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.
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
Amazing people make articles on… Nothing, essentially? It’s just encumbrance, right?
I was expecting it would at least go into detail and explain or compare how many items or units of weight you can carry, if it slows you down gradually or if it pretty much freezes you on the spot, differences with previous well known franchise games but no, none of that either.
I love how in Starfield your encumbrance and movement are aided or harmed by planetary gravity.
On a low gravity world I have had over 800/200 and run along with no issues. While on a planet with 1.6 or higher and you really can’t ignore the slowdown. You just can’t fast travel, but you don’t stop like in Skyrim, so I think that’s a positive step in the right direction.
That's not even realistic. I know that Starfield isn't meant to be a simulator, but if you put in something to try and be "real", you should do it right. Gravity would affect the weight of something, but the inertia is still the same. Moving and stopping a big object in space with no gravity at all is still hard to do.
Personally I think a good encumbrance system is a good thing in games. For example, look at the Demon’s Souls remake. You can carry as much adventuring gear (heals, grenades, etc) to make your life easier as you like, if you have the stats for it. And if you need to pick up a unique item that is beyond your limit, it can be sent to your stash, which is what the original was missing.
The alternative is to limit consumables, ammo etc to some arbitrary number. E.g. You can carry 5 heals and 5 throwing knives and 50 arrows. If you don’t want knives but want more heals? Fuck you.
That 90 minute to do a full ng+ run number is kinda nuts but an interesting design choice. I ended up not picking up starfield but I do hope someone takes this novel ng+ approach and expands on it to create a game more focused on that as a story telling tool.
Heck, THIS is what studios should be using AI for - write a solid base story and let the AI build on that to create a more truly infinite and distinct set of new loop possibilities. (I would say your first 5 or so runs should be handcrafted, tell an interesting cohesive story, and then if players still want more the AI can kick in and offer additional replayability)
I don’t mind encumbrance in Baldur’s Gate. I think people are only thinking of I got all this cool stuff why should I have to choose between it all. I see it as limiting cheese mechanics. It could limit infinite money by not letting people pick up every single item to sell. Or if there was no encumbrance why would I use tactics when I can just use barrelmancy? I have to fight these powerful opponents? Nah I’m just gonna hit em with x amount of exploding barrels till they die since I can carry every barrel ever.
I don’t like encumbrance, but I’ve never felt it negatively impact my enjoyment of a game. I didn’t even know encumbrance was this much of an issue honestly. It just makes sense in certain games, imo.
Edit: Could also be made a toggle-able feature or unlock?
“Would I like this game more if I didnt have my cool item right now?”
Hard to say yes… But in practice the answer might very well be yes. Challenge in games is rarely something you directly ask for, you want the reward after all, but often the fun is in exactly overcoming those obstacles, and not actually the reward. In that sense encumbrance might feel bad… but being able to grab every single item always could very well ruin part of the fun.
In the end games are sets of challenges presented in certain ways, and its just whether those challenges work well from a game design perspective.
Has anyone here ever thought “I would like this game more if it had encumbrance in it”?
Yes, I totally have. In fact even in starfield, I found pretty quickly that I was wishing the game would arbitrarily restrict my ammunition and medpack supplies, because the combat was more fun when I could run out of shots and healing in the early game. It’s not even the kind of thing I can easily do as a challenge myself because it’s so easy to pick them up and go “over”. I legit think starfield’s encumbrance system would be much better if it was more restrictive, so that I had to carefully choose my equipment and things, than the current “I can carry so much that gameplay is not meaningfully restricted, but not nearly enough to collect and sell all the loot I find”.
I posted upstream about the problem with encumbrance in this style of game. It’s not that encumbrance is inherently bad, but that most of the time in crpgs, it just seems to be ‘there’, it’s not in the service of any part of the gameplay.
I think encumbrance adds something really important to the game but it’s really delicate. Namely, I think the pacing of games is better when encumbrance exists compared to not.
What encumbrance does is force you to make some decisions about loot right now as opposed to later at the merchant. I have to decide to pick something up intentionally because I don’t want to have to deal with all this junk later. When I later go to a merchant, I only now have stuff in my inventory that either (a) I want to have on hand to use or (b) I think will be valuable to sell.
A game with no encumbrance does not enforce this part of the decision making on you. You no longer are required at pick-up time to make any part of that decision. As a result, players are less likely to interact with loot at all until they get to the merchant. At which point they now need to spend much more time sorting through their stuff to figure out what to sell or keep. In other words, the optimal way to play becomes simply clicking the take all button on every container you find and dealing with it later. I personally would find this interact worse as the chore of dealing with it becomes bigger and bigger and harder to manage with no in game penalty for doing this to yourself. Basically, players have to choose to play the game in a way that’s fun rather than being forced to play the game in a way that’s fun.
There’s also a second important thing that encumbrance adds to games like this: scarcity of resources. Not scarcity in a sense that resources of any kind are hard to come by, but in the sense that the player has to purposefully make decisions in order to amass things like gold or camp supplies. With encumbrance, I could still just take all every container until I fill up, but then I would have an inventory filled with worthless junk which might sell for much less. Or I might have less room for camp supplies. What I think most players will end up doing, though, is being more selective about what they pick up, enabling them to be more efficient with their sold goods and inventory space to prioritize things that help them succeed. Without encumbrance, this entire aspect of gameplay is removed.
Sure, it might feel bad in the moment to have to make a decision between two items for the sake of encumbrance, but I think the value it adds to the game is generally more than it takes away.
I’m a pack-rat in games and ive only hit the first (of three) stage of encumbrance two or three times in Baldur’s Gate and I’m in the final act. And my character is a bard with 8 strength so he has no muscles which means the lowest encumbrance threshold. I wouldn’t consider encumbrance even a little bit of a problem in BG3 since if you ever do become encumbered you can just move stuff from your player character to one of the NPCs used as a pack mule.
You can also send stuff from your bag directly to the camp chest without having to go there. On pc it's right click send to camp, on ps5 it's square button send to camp. I'm not sure if there is a limit as to how much you can send there i havent hit it yet if there is. You can access camp from anywhere but a red zone so no real reason to carry what you are not using.
My approach to this problem is that I just select the easy difficulty & just throw away all the crap that would make the game easier. (if I picked up 100x random shit from goblins I could make my character stronger from the extra gold, but I choose not to) Also I just disregard crafting as well. I know that I could play on normal (or hard), fiddle with all these systems & make my team strong enough to deal with any challenge. it’s a choice, since I’m playing a single player game for my own enjoyment, might as well make it challenging on my own terms.
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.
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.
I don't mind encumbrance, unless it's painfully low. Stalker is a bit annoying with it, though it makes sense. Then when it's so high it becomes a non issue is also annoying because eventually I hit the cap. The one in bg3 is fine with me. I tend to choose my companions to carry specific items, so it's evenly spread out. Then I take breaks to go sell off my junk, usually every few in game days. I think I gave only hit cap once, I gave Karlach all the weapons I find and she was overloaded. I don't mind encumbrance most of the time.
Actually I think I'm the opposite. I hate encumbrance more when it's massive. When I played survival mode in Fallout NV, I found it so much more fun to only pick up essential items. I would commonly pick up water bottles and food instead of valuable weapons or ammo. I was usually way under my low encumbrance because I had a mindset switch to only pick up stuff that will allow me to survive the desert.
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