I don't understand what you mean with the sprites.. to me they look exactly the same with the black border turned off, even in your screenshots. Other than that I agree with the sounds.. Miss the clicking noise and scroll sounds..
The UI itself still has some work to do, but the better modding support is good.. To be honest I've never liked that blue BGEE UI out of personal preference. Hopefully more UI mods will appear and I'll find one I like.
I absolutely hate the new patch. I was so excited yesterday about the new content and the chance to play my favourite game all over again, and then I saw THIS! Ridiculous parody on what used to be a great game to play. Everything, everything is inconvinient: map, character sheet, spellbook, hotbars, dialogs, saves, cusomisation, tooltips, animation. There are a lot of bags: sound disappears, potion and gem bags tend to "stack", locations missing on the map. And many many other unreasonable changes...seriously why have you done this? Why have you touched the things that were not broken?
I'm verry disappointed. And what irritates me most of all is the absence of the option to turn ui and graphic back to the original look. I'm not a programmer, but I'm sure it's rathe easy to add such an option, or even make two standalone versions of the game:one for the "new guys" and one for us, people who are used to playing it.
I noticed you can start BGEE and then launch SOD and load the BGEE save from the SOD launcher. It will let you play through BGEE with the SOD UI if you want.
Personally I like the outlines on characters and the map zoom. The new UI doesn't bother me to be honest and the game as a whole looks nicer to my eyes.
I would like to be able to use multiple portraits. One for the side bar that is just a facial shot and one for the character screen that is a torso or full body shot. It seems like it will only allow you to use one picture for both screens for some reason.
I haven't had a lot of time to play around with it yet. It took a few hours to download the patches and SOD and I work 11 hour shifts at the moment so I won't be able to dig in until Friday night.
I selected the hardest difficulty but I have heard that it reverts back to insane if you are killed. I haven't died yet but I am still in the prologue. I killed the rats with a Katana and it said I was doing 1 or 2 damage and that the rats resisted 10-12 damage so I guess it's working. I won't know until I get more time to play.
I really haven't had any issues yet with the UI though. It seems like I can find everything pretty easy and while it is different than the old school version it feels similar enough that it doesn't really bother me any. The spell book and the info tabs on the main character screen are different but easy to navigate.
I absolutely hate the new patch. I was so excited yesterday about the new content and the chance to play my favourite game all over again, and then I saw THIS! Ridiculous parody on what used to be a great game to play. Everything, everything is inconvinient: map, character sheet, spellbook, hotbars, dialogs, saves, cusomisation, tooltips, animation. There are a lot of bags: sound disappears, potion and gem bags tend to "stack", locations missing on the map. And many many other unreasonable changes...seriously why have you done this? Why have you touched the things that were not broken?
I'm verry disappointed. And what irritates me most of all is the absence of the option to turn ui and graphic back to the original look. I'm not a programmer, but I'm sure it's rathe easy to add such an option, or even make two standalone versions of the game:one for the "new guys" and one for us, people who are used to playing it.
Can we have the game we love back please?
I can only assume their internal question of "Is this Baldur's Gate?" was somehow not asked when they started mucking around with the UI.
I'm enjoying SoD and it's content for what it is (so far quite enjoying it!), but the UI is horrid. Just horrid. It's killed ALL of Baldur's Gate's visual aesthetic and charisma and now looks sterile and morbid (medieval stonework, spellbooks that look like spellbooks, little parchment rolls when mousing over avatars, maps that looked like an adventurer's scroll map, the little audio feedback when clicking on things, the unrolling parchment sounds....almost entirely gone).
A UI with modern design sensibilities does NOT belong on a 17-year old game. You do damn good work Beamdog, but this UI is your first significant failure.
1. The store. The inventory is aligned to the top of the page but the store action buttons are aligned to the bottom of the page, this feels clunky. There shouldn't be so much dead space between these two elements, they should ideally be centre aligned and right next to each other.
2. Text box. Are we able to have the width of the box draggable as well as the height? Again there is a lot of available space horizontally as nothing shares the same space as the text box - whereas the height cuts into the actual game space.
3. Spells. Please don't preselect spells for us when creating a new character. It's an irritant to have to go through and deselect them all. Appreciate you want to make it easy for newbies, that's what the 'choose for me' button was for.
