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Sunday, August 20, 2023
Inventory management in Baldur's Gate 3
I finished a major fight in Act II of Baldur's Gate 3 today, in which I had to defend a position against waves of enemies. As I was level 8 and had a good selection of area-of-effect spells, I killed a rather large number of enemies in that fight. And my first thought after winning the fight was: "Oh shit, this is going to be annoying to loot". I believe that this is bad game design, players should be happy about loot, not dreading it.
Basically Baldur's Gate 3 has too much junk loot, and not enough quality of life features for inventory management. Some loot, like for example rotten food, you don't even want to pick up. Some loot you can actually use for your characters, but those are few and far between. The majority of loot items you don't want for your characters, but they are valuable enough to sell; but they also have some weight, and so you need to manage that. There are some quality of life features: You can sort by type, weight, value, or order you picked the items up; but the "type" classification is very broad, so that you can for example have all weapons as one type, but they won't be sorted by sub-type of weapon. You can mark items as "wares" for selling, but you still need to carry them to a trader, and that trader needs to have sufficient gold to buy them, so you might have to visit several traders for a large stash. If the loot is too heavy, you can send it "to camp", but you'll still have to recover it from there and bring it to traders when you want to sell. The system would be okay if there wasn't so much loot, but in BG3 there is a huge quantity of low-value loot. And there is no area looting, you need to go through every corpse, every crate, every barrel, so the overall process of looting everything and selling it is complicated, time-consuming, and not much fun. You only do it, because many vendors have something you need for sale; curiously I have more items equipped that I bought from vendors than that I looted from enemies.
My recommendation is to pick up light-weight containers, like pouches, and use them to sort your inventory, keeping your arrows, your potions, and your scrolls neatly tidied away from your gear. I tend to carry a bunch of gear with me in Baldur's Gate 3, because there is so much gear that allows you to cast a single spell once per day. Equip the shield that allows you to cast Aid, cast the spell at the start of the day, then equip another shield that is more suitable for combat, etc.
The other big problem with the huge quantity of loot is that you end up not using even the stuff that is potentially useful. Hands up everybody who still has the void bulbs and caustic bulbs collected during the tutorial in his inventory! Throwable items, potions, and scrolls tend to pile up in my inventory because of the action economy of D&D combat: If you can only do one standard action per turn, you most of the time want that to be the best spell or best weapon attack you have; situationally useful items can easily be forgotten by the time the situation comes around where they would actually have been worth using. And the way I build my characters, I don't even have a lot of spare bonus actions during a fight.
I do think Baldur's Gate 3 could use some more quality of life features around loot and inventory management. A "loot all in area" button, for example. Selling stuff directly from inventory without needing to visit a trader. Better sorting features, and better ways to keep your inventory tidy. But most of all I hope that future Larian Studios games will simply have less loot and fewer containers to search for loot. Picking a lock on a chest to find 5 potatoes and a carrot isn't fun. Clicking on 20 wooden crates and barrels in a warehouse isn't fun. Going back and forth from a battlefield to a trader to sell everything isn't fun. Loot should be more fun than that.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:55 PM Permanent Link
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The quality-of-life features like the various sorting methods and Add to Wares and Send to Camp are actually well ahead of nearly every other RPG. I use "sort by type" for all 4 chars at once constantly. And the carrying capacity is outrageously generous, even all my strength-8-dumped characters can carry a vans' worth of junk all day.
Yes, it gets tedious, and yes Larian's people that placed their lootable junk containers went overboard. I don't think looting your kills is ever onerous, compared to looting something like the burnt Inn. There are storage rooms EVERYWHERE, particularly food/drink storage. They could have easily had a quarter of the camp supplies, and reduced consumption by a factor of 4.
What drives me the most nuts is their lack of auto-stacking for like items. Some things like torches should stack but don't. Items moved between PCs and into containers generally don't stack. If you're a hopelessly anal-retentive inventory manager like me, you have a bag of food and a bag of drink at camp, and periodically go in and manually collect all the carrots and potatoes subpiles into a single slot! This is exacerbated by having multiple versions of the exact same item that won't stack for whatever reason. I hope this is high on their list of things to fix for Patch 1.
My other high priority request would be to make it easier to move items between companions at camp. I've started experimenting with pulling in different companions for specific needs, kind of like sideboarding in MtG. But it's very tedious to move stuff around when you can't access the inventory of anyone not currently in your party. It's better once you learn how to move many items at once, but still a lot of work and discourages using more companions.
Yes, it gets tedious, and yes Larian's people that placed their lootable junk containers went overboard. I don't think looting your kills is ever onerous, compared to looting something like the burnt Inn. There are storage rooms EVERYWHERE, particularly food/drink storage. They could have easily had a quarter of the camp supplies, and reduced consumption by a factor of 4.
What drives me the most nuts is their lack of auto-stacking for like items. Some things like torches should stack but don't. Items moved between PCs and into containers generally don't stack. If you're a hopelessly anal-retentive inventory manager like me, you have a bag of food and a bag of drink at camp, and periodically go in and manually collect all the carrots and potatoes subpiles into a single slot! This is exacerbated by having multiple versions of the exact same item that won't stack for whatever reason. I hope this is high on their list of things to fix for Patch 1.
My other high priority request would be to make it easier to move items between companions at camp. I've started experimenting with pulling in different companions for specific needs, kind of like sideboarding in MtG. But it's very tedious to move stuff around when you can't access the inventory of anyone not currently in your party. It's better once you learn how to move many items at once, but still a lot of work and discourages using more companions.
Something I started doing is just sending all my vendor trash to the camp. I organized the stuff I want to keep in my camp box into back packs so it doesn't get mixed with my vendor trash.
When I want to purchase or sell I just walk to the vendor and then select all my vendor trash and add to wares and pick up all at once. Then I teleport back to the vendor and sell it all.
My main character is still full of potions and arrows but at least I don't have to deal with normal weapons and armor on him anymore.
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When I want to purchase or sell I just walk to the vendor and then select all my vendor trash and add to wares and pick up all at once. Then I teleport back to the vendor and sell it all.
My main character is still full of potions and arrows but at least I don't have to deal with normal weapons and armor on him anymore.
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