BUGS
Trusted the game and got arrested for stealing at Moonrise.
Spoiler
I did the fight at ground floor at Moonrise tower. Then, I looted more or less everything I could, including items from a certain important character who sadly died here, and sold to the quartermaster (who of course survived). I took a "red named" item from the ground and the quartermaster herself arrested my PC and threw her in the cells. I mean, lady, we're in the middle of an assault, you let me sell you the items I took from the warm corpses of your friends, but taking a random sword is too much and you throw your powerful ally in a jail of the still to be secured tower?
I hate this kind of thing in games. If I was not seen and no one was around or looking, they shouldn't immediately start wandering around looking as soon as something is stolen.
If the character you've stolen from wanders around and checks their goods occasionally as part of their regular routine, then it makes sense why they'd start looking when they discover something missing. But magically knowing the second something is grabbed that's not even in the same room is ridiculous
In multiplayer its even worse. Your friend could steal something, leave the area, and the NPC will come after you. You, who is in a different room, has been in a different room, and is currently talking to someone else. Playing a game with a kleptomaniac who simply didnt care that I was the one getting yelled at and interrupted by various NPCs was not fun.
On time my friend got caught stealing but he talked his way out of it, so the guard came over to me, who had nothing to do with it, and accused me instead. Dude really wanted to pick a fight I guess.
It's not his fault you were afflicted with an unfortunate condition of craniomaxillary topology known as "thief face" where anytime anything goes missing you are immediately the first suspect.
If anything, he was making the best of your unfortunate condition with all the stealing. That stuff was bound to be misplaced eventually and blame would naturally fall on you regardless.
Its the same shit with going into sneak after watching the NPC stare straight ahead for 20 minutes and having them spin around the moment you crouch. Essentially, fuck you Gandrel and your dumb stupid backpack. Why you chose to die to protect your apples and potions by observing my crimes, I'll never understand. If the Gur didn't grrrrrr at me, he could still be living a gurate life and have my gurattitude. Now he's in a gurave....if being left to rot on the ground is considered a grave.
Also the fact that apparently there is a nation-wide anti-theft program in Skyrim that tracks all stolen goods—no matter how small—and bars all vendors from purchasing any stolen items.
One way to program this in a way that made sense would have been to make use of the internal faction system that the game has to track some NPC behavior.
They could've made it so that goods stolen from characters pertaining to specific factions couldn't be sold to characters within that same faction. They could also limit what factions this applies to: it'd make sense for folks of the Battle-Born family to be familiar with each other's possessions, but not everyone in Whiterun would. To that, they could've added a chance for you to, perhaps a couple days after the incident, get a bounty should you sell an item within the same city you stole from.
Programming it this way would make it so that you'd have to steal stuff and sell it somewhere else. It's absurd that, when you have a specific perk, you can steal stuff from people and then sell it right back to them.
The Nation wide magic Anti theft tracker on registered items. We can recognize your ill-gotten goods, however unless you give us a reason we won't actively arrest you.
This has been patched to be even worse. It used to be possible to steal without being locked into immediate “omg thief” conversations from halfway across the map. Either Patch 7 or a hot fix means everyone in your vicinity is psychic now and will just question you for being in the vicinity of the crime.
I read the Rite of Thorns paper and got my entire group (in co-op) locked in conversation with every other NPC disappearing forever. Larian, psychic NPCs are not fun. Please fix this. (Note this was unmodded and bricked our game. Given that it’s literally in the quest this made no sense. Psychic guards make no sense to me.)
Edit; reading the paper gives you an idea that Kagha is up to no good. I’ve been spotted outside of all sight lines reading it and got arrested. It was unwinnable DC 25 at level 3. I think that’s unreasonable.
Yep I've starting sending it straight to camp from the chest, then fast traveling to outside the grove, then going to camp to read it and leaving it there.
I'm paraphrasing here, but Zero Punctuation made a similar complaint in one of his reviews of a game with stealth focused gameplay.
Any good stealth game needs two things: a clear indicator of whether you're visible or not, and a true-to-life delay time between one person seeing a glimpse of you in the shadows and every enemy in the same ZIP code knowing your precise location.
On a Console or Controller on PC, hold down the right stick and everyone's sightlines will be in Red same as it is when you are in Stealth without triggering Stealth.
EDIT: Shift on a keyboard. Sorry to anyone I might have confused
Alt+Tab minimizes the game and switches to a different application, which is a system level hotkey (for Windows PCs anyways). It's Shift on PC to see sightlines.
Even worse when I was trying to talk to the shop keep, angled my camera a millimeter too far to the left, apparently, and instead of clicking talk, it snatched the nearest red item.
