I think it's ridiculous, we have someone standing right there that might be a religion expert, but no, because my barbarian clicked on the item, oops, that knowledge is forever gone, sorry. It just encourages save scumming, and extra micromanaging, which isn't fun.
100% Agree. I know it's not game breaking. I'm still super excited about the game, and yes failing a save is not the end of the world but the whole point of D&D is to build a well-rounded party with vaired skills to tackle different situations. What's the point of having Gale or any other compaion even having skill proficiencies when whoever started the conversation has to make any religion, history, arcana checks that come up? If I pick up a book that seems magical in nature, I can't turn around and ask Gale to take a look at it? Who cares if Wyll, with his high charisma, has proficiency in Intimidation he's never going to use it. Even if you exit the conversation and restart with a different character, the conversations usually have a variety of skill checks, and one person has to try to pass all of them for no good reason. Having to save and reload is just a stupid waste of time. This along with poor inventory management is probably why the game takes 80+ hours to finish! LOL.
Given how much work Larian has put into making every other aspect of this game awesome, it is shocking that they looked at this and thought, yeah that's fine.