A bit earlier this year, I don't think we really had anything until like late september last year. Time to batten down the hatches, in spite of the heat (though not nearly as bad as last week). I also finally ordered a little air purifier off of amazon. I've stubbornly avoided it for all these years, even when I was working outside at the market, but I suppose I should take care of myself.
Made a new character in BG3 this morning, as is my wont. Gonna play on normal difficulty this time, take it slow and careful. I thought I'd try playing with a controller instead of KBAM, and it's... better? In a lot of ways? It's so frustrating that Larian is still having a lot of the exact same UX problems that they had all the way back in Divinity Original Sin 1. The camera is still finnicky, organizing your inventory is still a huge pain, they still haven't figured out a good way to organize character abilities, etc.
The last one is the real sticking point for me, in both KBAM and controller. I feel like it leads to me playing the game worse. The overwhelming number of options available by even the mid-game just leads to me relying on the same tactics in every fight. Astarion teleports and stabs guys, Gale casts nukes, Karlach runs up and hits dudes, Dantalian... flails around and tries to contribute, usually just locking down one enemy.
I wish they just had like... a menu with different broad options at the top level, like in a JRPG. I want to cast a spell -> here's a list if your spells organized by level or school or functionality or whatever. You could have like:
- Movement (jump, dash etc)
- Melee attacks
- Ranged attacks (including arrows and bombs)
- Spells (including scrolls)
- Items (potions, elixirs, oils)
The way things are now is just so disorganized, and so many of the icons are similar, I find myself spending an annoying amount of time looking for abilities I know the character has. It's not like this is an unprecedented problem in game design, plenty of RPGs have to grapple with an abundance of options available to the player. There are better ways of handling it.
It's the same with the inventory. There are too few hotkeys, and the methods of filtering and sorting are terrible. Resorting to typing in the name of an item in four seperate inventories always feels miserable. Just give me some tabs to look through!
You can debate all day about carrying capacity in RPGs, but I think it makes sense here. What doesn't make sense: there is absolutely no reason not to send every piece of food you pick up to your camp. There is zero benefit to carrying it on you, you can only use food in camp! Nine times out of ten, when my character was encumbered, I just opened the food bag and banished it all to the camp chest. The other times I gave some piece of armor or weaponry to Karlach.
Anyway, I wanted to mention about the controller UX: I love being able to move my character around directly, but I hate the radial menus for everything. There are plenty of free buttons, give me a few shortcuts to assign! C'mon! Also why can't I use that area search thing in KBAM mode? It's so useful!
Alright, I feel better having vented my spleen. Everyone is gonna spend the rest of the year yelling about how this is the most incredible game to ever game, so I wanted to get some of this out there. I still think it's really good, just... very frustrating that we're still dealing with these problems.