4. Custom portraits. Mirroring what other people have said. Having to click through X number of portraits to actually see them is a pain. Whilst the old system wasn't great either you could at least directly select the picture you wanted if you knew the name. Now regardless of if you know the name you have to click through every preceding picture to get to your desired portrait.
5. Cleric/Thief. Please can we have the thieving skills button taken out of the abilities menu. If there is a question of limited spaces then I personally would put Turn Undead into the abilities menu and have the Thieving Skills button in its place.
That said I like a lot of this so far. As always it's easy to find niggles rather than praise. One big thank you is the weapon switching finally being user friendly.
New interface is disgusting! Can anyone tell me how can I return old UI? I have been playing BG for 18 years and all this windows, sounds and buttons have become a small part of my soul... And you took it all away! Please, return me the integrity of my soul BACK!!!
After so many years the transition with the new UI is a bit brutal indeed, there are good things but also other things that need to be fixed and eventually will be.
For instance, the font size at the custom character screen ingame is too small imo, changing the font size won't effect it. This new imoen portrait bugs me, it looks too much "photoshoped". The character class creation with automatic filter is a bit weird and not needed, simple highlighting was enough. The multi class should be considered a class with sub classes (just like before) because it looks weird to have them mixed up with all the other classes, and when you choose half elf, shaman class looks really sad down under -_- Icons of memorized spells in spell book are too small. I also find the UI too dark, maybe it can be changed, i did not try it yet.
There are more things I would like point out but will not in this post. I am not really satisfied with the way it looks but I really like the new features and extra information added, I am optimistic, I think there is a good potential, those "little things" just need to be fixed.
I know it might be a bit painful to read those posts after so much work. I guess you guys did expect it with a new UI and hardcore fans. I tried to be constructive -_-
Was the actual launch product tested in beta? I don't see how these issues could've slipped through the cracks.
I love the expansion so far but my goodness it's buggy. One thing I've noticed about the difficulty is that it drops by one notch everytime you enter the main options screen. So if it's on Hard, you can leave and reenter, leave and reenter, and it will be normal. Leave and reenter again and it will be on easy.
I really want to try the Shaman but frankly, I don't have the courage to - not with the game in this state. I am going to go run through IWDEE and hopefully things will be better after the first patch or two.
I dislike basically every single change. It's not that it's much worse, it's that it's so unnecessarily worse, especially aesthetically. Baldurs Gate was great, and they changed a bunch of things just because.
If I could, I'd take the "you can now place weapons in right hand even if two-handed" feature from the new patch and leave EVERYTHING ELSE the way it was.
I'm with the OP on bugs, but as far as changes go...this is a re-release of a game by a company which originally had "Overhaul" in the title. If you were expecting everything to look and function exactly like it did in 1998 - and you say you have no interest in any new content - then the EEs might not be for you.
That said, I am sorry to hear that your experience has been so negative. Luckily, one of the awesome innovations that came with 2.0 are new interface editing capabilities, meaning that even people with virtually no modding experience can edit, tweak, rearrange, and fully replace the interface to their liking. If a "classic" interface is what you're missing, don't worry - I'm sure it won't be long before there's a mod that delivers just that.
As for zooming issues, portrait selection, and other bugs/features, Beamdog hasn't had the best track record when it comes to release/patch day. Unlike most developers, however, they continue working to improve their games long after release and make a genuine effort to ensure that each player can enjoy BG in the way that feels best to them. Hopefully it won't be long before that's your experience as well.
A lot of the changes sound promising to me, little things like knowing when your journal is updated, etc. hopefully the visual stuff you don't like can just be turned off.
New interface is disgusting! Can anyone tell me how can I return old UI? I have been playing BG for 18 years and all this windows, sounds and buttons have become a small part of my soul... And you took it all away! Please, return me the integrity of my soul BACK!!!
If you have the game on Steam, you can right click on it in the Steam Library, go to Properties, go to Betas and select "bgee_1.3 -". I fear you will have to download parts of the game again and I don't know if there are ways to revert to 1.3 if you have bought the game on GOG or on the Beamdog website but hopefully I've been helpful.
What is the timeline for the difficulty bug fix? It makes the game completely unenjoyable for me, and I honestly don't see how this wasn't caught. It's really noticeable immediately.
