Encumbrance is supposed to provide a type of challenge, and realism. Though how realistic is carrying more than like, one extra weapon really? Also, it is a weird thing to get hung up on for “realism’s” sake. The best possible argument for encumbrance is forcing players to make choices. In roguelikes for example, you very often only get to choose from a limited number of rewards. In that sense it’s really fun, but you cannot go back on your choice. With encumbrance, if you must, you can keep all your rewards, but it’s just very tedious to do so. So instead of forcing the choice and creating dynamic gameplay, most likely you’re just forcing the player to do some tedious shit. Roguelikes deal with the hording mentality much better than a traditional RPG.
Another thing to note about encumbrance, is that there’s just so much random garbage you can pick up in these games. Someone else mentioned that in real table top rpg, you’re not picking 100 wheels of cheese cuz they might come in handy later. I think it’s honestly just filler content, and doesn’t really add to the game aside from the fact that if you couldn’t pick up that wheel of cheese, you’d feel slightly cheated. I wouldn’t call it lazy game development, but I think “loot” as a gameplay element has a lot of evolving to do. It feels good to get loot, but so often it has to be padded out to feel like you’re actually getting anything. You have to receive it often enough. It has to give some benefit or it just feels like window dressing. That’s a fine line that very few games handle very well at all.
I think it would be interesting to be able to hire a merchant NPC to loot for you. You’d lose a bit of the value (say, half), but the merchant would reinvest those profits to carry better items, and they’d give you a discount.
You’d have an incentive to look through the loot to take what you want, as well as an incentive to ignore the stuff you don’t. That way you get the immersiveness of an encumbrance system, without most of the tedium.
Right, at the very least it’d add a gameplay element to the tedium. Or maybe your character refuses to pick up random shit unless they have the right abilities/training. Or like in skyrim where you can’t see the characteristics of certain plants you pick up until you’ve leveled up in a certain field enough, but instead of not showing the alchemical properties, the item itself isn’t fully detailed - like it’ll just look like a generic mushroom, or a generic sword/gun/etc. And a player with very high skills in certain areas would unlock different characteristics of that item.
The downside is with a realistic encumbrance system, you’d either:
A) Not be picking anything up, or:
B) Making so many milk runs your head will spin from the tedium of ferrying useless bullshit back and forth.
Being 70-80 hours into STARFIELD, there’s non-cheating ways to avoid the encumbrance penalty, such as the “Powered Assist” backpacks which lowers O2 / stamina consumption by 75% when overencumbered. You can also deposit your loot into your ship’s cargo bay and sell directly from it by pressing Q at any vendor.
In ITR/Into The Radius VR, a fully realistic military looter shooter survival horror like STALKER; I picked up and carried EVERYTHING, but through the use of an inane amount of utility items, such as a chest harness, backpack, lower back bags, leg bags, thigh bags, and so on. (My favorite thing to put in my belt bags was cake slices and energy drink cans, made for hilarious streaming content when you take a bite of cake in a dire situation)
I still spent like 20 real-life hours slogging knee deep through swamp to ferry back an entire inventory of artifacts worth 5K/ea.
So my takeaway is, people are gonna loot and hoard; if they do that, encourage it. If not, reward the player with more credits from missions and other things that don’t involve scraping and strip-mining every planet for every ounce of metal.
It depends on the kind of tabletop rpg. In old school ones you may have a cart and hireling to carry this stuff, so you would definitely take those cheese wheels to sell them or for food to your group that’s not so small anymore. Logistic was part of the game. But a part that’s easily lost depending on how you play.
Honestly, realism justifications for encumbrance outside of survival-type games where basic biological needs are the core gameplay loop have always been silly to me… but the latter one about wheels of cheese rings true.
To me the argument is “what does optimal play look like”? Without encumbrance, there’s no reason not to pick up every wheel of cheese, so optimal play is to pick up every wheel of cheese, which is tedious and dumb. But with encumbrance, every wheel of cheese becomes a tedious decision, and completionist-optimal play is to burn endless time ferrying stuff to the shops or storage or whatever. But as you said, making every wheel of cheese not something you can pick up breaks immersion.
So what’s the compromise that actually makes sense for the “wheel of cheese” problem? A realistic setting is cluttered with “slightly-useful” items. Don’t put so many “slightly-useful” items outside of settings with NPCs that will have realistic reactions to you stealing their stuff? But coding those realistic reactions (“uh, you’re The Savior, I guess you can steal all my food… a bit… okay that tears it call the guards!”) would be some more dev-work in these already-bloated projects.
But the problem still exists in hostile locales. A lived-in enemy camp is going to have store-rooms of “slightly useful” stuff. If the hero stops to raid the larder while massacring nameless Stormtroopers, is that a problem? I can see the immersion argument that “well, if you can, you probably should since you might need it and that breaks immersion” and therefore that justifies the encumbrance idea, but I also see Steph Sterling’s argument “this is just a game and I wanna!” And I have trouble defending realism in these games about butchering your way across the landscape without ever stopping to poop.
Do you mean Xbox Game Pass Ultimate? It can be streamed out of a browser or mobile app.
Why would they need a hardware device when your probably holding a device that supports cloud streaming and they can milk you for a subscription fee?
There doesn’t need to be one. Any windows handheld can run Microsoft’s first party games.
Microsoft are having enough trouble with home consoles, we don’t need them spreading themselves thin with an underpowered handheld too.
A mate of mine has the ROG Ally and while it’s a damn nice device, when playing uncharted 4 on it to show the performance to me it chewed through like 25% battery in about 15 minutes. You can’t have high performance handheld while having even remotely good battery life.
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)
It worked for The last of Us and Spiderman. Optimization through exclusivity allows the publishers to spend less time chasing down random bugs and rendering issues.
While there’s a current DLSS thread, am I the only one who actually likes the aesthetics of DLSS, regardless of FPS? It adds a softness to the whole image that reduces eye strain for me and make the game more cinematic almost.
The recent versions are much better. But it also depends on the engine. I haven’t played Cyberpunk2077 since release, but there the trailing shadows of moving people and cars were very visible. Hopefully these issues are a thing of the past.
I have a i9 13900k and a Radeon 7900xtx, 64GB RAM and I had to refund on steam it because it would keep crashing to desktop every few minutes. Sometimes I would not even get passed the Bethesda into Logo before crashing. Very frustrating experience to say the least.
I have a i7-10700k/32gbRAM/3080ti - playing the game at 4k with all settings to max (without motion blur ofc) and with almost 80hrs into the game, I have yet to have a single crash or performance issue.
Only realized people were having issues when I saw posts and performance mods popping up.
I mean, the game definitely runs like shit but if you keep crashing that sounds like a you problem. My 7600x/6700XT/32GB DDR5 build hasn’t crashed once in 15 hours of playtime and I’ve heard a ton of complaints about the game but barely any about crashing.
Yeah, it runs very nicely on ultra on a variety of hardware. It’s been optimized and has even improved since release.
I am hoping they improved the controller interface, though. I use that even though I play the PC version, and it was somewhat broken as of a couple weeks ago.
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