Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Degradation of Inventory Experience and Remaining Economic Problem

I got this game right at the beginning and even wrote a pretty positive review of it (https://yttribune.com/2020/10/12/baldurs-gate-3-a-realistic-look-at-the-long-awaited-game/). However, I played that with the first version and played some other games as I was hoping an early release would provide some easier difficulty level as death seemed way too common at the default setting. Well, here I am trying to see what has been updated, and while there are a lot of improvements, I've found that when you deal with inventory, which was a bit laggy originally, it is now near unplayable. The sheer lag when doing something that should be the least computationally intensive part of the game has become unbearable. I'm getting through large battles with no lag, but it's lagging if I try to move something to another spot in the inventory (still no autosort to my knowledge) and it's even worse when I try to sell.

For that matter, the economy still makes zero sense to me. I just purchased items that have a collective value of 200 gp and the seller - who stated these were things he didn't need anymore - is valuing them at 479, more than double. What I sell him, goes for less than half of the price it's valued for, creating a difference with a factor of 5 or 6. I would certainly hope it's not a factor of charisma as my character has a score of 13, which is in the +1 step.

I'm about to try if switching to DirectX makes it playable, but you need to at least offer a simplified graphical interface for inventory that doesn't overlay live action stuff if you cannot promptly fix it.

I want to do the actual math here. Let's look at my 1600 gp ruby. He will give me 667 gp for it, that is .416875. This is close to the difference between the 200 gp value of goods you can get from him and he charges 479 for, that's a .417537. Essentially it works out to a factor of 5.75 disadvantage when trading or bartering. To see exchange rates this poor, you usually have to go to a college bookstore.

However, DirectX did fully fix the lag.

And after playing that a bit, DirectX makes everything else extremely laggy. So I guess I'll have to quit the game and reenter it to switch between engines depending on if I'm dealing with inventory or not.

I can't comment on your lag issues, I haven't played the recent patches, but for merchant prices the character who interacted with the merchant will use their CHA to modify buy/sell value. It's a horrible system, forcing you to painstakingly move everything you want to sell to a single character. There are also old D:OS2 features behind the scenes, for example you can just gift a merchant some money which will increase their favor of you and lower all their prices. Right now that isn't very surfaced and I hope they just remove it entirely. As for the value vs the buy/sell price, it's pretty common in games for it to be like this one: merchant buys for less and sells for more (shrug).

I can't comment on your lag - I'm not experiencing any lag at all. The mercantile system, however, is pretty garbage-fire at the moment.

You do have an auto-sorting function for your inventory, thought the game doesn't call it out - there's a button to the right of your top bar, when you're in an inventory or character menu, which is a pull down that lets you sort things by weight, type, value, etc.,

I expect them to sell for more than they buy it for - that's to be expected. I am not intimately familiar with 5.0, because it is just poorly designed from what I am aware of, but the standard before that has always been that they pay half price on everything but trade goods. I expected half price - I sell for half the value but only pay the value. That has a factor of only 2 - something much more reasonable than 5.75.

That's exactly how it is defined in 5e. BG3 is following D&D in like 20%, most things you experience in the game is Larian's unbalanced homebrew.

Then why couldn't they have used 3.5 rules - the only complaint people had with them was that they were complicated, which the program would have removed the complication of them. I could be using some wonderful feats instead of this.

Yeah the annoyingly high prices blew my mind at first.

Fun thing is when I compare the stuff now almost all of it looks like unnecessary junk to me.
At least what they sell in the Grove before lvl.4 ( or whatever influences the merchants inventory ).
I sell them the trash of almost everything I find during our groups travel - and then I can easily afford one or two items I might want later on.
But ultimately buying in Act 1 feels like a trap.

They can take my trash. But I won't take theirs, especially not if its that overprized.

The nerf the Tiefling and Druid merchant has.
We are probably their only bet of SURVIVAL.
But sure sell us your stuff with a scent of weave (green quality) about them, sell it to a prize comparable to extortion.


When I joined the Goblins once to raid the Grove, I was actually only focussed on getting back at the Merchants.
" Thats what you get for trying to screw me over. " ^_^

Going purely on strategy, that depends on what you do. In my most recent start I managed to kill the snake druid once I got the wyvern poison, You get everything back after that because the tieflings slaughter the merchant, and you can loot him for everything he has. Having those green items can help you progress. However, my plan of breaking out the goblin afterwards didn't work out because they killed her when they slaughtered the druids.

I tested gifting goods to a vendor last night to see what the discount is and try to decide if worth it. I used the Harper ruby, Dragon's Grasp axe and a scroll with default value of 100 for my testing...my CHR is 12 I think.

Default values:
Dragon's Grasp listed as 250 sells to me for 600 = 240% markup.
Scroll listed as 100 sells to me for 240 = 240% markup.
Scroll listed as 100 sells to vendor for 42 = 42% of value.
Harper ruby listed as 1600 sells to vendor for 667 = 41.69% of value.

I gifted 100 gold worth of goods at a time to the vendor and fully left the conversation then re-entered to look at price differences. Prices hit max discount after 200 gold worth of goods was donated(nothing happens if you gift more).

Maxed values:
Dragon's Grasp listed as 250 sells to me for 475 = 190% markup.
Scroll listed as 100 sells to me for 190 = 190% markup.
Scroll listed as 100 sells to vendor for 53 = 53% of value.
Harper ruby listed as 1600 sells to vendor for 842 = 52.63% of value.

Prices in RPGs have never 'made sense' to me. But luckily I always end up with a bunch of gold endgame. I'm pretty sure the ratio is calculated based on a formula to 'balance' the game based on items/gold available to PCs. And not on what 'makes sense' if I were playing an economy simulator.

It's a bit simplistic, but it makes sense. A shop owner won't pay you what they sell it for because they have to make a living. Selling perfectly good weapons and armor you might expect it to get more like 80% of the value, but 50% hasn't proven problematic in the past 40+ years.

I bet Larian is looking at 10 items they put in every room and "weight-wise" it is kinda practical, to just slip 7 of them them in your pocket.
Then they add this calculation with every single item they put on the path and voila.
We must sell almost everything we actually never wanted to bring with us -> so that we can buy one article we want.

Feels annoying but it has to be done.
So that we can feel like we earned it or something.
Since "we worked so hard" for it by literally collecting all that trash.

Oh, once this thing becomes moddable I am going to be either modding a quick fix or downloading one - which will probably be just sticking 10k gold on a corpse when you crash. I presume the tutorial doesn't count as a spoiler.