Jodien

Yes, it was certainly annoying. In Baldur's Gate 2 this was fixed by adding a potion case (and other goodies). The same for other items as well. It was a great reward and I loved building my inventory with fantastic items like this. You don't have to find or buy an item in game, just to work around a silly design, do you?

Yeah, Diablo's tetris-style inventory is very good. Big items look big and occupy bigger space, small items are just the opposite. Right from the start, it adds realism to both item size and space allocation. But I want a hybrid system of tetris and tabbed list (like in DA:O) inventories. According to this, the primary tab is the tetris. The other tabs should be available once you aquire the relevant item container. For instance, when you buy a scroll case, you put it into the tetris and automatically the "SCROLLS" tab opens up and replaces the area of the tetris when opened. You either click the scroll case in the tetris, or the scrolls tab at the top to see the list of scrolls you have in it. It should be the same thing for small items which are expressed by quantity instead of size and weight: Potions, ingredients, rings, amulets etc. Again, a character should have only one quiver slot and when you click it, it opens a list to show all the arrows you have. When you highlight a type of arrow, you make it the current ammo. You close the list by clicking the quiver.

I always prefer a RPG with a classic inventory feature because managing your inventory is one of the fun things in role playing games and I am sure most of the people like to make decisions and choices while managing it. But the thing in IE games I hated most was the ridiculous usage of the inventory slots. While you could stack items and carry lots of stuff that way, you just could not stack diferent items although they are the same type. I have 10 slots and able to carry 100 potions of healing in stacks of 10 each, BUT I am not able to carry 10 potions if they are all different spells. It is extremely silly. Just let the player stack all kinds of potions in 1 slot which has a (say) 20 bottle limit. When you click the slot you open a pulldown menu and see a list of all the potions in it. It is same with the ammunition, papers, scrolls, gems, rings, amulets and such small and lightweight items.

Yes to all. You must be able to smash / picklock / lock / spelllock / knock the doors. There is no need to think rogue skills will be useless unless you are designing a game similar to Diablo where you can smash anything. And also keep in mind that doors have two basic properties: 1. The material and structure of the door 2. Quality of the lock Doors can be wooden, steel-reinforced, metal, stone, granite. There is already a varying degree of difficulty here against smashing. Naturally you don't want to smash a metal door all day when you can use magic or rogue skill in mere minutes and do it in a very silent way. But you must also be able to kick a door open if it is a very simple wooden door and have no descent lock, especially if you want a loud and showy passage through. Smashing option will gradually be ineffective and finally useless once the door becomes stronger material and with better lock mechanism. So you eventually have to rely on mages and rogues to pass through these doors after a certain difficulty level for such encounters. It is also true for lock mechanisms. You can break simple locks and open the door, but you need magic or lockpicking skills to unlock better quality ones. Knocking on doors of the houses should also be implemented. It was just too weird to picklock and enter a house of a person just to talk to them. You may be able to pick lock at nights using the cover of darkness, and find the residents sleeping, but you should run the great risk of catching the residents' and city watch's attention once you attempt to break into homes during daylight.

I think a good design concept on doors and chests is very important, it makes this game not only good but great. Doors really should be interactive to some extend. I want to see more than open/close/unlock options. For instance, * Ability to force doors open using strength. This may result in much noise (and maybe some loss of stamina), which might cause nearby enemies upon hearing the noise moving to the location and attacking the party. So it is a risk to take, either try to find a way to silently open the door (ie. pick the lock, use magic) or face a tougher encounter. Bashing down the doors should take much more time and energy and it should be extremely loud, a very unwanted solution used only in certain situations. * Ability to listen through doors. In fact to listen anything in an environment might work just like a FOW. Your party has a hearing range, you hear everything in it. Your distance to sound sources and the obstacles on the way dictate your ability to catch them. You can hear conversations behind a door, but with much lower volume. As you get closer you hear better. * Ability to use doors to bar passage. You may close the door to prevent enemies to come through. Force your enemies to use strength to open it in order to reach you. It can be resolved with a Strength contest. If you win you keep it shut, if they win they open the door and get through. * Ability to lock/magically lock the doors if you have the proper key/spell. * Breaking chests may cause fragile items (like potions, scrolls, light clothing) to be destroyed. So it is a risk you take, since you don't know what is in the chest. are the ones I can think of at first thought.