In TTRPGs encumbrance seems to be the #1 rule that players conveniently forget about and GMs only ever seem to bring up when they want to fuck with the players. It’s probably one of the more annoying, unexciting aspects of TTRPGs to keep track of. I like the approach that BG3 has taken, you essentially have an unlimited Camp inventory, but your personal inventory is limited. Is it realistic? No, absolutely not, but neither are Bags of Holding, which are basically a GM’s way of throwing up their hands to say, “Fuck it, I’m not dealing with this shit anymore.”
Absolutely, but video game designers actually amplify the issue by making so much useless shit able to be picked up and adding so many mechanics into a game, where as TTRPGs are often more focused. Starfield (or any bethesda game really) has hundreds of useless items that people can sell, random loot drops, and resources for multiple forms of crafting. It's a fantasy future where we could just let folks "teleport" to a private satellite storage facility or something similar to a bag of holding. Instead we just make gamers focus on inventory management which I doubt anyone finds "fun".
I think there's a delicate balance and I don't think we've hit it. I would love to see some data about how much time people spend doing inventory maintenance in the course of common RPGs. It's one of those modern things like making expansive worlds without fast travel that just feels unnecessary.
It’s really not any different from the mechanic as it’s been used in previous Bethesda titles. The soft limit of depleting my oxygen meter rather than hobbling my speed is a little more forgiving, particularly if I’m still picking through a free fire zone.
And once I learned that I could sell to stores directly from my ship hold, my problems kinda dried up. It’s mostly learning what things in the field are worth hauling back to town when it’s not the apocalypse and duct tape just isn’t that special.
Absolutely, but you still have to learn that and it's still work. Early on I had no idea how many credits "a lot". Their defense/damage system is arguably unnecessarily complex in a way that adds to this. Do I need more corrosion protection, radiation, airborne, or thermal? Does it even matter?
Even with some of the advances, it still like an artificial problem that doesn't actually make the game any better. It doesn't really add any difficulty or challenge, and it's certainly not "fun". There's still a lot of streamlining they could do.
It depends. There’s a fine line between managing logistic and soreadsheet grade chores. Managing logistic can be interesting and it can bring a lot to the game. But if it is merely checking boxes and numbers on a spreadsheet it’s a chore that’s better left out of the game.
Zelda has a good system for this. You need to decide which weapons, shields, and bows you keep, but you have otherwise unlimited storage. It adds a degree of realism and management, without negatively impacting the gameplay.
Then don’t clutter my world with infinite foam cups literally everywhere highlighted with the scanner drawing my attention and distracting me so I’ll inevitably pick it up,just for it to be something that’s just going to get dumped into a container or an npc?
If you want every piece of clutter in your game to be lootable, every piece of clutter in your game will be looted, if only to get it out of the way.
It's literally 100% on the gamer if they insist on carrying every item they find. There isn't even .00000000000000001% responsibility for the developer. Carry capacities are a mandatory part of good design.
I don’t mind the idea of an encumbrance system where it makes sense. Like, the idea of being able to carry whatever you want into combat feels obviously wrong to me, since you can just overwhelm any challenge with endless inventory - like you just grinded an endless supply of healing potions and smart-bombs. Encumbrance caused by your combat-relevant inventory creates the idea of a “build” of your character, it creates interesting decisions about which combat gear you’re going to keep available to roll with (or non-combat gear if your game’s core loop isn’t combat-driven).
Although I do see the argument that it shouldn’t be coupled to a weapon-durability system. I like weapon-durability as a way to make players fully explore all of the gear available instead of just getting “The Good One” and then never ever switching and making the optimal strategy super boring (yes, Steph Sterling, I’m That Guy) but it means working on the “build” of your character is constant fiddling and decision fatigue.
Either way, all that falls apart when it’s stuff you’re only carrying for saleable loot or for crafting materials. Unless you have an interesting and fun gameplay mechanic to provide supply-lines, that’s just adding tedium for the sake of realism. Yes, it’s not realistic that you can carry unlimited bricks, but taking that away doesn’t add anything interesting to the game, it just adds tedium.
Bethesda has been lowering the base carrying capacity for a while now. It was 300 in Skyrim. 200 in Fallout 4 I think. Around 100-150ish in 76. I can see why it’s impacting people so much. Even more so when your ships carrying capacity is also limited.
Holy shit I’m out of the loop. With as much respect as is possible has Jim sterling always been a woman? Like seriously I’ve seen the name a TON, but never actually watched a video lol
Now, on-topic, yeah, I agree with 100% of what she said, and said word for word some of the stuff she did just earlier today lol.
