Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Inventory Management Needs a Revamp

I know people may have different feelings about it, but inventory management really killed some of the joy of DS1 for me. :( So much time was wasted doing it. I'd rather clean my room than organize all of my containers/npcs (empty containers and mercs made for storage) and having to manually drag things back and forth because there's no shift + click feature to move things quickly between inventories. While we're on the topic of storage, it'd be nice if they had a sort button too. Besides being flooded by keys being a problem (a keyring would be nice), do we really need multiple types of similar items like skulls? Unstackable items that have the same name and appearance further added to clutter.

The best crafting feature I've encountered in any game so far was in Guild Wars 2. With the click of a button, it would send all crafting mats to a special storage specifically for crafting mats. When you wanted to craft, the game would use mats from your inventory and mat storage automatically, so you didn't have to pull all the mats out. I'd love to see a similar system in Divinity 2.

The EE D:OS menu's had some gradual improvements including categories and various sort options, but it still leaves something to be desired. What I find surprising is that some of the functionality from early releases was removed, such as having multiple inventory screens open for the same character, and being able to easily switch between characters in each inventory (you can now only do that in the first to be opened, inexplicably).

My biggest gripe is probably a matter of taste though, and personally I'd rather see a list type inventory with a brief description of the item, such as the one in Oblivion, rather than the hover over something to see what it is, which can become quite time-consuming.

A separate "stuff I want to sell" category would also be really useful to have: a lot of games have this, and it's a nice way of keeping the rest of the inventory relatively uncluttered.

Another good idea would be that if you click a backpack in your inventory in the trade window, the backpack is instead opened to show the contents to let you better organize things you want to sell into one convenient place.

Additionally, a "trade all" button will be added to the backpack inventory screen only to let you dump the entire contents of the backpack into the trade menu in one shot.

Certainly agree about the backpack: storing tradeable goods is the one use I could think of for it, and the one thing I couldn't use it for...

I am really fond of this.

Those were in Non EE to. Yes to a flag as junk and then a sell junk button. Keeping sort and auto-sort that every time you go into inventory it's is that sort and refreshed. You can also highlight new things with a flashing border vs a Sort by New. If one had to stay with a lot of what we have, naming bags and marking them a certain type, then every time you pickup something it knows which bag to go to. Really there are so many things the word overhaul saves the time writing. I'd go as far to say there is a whole nother level of polish and success if a near perfect UI was put on this puppy.

This has been mentioned since beta, I'm really hoping a proper overhaul is in order for D:OS2, as said it's a chore in this game, Game != Chore.

Add a category for items that have no gameplay value ("junk" category), so you know you can sell it or trow it away.
Store the books content in a journal somewhere, so you will have access to them anytime without carring them around. Or move it to "junk" once you opened them.
Keys should be automatically removed once you opened the door or a chest it was made for. Or again - move them to junk.
Subcategories in categories. In crafting i would love to have tools (like inkpot and quill) and ingridients separated.

I think it was Witcher 3 that marked books as already being read, both in your own inventory and in vendors'. That'd be quite nice, as I can never remember which ones I've read. I also agree that keeping the books in a journal would be nice: I'm not always in the mood to read them if I've just collected them in a combat-prone environment but I'm likely to be in a more receptive mood in a settlement, but by that time I just want to empty all the junk from my inventory.

And, yeah, some means of subdividing the ingredients category would be nice as it quickly becomes a fairly unpleasant task trying to find things. I still wish there was a way of switching between the standard Morrowind-like interface with icons and pop-ups and the Oblivion-type list with short descriptions: both have their uses and both can be frustrating, so having the choice would be nice!

Edit: apologies if there's some repetition, four hours after crawling out of bed, I'm still not properly awake yet...

