While I appreciate that Larian are trying to emulate the feeling of real dice rolls here, the animations for rolls, adding modifiers and showing the continue button are a masterclass in poor UI design. It somehow manages to be god awfully slow AND inconsistent in how I can skip it.
Currently this is how it works:
- I select my option in dialogue, without any idea of the DC of the check or how having multiple modifiers effects the DC
- I get booted to a whole new full screen view, with it's own unskippable entrance animation.
- I select my modifiers, which are hidden behind a button click for no discernible reason, then roll by clicking another tiny button.
- I need to wait for a lengthy roll animation, UNLESS I get lucky by clicking at the right time to skip. Performing this skip seems neither consistent nor clear: I just need to hammer my mouse in the general vicinity of the rolling area and hope.
- If I am UNLUCKY I'm forced to sit through an incredible floaty dice roll animation that apparently takes place in Mars gravity. I have played TTRPGs, I know how long it takes to roll and read dice: half a second, unless you fling your dice across the table like a barbarian.
- I then have to sit through MORE animations as bonuses are applied, penalizing me for being good at the game and stacking them. I groan as they float towards the dice like they are taking a Sunday stroll through a park.
- Then I sit through MORE animations as the final tally clobbers the DC dice at the pace of a large glacier, before the continue button finally fades in at what seems to be a totally random time frame.
- And we get MORE animations as the full screen fades away
The result is a tedious process that takes me out of the game totally: we have these beautifully rendered characters, with emotion and voice acted dialogue, and stunning backgrounds: and Larian choose to hide all that with a full screen animation for dice rolling.
All this in contrast to how classic CRPGs used to do things: you click the dialogue button and instantly get a success or failure. You can barrel through heaps of them, limited only by your reading speed. AND they don't take up the whole screen while doing so.
Instead with BG3 I have to sit through a minimum five second animation that's the same every damn time. It could end up ten or fifteen seconds if you fail to skip animations. You might perform four or five of these within a single conversation: at the end you could have spent more time waiting for UI animations than reading and thinking about dialogue choices.
Larian, please please reconsider the dice rolling experience, it's one of the only blemishes on an otherwise perfect game.
Yeah giving a toggle or something to let people who don’t care for the dice rolls skip/fast forward them would be a worthy addition. I agree, the current experience is really clunky if you’re trying to move through a given roll quickly.
Also, a tip: hovering your cursor over the skill tag on a given dialogue option will show you your modifiers for that particular skill, but I can understand wanting that to be designed differently to make it more obvious. I don’t dislike how it’s done now, because it evokes some of the “I know what I’m good at” from tabletop which would guide my choices anyways, but I also understand that just because something doesn’t bother me doesn’t necessarily mean it’s designed well.
As far as not knowing the DC ahead of time, that is the entirety of tabletop dnd (and a decent number of other systems I’m sure). I’ve never played in a game where we were told that, and I don’t tell my players when I DM. I do understand the sentiment, because unlike a tabletop game with really open-ended options for dialogue and approaches to problems, we’re doing the more basic video game RPG dialogue options and actions, and some of the sense for how difficult something should be doesn’t translate over. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with an option to show the DC ahead of time, but IMO that gets far enough into personal preference territory that I don’t think it’s really a knock against their design in a way that some of the other points are.
In all I think the answer is just toggles/options (maybe tweaks) rather than a redesign; I enjoy the rolling experience myself and don’t really share your complaints, but my enjoyment isn’t any more valid than your agony hahaha.