It’s such a trash game mechanic because it forces realism where there is none. You have faster than light travel in your game? Why don’t you have teleporters? You have magic in your game? Why don’t you have a Bag of Holding? If you are going to impose the constraint on the player for balance or gameplay reasons then at least make it fun, have a mechanic that is interesting in some way. Maybe teleporters and bags of Holding are expensive to build or don’t get unlocked until you collect 10 flippityboos but at least reward progression and picking up objects and don’t turn every decision into agony.
RuneScape has an excellent fast travel system. In fact, it has a whole bunch of 'em, and you have to work for them; either by completing quests, or by training your skills. You can also get items to expand your inventory somewhat, but they only work for specific item types.
RuneScape did it pretty well for sure yeah I always felt like there was a good level progression for items like at level 60 in old school bronze items were just straight up trash lol
Even if they think it’s a fun mechanic, they fundamentally fucked the amount you can carry imo. Should be higher than it is by default, because I straight up don’t want to waste skill points on that.
Then they’ve fucked the amount of cargo you can have on a ship. Either make it infinite, or ridiculously high even for a small ship.
I’ve got multiple freight containers on my ship, and apparently each can only carry about the same amount as my character??
I really wish Baldur’s Gate 3 had a shared party inventory. It’s already partway there, I can still move a potion from Astarion’s inventory to Shadowheart’s inventory now matter how far apart they are. It’d just be nice if I could save a few minutes of inventory sorting if everyone just pulled from one mega inventory that added everyone’s encumberence together. The way its implemented now just adds several unneccessary steps that don’t even matter because of the magic pocket system.
Maybe a system letting players choose ‘hardcore mode’ (having extreme limits on weight) in Starfield would be better, since people seem pretty divided about this.
If I’m playing an immersive misery simulator like a heavily modded S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly then encumbrance and inventory space plays a vital role in not only immersion but also gameplay systems like loadout choices and how much supplies and medicine you chose to bring and what that means in terms of how long you can stay out and how much loot you can carry back to base.
In games like Starfield and BG3 I find encumbrance mostly meaningless and annoying, and just exists as a means to slow down early game economy by preventing you from picking up literally everything not nailed down and selling it off. And in the end I typically end up thinking there are probably better ways to accomplish this that doesn’t leave you with an annoying encumbrance system as a byproduct.
In BG3 encumberance is absolutely needed to balance the game. Heavy Objects are still the best way to cheese combat and that is with you being limited in how many you can carry. Building a Character in a way to work around this is absolutely possible and a valid choice for a character build. It is definitely not a meaningless aspect of your character.
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.
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
I got sick of the constant quick travel back to merchants in BG3 and decided to just install the mod that multiplies my encumbrance by 9000x. the item management in that game is a giant pain and the gold economy plus encumbrance is an artificial barrier to getting them from merchants that simply adds playtime for no actual benefit.
Realistically speaking, if you want a useful encumbrance system, you should be thinking: what is the goal of an encumbrance system in the context of this game?
In BG3, it serves a few purposes:
physical consequences. reduced movement speed, damage from jumping, etc are all part of D&D rules, which is useful when you’re in a kind of situation where, say, you need to get a giant boulder across a huge gap and put it on top of a button that opens the gate while in combat. but outside the context of combat, doing this is meaningless, as the player can simply overcome this problem with time, which is annoying more than fun.
limit access to the number of options a character has when confronting an encounter. it’s not feasible to carry 99 potions of greater healing on you, and encumbrance is a general strategy that prevents this from being as effective. at the end of the day it does not solve this problem
express limitations on what a character can do with their environment. encumbrance affects how much else you can carry, such as throwing a big rock at an enemy to do a lot of damage. this is irrelevant in the context of inventory vs. how much you can affect your environment; it can easily exist independently of an encumbrance system.
I don’t like encumbrance in games in general. It makes games more fiddly, and forces the player to engage the system with no real addition to the fun of it. Limited inventory slots are similarly frustrating in games to the scale of Baldur’s Gate. BG2 solved both of these problems by giving the player a billion bags of holding, which also had the added benefit of making inventory organization easier in a system that was largely left the same from its predecessor since it probably was built on the same codebase. BG3 had no such codebase restriction, and its type sort system sucks (the search bar is a lifesaver). Encumbrance very much feels like a “This is how it works RAW in 5e, so we’re going to do it this way” decision, which is funny because in plenty of other situations the devs decided to stray away from RAW to make the game a lot more approachable.
