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

New UI and update looks amazing. Man imagine further improving this 6 years from now for BG4!

I mean wow, compared to this game made in 2009, weve come a long way!

Not sure where I saw those messages, but it seems not everyone noticed that different item tabs are still present in the inventory UI.
To get to them you need to just click on that search line. Don't start typing anything and you'll see that the game suggests to show things of certain types.

Not really "user friendly"...

I'm not saying it's user-friendly. I'm saying it's there so people will suffer a bit less.

I like it, seems like first step in right direction ...
First you need to acnlowledge type of items before you start work with them.

And Swen told us this UI is still just work in progress.

The elephant in the room when it comes to inventory management is that while there is a gigantic potential margin of improvement, no sorting option in itself will ever solve the issue completely, because the issue is: there's too much useless/redundant shit that can end up filling our bags...
And we could frankly do without a good portion of it.

I think the abundance of trash loot is Larian's way of trying to make the game world more immersive. And sadly while they are focusing on a minor detail like having worthless plates, spoons and quills as something you can pick up, they are missing the big picture of what makes an immersive game world. Night/day, gameplay that matches the narrative and visual style, consistency of style etc.

I hope they would drastically cut the amount of trash loot and empty containers in this game.

One kind of fun use for trash loot comes to mind in the form of the Animate Objects spell that could let you weaponize some cutlery or other worthless objects. But even that spell could be made work without having those items flood containers and inventories.

I also think they might use trash loot as ingredients for crafting. Could be wrong, of course, but once they get the crafting system implemented, I suspect a lot of useless junk won't be as useless anymore.

It's a sum of things that makes inventory management so cumbersome, honestly.

- For a start the inane amount of... well, everything. 60 or more types of food, 30 plants, herbs and mushrooms (that at time overalap with food, at time don't), plates, glasses, spoons, etc.
- keys that aren't gathered in a keyring (as it's standard in many RPG games since Ultima VII) because they want that competitive co-op meme pickpocketing (which they COULD make work even with a keyring, incidentally)
- books and letters that A)weight a surprising amount, all things considered B) are not easily sorted or marked relatively to their usefulness.
- the fact that even items that have literally NO OTHER USE that being vendor trash aren't automatically labeled as such (i.e. "Mark as wares" by default without expecting the player to do it manually),
- the absurd amount of containers everywhere and the lack of a proper system to tell apart what's full, what's empty and what was already checked (well, technically we have this last one, but it doesn't "match" with the previous two features, making it a lot less useful that it should be).
- a HIGHLIGHT system (the ALT button by default) that never seem to work according to ONE CLEAR SET OF RULES, so it's always a case by-case basis if something is marked as important or not when pressing the key, so it gives you no shortcut through all the inventory busywork.
- Last but not least, the fact that, of course, the inventory itself is not particularly comfortable to browse, sort and filter (even the existing filter options don't work "dynamically" and need to be constantly refreshed).

Just for the record this just aggravates the problem, since it increases the number of items players can't feel sure about and are factually encouraged to hold to.

Which makes even more important for the game to mark CLEARLY and automatically what types of items are "vendor trash" (or "wares", as they call them here) and have no other use than weight you down/bein sold.

Also, at some point as a designer you have to start questioning your own work and decide how many types of non-stacking unique foods, plants or what else do you really need before starting to self-sabotage the pace of your own game.

One example I made very often in the past is what a better game The Witcher 3 could have been with few significant changes to its itemization (and without arbitrary levels just to inflate numbers over time, but that's OT now).
Imagine if instead of having hundreds of plants at every corner one could gather everywhere the game gave you only the genuinely rare and useful ones every now and then that would unlock significant alchemical upgrades.
Imagine if rather than having your "witcher sense" lighting up the whole fucking scenario as a christmas tree because there were alchemicals and gems in any farmer's drawer, we had loot only when it mattered something.
Etc, etc.

Don't pick the crap up, no one is forcing you to, get over it.

When you have to filter through the junk and can't use the Take All button the damage is already done.

Filtering what crap is worth picking up or not and what you should keep or sell is ALSO part of the inventory busywork.
If you have a system that is constantly breaking the pace because it puts you constantly in front of this type of inventory management you have a design problem to address.

And I don't really need your advice about how to play this genre, for the record, so you can spare me the condescending tone.

If you want specific items you pick up specific items.


Obviously you do since this is just a "you" problem, you pick up stuff and get on the forums and start crying you picked it up. Sounds AMAZING

No, I don't. If anything, the glaring issue here is your lack of understanding about BASIC design principles.

In the exact moment every time players take a step they find themselves surrounded by dozen of crates and barrels with HUNDREDS of items, it doesn't really matter if they choose to carry zero, twelve or all of them.
Being put in front of all that browsing/filtering is ALREADY a problem in itself when it comes to busywork, inventory management and pacing.

Problem is that we have ended tons of playthrough, but players are not supposed to know what is a trash item and what is not.

The game should definitely mark trash items as trash items and allow us to sell all wares automatically without the need to "mark as ware" every single items...
which is absolutely tedious and useless => 1 click to mark items individually "as ware" + 1 click to "sell all wares" OR 1 double click to sell items individually is exactly the same.

A tag "wares" for decorative and ""useless"" items would be better and we'll only have to do one click to sell them all.
=> Management of such items ONLY comes IF the player want to keep a few items (i.e to decorate his camp), but in most cases people we just don't care and automatically manage these items with 1 click when they meet a merchant.

==> inventory management improvement.

I would question an ability to pick up trash items to begin with. I get that Larian likes systemic consistency (it's a item! You have inventory! Any item goes into inventory!) but that is only appealing if there is systemic consequence to it - if there is no potential interesting use for those items, then being able to put them in inventory isn't welcome either. Nothing prevents items from being interactable, and not being put-able into inventory.

EDIT. Not a problem for myself, as those items indeed have no use, so the worst thing that can happen is me picking up a vase or spoon by accident and then having to search through the inventory to drop it - which doesn't happen often enough to be annoying. A more negative effect is that I don't look at the enviroment the same I do in, for example Arcane titles - because in BG3 while a lot of things are interactable, there isn't much you can do with it.

It's a bit much to expect players to pull double duty as a Hoover vacuum and a filter...at every turn.

Oh come on, you know better than that: of course you have to collect literally everything, it's the first law of RPGs.

Er anyway, let's keep things nice, I'm sure nobody is being intentionally rude.