to have every individual dagger (just as an example) as a separate slot in the inventory when the weight is the only thing that matters for encumbrance anyway?
8- Multiple item selection (shift click, click and drag, whatever works...) for moving things around would make a hell of a difference.
9- Why sorting filters aren't refreshing in real time and need to be constantly updated manually?
10- Already addressed in a separate dedicated thread, but as we are on it... Why the trading system is ACTIVELY ENCOURAGING the player to juggle items from an individual inventory to the other just to take advantage of the attitude system? Why can't the one character starting a transaction with the merchants set the prices for the entire party?
11- Why is the game resetting the trading window when swapping characters while trading? Seems gratuitous inconvenience for the sake of it.
12- In fact, why do we even need individual inventories for each characters? Can't we have an unified one like in POE or Pathfinder? Pathfinder does it WITHOUT giving up on the encumbrance system, incidentally. In fact, making encumbrance some "party average" is even somewhat fairer when playing low STR main characters.
13- "Multiplayer necessities" is not a compelling excuse for the previous point. You can have separate inventories for different players that still "merge" their inventories with the ones of their NPC followers.
Etc, etc, etc.
