Great game, ABYSMAL inventory management

[atm]

I have a couple hundred hours in early access, but I'd forgotten how freaking bad the inventory management was in the game. Because the rest of the game is just so good, it really stands out as such an inexplicably bad feature.

Picking up items is a lot of work. Everything you pick up requires your character to have a small animation, and there is stuff EVERYWHERE. The crafting system encourages you to hoard everything you find. Every piece of grass. Every gnoll ear. You never know when later in the game it might craft into a pile of potions of speed. You kill a large pull of mobs, and you then have 20+ clicks ahead of you to loot all their items, and that's being generous. (And yes, I am aware that 'space' auto loots, but see my next problem below).

And there is so much junk fluff like plates, spoons, brooms, and so on, but you loot it anyway because it might be worth 2gp, and who knows, 2 gold is how much more you'll need to buy the shiny magic sword at the next vendor. You assume that because it's lootable, it must have some value (even if tiny), otherwise why would they even go to the bother of putting it there. So you'll have a great huge wall of (literally) hundreds of items that have either no use, some use as vendor trash, a utility use (such a shovel), use as a weapon or other equipment, use as a crafting component, random books that might or might not be relevant later on, and the list goes on. Whether after one hour or ten, you'll get this point where it will hit you and you'll be like... damn. What the bleep am I going to do with all this.

Then you have the non-shared inventory. After a while your main character will get encumbered. You'll open up the hideous wall of hundreds of items, and think '*bleep*, which of this do I send to Laezel?' There's no quick way to pass it off to her, but that's not the biggest problem; the biggest is that the game's 'wall of items' problem becomes even *worse* when you consider that the item you're looking for could be in the inventory of literally 7 or more characters, and you don't know which one. So you try really hard to loot everything that might be important into the inventory of your main character. And he's walking around like a hermit crab under a massive pile of junk as a result.

Then you have the fact you can't sort items during selling. You can sort just fine out of the trade menu, but as soon as you're in the trade menu, you can't sort by weight to sell the heaviest items; you can't sort be price to sell the most valuable items. You have literally scan through the horrendous wall of items to find things that might be appropriate to sell, worrying that you're rushing it and selling a gem you might need later for a quest or a book that has a clue in it.

If I could change just one thing about BG3, it would be this. The system is truly, truly awful - one of the worst I've seen in decades of gaming. It's overwhelming for the player and hard to use, and doesn't just need some polish or dressing up; it needs a tough-love overhaul.

[jsonaut]

Just started the game, and this is the first thing that jumped out at me. Why not have a shared inventory? Or at least easy ways to sort and transfer?
Hope this is changed soon, either officially or with a mod.

[Draktok]

Originally posted by jsonaut:

Just started the game, and this is the first thing that jumped out at me. Why not have a shared inventory? Or at least easy ways to sort and transfer?
Hope this is changed soon, either officially or with a mod.

because it was just imported from dos2 tbh
but i just pick 90% of ♥♥♥♥ up with my main character and sell everything thru him after sorting by 'value' constantly .

[ikeaman]

one thing that might help you is to pick up things as wage by right-clicking them. then when you go to sell , go in trade and on the bottom there's a button to "sell all wages" and voila no need to search for what is for sale and what might be important.

Now.. that makes it even more tedious to pick-up everything since you have to right-click everything but hopefully there's a shortcut I missed for that.. or they will add one or someone will make a mod ? also an option to hide all wages would help a lot to remove the wall of items problem since you wouldn't see all the junk !

[atm]

In fairness, you can now multi-select items, which is a minor game-changer. It doesn't fix the problem that the loot philosophy kind of hurts. I assume Larian doesn't intend for you to loot everything and that they have filled random containers with fluff just to stop you being on autopilot when you loot (e.g. you have to look at each thing to decide if you need it).

My objection is that it leads to some unhealthy play patterns, because when 99% of crates contain junk ant 1% contain awesome hidden treasures, you feel even more like you have to loot everything, or you might be missing something awesome or important. You're constantly clicking and looting on all these dozens of boxes per room, and sometimes finding absurdly good items on random dead bodies or in a pouch among ten other lootable containers.

I would rather loot was more focused to what is actually relevant. If a thing is lootable, I feel like it's a message that it's somehow relevant to the game. So far, most of it is only relevant in that it's put there as chaff to distract you and keep you searching. There's something that rubs me the wrong way about that kind of system. BG1 and BG2 had this more or less right; if it was lootable, MOST of the time it had something to do with the game, such as containing a weapon or some actual loot - rather than a fork or a rotten apple. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has it about right as well; if there's some loot, it's generally got something to do with the game, such as being obvious vendor trash or an item that matters to the game.

[Kashra Fall]

Everything is lootable because that is a choice, you can infact, be a loot goblin. However, not everything is valuable, now is it? As for management, use backpacks/bags in general. Drag "X" to the bags and your inventory won't look so cluttered. Also use the filter system, it helps a lot too.

[Caz]

I don't know why they removed the sorting from EA to launch while in the vendor screen. You could do that in EA.

As for the amount of junk, this wouldn't be such an irritant if our carry weight was three or four times higher. DOS2 had this same problem. Spoons, forks, knives, plates, bowls, bottles, cups, and so on. We get it, people live in the world, they eat. Doesn't mean their cutlery and dishes should be lootable.

[Draffut]

Agree 100%. Came to post about this. I managed to sell quest-vital items without even realizing it. Now I can't figure out which vendor has them, if it's one I can even still do business with.

Praying we get some console commands unlocked so I can just add them to my inventory otherwise I might drop the game.

