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

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.

1,2,3,4,6,12 - I don't like. 1-4 are not hurting the game in any sense and food is good for sale or decorating your camp. The thing that does hurt the game though, is that a skeleton might have a bone on it or it might have a rare magical ring on it, and you never know. So I can kinda feel that 4 could be adressed in some way, like, by introducing perception checks to spot treasure among the mundane. For now it really is searching every container not to miss anything, making some gold in the process. 12 is intuitive and helps to keep things realistic, with no potion and scrolls juggling at 20m range in combat.

The others I agree with and especially 5 and 7. And it is definitely a good idea to address all those once again.

Woah. Strong disagree.
if anything the way food is handled right now (starting with its insane over-abundance) is by far the worst offender.

Strongly agree with you and disagree with nepro.

Even if they want all the food items, as soon as we pick them up, auto stack into Camping Supplies total and vanish from inventory. Why make us flipping manage all this excessive food? It's not necessary. Shoot. They give us supply packs now, so get rid of all other food. Supply Pack is enough IF nothing else.

And get rid of all the clutter and useless everything. Do not make it like DOS 2 with so many crafting things I don't need to craft. Just no. It's too much.

And if Send to Camp is a thing, why bother with encumbrance and individual inventory at all.

#6 (having vendor trash automatically tagged as wares) would be great!

I would also like a keyring and a bookshelf.

I would like encumbrance to be a toggle in the options so that I can turn it off.

Yeah I agree that it feels really weird to have this "teleport to the bag of holding in your camp option". It is also related to the game having economy based on selling junk, rather than quests that reward you in coin.

Anyway, what did food do to you? It is kinda immersive to have food in the game. The real issue is not the food by any means, nor the infinite containers, IMO. How is food different from a knife or a fork? How is throwing an apple to kill a goblin not dnd? What do you want it to be like? 15 lootable containers per location? with 5 of them being golden chests which cry "here lies treasure"?

It is all about the cool things. How can I buy this shiny sword from a trader, how can I pay for this scroll or potion. And for now the only answer is - loot junk and sell it. Removing the junk will leave you bankrupt, lol. Introducing gold payments and people actually carrying more gold will completely let you leave the food to rot, not search through every pot like a hungry dog

I for one agree with neprostoman ...
Food and crates are fine as they are ...
I dont say i would be mad if Larian would switch 15 separate crates into single huge object, that would looklike 15 separate crates, but would give all loot at once tho. This change i noticed in Dror Ragzlin treasure room ... and it was quite pleasant surprise.
But if things stays as they are, its acceptable. :P

Eh ... no, we cant ...
Bcs if we would, our "items" bar would be totaly spamed by whole freaking party. -_-

It's about wasting my time constantly filling up my inventory with junk, and food is just 1 type. I even included knives and such when I said useless clutter. I don't mind crafting if I get cool items from it. I don't like it when I am picking up tons of ingredients so I can make potions that I can buy for a lot less hassle at a vendor. Just make it so all the useless stuff is, as mentioned, auto-marked as Wares so I can sell all Wares at the vendor and I'm good.

But food? It clutters inventory and there's too much of it and it's useless to keep on you. If I can send to camp and use it there only, no reason to even have it in the game.

I mean, I don’t want an “item bar” AT ALL, Ragnarok.
Except for the items I may EVENTUALLY choose to drag there myself.

And I would ideally do without bars at all. I absolutely loathe the concept of quick bar you seem to be so fond of.

I’ll take a clean UI with shortcuts “by type” a-la Solasta/BF1/BG2 any day, every day.

I even didn't know that there were still "filters"... Having to click the search bar to enable them is absolutely not user friendly.
Filters should be VISIBLE BIG and obvious icons you always see rather than being hidden under a search bar. We should not have to look more than 1 seconds to know how to only display our armors/weapons/arrows/potions/...

I mostly agree with all points raised by Tuco but just a few more commentaries :

- Totally agree with 5. They should at least make it work properly... grey = empty, yellow = something inside, red = something you can steal inside. Same color code for dead bodies...

- I also totally agree with 6. Items tooltip should show us fast what may be important and what is not at all (tags : consummable, wares, weapons, armors, food,...)
There are also a lot of items the description doesn't even tell you what's gonna happen if you "use" them (eat, throw,...).
I don't want to try all items in the game to understand what they can be usefull for. The game should tell me its rules rather than hidding them.

- +1 for 7 too. ALl items that are exactly the same should stack. It doesn't make sense to have 10 dagger icons when you can only have 1 with a little 10 written inside it.
It seems Larian really LOVE to have TONS of useless icons everywhere... Guess what : I don't (inventory, hotbar,...). They should optimize this a lot.

- 8 would be pretty usefull to me when I'm selling things. That's another issue but having to double click on every item is an absolute pain. Even the old BG games selling UI required less clicks...

1-3 Since there is a crafting menu, I was thinking that in the final version we'd get food/alchemy crafting. Potatoes and beef for a stew that recovers 2d6 HP, rum and fruit for a buff-type drink, the harvestable plants and medicinal herbs for various potions, that sort of thing. With as much clutter as there is lying around, you could probably have one alchemist-type character (with Medicine, Nature, Survival, and/or Arcana proficiencies) that keeps the party supplied with 'lotions and potions galore'.

