Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Let's talk new UI.

Please share your thoughts on new UI.

My initial impression is very positive. It's offers same functionality that before, plus much, much more.

Couple special unexpected mentions:

1) I do like how when youclick on weapon icon to attack the hotbar will default to showing available weapon skills - nice way of highlighting what one can do with the weapon
2) good, clear showcase of what status effects are in play
3) nice, compact character sheet/inventory/equipment
4) search feature is great!

Wishes/nitpics:

1) Because only sorting happens through resource icons, at the moment there is no way to quickly seperate cantrips, like we can leveled spells.
2) I wish items would sort even further into potions, throwables, arrows, scrolls - you know a bit like in main view the hotbar already is divided into main actions/class skills/items. There is so much stuff in BG3 that making it more organised is always welcome (you know I like my things neatly sorted
3) no way to hide minimap anymore? I imagine it is useful in coop, but I find little use in singleplayer. I would happily swap it with combat log (which still is rather barebone)

EDIT: I do think some big UI elements are unnecessary. One needs to find "End Turn" button but it's really humongous. Similarly character's portrait - I am not convinces we really need it. The only function it fulfulls is highlighting whom we are currently controlling - and I would rather use party management UI for that (highlight better character under control) then add another bigger portrait to the main UI.

Mine is far more negative,

Looks nice, is horrendous once in your hands :
- Enourmous waste of space, particularly during combats, the play order and hover take up a huge amount of space on entire field of view
- Minimap, Character icon, Forced turn-based mode, flee button and party handler have the same problem
- Whatever was gained in clicks was lost five time over in mouse travel time and UI readability
- Anyone used to standard MMO UI design will click the different UI buttons, not understanding why the same panel keeps appearing
- Spell bar isn't instinctive at all, and you'll be wasting time every time you want to come back to the "Main" bar
- Submenus for spells with multiple options make you lose track of what bar your were on
- Mixing permanent actions such as jump and throw with removable ones induces confusion
- On that note, permanent actions can now be removed, which people will unintentionally do
- Passives aren't immediately visible
- New character sheet makes the model way less visible
- No more UI locks for slots

Suggestions :
Re-instate the old UI general design, keeping the following things :
- The Improvements to tooltips, turn order and party management (the latest in their old locations and their old compact form)
- The improvements to the character sheets, in the character sheet menu
Or :
- Introduce a "UI mode" switch in the settings allowing us to switch between the old UI/Suggestions above and the new one

I like function over form, and especially in a strategy game, I want to see the most field possible without the UI obstructing my sight and to have the important information and possible actions displayed in a concise and immediately understandable way
To me this is an dramatic downgrade from the previous iteration, which was clear, concise and to the point. Synthetic, in a word.
Most of the Big buttons take unnecessary space, Your own portrait is redundant with your party icon, and spellbar navigation is frustrating because you have to reach the "close" button for each spell with its own submenu
You don't know what is built-in/essential anymore and you lose quick view and access to the important interactive actions, namely your passives

Without an UI editor to change sizes, element locations and on/off display, this is a disastrous design choice.

I did notice the Flee button is gigantic now – how much fleeing is everyone doing? I've never used it once.

After the initial excitement.. It's still messy and not good.

Everything goes in the same hotbar. They didn't fix the main problem. Stuff is going to move around in there, and you have to constantly search for what you want to do. Now you need to constantly filter before searching too. I had to search for something as basic as Jump while exploring. Basic Actions like Dash, Disengage, Jump or Hide should be completely FIXED and unmovable somewhere in their own section.

I clicked on the "Items" tab, but the bar is empty even though the character has scrolls and potions. Why do I need to sort "Bonus Action" or "Action" instead of "Item" if I want to drink a potion? Completely counterintuitive. I'm looking for an item and I might not instantly remember whether something is an action or bonus action.


Why can't it have fixed buttons sorted like..

UNIVERSAL ACTIONS (sorted clearly by Action / Bonus Action)
Dash / Disengage / Hide / Help / Jump / Attack / Shove / Throw / Improvised Weapon / Temporary Action (e.g. Activate Witch Bolt)

ABILITIES
Weapon Abilities and Class Abilities, sorted clearly by Action / Bonus Action.