No she used to be a man. I used to watch his old videos on YouTube, and only a few month ago i remembered it, and looked if he had a podcast, so i started listening to the jimquisition podcasts and was really confused how he's not in it. Only then they said James Stephanie Sterling i finnaly got it. She seems to do fine, she's also a wrestler now.
Yeah I caught the introduction of “James Stephanie Sterling” and was like… -record skip- wait what? Not that it matters, just was a surprise, and I couldn’t find anything specific googling lol
Eh. Can't say I had fun watching my higher end weapon break on the stronger, bullet sponge enemies later on, and replacing it with a crappy short swords that do barely any damage. ToTK though was certainly better thanks to fusion.
That it kind of the thing tho, if you just violently smash your sword around, it's gonna break. Like katanas are pretty flimsy and a german greatsword for example could just snap it off. Let's take elden ring for example and you use your sword to find an invisible wall, that's terrible for a sword and it would go to shit really quick. So i guess in a way it's realistic. But i really don't like it when games do that. All it does for me is that i'm never going to use the nice things in the game, because they break, then you need a new one or repair it or whatever.
I'm fine with encumbrance... especially in these Bethesda games. All they do is litter the world with garbage for the player to pick up and carry around for no reason other than make the game longer.
My issue with it in Starfield (and any game in its genre) is that the game seems to be confused about how it feels about encumbrance. Am I supposed to be looting everything I see? If not, then why is it the major income source, why are so many random objects worth selling and taking? If so, why do merchants have such low credit stores? Am I supposed to be collecting cool stuff to display? If not, then why all the display objects? If so, why have my companions constantly nag me about bringing junk? Why make ship storage so low? Or, am I supposed to be carefully considering what I want to bring as loot? If so, why is there so much of it and why isn’t there some way to quickly see what’s worth taking? Am I supposed to spend an hour after each combat carefully weighing what to take home?
It’s entirely unclear what they want. If they want looting to be less of a game loop, junk items should have no sell value and missions should be more of a reward, and item value/kg should be easy to assess. We should be quickly able to discard valueless items from inventory. Otoh if they want looting to be a bigger part of the game, I should be able to readily carry and sell my loot and doing so shouldn’t make me so rich it breaks the economy.
It’s one of my main complaints, not so much about starfield, but pretty much anything in this genre. It feels like they can’t tell if they want me to loot everything or not, the design is fundamentally at odds with itself.
I have a friend who says it needs to go one of two ways - either encumbrance matters hard and is super realistic, where you can reliably carry 30-60 lbs of gear for long distances, and that’s it, or it just doesn’t exist and you can lug around as much shit as you want and abstract out the rest, because the middle ground where PCs can carry like 250 lbs of shit leads to a game where you’re constantly just sorting through your inventory about the best vendor trash you think you can packrat to sell while moving through a dungeon, and that’s slow and unfun. The low carry weight turns every interaction into “is it better than my current gear?” which is really easy to answer in the moment, and when weight doesn’t matter, you just hoover it up and sell it when you get a chance.
I don’t agree with that dichotomy in a game like this. Certainly in the deeply simulationist roguelike I stan (cataclysm dark days ahead plug), that’s appropriate, but this game is fundamentally silly and arcade style so I don’t think the trouble has anything to do with realism. The solution I’d have personally in something like this is to eg. allow you to carry up to 6 weapons, 1 of each wearable type of item, and a certain amount of aid items in your “active” inventory, and then have everything else you loot automatically go to your ship inventory which is huge or infinite, but restricted in how you can access it (personally I’d still have ship inventories be finite, but enormous). Let perks increase your number of slots in a particular category, rather than increasing carry weight. Have resources and ‘notes’ go to the ship automatically as well, since it doesn’t really have any impact on the game to be carrying these on your person. Plus, I’d do what modders have been doing for a while and make decorative junk items have no value or weight. Let me pick up as many blenders as I want, I’m just going to use them to decorate my juice bar and play house, who frigging cares.
I’d also remove vendor credit caps, but make the amount of cash you get from loot pretty trivial compared to what you get from missions, so it’s just not that appealing to sell 15 cheap machineguns. And while I’m wishlisting, I’d love to be able to set up an auto-sell filter, eg. ‘sell non-unique weapons below a particular dps’
Yes and it flows through to the skill system too. 8 points for carrying more crap across yourself and the ship, and 4 more for increasing companion inv. Even more if you include pockets upgrades on suits.
Are these good skills? Not for the player to choose but to be available in the game. What’s the balance here? What’s the decision, carry more crap at the expense of doing more damage? Is that good choice to give the player? How do you balance encounter difficulty around that? You can’t the player has to choose encounters based on their gimped pack rat skills.