4 The container issue reminds me of Elder Scrolls Online. Hundred of containers with little more than trash, to encourage people to subscribe for more bag space (and a crafting bag)
+1 for an empty container check before being forced to open everything

5-11 I think these are still WIPs. And I'm a bit worried by how many features still feel unfinished 2 years after EA release. Imo, WotC wanted to syncronize a 2022 Baldur's Gate thing between BG3 and MtG, for extra hype and bigger sales in both gaming communities (and that's why there are so many BG3 spoilers in the MtG set) and they set an estimated release date but for some reason Laria has a delay of over a year. ...Hopefully, EA stuff is different from the devs' own working version so this stuff has been fixed but not transfered over.

12-13 +1 For unified inventories...
The multiplayer excuse doesn't even make sense. You play with people you supposedly trust (friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances). And if some item does 'get stolen' when you organize a PUG... omg, what's the worst that could happen? It's an item! You stop inviting that one guy. Big deal.

In my multiplayer playthroughs, ability checks and item sharing were two of the most annoying issues. We'd be trading stuff between us while looting and suddenly one of us would move just a bit out of range and the trade stopped working. Yep, inventory management totally optimised for a multiplayer experience... Or an NPC would ninja-start a dialogue and it wouldn't be with the one who could make the best rolls - and the other Tav would just stand there like a fool. His skills couldn't help at all.

I think the only fond memory I have of those runs is my husband rushing ahead with Astarion & his wizard before Lae'zel & my Tav could trigger the cutscene... and somehow he managed to bullshit his way through the whole kithrak scene by pretending to be an idiot but winning all the deception, wisdom, and arcana rolls... one funny thing that doesn't offset the other countless small inconveniences.

Ok, I get your point, but I just can't agree here, sorry. I think there are lot of things in games and films which feel irrelevant to the viewer. You could say that some extra detail and touch doesn't contribute to the plot but they help you to believe the world you are in. Then you remove them and the film feels shallow and the game lacks immersion. Is there no food in the world of living creatures? Do they use forks or eat with their bare hands? Games are even cooler in this aspect, because they allow you to interact with those details, if you want to. Can I ask you a question? Why is your inventory full of food and other items that clutter it? Do you need it for something else rather than money? Because if you need it for money only, then again - should we remove food and take away immersion or add new ways to gain money and add immersion? I doubt you'd collect food for no benefit.

This is adressed to GM4Him

Yeah i had the exact same feeling not so long ago ...
Not anymore tho, this new hotbar we got is much more versatile than i give it credit after first try.

And i hope someone will mod it for you.

IMO Pillars of Eternity II inventory is one of the best in RPG in terms of filters.
there are several item categories and you can toggle show/hide every one of them.
1,2 are ok if we have separate filter for food and one button "send to camp" for it
3 - not needed, if we have filters and "send to camp"
4 - agree, but ok with current implementation
5 - agree, good highlight system again in pillars
6 - don't care
7 -yes
8 - don't care if we have 7(item stack)
9 -yes
10 - agree, also why can't we use multiple characters during dialogs. that's how it should be in dnd
11,12,13 -yes

p.s. sorry for my English

Maybe we dont have it, bcs we are not suppose to use "send to camp" as infinite food stash?

Ok, just to elaborate a bit on this since I wrote it from my phone when I was in the middle of my daily trekking (and don't tell me that I'm not committed to the cause of making this game better, people) if I have to be more specific I would probably marry an "unified inventory for the party" to few slot of "quickbelt" individual for each character where consumable items could be placed and appear in the UI quickbar. Basically what PoE II and Pathfinder already do.

That said, I reaffirm that in my ideal world the "quickbar" would be a submenu on a very minimalistic UI and the "big hotbar randomly filled with garbage" would FUCK OFF into space in a collision route to the center of the Sun, to make room for a decent UI that fits the needs of a D&D-based game.

Probably the only one in the world thinking this but IMHO the BG2 inventory was kinda PERFECT.
LIMIT (yey!!) of 16 slots for your bag-pack items. 12 slots for wearable equipment stuff. 3 slots for quick items. 3 slots for quiver. No food items. Hardcore weight limit. Super clear, snappy and easy to move stuff around. Potion, key, quiver and bottomless bags.
So much fun to play around that inventory system.

Nowdays its :
Unlimited food
Unlimited rest
Unlimited inventory space
Unlimited magic item
etc...
People say that makes the games fun. I say it makes the game boring and dull as hell. But Yea its great for games like Diablo!

I don't think it was "perfect" but it did its job competently.
And the restrictions didn't feel too bad simply because there wasn't the same inane amount of pointless items every-freaking-where. If we had the BG2 inventory in this game we would be driven to compulsive murder under the 10 hours mark, though.

We're at least 2... Inventory management was FUN to me in the old BG games.
It was a mess in my bags after a while so I had to sort things manually because what was important and what was not was mostly obvious. We never had to sort more than 16 items per characters...
Going in an inn or in a merchants house after an epic journey to sell stuff and have a "clean" inventory for our next adventure was incredibly satisfying.

Now with unlimited inventories and the ton of crap you never really know if it's going to be usefull or not in games... managing inventories manually is a pain while auto management doesn't involve the player.

HAHA yea, that I agree would be crazy to have that slot system in bg3...just because of the items overload.