Then a separate button for SPELLS that hides/expands all your memorized spells into view, with separate upcast buttons. Solasta does the 5e spellcasting UI extremely well, take note please.

Then a separate button for ITEMS that expands/hides a grid view with scrolls, potions etc.

Separate button for QUIVER that does the same for ammunition for all the ranged characters out there.


If you want to have less clicks and everything on the screen at once, leave all tabs open. If you like a cleaner minimalistic look, there can be an auto-close option in settings that hides the menu after you use an item or cast a spell.

+1 all agree.

You need to go to options and toggle stuff to be automatically added to hotbar, otherwise it will remain empty.

In spite of the new "deck" system, the hotbar works more or less the same, and has same frustrations. I organised so cantrips at the left side of Shadowhearts spell "deck", and it all got jumbled as soon as I leveled up.

Rather then acting like subfolders, like in PoEs, those are more like item spell filters. I like it more then what we had before, but like with chain system, it feels like we got options to deal with a bad system, rather then bad system being replaced by something better.

There is a lot of complicated UI, that's for sure. I didn't spend more then couple seconds managing UI so far, so that's a big improvement for me.

At what resolution are you playing, exactly? I'd be all for trimming down a lot of wasted space, but it doesn't look anywhere near as gigantic as you are describing it to me.

Also, while this one is still far from flawless I strongly disagree about your claim that the previous iteration was better in ANY way.

Still dislike the MMO art direction of the UI and I personally prefer the more minimalist, organized subfolder approach.

And throwing, while nice, is a total UI mess. When you say you're going to throw something it immediately gives you access to literally everything in your inventory. While I suppose this should be possible (via toggle) the default should just be thrown weapons with maybe toggles for thrown consumables and everything else.

It's kind of a disaster.

Jesus and holy smokes. You'd think game developers would have licked HUD clutter by 2022, but...no.

Looks awful and cheap.

It looked neater at first, but after playing around with it a bit... I take back what I said about it possibly being more functional than Solasta UI just by looking at it from the panel from hell. In actual practicality, it needs a bit more work. Still better than before, at least.

Barbarian doesn't interest me much, I just booted up the patch to look at the improved UI. Gonna go back to hibernating until the reaction patch or a new companion is out. (Or Bard, but I assume reactions are a pre-requisite.)

The good:

Character sheet looks much better, everything is easy to find now.

I like that some of the stuff I won't use on some characters can be removed from the bar (like shove, throw, dip and weapon attacks for spellcasters)

The bad:

Can't find a way to increase the size of the bar at all, this is going to be horrible in later levels especially for spellcasters and anyone who frequently uses items. Pretty sure we have even less space than before.

If I am going to be forced to have to click on extra buttons to open up more menus (spell slots, action, bonus action) then rearranging needs to be an option. Once my custom bar is filled up then I can see that I will be wasting more time finding what I need to click on than actually playing the game and this is stupid.

Are they only playing and testing their own game in multiplayer controlling only one character?

In a single player game where you control 4 characters it makes absolutely no sense to move or remove something as basic as Dash or Shove. Those need to be in the exact same place for all characters always. It shouldn't even be possible to remove something like Dash by accident.

The new UI is better for spells because of the sorting but that's about it. They are clinging to a really bad foundation of design here. I would like to hear a dev talk on UI design and why they hate a Solasta or Pillars of Eternity type UI so much?

I'm also experiencing problems with weapon specific abilities being removed and re-added every time I load, changing their location in the UI from where I place them.

This new UI looks to me as if someone preferred design over functionality. Way to bulky to my liking.

I only looked at it for a few minutes (because of various crashes I had after updating) but I really liked the old one more.
Would love to see some scaling and show / hide options.

One thing that I noticed is the fact that the huge character-portrait is of no use at all.
You can double click to centre the camera, but this centring is different from the key bind method. Once you use the key to centre, the double click will not do anything anymore.