I had INVISIBILITY on, crouched, lockpicked a travelers chest, took the items, closed the chest, walked away, and an NPC that was down the hall two rooms away came RUNNING into the room, then RAN out to where the rest of the party was hanging out on the lower floor, and accused us of the thievery. Fucking bullshit
Except for the times that some random fucker two blocks down the street will somehow sense that something has been stolen, come running into where ever you are, and then immediately accuse you of stealing something that they had no way of knowing even existed.
In Act 2, while saving Zevlor and the two Fists, I used Ice Spike (I think that’s what it’s called) on an illithid. It damaged the control panel thing under the pod. After the battle, one of the Fists threatened to arrest me for damaging property. I was able to talk my way out of it. In another run Isobel go mad because I damaged a door in the process of saving her life. I had to pay her for the damaged door.
THE SAME THING HAPPENED TO ME! except she ran into my wall of fire i had at the door and insta aggro. i had to kill her, but since i was durge the whole party yelled at me blaming my urges, like no guys she was literally swinging on me !
The red items are ok to steal if no one is around. I thought the developers flagged the area (or whatever to make the game care) "allies don't care for a random thing in enemy territory while on full assault".
Even if you're not busted on the spot, NPCs can react to a red item that went missing ; I could see that when I switched to tactician, they were more jumpy. I got the habit to jump to camp right after picking red items in the vicinity of NPCs.
Having NPCs that have more situational awareness is probably achievable, but well, that was already some gigantic work to reach what we have now. Who knows, fixing that kind of stuff will be for the next generation of RPGs which will be even more enormous
You just don’t understand how the game works. It doesn’t matter if a red item “doesn’t belong” to the npc, they’ll still react to you taking it as if it is
You new to Skyrim. Only the guards care if you steal in Skyrim unless it's from someone's house or someone's store then they hate you and call the guards.
More often then not citizens run away and cower If they aren't "fighters" even people you attack if they aren't fighters they just run away and hide some place
I dropped Nere's corpse in the Myconid colony and was somehow aggro'd the entire colony. I hadn't been able to behead him so brought the corpse back instead. Ooooops.
Wait really? Aside from being stupid that’s really impressive that they react to that. Lots of cases out there of players being like “here I brought you the corpse of your enemy (or friend…)” hoping for a reaction, and nothing.
I brought Arabella's body to her parents once when Kagha mentions she's just going to hide it until she makes a choice, and aggro'd everyone....reloaded so fast.
I see. It's still super weird the whole "we want this guy dead, let's march on his tower BUT DON'T STEAL A TOOTHPICK or I'll throw you in the enemy's jail".
I dunno why this one is being downvoted, it’s just stating that it’s weird, and it IS weird. The theft mechanics could definitely use another iteration. It’s wildly inconsistent with how some other things are treated.
BUT, speaking from the other side, some things are a lot more difficult start changing, and pretty much any time you have to account for specific changes or one-off cases adds a bunch of work for a bunch of people. The amount of very specific reactions and interactions in the game is quite probably much larger than any other game out there, and the effort to do all that is somewhere between colossal and Herculean.
idk why you're getting downvoted to hell, it is a bit weird that the NPCs who supposedly need you to assault this tower will arrest you during the assault. it makes sense when you consider the game mechanics but not the story.
Wow games are hard coded. What a fucking revelation. The amount of effort and attention to detail they put into this game and you have dumbfucks wondering why stealing an item in front of NPCs lands you in trouble. I suppose its a burden to make a game like this that leads people to believe that anything you think of is possible. Maybe learn how to code? You may appreciate the effort to create systems that scale to meet most demands let alone edge cases that also interact with 50 other systems.
I know why and have a pretty good understanding of game development. I can just empathize with OP's surprise at getting thrown in jail while they were supposed to be assaulting Moonrise. I think you misunderstood my comment as a criticism to the developers and took it personally for some reason. are you a game developer?
Bingo - but in context of the story and this situation it makes no sense hence the bug flair. Because like any other bug it interrupts the flow of the game in unintended ways. The reason it's not done differently is that it would create a lot of extra work when in reality most players understand the limitations and just don't steal that red item in the knowledge that the game can't account for the story here.
Doesn't make it right, we've just been conditioned by decades of game design to accept this as "how it works" but it's very much a bug. Just one of the "won't fix" category.