I honestly really like most of the changes - it's nice to see BG given a more modern makeover. Definitely a step-up from the original EE look. As has always been the issue here, if people want original/vanilla BG then just play that instead. This community's toxicity and inclination to browbeat Beamdog over any and every decision, justified or not, is silly.
Lots of people are mad about UI changes. You could have seen them in any stream. They will soon be modded too. Chill.
Yes, I saw them on the official stream, I asked the question and was told they could be reverted. But most of them can not. Even if you turn the new sprites off, the animation is different, more blurry. And you can't change map, background colours, tooltips, spellbook, hotbars, character sheet, shop window, dialog window and many many other things.
I do not also use mods.
All I want is the old ui back. If you like the new one it's great, but many people do not. I believe we deserved the option to switch it back.
I relied on the dialogue box to tell me what was going on but now it just stays scrunched up at the bottom of the screen and can't be expanded - is this intentional?
And as for that huge great box that obliterates half my screen every time a note is added to my journal - MAKE IT GO AWAY!
Lots of people are mad about UI changes. You could have seen them in any stream. They will soon be modded too. Chill.
Yes, I saw them on the official stream, I asked the question and was told they could be reverted. But most of them can not. Even if you turn the new sprites off, the animation is different, more blurry. And you can't change map, background colours, tooltips, spellbook, hotbars, character sheet, shop window, dialog window and many many other things.
I do not also use mods.
All I want is the old ui back. If you like the new one it's great, but many people do not. I believe we deserved the option to switch it back.
If they had the option to undo any change anyone didn't like, the game would be huge with way too many options. It;s why modding exists and why the game is so mod friendly. If you want the old layout, it will happen via mod soon.
Every time I start my Steam BGEE, baldur.lua rewrites from stratch! I cannot save any of changes. WTF?
I guess you could try making it read-only? All changes would have to be made manually to the .lua file, but the game shouldn't be able to edit at that point I think.
I relied on the dialogue box to tell me what was going on but now it just stays scrunched up at the bottom of the screen and can't be expanded - is this intentional?
And as for that huge great box that obliterates half my screen every time a note is added to my journal - MAKE IT GO AWAY!
For the first bit, you can click and drag the top edge of the combat log to make it taller.
For the second, you can disable Journal Pop-Ups in Options > Gameplay > Feedback.
I've played some more BG:EE and discovered more bugs and things I wanted to comment on. I did a super quick, minimalistic run so there's probably plenty of more stuff out there that I haven't encountered. I'll edit the opening post to include them.
General thoughts: - It was mentioned before, but the swapped location of done/save/load and cancel buttons is pretty annoying. Why would you do that after years of having it the other way? I constantly keep canceling out of actions I want to perform, out of muscle memory/habit guiding my hand. - The locations on the world map are in different places. For example, the area south of High Hedge (the one with Bassilus and Melicamp) appears way to the west. It makes no sense. Also, look where Durlag's Tower is - I know it was south of Firewine in vanilla, but was it displayed over there in EE? That's one thing I don't remember precisely. In a different thread, I've read that you can't uncover/travel to some locations from places you could before, but I haven't encountered that myself. I didn't explore everything in this short run, though. - Speaking of traveling, I've noticed there are many other entrance places added. I'm neutral to that change. It feels weird, but it's not a negative thing. Maybe with the exception of the Gnoll Stronghold, when you enter from the north. You can skip the bridge with the 2 ogrillion guys altogether, while it has always seemed to be the intended encounter you had to beat to reach the stronghold. - It was also mentioned before in this or other threads, but being able to scroll beyond the area map borders is not a good idea. - The cutscene with Charleston Nib is weird - his pathfinding makes him go back to the other rooms and you have to wait for him for quite a while, being stuck in that cinematic mode. Not a big deal, it was always a crowdy place and difficult for the whole party to get through the doors, but it's something to correct. Tried that twice, so it seems consistent. Never had that happen before, and I usually have a full party, which should have made things even more difficult for poor Charleston.
Inventory: - When you take an item out of a stack, it appears way further from the cursor, above and to the right of it. The screenshot isn't that great, as it doesn't have the hand cursor displayed. I tried to indicate where it was and it's an easy enough thing to check for yourselves. - Bug: something like this happened to me when I was ordering my characters to drink a potion in the inventory screen and switching between them using number keys.