I did some measurements and can only conclude that it's a disaster:
I play at a 16:9 screen, 3840x2160 and when in combat with a full party, 4 opponents about 25% of the available screen gets taken by the UI
At that moment you have 3 pictures of your active char, and 2 pictures of your other party members on screen. What the use off all this screen-clutter?
Mini-map isn't exactly mini anymore.
End turn is way to big, as is flee, as is character, as is inventory.

Scaling happens only when you change the height of your window, it does not react to changing width. Try and put your playable window in a 4:3 res. and you will no longer be able to see anything from the game but the UI

I could go on for a while, but in the end I think it's a terrible implementation of UI, it's more like back to the seventies to me. Please make it scalable, this size is hardly playable.

Well so far i have only few dozen minues of experience, but allready im full of impressions.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly:

First the Good:
- I must admit that i enjoy sorting much more than i expected, not that i use it ... especialy not the way Swen showed us, i still preffer one huge hotbar where i can find everything im using often. But i like that i can have "weapon" section ... "spells" section ... and "items" section that can be draged or hided any way i need. That much is awesome!
- I really like how instead of poping up windows our hotbar get replaced with temporary one ... this is really nice and ellegant solution in my eyes!
- I believe there is either bug or oversight, bcs we are able to put anything to any bar ... like spells into "items" bar, or vice versa ... FOR THE LOVE OF ANYTHING THAT IS HOLY PLEASE DONT, I REPEAT DONT REPAIR THIS!!!
- All spells of level 1 finaly get level I. indication on icon ... that is something i was hoping for whole year. :3
- New tooltips looks really good! The DnD style damage seem a little faded next to typical RPG X-Y value tho.

Now the Bad:
- Crowned king of everything bad in UI, lack of hotbar lock ... this is one of worse things you could do.
- Hotbar still have that really, REALLY ugly habbit of sorting itself. :-/
- Sadly the same sorting habbit have even party UI ... please dont change the order of my party members, when i use ungroup button ... there is reason i keep sorting them the way i do. :-/
- Hotbar is still too small. :-/ Im sory, i know we get a LOT more buttons than in previous patches, but almost half of them is now filled with buttons that were previously part of fix UI (shove, dip, jump, hide, etc) and when you add your weapons skills ... sudently almost 3/4 of your bar is full and you didnt even get to single spell. :-/
Playing as Cleric is pure nightmare ... i want my hotbar to work with me, not against me there is plenty of other enemies to fight with.
- Spells with more versions (yes that basicaly means just Chromatic Orb, i dint seen Hex yet) seems to still lack any second-sorting ... yes we get level 1 on left half and level 2 on right half ... but elemental versions are still chaoticly poured out more than sorted.
- I didnt find any way to close temporary bar (before known as popup) other than manualy clicking on the little X button ... Escape, nor right clicking is working ... quite frustrating to be honest.
- Tooltip for Magic Missiles claims that the spell deals 2-5 damage ... there certainly should be written "per missile", otherwise nobody will ever use it.
- Speaking of tooltips ... the old tooltip that showed everything in regular sized text was WAAAAAAAAY better than that small print under our target health bar, wich by the way still tells us nothing ... i was just attackin with Astarion and i just had there written "player disadvantage" ... i FUCKING KNOW i have disadvantage, chances of hit allready told me that, i read the tooltip to find out WHAT gives me disadvantage, so i can think about how to get rid of it!!! :-/
- When you are eqipping your party the letter E seems more like shortcut than anything else, and the warning text telling you who have it equipped is way too small to notice.
- Also im not quite sure why do we need double click for equip item when we allready

And finaly the Ugly:
And while i realize this is matter of personal taste, this is the bar itself. :-/
- Dead and unused space on both right and left sides now seems even biger ...
- It took me a while before i finaly find reactions ... and i still didnt find any way to make them visible at all time ... honestly switching between lethal and non lethal attacks is pure hell. :-/
- Button for ending the turn is too far away from spells to use it comfortably. :-/
- Also its unnecesary HUGE.
- Speaking about huge things ... why is my "mini"-map taking almost 1/10 of my screen? O_o
- Writings on minimap are too big ... i dont need to see names of every portals there, i never use minimap UI for fast travel anyway. :-/
- And who the Hells come with that idea that shortcuts on hotbar will be sorted verticaly instead of standard horisontal style?!!! -_-
- Tooltip for Chromatic Orb seems to be quite unfinished ... since it lacks both X-Y damage, and any dices or other "pretty parts".


