Justin258

This all seems to be because of the multiplayer. This game can be played with up to four people so inventories have to remain as separate as possible.

One possible solution for you and @efesell and anyone else who might be having inventory issues - there's a mod out there that lets you bring more than four party members along. Perhaps install that mod, add all the extra people whose inventories you want to mess with, and then remove the extra people so your party is back down to four and you don't upset the game balance. Is that still clunky? Absolutely, but it's potentially less clunky than what we currently have.

I still think Larian need to seriously rethink how they approach inventory for their next game. This was a problem in DOS1, it was a problem in DOS2, and it's somehow worse here.

Digital Foundry did a video on this - Acts 1 and 2 are largely fine for pretty much any reasonable gaming PC, but Act 3 is a bastard on the CPU. This seems to be because Act 3 takes place in a city with lots and lots of NPCs and other stuff going on whereas Act 1 and 2 don't, which means that Act 3 will always be worse than 1 and 2 performance-wise. Still, it really seems like Larian has some serious optimization to do.

I don't think there are any real spoilers here but this is footage of the final act of the game so take that into account when watching this.

I feel like anyone looking for a "Bioware fix" has been able to get it from other places for a while now. The Witcher 3 was the poster-child for that for a long time, but eventually we got The Outer Worlds, and now we've got (in some sense of irony) Baldur's Gate 3 apparently doing incredibly well. Even before that, Obsidian put out Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny and Larian did their two Divinity games, among a pile of other isometric RPGs over the past decade. These might not get the "Bioware fix" for anyone who needs their RPGs to have facial animations and camera angles, but if you were looking for stories and characters, Bioware hasn't been the cream of the crop for much longer than people seem to realize. They've been falling apart for over a decade and their last good game was Dragon Age Inquisition, if you're being really generous, and the last great one was Mass Effect 3.

I haven't said much of anything about this anywhere, but I've found myself wondering when EA is going to add Bioware to the pile of development studio corpses they keep in the basement, not if.

Oh, hey, a bump I can comment on.

I recently installed Debian 12 and I have really enjoyed using that. Due to some computer parts swapping shenanigans, I am using Windows right now (I knew this would be a thing before I started taking apart computers) but I'm going to put Debian back on this PC pretty soon and... I don't know if I need to dual-boot anymore? Halo MCC matchmaking works on Linux now, at least it did for me when I was messing with Debian. Vermintide 2 doesn't really work unless you're host, which is a bummer, but it seems like Darktide works now. I don't play Siege anymore. I haven't been able to think of a good reason to stay on Windows.

I don't have anything against Windows, for the record, but being tied to this operating system that constantly begs me to use Edge, continually moves settings around for no good reason, and begs me to put everything on OneDrive just sucks. Debian was faster and much more interesting to use, even if I'll have to deal with some quirks when it comes to installing GOG games.

@bladeofcreation: Pillars 1 wizards at level 1 could get like one or two spells that could be cast per encounter. The best thing about that game's system is that at a certain level, you could start selecting some spells to be per encounter and not per rest, so in the latter half of the game your priests and wizards really could do a lot more in combat.

Pillars of Eternity rectified this entirely by making all spells and abilities per encounter, no resting required. Instead, resting was for eating food and refreshing your Empower ability, which let you make an ability much more powerful.

I got through some of Kingmaker, a whole lot of Wrath of the Righteous, all of the original BG games, and a chunk of Icewind Dale dealing with basically everything being per rest, so it's not too big a deal - but I think these games would "flow" a lot better if they could figure out how to adjust these systems such that I didn't have to click "go to camp" or something every few encounters.

I was actually very curious about how they would handle resting in general. I like these games a whole hell of a lot, but these "rest to regain spells" magic systems don't really work so well in video game form for the reason you've spoiler'd - you can run into an encounter you didn't expect and if you don't have much left in the way of spells and such - well, you're going to have a real tough time.

In the old games, resting consisted of clicking the rest button, the screen going black, a small cutscene playing, and then you're back, fully rested. After the first few times you skip the cutscene. Sometimes you get interrupted while resting, which can be disastrous but that's why you quicksave beforehand. Is that better? No, but it was much quicker.

When I made my character, I went completely against Infinity Engine convention and put a lot of points into Charisma. This has paid off in spades, as I'm able to pass so many dialog checks. I'm also a Rogue with 18 Dex and so I seem to be able to hit things with either my ranged or melee weapons with a pretty high degree of accuracy. This might be feeding into why I'm not finding myself save scumming or reloading all that much. I avoid casting anything that only returns on a long rest as much as I can (which is another mark against resting mechanics, just make skills/spells per encounter and balance around that).

On PC at least, the controller support does allow you to Quicksave - you pause, mash a button dedicated to quicksaving, and it saves. I wouldn't tell you to abuse quicksaving and quickloading, as I'm not personally doing that either, but I am going to strongly - as strongly as I possibly can - advise you to keep multiple save slots.

This game is, in my experience, far less buggy than most massive AAA RPGs at launch, but frankly it's still one of those and still has some occasional bugs. I don't think this game is going to be prone to corrupted saves or anything drastic like that, but I could see someone running across something that makes them want to load an older save.

I'm personally sticking with the dice rolls I get. I've had some things not go my way that I thought would work out and some things I very much expected to not go my way turn out OK and having moments where I go "oops, uh, I'm in trouble" are a lot of fun for me. Not knowing for sure if I'm going to fail or succeed a check is interesting and cool and at least somewhat novel in comparison to the usual "if you have X amount of Y skill you pass Z check automatically".

...narratively at least, mechanically I think this game is mostly pretty easy. I've only wiped a few times. It's not as hard as Divinity: Original Sin 2 and it's definitely not as hard as the original games even when playing those on Beamdog's Normal difficulty.

I feel like gaming has generally been in about the same spot since like 2016 or so, maybe 2015. Too many microtransactions, too many buggy games getting released, but also there are at least a few amazing games coming out every year. Despite all the complaints I might be able to make, I feel like video games in general are in a good place. Always be prepared for your most anticipated game to be a turd, be willing to look into things that are not on the top shelf, and don't buy games on day one in case they're a buggy mess.

This doesn't apply if your favorite genre is in a bad place. Amazingly, racing games do seem to be in one of those bad places, something I never thought I'd see because it seemed like a million of them were always coming out every year in the PS1/PS2/PS3 days and they suddenly dried up, like RTS games.

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.

I started playing the original games three years ago and just played them off and on until I finally finished them. I love them and I think they're great games, but I also spent a lot of time in wikis and forums trying to figure out how to play them and/or what I might be doing wrong. It's not always immediately obvious that an enemy is immune to something, for instance.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 also had a "mark as wares" option so I looked for that very early on.

You can also Shift + Click to highlight a selection of items and CTRL + Click to click on several items and just send all of those to wares. I didn't notice that quest items were highlighted orange, though!