https://www.charlieintel.com/baldurs-gate/baldurs-gate-3-players-demand-major-quality-of-life-changes-for-inventory-management-288260/
Baldur's Gate 3 players beg for a highly requested change on inventory management: "I have so much loot it hurts!"
I agree that the inventory is atrocious - by far my least favorite part of the game - but....just stop picking up useless shit. I ended up with 40,000+ gold at the end of the game. When I replayed it, I only picked up the useful stuff and still ended the game fabulously wealthy while still buying all the things that I wanted
The most QOL inventory change would be being able to access everyone's inventory while in camp no matter if they are in my party or not
Having to constantly dismiss someone and get another character to join in order to move stuff back and forth is annoying as fuck
I ended up with 40,000+ gold
Please tell me you and the tollhouse woman got together and lived happily ever after.
I kept picking up useless shit because I thought I might be able to decorate my camp at some point and didn't want to waste paintings and vases ):
Inventory management is the bane of RPGs.
I'd like to see a series of games that accepts how big of a role this annoyance plays where literally the whole game is only inventory management.
It always reminds me of a beautiful quote that I’m going to butcher from one of the Factorio devs. If something isn’t fun, no matter how sacred it feels to your gameplay, get rid of it.
It’s hard to think of a game that has been improved by having inventory weight caps. For most games there should be two systems: resource hoarding, and item unlocks. You find an item, it’s now unlocked gratz. You find gold? Hoover it all up.
Really the only game I can think of where it really adds depth to the game is Darkest Dungeon 1. You have so many inventory slots, and you start out with them somewhat filled with food and assorted supplies to help you go. As you progress through a level, you naturally use up some supplies, but you still eventually have to choose whether to keep the bandages or the loot. But that was clearly a deeply thought out mechanic in the game, core to the experience, not “oh well skyrim has inventory management so we should too”.
I would add Pathologic 2, where resource scarcity and limits on inventory capacity are a driving force of the experience.
Yeah, the genius of the game was taking the stuff that sucks the most in open world games (inventory and fetch quests) and turn it into an enjoyable experience. The game stops being fun when it starts to be less about that (once you're ziplining everywhere the game starts to get kinda boring).
I agree with that. I would have liked the whole game to be on foot, really make you think about your choices
I almost gave up because of the atrocious inventory management. I lost many items because of it. Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know because everything is all over place.
My party is suboptimal in weapons, armor, and magic items because it's too slow to pickpocket the non-selected party to see their inventory and the camp chest and compare it to everything else
I wish that at camp it let you cycle through everyone, not just the people to have in your party. That way you could level everyone up and give them the best gear without the tedium of having to go to each person and put them in or take them out of the party.
this I can't understand. at all. if everyone is in camp, why can I not browse everyone's inventory? it makes no sense.
how many times have I got an item that's awesome for a character that's not in my party, but I have no inventory so I have someone else pick it up.
unless you're diligent and sending every single thing to camp, it's a pain in the ass to swap gear around. I still use the goody-bag method for gear drops. but it's not perfect and it can fail if you don't do management every time you play.
If you click on an inventory slot on your character sheet it will pop up a window with all available items anywhere in your inventory that can be equipped there.
Yeah, but it doesn’t work for the party chest, where most of the equipment is stored, because it’s heavy and clutters the inventories.
It’s hilariously bad…
Imagine if you could just sort and search. A lot of the problems DOS2 had that people complained about, they just kept for BG3. I don't think Larian play their own games.
Sort is only by recency, value etc, not exactly in-depth or particularly useful. I can open a bag and type to search for an item?
You can sort by type as well, there definitely could be more options but I really haven't had many issues with what's already available when finding stuff. And yes you can search for an item.
I dont understand how is this still such a big issue in 2023. Years ago even Pathfinder Kingmaker figured out a better way of doing it (shared party inventory and combined total weight with gradual penalties), why is nobody just copying or improving on that? Or just remove the limitation whatsoever if the game is not about it, like would the CRPG experience really be diminished if we didn't have to worry about constant looting and inventory management?
Even the RL DMs know better than to pester their players about it, just keep it within some reasonable common sense limits.
BG3 like DOS2 doesn't have shared inventories because they want multiplayer situations to allow for stuffing around etc
It's an UI issue, not a gameplay one. If it's really that important to have separate inventory while exploring, fine - but then make it a shared, easy to manage, infinite stash once you're back at your base or at some other meaningful checkpoint.
Im just tired of pointless inventory management. I just want to play the game.
Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous really spoiled us with its carry weight when half your party got pets. The inventory in BG3 is bad, but the fact it's so easy to reach the carry limit only makes it worse.
I would much rather have an auto-loot mechanic, like hire an NPC to loot for you and only bring the stuff you care about. That way it still feels realistic, but you don't actually need to deal with loot all that much and you get most of the benefit. So you'll just grab the stuff you think is useful, then the rest gets sold eventually.
I've managed to talk most of my DMs into a graduated scale of bags of holding. The cheapest is only 100gp, but it only weighs 5 pounds, and only holds 25 or 30. Something like that. It's been years.
It made it so we all had an appropriate bag of holding by level 2, and we just upgraded as we plundered and looted the countryside "aided the poor villagers."
Yeah, the inventory system in BG3 is absolutely awful. It’s in dire need of an overhaul of some sort.