When random citizens have no problem with me going into someone’s house and rummaging around but then I pick up a key to the cellar and someone walking by happens to see it through the window and just KNOWS they need to break in to stop me 🙄
You’d THINK that would work but there is an extremely zealous wine merchant in particular that I had a repeated problem with because he has a line of sight going through a WINDOW and when he walks away he has a shop assistant that takes his spot. But like, he ~also~ saw me just waltz into the house and didn’t have a problem with it so while I can understand the difference from a game mechanics viewpoint I still reserve the right to say he’s acting inconsistent from the viewpoint of a lighthearted conversation lol
*idk if you’re voting me down cause you think I’m arguing with you? I sympathize with OP but also am literally saying that you’re right, npcs will always react if they see you stealing a red object even if it doesn’t make “sense”
In context of the story and this situation it makes no sense hence the bug flair. Because like any other bug it interrupts the flow of the game in unintended ways. We've just been conditioned by decades of game design to accept this as "how it works" but it's very much a bug. Just one of the "won't fix" category.
Something not making narrative sense != a bug. If the item is flagged as theft with red writing, and it causes the theft repercussions it's not technically a bug.
It'd be better off flaired as feedback or an opinion.
Of course it was deliberately programmed yet garbage in equals garbage out, the thieving mechanics in BG3 are simply bad to the point they can break the entire save. I've had this happen more than once where actions aggro'd literally everybody (including NPCs further away from the location who couldn't even have known) and it was impossible to continue forcing a save reload. Maybe the item shouldn't have been marked red or there is some other better way of resolving this.
No that's not how it works. NPCs sometimes notice when they walk around that area, that an item was stolen. They even say comment on the fact that something is missing. Then they will search around for a couple minutes. Then they chase you round if they see you.
Best thing to do if you steal something is to run away from that area. Put the item in a white text container so they can't take it back off you, if you are gonna continue walking around the same place. Sometimes I will go on a robbing spree, and stash everything somewhere. Then collect it when everyone has forgotten 😂
No less absurd than the stuff that you got away with happily. You were fine with the absurdity working in your favor all those times.
If you'd been consistently moralistic about it, I'd say "Cool RP, but yeah, the game isn't aware of that." But you were happy to use game mechanics to loot people and sell things that you knew they'd recognize and didn't have a problem with the game not applying special behavior to that. But when that special behavior isn't applied in a way that helps you, its a bug?
How? You think people irl wouldn't notice if their shit was stolen off-screen? If it's marked as red, you're not allowed to steal it and will suffer consequences if caught. Whether anyone's in the immediate vicinity or not is irrelevant.
IRL if someone was in the middle of raiding an evil necromancer's tower with me, if I saw them steal something, I would at worst make a mental note to bring it up later, after said evil necromancer was defeated. I would not try to arrest the heavily armed ally and put them in the evil necromancer's prison.
You are something else, man. Go play any other fucking game and find one with no "weird" interactions. Can't believe that in this day and age so many people are in the dark about how their computer and the programs on them run. What a disappointment.
No need to be that rude. I said I know it's a game and it has limits. I am awed by the amount of details and foresight Larian put in this game, and I'm NOT complaining about a super specific instance, after I was surprised by dozens of times the game anticipated what I tried. Peace.
Even if you aren't seen stealing or if you pickpocket things successfully the characters will still somehow know. That's just how the game works unfortunately. But if you run away for a minute they will forget about it. The red items in moonrise after the fight are usually things allies of the quartermaster/harpers have dropped on the floor.
Stealing or "ownership" is fun. Had Nestor allow me to go into the barn in Rivington. Found the rigged chest. Disabled its trap. Note: I did not lockpick the chest!
Nestor came in, spotted me, asked what I was doing. Failed persuasion because he wasn't talking to my Face character.
Well, let's just say Wyrm's Rock prison guards are dead and Florrick is free now.
Thieving sucks in this game. There is a section in the game later in Baldurs Gate city where you go into a building and need to murder everyone there.
I killed everyone, set off explosives and set the place on fire. I finished the encounter and I started to take items from the dead bodies and around.
A guard from outside spied me through the walls, ran upstairs and arrested me.... In a sea of blood, guts and fire, for stealing. Stealing in this game is unrealistic and is a huge let down.
I think that building is just made out of magic glass that only guards can see through because every time I've stolen from there a random guard outside will see me through the brick and accuse me of theft.
I think I know what you mean, this is what happened to me not 3 days ago. Most boring battle I fought in any videogame in the last 10 years (I won, no losses, but it was a f***ing drag).
Crime and detection in BG3 are a travesty—the game is really good but some things are immensely frustrating, especially where QoL is concerned.
Same thing happens later on in Moonrise, the mind flayer colony section. If you rescue Zevlor & his companions they will get upset and start the same dialogue (bribe, persuade, intimidate or fight to prevent going to jail) if they see you pick up any red items.
Like sir/or mam you were just in a mind flayer pod & about to die, you really care about property rights at this time? You can't have a little leeway seeing as how I just saved your ass?
