While I appreciate that Larian are trying to emulate the feeling of real dice rolls here, the animations for rolls, adding modifiers and showing the continue button are a masterclass in poor UI design. It somehow manages to be god awfully slow AND inconsistent in how I can skip it.
Currently this is how it works:
- I select my option in dialogue, without any idea of the DC of the check or how having multiple modifiers effects the DC
- I get booted to a whole new full screen view, with it’s own unskippable entrance animation.
- I select my modifiers, which are hidden behind a button click for no discernible reason, then roll by clicking another tiny button.
- I need to wait for a lengthy roll animation, UNLESS I get lucky by clicking at the right time to skip. Performing this skip seems neither consistent nor clear: I just need to hammer my mouse in the general vicinity of the rolling area and hope.
- If I am UNLUCKY I’m forced to sit through an incredible floaty dice roll animation that apparently takes place in Mars gravity. I have played TTRPGs, I know how long it takes to roll and read dice: half a second, unless you fling your dice across the table like a barbarian.
- I then have to sit through MORE animations as bonuses are applied, penalizing me for being good at the game and stacking them. I groan as they float towards the dice like they are taking a Sunday stroll through a park.
- Then I sit through MORE animations as the final tally clobbers the DC dice at the pace of a large glacier, before the continue button finally fades in at what seems to be a totally random time frame.
- And we get MORE animations as the full screen fades away
The result is a tedious process that takes me out of the game totally: we have these beautifully rendered characters, with emotion and voice acted dialogue, and stunning backgrounds: and Larian choose to hide all that with a full screen animation for dice rolling.
All this in contrast to how classic CRPGs used to do things: you click the dialogue button and instantly get a success or failure. You can barrel through heaps of them, limited only by your reading speed. AND they don’t take up the whole screen while doing so.
Instead with BG3 I have to sit through a minimum five second animation that’s the same every damn time. It could end up ten or fifteen seconds if you fail to skip animations. You might perform four or five of these within a single conversation: at the end you could have spent more time waiting for UI animations than reading and thinking about dialogue choices.
Larian, please please reconsider the dice rolling experience, it’s one of the only blemishes on an otherwise perfect game.
You can skip the rolling animation. Once you set your modifiers and click the die (or dice), just move the cursor out of the dice window and left click again. It finishes instantly.
If you’re on controller, I haven’t played that way, so I couldn’t tell you.
I haven’t found a way that it’s skippable on controller (though I haven’t looked hard because I actually like the dice rolls).
Just press A. Or X in the case of a PlayStation controller. B for Nintendo.
Ah that’s it, thanks.
That being said my other complaints still stand: the whole thing is incredibly tedious for an animation you are going to see hundreds, possibly thousands of times over a standard playthrough.
I feel like this is an example of singular testing: they designed an experience that looks great when you look at it once, but forgot that it’s going to be seen hundreds of times
While we’re on this topic can we also please not have to walk to people in camp to talk to them? I just want to replace my party member quickly.
Yeah, Kotor party switch is how it should work, just pull up a menu and select.
Why do I have to tell someone to leave and then walk over to someone else and tell them to join up, such a pain in the ass.
Especially since they have that confirmation dialogue where they try to guilt-trip you every single time.
The only thing I can think of there is that it suggests losing approval with someone if you bench them or something, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. But maybe it did on an earlier build and the confirmation dialogue was left in?
Nah, it’s actually because they were originally going to have you stick with only 3 other party members iirc. So being able to swap was more or less tacked on.
Ah, that would have sucked, I’m glad they went away from it. I would never have guessed with how well developed the camp seems to be.
Oh i feel this so much. I wish it was easier.
That’s what I thought the “Party View” or whatever it’s called was for (TAB, I think?). Imagine my surprise when it’s just to see multiple inventories at once.
Speed setting but keep the rolls. I like em.
Or just add wiimote support so I can shake em up shake em up shake em.