Well those are my first impressions ...
I wonder where it will go next.

I agree with a lot of the stuff Rag pointed out.

My two Main issues are:

1) No hotbar lock. I kept looking for it and thought I must be mistaken, since it's such an important feature, but it really was not implemented.
2) The Inventory screen is WAY too small given the huge amount of inventory we are dealing with. I really would like to have access to side by side/full screen inventory panels that display an entire inventory at once for easier sorting. You pick up so much random crap in this game it really helps to be able to work with the larger screens.

More issue will likely occur, we are doing a run down later.

I feel that given the huge mod community we have as a resource that we should be reaching out to them for design assistance here, because I am 100% certain the first mod will be UI improvements at this point.

was going to make my own post about how I dont even want to play this game with the UI in its current state
like it may actually be one of the worst UIs i've played with in a long time
but this guy pretty much covered everything I have issue with

only thing id add is that separating all the inventory stuff means you can only right click > send to (party member) rather than just drag it over
and that part is extra weird since there used to be a weird sort of delay when you would try to click and drag an item that seems to have been fixed

honestly my only wish for the UI is the patch 6 one but with a 3rd row

Just on that second point, Blackheifer - are you aware that there's a button that will expand your inventory up, to show off more of it and cover the rest of your character sheet with it? It doesn't necessarily fix the issue, but that will let you see more at once, at least.

That aside...

As much as I spoke mildly and favourably about the new UI in the synopsis, actually playing with it for a while leaves me with a distinctly different impression.

- It takes up way too much of the screen, and there is no way to scale any of it.
- The mini map is a particularly bad example of this, but the hot bar itself is far bigger than it needs to be, compared to the screen.

- The character sheet looks nicer, certainly, but it's still very large - and now we no longer have the pop-out option to have our inventory on screen, but with most of the screen free; we've LOST that functionality.
- This means that if you are, for example, trying on a few different armours and trying to look at your character as you do it, you actively have to fight the UI; the large character window, the nesting tooltips which cannot be delayed, disabled or detached to a fixed location, and the rest of the oversized UI elements means that it can legitimately be a struggle to change your equipment and look at your character on screen as you do... and yet you want to do this, because the doll in your actual character sheet is now much smaller, so looking at your character directly is actually the better option - if only you could do it comfortably.

- As others mention, the Throw element is a mess that just spews out your entire inventory that you then need to scroll through awkwardly to find what you're after... and this is at the very beginning of the game, before I've even collected a lot of stuff.

- I often felt that trying to look at, access or do something had become an oddly multi-step process of "first I have to do this, then this, now that. Okay, now that I've changed that, I have to go back, and back again, and then..." and it felt as though there was no simply, fast and efficient way to achieve it. There was often, it seemed, only one way to do a given thing - such as clicking a specific button, and normal gaming precepts hadn't been observed in this regard.
- One example: if you have any kind of filter on your inventory (such as armours), you can try one one easily enough, but you can't, now, drag the armour you're wearing off to unequip it; not with the screen like this. You first have to either clear the filter and return to your base inventory, or you have to unequip it by the right click menu. It's clunky as balls, and counter-intuitive to boot.

- Speaking of normal gaming precepts... As well has the character panel being scale locked, taking up approximately 1/3 of the screen when open, and being broad as well as tall.... it also steals complete priority, which means that if a new window is brought up - such as an examine window (also large, and also impossible to resize), it pops up Underneath the character panel, behind it, despite being the active and more recent window, and will generally be entirely illegible until you close the character window first - in many cases, this is unavoidable, because you needed the character window open to access the item that you are inspecting, which you can only do through the right click menu on the item while it's in your inventory or on your person; it's a design which literally fights against itself in these cases.

It looks better, on the surface, but looks are only UI-Skin deep; it doesn't actually function smoothly or cleanly in practice right now.