Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Why are bookshelves empty?

In every book shelf I encounter that has the loot symbol, it’s always empty. It would be nice to find some loot there.

In general, there are far too many lootless containers. It's not that I want more loot. I'd just like to waste less time opening empty containers. This isn't an MMO so there's no need to give us busywork to keep us subbed.

Oh I agree. Even weird little storybooks or boring history type books or second copies of something we already found.

This could be such a cool place for Easter Eggs.

people are complaining about they take all this time to open all the boxes and barrels and dont find anything inside, how about not being a psycho that opens all boxes ? XD

how else do you get 60 potatoes?

yeap the problem is in the high expectations, i love inquiet millenials XD

That's how you miss out the actual loot.

No, seriously. Larian should address this in several ways, because currently it's absolutely pace breaking. At times just entering a room full of shelves and boxes is enough to make you think "Ok, time to save and quit".

A good start would be to have fewer containers to begin with. On top of that, making immediately evident with both the highlight function and/or the mouse cursor which one are empty even BEFORE the inspection would help a lot to not hate the environment.

P.S. Just to be clear, filling them with items wouldn't make things any better. Maybe the opposite.

we agree to disagree, its very clear for some chests that there will be loot, and dead bodies of important chars as well, as for everything else, you start with bells and whistles, colorful indicators everywhere, and then we are assassins creed, where the game tells you everything you have to do, and is totally ant immersive

Agree with fewer containers. Also, we should be looting a group of them, not separately. I don't think the highlight should tell us if there is loot though, that makes it too easy.

Of course we disagree, because personally I think the smug "Just don't look at them" is a bullshit solution that completely overlooks the problem.

It's not about opening all the boxes and barrel, they at least have something more than half the time. It's about that you are told these book shelves are lootable but there's nothing inside. So, what is the point of making books shelves lootable if there is nothing inside?

I think you misunderstood my post. You always find potatoes in barrels. I'm talking about the book shelves not having any loot when it's has the chest symbol.

I agree, there are far too many empty containers, esp. bookshelves.

Fewer containers would help. Barring that, indicating that they're empty with a mouseover works as well.

They need to make some interesting books first

It is a bit frustrating. That said, a convenient way of dealing with them in Larian games since (at least) Divinity 2 has been to do a whirlwind attack to "open" a bunch of them at once and collect any resulting loot. So far I've neglected to see if the same tactic works in BG3, but it did in DOS/DOS2.

I imagine that Larian are not falling over themselves to stock random stuff at present, but perhaps the containers and bookshelves will be better stocked after EA.

Bookshelves can be good sources of in-jokes and general lore about the world, so it would be great to have this in BG3. Books that explain a little about the FR, books that give meta-knowledge useful when developing your character, and books that just have fun stuff. DA had a great series of love letters, for example, which could be found stuffed in odd corners around the gameworld.

Why everything is empty


There are some books like that in the ea already. Of particular note is a book that tells the story of the first two games from the point of view of various NPC's who are pissed by the mayhem the Bhaal spawn caused

Yes, I've found a few. I just hope that Larian take the opportunity to fill a few more shelves. I don't want tons of mundane 'stuff' to lug around, but neither do I want every random box containing magic swords and piles of gold. Also, whilst I like the plethora of domestic items tucked away, maybe Larian could include generic piles of 'trade goods' that are high weight and low value. A little like a few of the item already in the game but non-specific. You could choose whether to drag half a ton of mouldy fabric to the nearest trader or just leave it, but at least you have found something in that box.

I just hope that they don't increase the book count too much, or make it so that more books add actual clues that can be used in quests and dialogues.

I think the Baldur's Gate games were very good at this. Usually for every quest you had a better than usual item and for bigger quest and dungeons you had 3-4 special ones. Since the party is smaller, 3-4 might be too much, but 2-3 sounds about right.
I agree that overloading the game with special items is even worse than the current state, and after dos2 I think Larian learned their lessons on that regard