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.