Originally posted by Kashra Fall:

Everything is lootable because that is a choice, you can infact, be a loot goblin. However, not everything is valuable, now is it? As for management, use backpacks/bags in general. Drag "X" to the bags and your inventory won't look so cluttered. Also use the filter system, it helps a lot too.

Everything has a sell price, and is therefor valuable.

[Aria Athena]

Yep, have to agree with most of that. 60hrs in and it still bothers me. Sorting items is boring me to death. The fact that items do not automatically stuck inside containers grinds my gears.

[Aldain]

Larian has never been good at inventory management, way too much fluff, junk and copy/pasted mostly empty containers.

[Caz]

Originally posted by Kashra Fall:

Everything is lootable because that is a choice, you can infact, be a loot goblin. However, not everything is valuable, now is it? As for management, use backpacks/bags in general. Drag "X" to the bags and your inventory won't look so cluttered. Also use the filter system, it helps a lot too.

When 99% of the things you can pick up are dross, you've failed at making a compelling and engaging loot system.
The kitchenware in my house in real life has value. I can sell it in a garage sale. That isn't a good justification for doing the same thing in a game.

[Aria Athena]

Originally posted by Caz:

Originally posted by Kashra Fall:

Everything is lootable because that is a choice, you can infact, be a loot goblin. However, not everything is valuable, now is it? As for management, use backpacks/bags in general. Drag "X" to the bags and your inventory won't look so cluttered. Also use the filter system, it helps a lot too.

When 99% of the things you can pick up are dross, you've failed at making a compelling and engaging loot system.
The kitchenware in my house in real life has value. I can sell it in a garage sale. That isn't a good justification for doing the same thing in a game.

This is something Larian has included since their very first game 20+ year ago and I don't like it in BG3. It adds too much micromanagement in an inventory system that quite frankly, sucks.

[living_one]

I just wish the game remembered what sort of sorting mode I set up. It's a pain in the a** to change it every damn time. And the search is buggy, sometimes it will find an item based on one word, sometimes you have to start from the first part (an example would be looking for the "scroll of lightning" , but typing "lightn" does nothing, you have to start with "scroll").

So yeah, loved the game, finished it after 110 hours, but fought with the inventory till the end.

[Caz]

Originally posted by Aria Athena:

Originally posted by Caz:

When 99% of the things you can pick up are dross, you've failed at making a compelling and engaging loot system.
The kitchenware in my house in real life has value. I can sell it in a garage sale. That isn't a good justification for doing the same thing in a game.

This is something Larian has included since their very first game 20+ year ago and I don't like it in BG3. It adds too much micromanagement in an inventory system that quite frankly, sucks.

I've found myself frequently comparing BG3's looting to Skyrim's looting.

Skyrim has a ton of loot, but even among the junk it's mostly useful for selling. Low weight, decent value. And almost every container holds something worth considering.
BG3, on the other hand, the overwhelming majority of loot in general is dross. Too much weight for too little value. And if there's 100 containers in an area, about 60 of them will be completely empty, 35 will have useless crap trash, and the remaining 5 will be potions of some kind with a tiny chance of having something that sparks excitement.

I recall similar complaints about DOS2's loot. Too much trash, too little treasure.

[ULTRA]

I started out mildly annoyed by the inventory and then learned, insanely, that there's a kind of learning curve and even "skill" to it and now I don't even know what to think about it. It's not exactly that thrilling to move stuff around but now that I'm using things properly I guess there's uh, some kind of satisfaction in that mastery?

Originally posted by Caz:

Originally posted by Aria Athena:

This is something Larian has included since their very first game 20+ year ago and I don't like it in BG3. It adds too much micromanagement in an inventory system that quite frankly, sucks.

I've found myself frequently comparing BG3's looting to Skyrim's looting.

Skyrim has a ton of loot, but even among the junk it's mostly useful for selling. Low weight, decent value. And almost every container holds something worth considering.
BG3, on the other hand, the overwhelming majority of loot in general is dross. Too much weight for too little value. And if there's 100 containers in an area, about 60 of them will be completely empty, 35 will have useless crap trash, and the remaining 5 will be potions of some kind with a tiny chance of having something that sparks excitement.

I recall similar complaints about DOS2's loot. Too much trash, too little treasure.

For example, if you feel like obsessing about loot like some people playing Skyrim do, it's actually much easier because you can just mark almost everything as wares and send it to your camp on the spot, so you don't even have to carry 10000000000 spoons around for a 50 gold profit.

[Caz]

Originally posted by ULTRA:

I started out mildly annoyed by the inventory and then learned, insanely, that there's a kind of learning curve and even "skill" to it and now I don't even know what to think about it. It's not exactly that thrilling to move stuff around but now that I'm using things properly I guess there's uh, some kind of satisfaction in that mastery?

Originally posted by Caz:

I've found myself frequently comparing BG3's looting to Skyrim's looting.

Skyrim has a ton of loot, but even among the junk it's mostly useful for selling. Low weight, decent value. And almost every container holds something worth considering.
BG3, on the other hand, the overwhelming majority of loot in general is dross. Too much weight for too little value. And if there's 100 containers in an area, about 60 of them will be completely empty, 35 will have useless crap trash, and the remaining 5 will be potions of some kind with a tiny chance of having something that sparks excitement.

I recall similar complaints about DOS2's loot. Too much trash, too little treasure.

For example, if you feel like obsessing about loot like some people playing Skyrim do, it's actually much easier because you can just mark almost everything as wares and send it to your camp on the spot, so you don't even have to carry 10000000000 spoons around for a 50 gold profit.

You can't sell from your camp stash.