Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Post Patch Inventory window positioning

Among all the tweaks, bug fixes and what not this patch has introduced, it would appear that you guys have had a play around with the default positioning of the Inventory windows when opened and I really feel compelled to let you know that you have definitely moved in the wrong direction when it comes to the intuitiveness of the window.

You press the 'I' key and it opens the inventory window for the character that you have selected, fair enough - as you would expect. The post patch feature that I certainly thinks needs to be redesigned is the newly selected default position of the Inventory Window - directly on top of the character portraits forcing the player to manually move the just opened inventory window if he/she wants to open an additional one. Compounding this is the fact that when the player closes those inventory windows, the next time he/she opens those inventory windows again, they have defaulted back to their original positions, above the character portraits again...

I know that a large amount of people will be playing with a full party of 4 characters, but I, playing Lone Wolf, prior to the patch, really appreciated the original positioning of the first opened Inventory window which was positioned to the left centre of the screen meaning when I opened the inventory window for my other character, I could position them right next to one another and transfer items to and from each character easily and then when I closed the inventory windows and reopened them, they remained in the positions that I had previously left them in the last time - my obviously preferred screen location.

I know this is a quality of life thing but personally I don't know why you guys did this. If anything, it is moving away from the direction you should have gone in in relation to the inventory window, that being that the game should have remembered where the player chose to set the 2 - 4 inventory windows and kept their positioning each time the player opened and closed the windows as quite obviously this is where the player preferred them to be on the screen.

A game of this nature lends itself to popping in and out of a number of different windows constantly, of which the Inventory window is possibly the most important and the fact that the direction the design of this screen has gone in is now less intuitive and user - friendly, I personally think needs immediate addressing and amending.

So to summarise, I think the following design is what needs to be implemented for the Inventory Window.

When the player opens an inventory window, regardless of whether it be by pressing the 'I' key or by right clicking the character portrait, the corresponding inventory window opens in the left centre of the players screen. If the player then opens another characters inventory screen, it appears to the right centre of the players screen.

If the player is playing with a party of more than 2 characters and opens a third or more inventory screens, they open directly on top of the initially opened first two - in the left and right centres of the players screen.

Lastly, when the player closes these inventory windows, the next time he/she reopens them in the same load session, the game remembers where he/she left the windows previously - as I said previously, in my opinion, the location the player leaves their Inventory windows is not by accident, it is due to preference and the game should recognise and accommodate that.

I expect to be investing a very large amount of hours in Divinity: Original Sin and the way the Inventory Window is currently designed, if not reviewed and amended, is going to cause me unending frustration throughout my time playing this game.

Please listen to my recommendation and consider it - I really believe it is, if not the best design for the Inventory Window, at least a step in the right direction.

Thank you for your consideration.

Syn

I would go one step further and say window positions should be safed across sessions.

And the same goes for bags and containers.

When i open my (half a dozen'ish) bags to sort my loot they popup ontop of each other and need be rearranged, every single time..

Also funny that bags open behind the inventory screen, instead of in front of it (where you want them to open) since when you click on a bag, the game should probably assume that we wanted to see what's in them ;p And not jiggle the inventory screen around until we find the window for bags... ^^

I fully agree Syn, well constructed and thought out post, cheers.

+1 apart from :

[quote=Syn_

If the player is playing with a party of more than 2 characters and opens a third or more inventory screens, they open directly on top of the initially opened first two - in the left and right centres of the players screen.

Syn
[/quote]

... A slight appearance of overlap would be nice, to click from fore- to background panels.

I just assumed that they've introduced a bug into the game with regards to the inventory window position not being saved as well as where it is now opening.

At least I hope it's just a bug that they'll fix in the next update as what it does now makes no sense to purposely add to the game as far as I'm concerned.

I can see them forcing the inventory window to open in the position where it overlaps the character icons, maybe it was necessary for people with smaller screens but it should definitely remember it's last position where the player moved it to.

I was just getting used to opening two or more inventory windows at the same time to shift around loot, but after only about an hour or two of playing where the window position is no longer remembered, I've already grown frustrated with playing the game since with the way that the game works, I'm constantly having to move loot from one character to the next before doing any trading and it's just gotten downright annoying to me to have to continually slide around the inventory screens because the position is no longer saved upon closing them.

Please fix.

I agree, it's annoying how it is now. My feeling is it's a bug that was introduced with 1.0.72 rather than a design change. As you can open the inventory the first time and they open up normally (away from the portraits and staggered) it's not until the second time that they both reset to hard left. May sound like a small thing, but the amount of time you spend in inventories (especially in our case of just running 2 characters) it quickly turns to frustration.

I also noticed that when you replace / equip an item, it no longer does a clean swap - the unequipped item now goes to the first available slot... another new bug I think.

Well, I posted similar, so to back it up:

Leave the windows where I put them/how I size them. I like them in a certain spot and I like to be able to see more than one character screen at a time. Moving my inventory *every single time* I open it is already getting tedious.