More (Spell) Slots on the Hotbar!

TvrtkoSvrdlar

So, how difficult would it be for the devs to extend/tweak the UI (and hotbar by extension)?

I'm not talking about anything radical, rather, just a couple more spell and item slots.

Would it be possible to 'shrink' all the icons a bit, and make room for more of them?

Best case scenario would be something like the hotbar from Dragon Age: Origins.

Possible? Impossible? Or just time-consuming and impractical?

What do you guys think?

enqenq

I dearly hope that if the devs were able and allowed to improve the UI like that (IWD2-style would be a step in the right direction) they would have.

TvrtkoSvrdlar

enqenq said:

I dearly hope that if the devs were able and allowed to improve the UI like that (IWD2-style would be a step in the right direction) they would have.

Why wouldn't they be allowed? They can't mess with the story and existing characters by changing either, but UI is just UI - there's no reason why they'd be forbidden from messing with it. In fact, they already have, which is why the clunky, restricted one is perplexing me.

This all ties back into the original question - did they not expand the number of slots due to time constraints, or because they simply can't due to some kind of engine limitation(s)?

Joey

i will bump for one of the things i really, really wanted from ee. More spell slots, also allow us to put special abilities right onto the hotbar.

Irithyl

I agree

TvrtkoSvrdlar

@Joey
@Irithyl

I'd be happy with even 10 slots. That's pitiful by modern standards, but anything beats the paltry 3 you get on a regular mage (and even less than that on multi-classed ones).

It's just such a pain in the ass having to scroll through a horizontal list of dozens of spells to pick out the one you want.

Best case scenario? Hotbar with ~15 empty slots, with each of them blank and configurable to whatever you need/want them to be. Something similar to Icewind Dale II; right-click, then choose from a list of spells/abilities/items. It'd be nice to be able to drag-drop directly from the spellbook, but I doubt we'll ever see that. Somehow, it seems like too much work for such a 'minor' feature.

Then again, I could be wrong

Freche

I hope we can get a "fully" customizable hotbar.
Make all buttons work like when you right click a spell button. Then you pick whatever you want for that button, Attack, Talk, Weapon, Steal, Turn, Item, Special, Mage, Cleric, etc.

TvrtkoSvrdlar

@Freche
I agree, but I don't think it's very realistic. The devs have trouble introducing little tweaks and whatnot, I seriously doubt they'd *overhaul* (sorry, bad pun) the entire UI. A part of me thinks they would had already done it had they been able/allowed to.

EnterHaerDalis

What I think would really be a good idea would be to reverse the order of spells

In SoA and ToB you use higher level spells way more often I think it would be cool if you had the option to start the list with higher spells and have lower level spells to the right