[Request] New magic items come unidentified

sandmanCCL

Current Behavior:

Many of the new magical items come identified but have basic item art attached with them, meaning people who normally skip picking up, say, normal clubs (you can't even sell them for cash) miss out.

Expected behavior:

Magic items are unidentified, use different art than just basic items, or both.







I looked through the new items thread by @ajwz and was really mad. I've gone through half that content and didn't notice any of those items. Why would I scroll over the halbred carried by the gnoll dude outside the gnoll fortress especially after wading through 500 regular gnolls who carry just normal halbreds? My CHARNAME wouldn't know what that halbred was, so it seems to me like it should be unidentified.

bigdogchris

I agree, new magic items should be unidentified.

I have found one of the new magical items, and it was unidentified, but I didn't know they all were. Who knows how many I have missed.

Unferth

It's months later, but I'd like to add to this idea. (Apologies if the following has been discussed elsewhere and I just missed it.) I agree that all magical items should be marked as unidentified (i.e., tinted blue), but I actually wish all unidentified items, perhaps excluding unique ones, looked otherwise like their generic counterparts. For example, arrows +1, before identification, would look like regular arrows except with the blue tint; when identified, they'd look like arrows +1. The same for armor, jewelry, clothing, etc.

This setup would prevent experienced players, who are familiar with all the icons, from knowing on sight what "unidentified" item we've just picked up. As it stands, we're forced by the game to act as though we don't know what something is when in fact we do. Of course, we'll always recognize certain items just by virtue of where they're located or who drops them, but in many cases, changing the way unidentified items are displayed would convey more effectively the idea that, "these are definitely arrows, and they're clearly special, but that's all I know."

This change is not a perfect solution, but I do think it addresses an immersion-flubbing issue. Whether or not it can be reasonably implemented, I don't know; I can imagine complications with stackable items in the inventory. (I guess technically unidentified items shouldn't be stackable, since you can't determine what's like with like.) Alternatively, a possible way to represent the player's and/or the character's knowledge of what certain magical items look like would be to make the player identify a given item type only once: Maybe all arrows +1 do look the same, and after you've identified one, you've identified 'em all.

Either of these possibilities, I think, would correct to some extent the disparity between what players know about items and what the game pretends they don't.

CorpusDelicti

I like the unidentified/new art combo best.

franco

I think the blue tint is the indication you need to suggest that there may be something special about the item. It would be like seeing that, "hm this item seems to glow". I think to make play interesting, though, you should sort of guess or figure out which items you want to have a better look (scroll over) after a battle. I think that's more realistic.

I disagree that once you have identified an item, that you should be able to identify all similar items (say Arrow +1) on sight. It is more interesting to have some party members develop sufficient Lore abilities to do that.

kamuizin

I lost many of the new items by a simple reason:

Undentified similar to normal items doesn't call attention, and if i stop to look each item i meet on the game to see if that one is magical or not, it will bore me to the extreme of make BG EE unplayable anymore.

Unferth

@sandmanCCL and @kamuizin hint, I think, at another possibility: Drops that contain items of especial interest--unique items, magical items, quest items*--could glow a different color when the tab key is pressed, maybe a darker blue. Some players would undoubtedly feel too omniscient having everything flagged in this way, but that objection could be redressed by making the feature optional. As @franco indicates above, the differing glow could be explained from an RP perspective as representing a magical aura that the character can detect, much like the blue tint in the inventory screen. The same feature could be implemented for containers as well, though that's probably a bridge too far.

* Ideally, non-magical quest items would be marked only after you've received the quest, since otherwise your character isn't yet looking for them. But that might be too ornate.