I'm about 7 hours in and I both like a ton about it and have quibblings about a number of things. It's just very much a DOS game with D&D packaging, and that comes with good and bad, I think. Much more good than bad for my taste though.
Having said that, random question for the group: will we ever solve inventory shit in games? I feel like I'm much more about a streamlined ME2 style one before something like this, but I also feel that for a more tabletop styled adventure like this one, a big, flexible inventory is valuable. Regardless, I fucking hate using the inventory in this game with a controller. It's not even that bad, it's just not good enough to be fucking annoying enough to make me irritated whenever I have to significantly interact with it, which is not so great!
Pillars of Eternity gives you an invisible bottomless chest that you carry with you all the time. Every character has their own individual inventory, but that's for items that you think they're actually going to use. For instance, you might keep scrolls in your Wizard's inventory, a selection of weapon types for your Fighter, or a handful of traps for your Rogue. Everything else goes into this bottomless box. When you click on a group of dead enemies, you click the bottomless box, you click "take all". As a player, I would ask developers to consider one question - is it really important to you that players consider the importance of what they're carrying, forcing them to drop things they deem less important? If so, have a smaller number of more significant items so it's easier to sort through. If you want a zillion interactable objects, any one of which might be useful in some creative way, just give us an infinite inventory.
Maintaining an inventory in tabletop can be fun, but the thing about tabletop is that your characters likely aren't running around with a load of garbage in their inventory. There are a zillion things to pick up here and there's not really a good indication of what I need to keep around and what I don't. DOS 1 and 2 were somewhat infamous for having some combinations of items that were brilliant along with a ton of recipes for potions, food, scrolls, and equipment, some of which could be incredibly powerful, so I assume that's true here - but I don't know what's useful and what isn't. Should I carry around every single bloodstone I see? What if I find a recipe for something that needs bloodstones fifty hours into the game and I can't find any because I sold them all to a merchant I no longer have access to? Sure, I could send them to the camp traveler's box, but that fucking thing is even more of a nightmare to sort through.
My final point, and one that I've never seen brought up anywhere else but that I'd love to see discussed more often, is that grid inventories SUCK ASS. I'd love to say that as forcefully as possible in text. I love these games but for some reason all of them insist on using these fucking grids and I loathe it. Why is it a good idea to have players look at a ton of small icons, some of which aren't immediately all that distinguishable from another, and hover the mouse over every fucking one of them just to see what it is? Why is that just accepted as "this is the best we can do, deal with it?" I would point everyone who ever aspires to develop RPGs with a large inventory system to a mod for Skyrim called SkyUI, which I've brought up here before. It's a spreadsheet, a word which might scare everyone away, but just look at it. You click on the type of items you want to look at (armor, weapons, magic, miscellaneous) and you get a selection of values to sort by (name, weight, gold value, attack value, armor value, etc.) and from there you can look at whatever effects the item might have. Why can't we use this more often? Why can't I sort a spreadsheet of armor by type (light, medium, heavy) and then AC value and just see everything I need to right there?
Anyway, this got way longer than I intended it to be and is way more rant-y than I thought it would be, but yesterday I did stop playing the game and think about this for a little while.
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