Your basic gripe has been answered (and I’m really sorry if you’re still struggling to skip the animation, it IS long), but just want to throw out here that “without any idea of the DC of the check” is an intended gameplay element.
You are supposed to look at the situation and try to guess how hard you think a thing would be. This is a hotly debated subject in tabletop, but Larian’s position is clear - you don’t get to know the DC until you’re committed. Figuring out that intimidating the cave troll is a high DC is on you to infer from the situation. Some DMs don’t tell players the DC at all, even after the roll. Some DMs don’t even tell players whether or not they succeeded (which I think is really fun for things like Insight checks)
fair point, but in some cases i can add bonuses after knowing the difficulty?
agree about the last point, esp when there’s not a hard line to success/ fail.
but its nice for the player to know they did “their best” or “screwed it up” i.e. know the dice roll. just not be sure if it was good enough
You actually can just Examine an NPC and get a good idea of how hard a check will be, even if it’s not the exact DC. Like if you’re using speech against someone, knowing they have a higher Charisma and Wisdom bonus means it will be harder to persuade or deceive them (and strength for intimidation).
Insight, investigation and perception should generally be treated as thresholds of information to disclose rather than fixed DCs, with shades of failure and success.
Having been save scumming quite hard, the Critical Failure and Critical Success means fuck all. It changes nothing so I’m not sure why they included them outside of combat. Unless it changes in the harder difficulty. I’m on the medium, default one.
It’d be nice if they gave the option to skip the virtual rolling altogether and just show the result straight away. That said I’ve never had an issue skipping the animations and it’s usually pretty quick if you do that. Sounds like maybe you’ve run into a bug if it’s not working consistently for you.
This should be a game option. Dice animations enable disable. Leave it on by default let people turn it off if they get tired of them.
I for one would completely remove the animations in any sort of delayed gratification screen. These aren’t freaking loot boxes. We’re already invested in the game. We don’t need drama added to an event we’re trying to resolve. The event is the drama.
And here I am, wishing we could roll the dice manually by actually moving the mouse
I would like to just not have the animation play, but I also like seeing the DC to know if I want to add bonuses that I only have limited uses of. I also like seeing the numerical result of the rolls somewhere. I got quite accustomed to that back with Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights. Put them in the “combat log” (which logs everything not just combat for those who don’t know) and Id be happy.
I like the idea of just removing the animation even. It is nice to have custom dice sets is the only reason I would want to still see it. I feel compelled to collect dice.
Press the Esc key whilst it’s rolling, and it will just skip to the results.
That doesn’t solve the rest of the problems though
Yeah giving a toggle or something to let people who don’t care for the dice rolls skip/fast forward them would be a worthy addition. I agree, the current experience is really clunky if you’re trying to move through a given roll quickly.
Also, a tip: hovering your cursor over the skill tag on a given dialogue option will show you your modifiers for that particular skill, but I can understand wanting that to be designed differently to make it more obvious. I don’t dislike how it’s done now, because it evokes some of the “I know what I’m good at” from tabletop which would guide my choices anyways, but I also understand that just because something doesn’t bother me doesn’t necessarily mean it’s designed well.
As far as not knowing the DC ahead of time, that is the entirety of tabletop dnd (and a decent number of other systems I’m sure). I’ve never played in a game where we were told that, and I don’t tell my players when I DM. I do understand the sentiment, because unlike a tabletop game with really open-ended options for dialogue and approaches to problems, we’re doing the more basic video game RPG dialogue options and actions, and some of the sense for how difficult something should be doesn’t translate over. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with an option to show the DC ahead of time, but IMO that gets far enough into personal preference territory that I don’t think it’s really a knock against their design in a way that some of the other points are.
In all I think the answer is just toggles/options (maybe tweaks) rather than a redesign; I enjoy the rolling experience myself and don’t really share your complaints, but my enjoyment isn’t any more valid than your agony hahaha.
Larian making an almost perfect game crippled by a tedious, immersion breaking minigame. Name a more iconic duo (looking at you DOS Rock Paper Scissors).