The inventory management isn't great, but between sorting by weight and latest, plus the text search, it didn't hinder my ability to play. You basically just have to ignore the visual inventory in favor of those options.
When the game first came out a friend and I were discussing how bad inventory management was for about 20 minutes before I realized he was playing with keyboard+mouse and I was playing Steam Deck/controller.
We both had so many complaints about inventory and we were using completely different methods.
I've gotten use to it so it's "fine" now, but it could use some major improvements.
Loot has gone from "fun grid systems where there are tradeoffs and you always have to balance out what you can carry" to a "you are a walking truck who can just stash things like mad until you reach a ridiculously unrealistic limit and have to face the consequences of your own looting actions", at least for me.
Borderlands is the worst offender, and Bethesda Game Studios are right behind. They really need to give me a party where there are members who are looters and merchants who follow me around and slowly auto-sell the loot I leave behind, or something else to that effect. I think that it's one of those ideas where once one game begins implementing it, they all will.
Borderlands 3 and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands started to implement this with their Lost Loot Machine, but all it really does is delay the problem. The Loki 2 Season Finale had it right here, “The Loom inventory will never be able to accommodate for an infinitely growing multiverse item list”, it all comes crashing down eventually.
Sure, you can leave stuff behind, but I feel that the shift to a system where players are essentially walking trucks has changed this dynamic.
I really do feel like Loki at the end of the series when I'm managing inventory sometimes
I absolutely LOVE BG3. Currently in my 3rd play through (as The Dark Urge this time... amazing) and the one and only thing I feel they did a bad job on is their inventory system. They put in the alchemy pouch and camping supplies backpacks but nothing else at all to help manage anything else. You can switch between item categories but it's really not enough when there are so many items for so many different aspects of game play that even those are not an effective way to manage anything in a meaningful and semi organized way. And the custom/item hot bars need to work exactly like DoS/2 bc rn they just dont cut it. DoS2 had a Inventory container upgrade but it was shit bc you had to move the items out of their bags to use them for crafting/hot bar so this inventory issue has been a problem for Larian for a long time. Larian is the gold standard for game development studios and i have nothing but respect for them but they need to get their shit together with their inventory seeing as it's a HUGE part of the game play.
I haven't played, but does BG3 have the curse of inventory tetris?
As a D&D game, it really shouldn't have inventory issues. At low levels the only issue should be the weight of the bag. At high levels players should have access to bags of holding so that they can essentially keep anything they come across and not worry about the weight. Also, as D&D, your items should just be in a list.
It’s not inventory Tetris at least or even an issue of a carrying capacity (because you can right-click and send items to camp at anytime)…it's issue is the massive amount of items you accumulate and the difficulty of properly organizing/grouping and finding them. Sorting by stats & abilities is next to impossible…so your characters most likely are not equipping the best suited gear…and the potions, ingredients, scrolls…
I disagree. The number of "stuff" is important for RPGs. If you could only pick up "important" things, the game would have no real balance of mystery. Every meaningful item would obviously be useful in some mission or goal. I like it better where the stuff is plentiful and the mystery/puzzle is: can I use this? Can I use this generic poison in this giant pot of booze? Can I use this person's hand?
I feel like the puzzle is sort of beneficial by hiding important items or clever usages of boring items in the midst of all the guff.
I get why it's annoying but I think it adds to the games charm.
I love the puzzle, mystery and the massive quantity of items is a blessing. I want to be able to manage that well. ie let me tag items with custom labels and a send to my "possible puzzle items" chest, or my "tank gear" chest etc...that is all I want. This is the only thing that is holding back from a perfect 10. Edit: You could even in game rgp it by allowing the hire additional wagon(s) holding your traveler's chest(s)...idc just give me custom labels
Lol that's fair. I really wish we could manage things into chests. I want an armor chest, weapons chest, quest chest, etc. but I feel like the way it works right now isn't too bad but maybe I'm a glutton for pain.
I say I want that IRL
but i know full well that if all the slotted screwdrivers magically stayed in, or returned to, the allocated slotted screwdriver place, then I'd get spooked and wonder who's been f*ing with my tools.
I reckon best just to choose a character who would't care and try to RP that way.
They are just in a list. You can sort and filter the list, and certain small items will get added to pouches, eg keys.
The only issue is that the game doesn't signal what is worth picking up and what is not. If you're an obsessive, you can pick up 20 things in every room. Most of then are only interactive so that you can throw them at people. If you want to pick up 500 candles from a castle and sell them at 0.5gp each, you can. If you mean to do so, fine. If you're just doing it because slamming "take all" from every corpse is quicker, well then you are causing your problem.
If you pick up the weapon of every enemy you've killed, you kind of deserve it. That isn't d&d. By the second act you have magical weapons and never need a common weapon or armour again.
If by inventory Tetris you mean something like RE4's attaché case system, then no there's no reorganizing like that - it's closer to the Witcher 3's system, with a big grid of square images for each item and a section to the left depicting the character and where equipment can be slotted in. It's all just a bit cumbersome - item images are small and sometimes fairly generic, sorting options are few, juggling which characters are holding what, characters' inventories that are back at camp can't be accessed unless you go back and switch them into your party (AFAIK), which involves telling one character to stay behind, confirming with them, going over to the new character, asking them to join, THEN accessing their inventory.
They should copy the scavenger thing from Solasta so we don't need to pick up so much junk.