UI Bigger Icons (UI Scaling)

[dinsdalepiranha]

I know this has been brought up on the Larian forums dozens if not hundreds of times in hopes of the official devs taking notice (with apparently zero engagement on their part), so I'm probably screaming into the void right now.... but we desperately need an option for making the UI bigger. I know there's mods to increase text size/change the fonts to something more readable, and that's all great, but I'm talking mostly about buttons and icons.

This post will be divided into two halves, Part I (the screed), and Part II (the solution). Feel free to skip to part II if you don't wanna listen to my whiny diatribe.

PART I - The Screed

This is my first CRPG. I can tell that it's an amazing game and I want SO BADLY to enjoy it. But alas, I do not have the ability to play it on a 4K ultrawide monitor, while sitting with my face ten inches away from said monitor. And that is literally the ONLY way I can imagine the vanilla UI being adequate.

I think the sheer number of UI improvement mods that already exist, is testament to that fact. Clearly, there's a lot of gamers with less-than-perfect vision, who've felt the need to ask for or create these mods. Yet for some reason, there doesn't seem to be a single mod that can uniformly increase the size/scale of the whole UI.

Personally, I am splitting my playthrough between the Steam Deck (with a custom control scheme allowing me to take advantage of the mouse/keyboard UI, because the controller UI has its own litany of issues), and playing docked, on my 65" 1080p bedroom TV. When I'm in handheld mode, at the very least I can hold the Deck right up to my face in order to better read the microscopic icons (still not a pleasant experience) but on the TV, it's nigh-unplayable. The icons are the size of a literal thumbnail. If I can't find a  way to change this, I'm afraid that I will be forced to give up on the game, and miss out on the 2023 GotY. Which would really, reeeeeeeally suck.

PART II - The (proposed) Solution

We need a mod that allows us to scale different elements of the UI (ideally, on an individual basis) both UP in size, as well as down. Currently, there's mods to make it SMALLER, but none to make it bigger, which is wild to me. Having more screen real estate doesn't mean dick if I have to strain my eyes in order to do any kinda of inventory management, or even to organize my hotbar. Ideally, I'd want the option to scale the hotbar up to 200% of its default size. I don't care if the icons end up looking low-res. I don't care how much of the screen the UI takes up, I just wanna be able to look at the icons and tell what they are AT A GLANCE.

Same goes for the character sheet/inventory screen. I don't care about overlapping windows. I don't care about containers having a bigger grid size. I'm not averse to scrolling. I want icons that come closer to the size of those you find in games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, etc. I don't care if that means I can only see 4x3 icons onscreen at a time without scrolling. I'll deal with that, if I can actually make out what the icons are.

The aforementioned feature (UI scaling up to 200%) is the most important thing needed; however, there are some supplemental features that would make it even better. For example, being able to assign a hotkey that will, in the event of having multiple containers/UI elements open, allow you to flip through them, changing which window has focus and displayed as the top layer (basically the same way Alt+Tab works, but only affecting in-game UI elements). A hotkey like that could also be used to switch between the different sections (shutters) in the hotbar, since having the UI scaled that big would obviously make it difficult to show multiple sections simultaneously.

This mod would hopefully be compatible with mods like Aether’s Immersive UI, so as to remove the scaled-up UI when it’s not needed. It also hopefully would operate independently from mods that change the font/size of various text in the game (mods like this), so that even with a scaled up UI, certain text could still be reduced (or made even larger) by utilizing a font-changing mod.

Lastly, (and this might be the least likely to be feasible), it would be amazing if it were possible to use the keyboard keys to select different icons in the hotbar/inventory (similar to how it works in the controller UI), so that users would have the option of using the mouse cursor OR buttons to flip through their inventory (WITHOUT having the entire UI/control scheme switch to ‘controller mode’). I assume the only way to do that would be something that changes the x,y coordinates of the mouse cursor’s position in relation to the UI window, (i.e. calling the coordinates of [row 1, column 1], [row 1, column 2], etc). I’m no modder, but that sounds like a difficult thing to implement, even to my ignorant self, so I understand if that’s not really a possibility. But damn would it be sweet if it were. Maybe assigning a hotkey that you hold down, to shift WASD’s inputs from camera mode/movement mode to ‘UI mode’

IN CONCLUSION:

Again, I’m not entirely sure what’s possible, so all the extra features are just my ideal wishlist. But the MAIN point, which is just straight-up UI window scaling up to a much larger size, is something that I feel should’ve been implemented in the official game, and I’m frankly amazed that no one’s made a mod to do it yet.

If some enterprising BG3 modder were to make this request into a reality, I promise you, it would make a MASSIVE difference in the accessibility of countless semi-blind gamers, and allow them to enjoy the Baldur’s Gate 3 experience as much as everyone else. Please, pleeeeaaase, can somebody make this happen? I would literally pay you to develop such a mod.