I don’t know if the goal of encumbrance is to prevent players from taking everything as much as possible or not - but if it is, it utterly fails at that goal
BG3 does give the ability to send stuff from lootable locations directly to camp, which solves half the problem. If I could sell stuff directly from camp the other side would be solved.
There is a valid argument of part of thee reasoning being determining what is really important to you prevents you from picking up literally everything and breaking the economy. But Starfields economy already seems pretty broken in my favor. I significantly upgraded my ship on both my first and second visits to New Atlantis. So I’m having a hard time feeling overwhelmed by the encumbrance.
An inventory management button that would automatically distribute wares to the character with the least carried stuff would already hope a lot - especially if we would be able to save that every cup, fork, etc would automatically be marked as wares and if there was a way to mark multiple things as wares at the same time (and if " sell all wares" would sell everything from all inventories present and not just for the talking character)
Selling wares remotely that are in camp and having an option to automatically send everything marked as wares to camp would also help a lot
I feel as if BG3 could do a lot more with the “wares” marker to make the weight limit less annoying
Moving cups and plates from one char to another just isn’t fun
If Volo is in your camp you can sell him your stuff. It’s not a dialogue option but the button on the bottom left. His gold and potion supply seems to refresh as well.
I finished my first run the other day and had no inventory issues. I did stop picking up every single thing not bolted down about halfway through the game and still ended with a surplus of 25k gold. You can select multiple items and send to camp/stronger party member or add to wares for quick sell. I was a low STR sorceror so just sorted by weight and sent it all over to lae'zel whenever I was carrying too much. Didn't really go out of my way to go to merchants
In previous Bethesda games I eventually just started doing calculations in my head constantly about whether the stuff I was grabbing was worth the weight involved. I’m still not quite at that point for Starfield, but I’ll get there.
A UI fix to do that for you was modded in almost instantly, I’ll be installing that one tonight I think. The vanilla game is much better than I expected but I’m finding it too easy if I cheat in infinite personal storage, and too much of a cognitive burden to constantly weigh every loot item in my mind.
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.
This actually does make me want to play the game some more. I had beat it once and started a new game+, but then got sick of doing it again. I might actually try it again soon now.
Do you have to go through the long opening sequence content again in NG+? Like all the way through to getting Sam Coe? I do wish they would kinda just plop you out in the world faster like New Vegas
I prefer no inventory or encumbrance but just collections. Perm objects once you collect you have it forever and if you get a new one it just auto converts to coins or whatnot and consumables you get a number in the collections and if it is 0 then you can't use it. Sure its not realistic that a character can carry tons of crap but they stick in magic chests or unlimited space motorcycle trunks or whatever anyway. Just pretend your character is only carrying the equiped items and every thing else is in the magic mcguffin that allows you to essentially carry around a bunch of crap but take the inventory management aspect out. I play to have fantasy and have fun. Not organize crap. I have to organize crap (or at least should) in real life.
While I do think encumbrance in a Bethesda game is pretty pointless I do believe it serves a purpose in BG3. Barrels full of all sorts of liquids are extremely useful, their drawback is that they weigh a ton. Encumbrance exists to prevent you from being a barrelmancer. I think you can also pick up any chests, so you can just carry away all the chests you can’t unlock and then break them somewhere safe (or move them to you lockpicking character etc).
One of my questions on Starfield - can I roleplay as a hoarder, picking up every possible piece of junk - cups, pencils, etc - and store it all in a couple of cabinets or containers as some kind of infinitely huge repo?
...because I swear to god, for whatever reason that seems to be my favorite part of Skyrim and Fallout 3 for whatever reason.
If that mechanic isn't in Starfield then I lose like half my motivation to play :)
Based on what I was reading last night, there's a chest in The Lodge basement that has unlimited storage space. The trick is, you just have to be able to get your stuff there.
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