Inventory pausing

OneAngryMushroom

Am I the only one who liked the original BG's pause. Namely that you can't pause in the inventory screen. A Doom Guard isn't going to wait for you to pass a healing potion around, and I liked reading item description when traveling from one side of the map to the other.

PlasticGolem

That's Fake Difficulty. Preventing passing equipment between characters during combat, or from using items not equipped in quick slots would be fine (though I don't know if that increases challenge so much as makes inventory management more fiddly than it already is) but the unpause during inventory management just makes doing these things dependent on the player's dexterity and ability to memorize where things are in their characters' inventories, which isn't really the kind of challenge that the game otherwise purports to offer. To make things worse, you can't see what is killing your party and your other characters can't react: they all just stand there and take damage while you try to get Jaheira to pass a potion to Khalid.

Sharn

You could always do it before, you just had to pause the game prior to opening the inventory screen.

atcDave

I think it's reasonable to assume that your characters, as professional adventurers, would know exactly where all their equipment and tools were located. And could likely grab that Potion of Healing far more quickly than me, a fat fingered computer nerd could ever manage.

I would call it poor game design if characters are getting killed off because of inventory malfunctions. That's an interface issue, and pausing on inventory seems completely reasonable to me.

Jalily

Sharn said:

You could always do it before, you just had to pause the game prior to opening the inventory screen.

...which would then unpause, with a message saying it had unpaused, as soon as you looked at your inventory.

marfig

Regardless of the artificial difficulty decrease, I personally prefer the game paused when moving around the inventory screen. In any case I believe this is a side-effect of having moved to the BG2 engine (with ToB) which had the Autopause on Inventory screen feature. It is also seen when playing BG1 with Tutu.

TJ_Hooker

I could be remembering wrong, but I think the one big advantage of the BG1 style, auto-unpause, inventory screen was that you were able to swap armour in and out during combat. A little cheesy maybe, but it could be useful for characters like bards, who really have no good items to wear for armour if they want to be able to cast spells.

Chow

I prefer IWD, which takes the best of both worlds: if you paused the game before going to the inventory screen, it would remain paused - otherwise, it wouldn't. Like with the map.

This'd let you do things while they walked around or got other chores or whatever done, but at the same time pause the game in the midst of a tough battle.

The_New_Romance

I'm still not used to the inventory pausing the game, that's why I almost never use that to my advantage. Guess I played too much BG1. Even though BG:EE allows for cheesy inventory management mid-fight, at least you can't change your armour now (which was possible in BG, and if you were fast it was quite practical).

I think it's okay the game has that feature, even though I don't use it that often myself. If you think it's cheesy, try to limit yourself to not doing it. I wouldn't vote for it being changed.

Zutti

I *think* in BG2(and therefore BGEE) you could leave the game unpaused by first going to the map screen, THEN swapping to the inventory screen. Useful for speed runs.

Might have been the spellbook screens, though.

Aasimar069

Jalily said:

Sharn said:

You could always do it before, you just had to pause the game prior to opening the inventory screen.

...which would then unpause, with a message saying it had unpaused, as soon as you looked at your inventory.

I confirm.

This shall also be restored.

Severon

To be honest, there's very few occasions that warrant me to have to go into the inventory screen during battle. About the only time would be to fetch a specialist potion that wasn't in my quick slot, or perhaps to change the ammo type when the fight warrants the use of precious magic ammo.

Jalily

I often go there during battle because I'm obsessively collecting loot while my other party members fight, and my inventory is full (again). :P

badbromance

Jalily said:

I often go there during battle because I'm obsessively collecting loot while my other party members fight, and my inventory is full (again). :P

Hmm, I need to check if looting breaks bardsong!

Edit: Damn it does cancel bardsong. I thought if you were going to do nothing but sing you might as well loot at the same time