Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback The merchant UI is really clunky and confusing

As somebody brand-new to the game, I could mostly muddle my way through things... and then I ran into the first merchant in the druid grove and promptly got incredibly frustrated.

- Why are there separate "Trade" and "Barter" screens? What's even the difference between them, why is the game not telling me how they work? Why is the game even allowing me to give away items for free without any warning?

- Why can I only trade for one character at a time? Why do I have to manually move gold and items between characters before talking to the merchant?

This whole interface feels like it desperately needs an overhaul to make it friendly to new players. Heck, just stick the BG2 trade screen in there, that was easier than whatever's going with this mess.

As to your question on why you can just give items away... each npc has a attitude rating toward each of you companions that can be raised by gifting gold or goods. You can see this by right clicking and examining. After 200 gold or equivalence in goods the attitude will max out at 100 and that npc will offer that toon better buy and sell prices.

This is per npc and per companion. If your main donates 200 gold to a npc that npc will only give your main the discount.

Honestly, that just seems incredibly silly. Discounts for doing specific things for merchants (or saving them from such-and-such threat)? Sure. Discounts for... giving them random stuff? What? That makes no sense.

welcome to larian games

I think a lot of these systems were just transitioned over from DOS2 and haven’t been integrated properly at this stage. We don’t even have proper FR currencies yet (AFAIK you can find a few of the coins but all you can do is sell them for gold, at incorrect exchange rates)

Copper and silver coins each being worth 1 gold coin is one of my favourite features to be honest

Can't really say I find it particularly "confusing" but holy shit if being "clunky" isn't becoming a larian trademark when it comes to UI (and inventory in particular).

Here to wilfully admit I have no idea how merchants work and why an item is one price in their store but ends up being double the cost when I select that item to purchase. Why do they insist on bringing so many jarring mechanics from DOS into this game? These were things in the original games that literally worked totally fine 20 years ago. *face palm*

I learned how the merchants work in the DOS games (but not after accidentally giving merchants all my loot in the beginning or when I was not paying attention) which was an awful learning experience.

There is nothing really good about it, giving items to get reputation is... eh. It feels weird. The doubleclicking/dragging items in the barter screen feels tedious. It is tedious to fiddle with math and balancing stuff when you have too many items and need to buy potions/scrolls to balance it, or remove them and rebalance. It feels weird to just offer a bucket full of random junk when you do not have enough money, to have equal value.

I also hate how each companion needs to sell seperately, and how every companion has prices adjusted to their charisma (Even when talking/initiating trade with your high Charisma person). It either means your Face of the party does not matter when selling stuff, or you need to do the extremele tedious chore that is inventory management (It is a chore in BG3 and DOS games. Moreso in BG3 though) and move all the lootstuff one by one to your party Face.

It is not fun, just busywork and feels like a chore. In most games it is sort of fun at least to go to the vendors and sell your hard earned loot and see the gold come in. In BG3 (As was in DOS) I tend to dread going to merchants and kind of have it as a "Well. Let's get this over with." moment.

Can't really share the worries about "balancing purchases" being time consuming (there's literally a button that does just this in an instant) but I couldn't agree more about the quoted part.
It's really nothing else than tedious busywork just for the sake of it.

I mean, it does not take a huge amount of time, but it does cost more time than just selling and buying stuff normally. There have been times where it was a case of clicking the autobalance button and either paying too much or not having enough gold, and finding the item that makes up that difference etc. It is added work, and kind of unnecesary. Even if it is easy to deal with, it is extra clicks and that is a main issue had with other parts of the UI already, too.

Why make something more complicated than it has to be?

If you try to profit off of every goblin killed in combat it becomes tedious very fast. Sadly all the goblin bows and scimitars can't just turn to gold themselves. Normally I'd ask "How much would you value all these goblin bows". But currently I have to drag them over one by one.

Balancing purchases is the only thing the trade UI has going for it at the moment.

Not sure what's your point exactly, but one of my favorite things about how Pathfinder Kingmaker did inventory management is precisely that it actively discouraged the player from carrying around any piece of gear dropped by enemies, by making their resell value minimal while exacerbating the downsides of carrying around a lot of weight.
Given that you traveled considerably faster with a light inventory, you were actively incentivized to leave the trash loot on the ground and move on. Which mattered a lot when you had some deadline to match somewhere else.

Why not? D&D has a lot of ways to focus on the details that are interesting and then abstract away non-salient stuff. If people are just going to go through the tedium of looting all of those bows and scimitars to then turn around and drag them off to a merchant with a bad UI, why make them do that? Just give them the gold and skip the tedium. Maybe one or two bodies have weapons on them, just in the rare case you really need a weapon of some sort right now, but just loot gold from the rest - they can assume that you sold that stuff.

Alternately, give the merchants some measure of self-interest and only have them buy things that they care about. Why in the world would any of the merchants we've seen so far (apart from the one in the goblin camp) actually want a stack of crappy shortbows (or cutting boards or half-burned candles,...)? Just make it so they won't even buy that junk unless it's something that that particular merchant would actually care about.

I decided to play Solasta and BG3 back to back and the quality of gameplay is clearly evident by how both games handle the UI. In Solasta, it almost seems like the UI isn’t there because it’s so intuitive and easy. I don’t have to think about how to use it. Now I still think Solasta still has some issues but I think it can be fixed with some tweaks.

But with BG3, I am constantly fighting the UI to get my characters to do what I want. It gets frustrating.

Seriously play both games back to back and you’ll never want to mess with BG3 again. It is horribly clunky. The problem is, in order to fix the UI, it’s going to take more than simple tweaks.

I only discovered the attitude thing by accident, when I was trading with someone towards the end of the game and accidentally gave them 1 gold too much in a trade.

This is also useful for improving non-trader attitudes to your character (eg if you get caught pickpocketing from them) - just click on "trade" button during dialogue, buy their crappy apple for 4 gold instead of 3 and hey, relations are hunky-dory again.

Agree.

Interacting with merchants was actually enjoyable in BG2. Like I remember feeling reasonably excited to pay Ribald a visit, pretty much every time.

Buying and Selling things in BG3 feels like a chore and not just cause the click doesn't stick.

I don't know why they aren't referencing the earlier games with their interface or the nuts and bolts there, so that BG3 looks and feels more familiar to people who played BG1/2. Even down to the basic layout of the menus they could be doing things to make it organizationally closer to what we liked about the old games.

I also found the trade/barter thing weird, like ok are we supposed to haggle in dialog? Nope, just take my money for free? It was also more interesting when reputation and temples played into the buying/selling mini game.

They have a lot of work to do, like so much work

Hell, even CP2077 lets you sell all your ‘junk’ with one command.

You can do that in BG3 too, although you have designate the items as junk yourself first, so it's still not tedium-less.