Achievements: - There are some embarassing typos for some of them like "side with ALDEST Sashenstar", "bring TANYA's possessions", "unpetrify CAMAH" (should be Aldeth, Tenya and Tamah of course)... Also, one achievement correctly mentions Silke, while the other - Silkie. But really, ALDEST? TANYA? :+D Were those descriptions done by someone who has never played the game before? - Some of the achievements are bugged - the one for completing Chapter 4 (kill Davaeorn and flood the mine) never triggered for me, tried it two times without success. The achievement to bring Tenya's bowl only triggered when I entered Baldur's Gate city. I thought it wouldn't work at all, after trying it two times, so I just proceeded with the game as usual and was surprised when it popped up after arriving in the eastern district of BG.
Sounds: - Some sounds are different than before - for example the miners in the Cloakwood Mine have a different groan. It doesn't affect the experience in any way, but I fail to see the point of changing them to something else after all these years. - Some NPCs are silent now. I suspect something went wrong and their intended voiced line isn't playing properly. Drasus, the Flaming Fist guy and Scar on the bridge to Baldur's Gate didn't play their line when initiating their dialogue.
More graphics feedback: - Here are my settings - everything turned off. And this is how the game looks - example 1, example 2. You can't tell me you don't see how different the characters look. Not only is there an outline, but they are blurry and the colors/contrast is different. Look at Eltan's armor, for instance. - The portraits of recruitable NPCs are different, too. They're sharper, while before they were blurry. Now their avatars in the game are blurry instead. A switcheroo! - Ashideena's lightning damage effect is also different, the sparks having a big black outline. Another example of some fundamental graphics change that affects everything, I guess.
I'm with the OP on bugs, but as far as changes go...this is a re-release of a game by a company which originally had "Overhaul" in the title. If you were expecting everything to look and function exactly like it did in 1998 - and you say you have no interest in any new content - then the EEs might not be for you.
I think you're reading a little too much into my post. I've never said everything has to stay like it was in vanilla. The EEs are very much for me! Well, at least they were, for the last few years. I've enjoyed every patch before 2.0.. The thing is that previous EE changes were minor and in the spirit of Baldur's Gate, while these new ones are huge, unnecessary and forced, sometimes taking away very characteristic things from the series.
Was there even one person who requested such enormous UI, sound, graphics changes? A lot of the things I and other people mentioned worked perfectly fine before and are now MUCH worse: the portraits, for instance, are a disaster pretty much everyone agrees on and so is the list of imported characters. And those are only examples, not a comprehensive list.
I would like to be able to use multiple portraits. One for the side bar that is just a facial shot and one for the character screen that is a torso or full body shot. It seems like it will only allow you to use one picture for both screens for some reason.
That's a very good point and something I completely forgot about before. This new portrait system doesn't allow for a different character sheet and side bar portraits. Not a big deal, considering the main problem, but still - whyyyyy?
Comments
The UI itself still has some work to do, but the better modding support is good.. To be honest I've never liked that blue BGEE UI out of personal preference. Hopefully more UI mods will appear and I'll find one I like.
I'm verry disappointed. And what irritates me most of all is the absence of the option to turn ui and graphic back to the original look. I'm not a programmer, but I'm sure it's rathe easy to add such an option, or even make two standalone versions of the game:one for the "new guys" and one for us, people who are used to playing it.
Can we have the game we love back please?
Personally I like the outlines on characters and the map zoom. The new UI doesn't bother me to be honest and the game as a whole looks nicer to my eyes.
I would like to be able to use multiple portraits. One for the side bar that is just a facial shot and one for the character screen that is a torso or full body shot. It seems like it will only allow you to use one picture for both screens for some reason.
I haven't had a lot of time to play around with it yet. It took a few hours to download the patches and SOD and I work 11 hour shifts at the moment so I won't be able to dig in until Friday night.
I selected the hardest difficulty but I have heard that it reverts back to insane if you are killed. I haven't died yet but I am still in the prologue. I killed the rats with a Katana and it said I was doing 1 or 2 damage and that the rats resisted 10-12 damage so I guess it's working. I won't know until I get more time to play.
I really haven't had any issues yet with the UI though. It seems like I can find everything pretty easy and while it is different than the old school version it feels similar enough that it doesn't really bother me any. The spell book and the info tabs on the main character screen are different but easy to navigate.