Also, if there will be a thing similar to homestead with a forge - there should be an option to stash crafting materials there and use them right out of the stash while you are there, without neccesity to have them in the inventory.
Though i think you still have to carry stuff if you want to craft in the field :P

I've recently finished D:OS again, this time EE edition, and I gotta say inventory micromanagement eats huge chunks of time. It definetly is in need of a huge revamp.
I can understand the need of separate inventories while playing coop, but for single player I'd much rather prefer shared inventory for all party members.
My main problem is that unlike Loremaster skill, highest number of which can be used by all chars to identify items, other skills like Barter, Crafting and Blacksmithing, for example, are not shared across party members and so you constantly need to send all those items you wanna trade, craft or smith to those party members who have these skills at highest numbers. And since you can only send one item at a time to other party member this takes huge amount of time overall to micromanage this stuff. Which is really unnecessary and constantly detracted me from having fun of actually playing the game. And by playing I mean progressing through the game not sitting in the inventory screen for hours.
So for D:OS 2 I would strongly suggest making shared inventory, at least for single player. And also, I would very much like some skills to be shared as well, such as the aformentioned Loremaster, Barter, Crafting, Blacksmithing and maybe Charisma.

Blacksmithing at least is shared in the EE - you can have other party members repair your stuff while you're wearing it.

I wouldn't get your high hopes up for big inventory management changes in D:OS 2 - not if they want to keep the "drop-in, drop-out" co-op style going, and especially not with competitive questing.

Repair, yes. Smith new stuff, no.


That would be too bad if they wouldn't do something. Still, I think pointing out game design flaws and making suggestions can sometimes make devs change their minds. And this here is not some minor flaw, but a rather big one.

Oh, I absolutely agree that pointing out things to maybe make the devs change their minds is a good idea.

But they seem to be moving more towards multiplayer, which is coming at the cost of single-player quality-of-life stuff. It'd be one thing if it was a pure co-op game, but shared inventory and other such things won't work very well with the new competitive questing angle where you may not WANT to assist your fellow players.

How about making shared inventory optional?
For backstabbing multiplayer - make an option for separate inventory, for nice & cuddly multiplayer and singleplayer - shared?
Or make it another way - an option to share certain non-combat skills across the party, that way there's no need for larger part of item micromanagement.

A searchbar for items would be SO USEFUL. Type "pyramid" in one character and it'll tell you who has the pyramids and let you use or select them. Also agree that an item name list might be more useful at times than an icon inventory. Switching

A shared inventory option would be nice too. At least a way to display all characters' items at once, if still slightly separated.

An auto-send feature, pleaaaaseee. Send arrows to your ranger no matter who picks them up, automatically distribute healing potions and food equally (or slightly more to one character), etc.

Shared lucky charm effect, too. Hate being like, "Oh crap I looted with the wrong character >.<" (Especially since I buffed lucky charm in my game). That should not be a concern.

Group looting of containers. Isn't that on the controller UI? Nothing like looting 5 crates with 1 item in one of them.

Just throw durability in the garbage unless it can be interesting. If you had skills that broke your weapon on using it or something, and you had to have lots of weapons and maybe spend time in combat repairing, MAYBE that would be an interesting use of durability, but right now durability just doesn't add anything to the game. MAYBE if there was a higher blacksmithing requirement to repair higher level items, it'd incentive investing in blacksmithing on a main character instead of a mule, or you'd have a gold sink on repair, but there's better ways to balance the economy.

Larian, don't let competitive questing get in the way of a much improved inventory system.

THAT

Also make it as a virtual shared space. So any character of the player can access it. e.g. one or up to 4 character can acces it. Depends number of humans in the game. Also the weight of this space is automatically redistributed so smart that your characters help to carry that but that weak mage is not overloaded.

and THAT +1

--------------------
I want to use dye on bags. Like old Ultima Online. The bags interface looks soooo ,ehm, copied from there :-] So now keep copying and add change color feature :-] Thx !

Yes to Junk Status needed, aka sell at vendor next time I'm there shortcut, hide in standard inventory after set. Have Junk category to review, pull out if needed. Standards.

Make Sort By Type stays active forever until changed.

There are still some various issues then with going through each character inv/skills/trade windows etc once you open one and then go through others from that first window. Lots of little things that could use cleaning up to be consistent. Perhaps the biggest one is when trading, when you change characters have the comparisons be between the item your now browsing and the character now selected, not the character that started the conversion/trade.