Love this game and all, and while I'd consider most aspects of it to be flawless, there are many rather glaring problems with the inventory system and various UIs, which I will attempt to list exhaustively here. Some of these seem to be bugs, others are minor annoyances, and some are suggestions for improvements, but without further ado, here they are:

1. The Inventory screen does not list the remaining quantity of equipped subweapons (i.e. throwing knives, bombs). They must be unequipped to view the quantity.

2. The auto-scrolling text box that displays an item's statistics or crafting requirements on the Inventory and Shop screens is very tedious. We shouldn't have to sit and wait for the box to scroll up every time we mouse over a new item.

3. The damage stats on weapons and weapon diagrams seems to change randomly every time the inventory or shop screen is entered, for no reason. For example, a sword may sometimes claim to do "29-32" damage and, upon leaving the screen and returning, may say "30-33" instead.

4. When selecting a formula in the Alchemy menu, the ingredients are initially chosen automatically. This has the potential to waste rare, important ingredients. For example, when selecting a formula that requires aether, the game will automatically select the rarer, more valuable Elemental Stone as an ingredient instead of the more common Scleroderm mushroom.

5. Even if the ingredients are changed (re: #4), once the potion is created, the ingredients once more reset to their automatically selected defaults. This requires the user to constantly manually select the more common ingredients for every potion he creates, even when making the same potion multiple times.

6. In the Alchemy menu, the ingredients that are currently chosen don't show their remaining quantity. To view the quantity, they must be removed from being a selected ingredient so they show up in the available ingredients list again.

7. In the Alchemy menu, the quantity of potions already possessed is not shown. For example, if I am crafting Swallow potions, it would be helpful to list how many Swallow potions I already have without having to exit Alchemy and view the normal Inventory screen.

8. There is no filter category in the Inventory or Shop screens for Junk items. In order to sell junk items, one has to select the 'All Items' category and scroll through the entire huge list of items to find them.

9. The scrollable lists of items in the Inventory and Shop screens is rather small, which requires the user to scroll frequently to find certain items he is looking for. Furthermore, the item currently beneath the mouse cursor "grows" in height. This makes it a tiny bit more difficult to select the correct item, as the list gets "juggled" around slightly when this happens.

10. It would be nice to see what formulae or diagrams a material is used by when we look at the statistics for a certain material (assuming Geralt already has that information in his journal). For example, if I own or have seen the Fire Rune recipe, which requires Endrega Embryos, then when I select Endrega Embryos it would be helpful to see something like "Used by: Diagram: Fire Rune", or something to that effect.


That's about all I've come up with for now. Would be great if some of these were improved in a patch.. thanks again for the excellent game!

Just wanted to stop by and say that I agree with your list. Especially the bit about alchemy always choosing rare ingredients over more common ones. Why would I want to use one of my few troll tongues to make a potion when the much more common scleroderm herb works just as well?

Also, this is probably a bug but I noticed that "Formula: Blade Oil" takes 5 ingredients to make but only produces regular crafting oil (which can also be made using "Diagram: Oil") and nothing to put on your sword blade as the name implies.

Hey, I completely agree with what you've said. These are pretty much the exact problems I've encountered.

Also, something else. Crafting recipes for swords don't seem to show how many enhancement slots they have, or I didn't notice it. When I crafted the Jagged Blade I was surprised to find it had two slots.

I also love the game but I have to say the inventory/alchemy/barter pages are some of the worst and least user-friendly I've seen in a while!

I agree with everything the OP says, but would like to add to the list:

11. When in the barter screen, it should be possible to compare equipped items with items for sale

12. Again in the barter screen, books I have read and recipes I already own should be indicated in some way, rather than having to scroll up and down the vendor's inventory to compare each item individually with my own recipe inventory.

But yes fantastic game, just a few things like this could do with being fixed!

The currently "equipped" ingredient doesn't show how much of it you have left of that ingredient either. You have to unequip it, much like with bombs or daggers or traps.

+ rep to op

Good list, I'm enjoying the game for the most part but it feels like they just forgot everything they learned regarding inventory UI when making the current one.
Hopefully it will be addressed in patches or mods.

I agree with everything you said!

Would make the game so much better. CDP, I am disappoint!

The designers would have spent many months on inventory design decisions.
I suspect mods rather than patches will give a very few wish-list solutions [tears of blood].
Adding one tiny wish by a designer can cause unexpected slowdowns/bugs that lead to more tears [QQ].

Edit add: Can you imagine if you were a designer. Would you step forward and bear you chest by saying "I will change something"? I know that my bravery index would not be enough.
It was bad enough just learning to bear my chest when being audited at work.

I agree whole heartily with the OP's list and Epona222 that basically list all the annoying issues I have with the UI. If they fix this in the first patch or the next one I will make the game more enjoyable to played.

Yes, this list is very true.
Plus, with controller you can double the difficulty of the handling; Alchemy is downright impossible to do with controller, if you want to change the ingredients.

Edit: And in characterscreen, attributes, everything goes in turbo speed (keys and pad alike, you can't select one line to read, because you skip several, when trying to scroll through.

Yep, op has nailed it. Why proper UI implementation is so rare nowadays is beyond me, but few RPG devs seem to get it right.

Looks like we're going to need another Enhanced Edition.

They overhauled the Witcher 1 inventory screen, separating the alchemy ingredients from the backpack proper and giving it its own filtering on top of the sort for each section, so it's not that far of a stretch to imagine them doing something here. As to the list, never seen OP's #3 come up, but one thing I'd definitely emphasize is sorting, especially with something like the crafting/formula lists, when you can buy out a few crafters and have a group of alchemy formulae, then a few crafting formulae, and then a few more alchemy.

Thought about the whole view system and... ...in response to 11, I had thought it would be good to have the tabs follow each other--ie, switch from All items in Inventory to Weapons and have the Shop side switch as well--but when I thought about it a bit more, I realized the same thing, comparing inventory versus shop is great, but when you want to buy equippable items, it's usually what you have already equipped that you want to compare against.

When you look back to the Witcher 1 shops, you had the shop window next to both your inventory/alchemy items AND all your equipment slots/items. Being able to get something close to the same for this game would be ideal. Personally, I think the best way to alleviate most of the view-related problems would be to make things on-screen smaller to use more of the space.

The issue then becomes how to do it. I'm among the left-handed group eagerly awaiting next week's patch, but until then I'm using a wired Xbox 360 controller. The system is already a bit awkward, but if they go more the Witcher 1 route and rely more heavily on overlays/tooltips for item information and/or add in a third category of items (equipped items), it becomes a lot more convoluted for anyone who needs to use something other than the mouse and keyboard.

Another note, just checked at a merchant. If you've got the game set to gamepad and move the mouse around in a store and in the menus, it works, but you don't see the cursor. Of similar note, the map can be moved however you want with the mouse, but on a controller you can only move it horizontally or vertically at any one time.

I sincerely hope CDPR is reading this as the alchemy UI has be banging my head constantly against a wall it is such a bad implementation. If you have to fight with any control system in a game past the first few hours you have done something wrong.

+1
Great post :).