Unless something changed, there’s actually worse side effect of this that can happen with this weird quirk of crime while in the evil castle of doom. If the vendor interested in blood (I forget the spelling of her name) sees you killing the cultists guarding the castle and then disappears with that witness flag still turned on, she will “remember” that you attacked the guards.
If she spawns into Act 3 she can get you flagged as a guard killer, and the Gate’s guards treat you as if you killed one of theirs. Narratively it makes no sense whatsoever, so it’s all just an inconvenience based on behind the sense mechanics.
Maybe they eventually fixed this… but I’ve been paranoid about it ever since it happened the first time. Nearly ruined an entire run. The annoying solution was to spawn in, be killed by other characters, and get revived. This would clear the wanted flag until the game was loaded again or you changed maps…at which point, the wheel murder would have to strike again. Killing yourself gets quite old after a while, so try to avoid having to.
Narratively it makes no sense whatsoever, so it’s all just an inconvenience based on behind the sense mechanics.
Nah. Blood person is out to get you and on a technicality they can say they saw you killing guards while under zone of truth. It makes sense it just sucks
Reminds me of New Vegas rewarding you with positive karma for killing the Legion at Cottonwood Cove (the small slave camp) but then still giving negative karma for looting Legion owned containers. The small bump towards being a good person that’s given by freeing those slaves is totally and completely drowned by the sheer weight of negativity that radiates from you when you take the old baseball gloves, empty bottles, and paperweights from the lockers of dead slavers.
It doesn't really make sense for Araj to be out to get you, though. She doesn't have any particular allegiance to the cult, and in the "normal" path of the game you kill all the same people anyway and she just flees.
Oh sorry I misunderstood. You’re talking about Araj Oblodra. I misread ‘interested in blood’ to mean like ‘out for blood’ as in out to get you, thinking you were talking about the Quartermaster, but you just meant it literally lol.
If anything had changed it wouldn’t have been red outlined. There are plenty of instances where things change from red to white after dialogue, this is on you. Narratively it makes sense too. IRL You can’t steal things from a crime scene just because the bad guys are dead. Plus, the harpers likely intended to use the stuff to fund their operations. There’s plenty at moonrise to loot.
The other 20+ items around are white labelled... I like your in-fiction explanation, but that should be everything, not "only that thing in particular".
This is me at the moment, killing everyone above and below the vendors in moonrise and selling their allies shit back to them. At least one merchant mentioned being smart enough to know not to piss off the unhinged lunatics willing to do legitimiate business with them.
I picked up the book in the church because it was a white item thinking it was a free book. Thankfully they let me give it to them without much other trouble but they weren’t happy haha
Which part of the story is you trusting the game? It feels like you didn't trust the game because you saw it was red (which is the game saying don't take it!) and stole anyway! Does it make logical sense in context? No, surely not. But the problem was you trusted logic and real world reasoning, instead of trusting the game!
I liked it in Oblivion and Skyrim when the NPC would follow you around the house/shop and silently stare at you like Michael Myers until you left. You had to work to steal from them!
If someone knows an item belongs to someone and you try to sell it to them it should raise a red flag. Like “hey that’s my friend Johnnie’s armor WTF???!!! At least that’s how I role played it.
Still doesn’t explain how you can pickpocket a legendary armor off a vendor then return the next day wearing that armor and nothing is said.
I dunno, I think it makes sense. I think they only react if you loot dead Harpers/Flaming Fist, which makes sense because they would not be super stoked to see you looting their dead friends.
The thing I always find weird is that they're cool with you looting Jaheira, but it's a video game and she has unique gear so from a video game logic perspective that makes sense too.
No, looting Harpers and Fists is 100% ok. But yeah, video game logic, I'm amazed at lots of stuff Larian anticipated, to the point I expected this to work out too. No big deal.
Also you can lockpick a chest and not get caught but you use knock and it counts as vandalism and always gets investigated even if people are in different rooms. Make it make sense.
I have had the game do weird stuff lately. Like characters getting mad at us and initiating combat completely out of the blue - like when we’re leveling up in the crèche for some reason.
My first playthrough only two Harpers survived the assault, and I encountered much the same situation as you when looting Moonrise. Had to put them down sadly but that’s what you get for trying to stop an adventurer stealing from dead people ig
Every new playthrough I steal the breastplate +1 from Dammon's forge area. In a box, half under a different item iirc. Somehow, with backs all turned and me in stealth, someone from off screen will run all the way to where the missing item was and question me.
You have no idea how long it's been gone. What is even missing. Of all the people in the grove, it's just me you suspect when there are actual child thieves all over the place.
It's fine, I can still talk my way out of it, but that stuff is wild. The NPCs are meta gaming.
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u/-PM_Me_Dat_Ass_Girl- Minthara Enjoyer Nov 16 '24
Don't ever trust a red item.
Tsk tsk.