I'm enjoying SoD and it's content for what it is (so far quite enjoying it!), but the UI is horrid. Just horrid. It's killed ALL of Baldur's Gate's visual aesthetic and charisma and now looks sterile and morbid (medieval stonework, spellbooks that look like spellbooks, little parchment rolls when mousing over avatars, maps that looked like an adventurer's scroll map, the little audio feedback when clicking on things, the unrolling parchment sounds....almost entirely gone).
A UI with modern design sensibilities does NOT belong on a 17-year old game. You do damn good work Beamdog, but this UI is your first significant failure.
1. The store. The inventory is aligned to the top of the page but the store action buttons are aligned to the bottom of the page, this feels clunky. There shouldn't be so much dead space between these two elements, they should ideally be centre aligned and right next to each other.
2. Text box. Are we able to have the width of the box draggable as well as the height? Again there is a lot of available space horizontally as nothing shares the same space as the text box - whereas the height cuts into the actual game space.
3. Spells. Please don't preselect spells for us when creating a new character. It's an irritant to have to go through and deselect them all. Appreciate you want to make it easy for newbies, that's what the 'choose for me' button was for.
4. Custom portraits. Mirroring what other people have said. Having to click through X number of portraits to actually see them is a pain. Whilst the old system wasn't great either you could at least directly select the picture you wanted if you knew the name. Now regardless of if you know the name you have to click through every preceding picture to get to your desired portrait.
5. Cleric/Thief. Please can we have the thieving skills button taken out of the abilities menu. If there is a question of limited spaces then I personally would put Turn Undead into the abilities menu and have the Thieving Skills button in its place.
That said I like a lot of this so far. As always it's easy to find niggles rather than praise. One big thank you is the weapon switching finally being user friendly.
I have been playing BG for 18 years and all this windows, sounds and buttons have become a small part of my soul... And you took it all away! Please, return me the integrity of my soul BACK!!!
For instance, the font size at the custom character screen ingame is too small imo, changing the font size won't effect it.
This new imoen portrait bugs me, it looks too much "photoshoped".
The character class creation with automatic filter is a bit weird and not needed, simple highlighting was enough. The multi class should be considered a class with sub classes (just like before) because it looks weird to have them mixed up with all the other classes, and when you choose half elf, shaman class looks really sad down under -_-
Icons of memorized spells in spell book are too small.
I also find the UI too dark, maybe it can be changed, i did not try it yet.
There are more things I would like point out but will not in this post.
I am not really satisfied with the way it looks but I really like the new features and extra information added, I am optimistic, I think there is a good potential, those "little things" just need to be fixed.
I know it might be a bit painful to read those posts after so much work. I guess you guys did expect it with a new UI and hardcore fans. I tried to be constructive -_-
I love the expansion so far but my goodness it's buggy. One thing I've noticed about the difficulty is that it drops by one notch everytime you enter the main options screen. So if it's on Hard, you can leave and reenter, leave and reenter, and it will be normal. Leave and reenter again and it will be on easy.
I really want to try the Shaman but frankly, I don't have the courage to - not with the game in this state. I am going to go run through IWDEE and hopefully things will be better after the first patch or two.
If I could, I'd take the "you can now place weapons in right hand even if two-handed" feature from the new patch and leave EVERYTHING ELSE the way it was.
That said, I am sorry to hear that your experience has been so negative. Luckily, one of the awesome innovations that came with 2.0 are new interface editing capabilities, meaning that even people with virtually no modding experience can edit, tweak, rearrange, and fully replace the interface to their liking. If a "classic" interface is what you're missing, don't worry - I'm sure it won't be long before there's a mod that delivers just that.
As for zooming issues, portrait selection, and other bugs/features, Beamdog hasn't had the best track record when it comes to release/patch day. Unlike most developers, however, they continue working to improve their games long after release and make a genuine effort to ensure that each player can enjoy BG in the way that feels best to them. Hopefully it won't be long before that's your experience as well.
I fear you will have to download parts of the game again and I don't know if there are ways to revert to 1.3 if you have bought the game on GOG or on the Beamdog website but hopefully I've been helpful.
I do not also use mods.
All I want is the old ui back. If you like the new one it's great, but many people do not. I believe we deserved the option to switch it back.
And as for that huge great box that obliterates half my screen every time a note is added to my journal - MAKE IT GO AWAY!
For the second, you can disable Journal Pop-Ups in Options > Gameplay > Feedback.