Every part of the game needs a single big mod overhaul to pick a coherent direction.
If you have a source on this, please share it - I have not found anything to corroborate that he is being replaced by AI, although the idea that this is happening is plausible and believable.
Thing is, what’s the alternative? Either you put a hard limit on the inventory, or you give players an infinite inventory. The latter can be made to work, but it also takes away the element of risk.
Perhaps ‘inventory size’ could be tied with difficulty settings. If you want a Deus Ex-type experience where you really have to be picky about what you bring, maybe that should be down to the player; and so should a huge inventory that lets you bring everything everywhere.
I actually really like what starfield does. It’s a rolling scale, the more encumbered you are the more you have to pause and “recharge” O2. So being over by 2 won’t affect you a lot, but over by 100 sure will
I agree, I don’t mind much of how they handle encumbrance itself except for the constant nagging from my companion. Personally, I just don’t think they interrogated the concepts of encumbrance at all - which isn’t surprising of course, bethesda design seems to have so many sacred cows it may as well be a holy dairy.
In my opinion, it works best to make loot non-sellable. It takes away the need to fill your inventory with tons of garbage, just to carry it to the store. Instead, your inventory can be reduced to a size that meaningfully limits your options during challenges and forces you to select your equipment strategically.
Not so much for these games, but this conversation had me thinking about alternate mechanics for loot sales in the open source game I work on, and I think one solution is to have any loot of any value use more of a pawn shop/consignment mechanic. Rather than selling guns individually maybe you can put your crate of used weaponry up for sale on the black market, and then you have to wait for a buyer. Might take a long time depending on how much they’re worth.
Hmm, do you mean with a limited number of slots of what can be on offer in the pawn shop? So, that players can maybe grab one or two trophies for selling and leave the rest behind? Otherwise, I’m not sure, what your idea is. 🙃
No, I mean when you the player want to sell your items you have to put them up for sale on the black market and wait for buyers, and there’s a simple demand algorithm that determines what kind of price you’ll get and how long it will take.if you’ve flooded the market with cheap guns, you don’t get much for them.
Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't really have an encumbrance system. It has a "send to camp" button that basically negates 99% of that. Camp supplies? Send to camp. Bunch of valueable loot items you only intend on selling "pick up and add to wares" the "send to camp". When you're ready to sell things between adventuring shove it all in a backpack, give it to someone stronk, and teleport to a merchant.
I get the complaint with starfield since transferring stuff to your companions or ship is such a pain with their awful UI, but it’s not even an issue in BG3.
99% of the time my party members have plenty of room to store all my shit, and in the rare occasion they don’t it’s a sign I have tons of shit to sell. On the even rarer occasion I run out of room in a situation where I can’t easily leave, I can just send my extra crap to camp. Mind you, besides Shadowheart(Str 18) me and my party members all have base strength.
You can multi-select items and mark them all as wares at once, just only for one character at a time. I agree all wares should be pooled between characters though, or we should have the option at least.
Yeah, I added a ship upgrade and never even got it beyond halfway full. Granted I don't pick up everything, and I usually sold spare armor/weapons each town visit out of habit, but exotic materials and resources I always grabbed, and ended up with like 1100 mass out of 2600 on my ship.
You can modify your ships without having any of the shipbuilding stuff I think. You are limited, but you can add cargo space with some penalty to range and mass to help ease it that. Additionally, storage via outpost is cheap. It's like 3 iron, 2 aluminum, 2 adaptive frames for 250 mass resource storage. Build a couple of those at an outpost and you're set. If you do a....I don't remember the name, but a storage link between your ship and containers, you can transfer straight from ship to container without taking it out of cargo. Just mass dump things into storage and be cleared out.
Alternatively, if you have a lot of credits, Shieldbreaker, a class B ship at New Atlantis, is a wonderful ship. Like 2300 mass stock, and you can add more if needed with minimal penalty.
It takes 4 minutes to craft like 30 storage containers and the piece to move stuff off your ship easily.
Every single Bethesda game since at least Daggerfall has had carry weight. This isn't a new concept within Bethesda games. If you are hoarding crafting materials, why not...use them to craft things so you can hoard more?
They’re always the first mods I installed in skyrim. So many times you get a surprise dragon fight after just clearing out and looting an entire dungeon. I hate killing it and then not being able to pick up the bones because oooh no you’re already carrying too much!
I’m a hoarder in these games. If I can store all my stuff back at my base like in Fallout 4 and Skyrim then I’m happy. As long as they don’t pull the Fallout 76 stunt where you need to pay monthly for extra storage.
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Aktywne