Inventory management is the bane of RPGs.
I’d like to see a series of games that accepts how big of a role this annoyance plays where literally the whole game is only inventory management.
It always reminds me of a beautiful quote that I’m going to butcher from one of the Factorio devs. If something isn’t fun, no matter how sacred it feels to your gameplay, get rid of it.
It’s hard to think of a game that has been improved by having inventory weight caps. For most games there should be two systems: resource hoarding, and item unlocks. You find an item, it’s now unlocked gratz. You find gold? Hoover it all up.
Really the only game I can think of where it really adds depth to the game is Darkest Dungeon 1. You have so many inventory slots, and you start out with them somewhat filled with food and assorted supplies to help you go. As you progress through a level, you naturally use up some supplies, but you still eventually have to choose whether to keep the bandages or the loot. But that was clearly a deeply thought out mechanic in the game, core to the experience, not “oh well skyrim has inventory management so we should too”.
I would add Pathologic 2, where resource scarcity and limits on inventory capacity are a driving force of the experience.
Backpack Hero gets close to that in a rougelike/lite kind of way
It was a major component in playing Death Stranding optimally.
They should copy the scavenger thing from Solasta so we don’t need to pick up so much junk.
I almost gave up because of the atrocious inventory management. I lost many items because of it. Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know because everything is all over place.
Imagine if you could just sort and search. A lot of the problems DOS2 had that people complained about, they just kept for BG3. I don’t think Larian play their own games.
I don’t think you’ve played the game given you can sort and search…
The inventory management isn’t great, but between sorting by weight and latest, plus the text search, it didn’t hinder my ability to play. You basically just have to ignore the visual inventory in favor of those options.
Loot has gone from “fun grid systems where there are tradeoffs and you always have to balance out what you can carry” to a “you are a walking truck who can just stash things like mad until you reach a ridiculously unrealistic limit and have to face the consequences of your own looting actions”, at least for me.
Borderlands is the worst offender, and Bethesda Game Studios are right behind. They really need to give me a party where there are members who are looters and merchants who follow me around and slowly auto-sell the loot I leave behind, or something else to that effect. I think that it’s one of those ideas where once one game begins implementing it, they all will.
Borderlands 3 and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands started to implement this with their Lost Loot Machine, but all it really does is delay the problem. The Loki 2 Season Finale had it right here, “The
Loominventory will never be able to accommodate for an infinitely growingmultiverseitem list”, it all comes crashing down eventually.Sure, you can leave stuff behind, but I feel that the shift to a system where players are essentially walking trucks has changed this dynamic.
I really do feel like Loki at the end of the series when I’m managing inventory sometimes
I dont understand how is this still such a big issue in 2023. Years ago even Pathfinder Kingmaker figured out a better way of doing it (shared party inventory and combined total weight with gradual penalties), why is nobody just copying or improving on that? Or just remove the limitation whatsoever if the game is not about it, like would the CRPG experience really be diminished if we didn’t have to worry about constant looting and inventory management?
Even the RL DMs know better than to pester their players about it, just keep it within some reasonable common sense limits.
I would much rather have an auto-loot mechanic, like hire an NPC to loot for you and only bring the stuff you care about. That way it still feels realistic, but you don’t actually need to deal with loot all that much and you get most of the benefit. So you’ll just grab the stuff you think is useful, then the rest gets sold eventually.
I haven’t played, but does BG3 have the curse of inventory tetris?
As a D&D game, it really shouldn’t have inventory issues. At low levels the only issue should be the weight of the bag. At high levels players should have access to bags of holding so that they can essentially keep anything they come across and not worry about the weight. Also, as D&D, your items should just be in a list.
They are just in a list. You can sort and filter the list, and certain small items will get added to pouches, eg keys.
The only issue is that the game doesn’t signal what is worth picking up and what is not. If you’re an obsessive, you can pick up 20 things in every room. Most of then are only interactive so that you can throw them at people. If you want to pick up 500 candles from a castle and sell them at 0.5gp each, you can. If you mean to do so, fine. If you’re just doing it because slamming “take all” from every corpse is quicker, well then you are causing your problem.
If you pick up the weapon of every enemy you’ve killed, you kind of deserve it. That isn’t d&d. By the second act you have magical weapons and never need a common weapon or armour again.