General thoughts:
- It was mentioned before, but the swapped location of done/save/load and cancel buttons is pretty annoying. Why would you do that after years of having it the other way? I constantly keep canceling out of actions I want to perform, out of muscle memory/habit guiding my hand.
- The locations on the world map are in different places. For example, the area south of High Hedge (the one with Bassilus and Melicamp) appears way to the west. It makes no sense. Also, look where Durlag's Tower is - I know it was south of Firewine in vanilla, but was it displayed over there in EE? That's one thing I don't remember precisely. In a different thread, I've read that you can't uncover/travel to some locations from places you could before, but I haven't encountered that myself. I didn't explore everything in this short run, though.
- Speaking of traveling, I've noticed there are many other entrance places added. I'm neutral to that change. It feels weird, but it's not a negative thing. Maybe with the exception of the Gnoll Stronghold, when you enter from the north. You can skip the bridge with the 2 ogrillion guys altogether, while it has always seemed to be the intended encounter you had to beat to reach the stronghold.
- It was also mentioned before in this or other threads, but being able to scroll beyond the area map borders is not a good idea.
- The cutscene with Charleston Nib is weird - his pathfinding makes him go back to the other rooms and you have to wait for him for quite a while, being stuck in that cinematic mode. Not a big deal, it was always a crowdy place and difficult for the whole party to get through the doors, but it's something to correct. Tried that twice, so it seems consistent. Never had that happen before, and I usually have a full party, which should have made things even more difficult for poor Charleston.
Inventory:
- When you take an item out of a stack, it appears way further from the cursor, above and to the right of it. The screenshot isn't that great, as it doesn't have the hand cursor displayed. I tried to indicate where it was and it's an easy enough thing to check for yourselves.
- Bug: something like this happened to me when I was ordering my characters to drink a potion in the inventory screen and switching between them using number keys.
Achievements:
- There are some embarassing typos for some of them like "side with ALDEST Sashenstar", "bring TANYA's possessions", "unpetrify CAMAH" (should be Aldeth, Tenya and Tamah of course)... Also, one achievement correctly mentions Silke, while the other - Silkie. But really, ALDEST? TANYA? :+D Were those descriptions done by someone who has never played the game before?
- Some of the achievements are bugged - the one for completing Chapter 4 (kill Davaeorn and flood the mine) never triggered for me, tried it two times without success. The achievement to bring Tenya's bowl only triggered when I entered Baldur's Gate city. I thought it wouldn't work at all, after trying it two times, so I just proceeded with the game as usual and was surprised when it popped up after arriving in the eastern district of BG.
Sounds:
- Some sounds are different than before - for example the miners in the Cloakwood Mine have a different groan. It doesn't affect the experience in any way, but I fail to see the point of changing them to something else after all these years.
- Some NPCs are silent now. I suspect something went wrong and their intended voiced line isn't playing properly. Drasus, the Flaming Fist guy and Scar on the bridge to Baldur's Gate didn't play their line when initiating their dialogue.
More graphics feedback:
- Here are my settings - everything turned off. And this is how the game looks - example 1, example 2. You can't tell me you don't see how different the characters look. Not only is there an outline, but they are blurry and the colors/contrast is different. Look at Eltan's armor, for instance.
- The portraits of recruitable NPCs are different, too. They're sharper, while before they were blurry. Now their avatars in the game are blurry instead. A switcheroo!
- Ashideena's lightning damage effect is also different, the sparks having a big black outline. Another example of some fundamental graphics change that affects everything, I guess.
And to address some of the comments: I think you're reading a little too much into my post. I've never said everything has to stay like it was in vanilla. The EEs are very much for me! Well, at least they were, for the last few years. I've enjoyed every patch before 2.0.. The thing is that previous EE changes were minor and in the spirit of Baldur's Gate, while these new ones are huge, unnecessary and forced, sometimes taking away very characteristic things from the series.
Was there even one person who requested such enormous UI, sound, graphics changes? A lot of the things I and other people mentioned worked perfectly fine before and are now MUCH worse: the portraits, for instance, are a disaster pretty much everyone agrees on and so is the list of imported characters. And those are only examples, not a comprehensive list. That's a very good point and something I completely forgot about before. This new portrait system doesn't allow for a different character sheet and side bar portraits. Not a big deal, considering the main problem, but still - whyyyyy?