Starfield: Proving That Encumbrance Is A Bad Mechanic (The Jimquisition)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.ย. 2024
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Starfield is a Bethesda game, and despite what the reviews claim, it is NOT polished. While we make fun of how buggy it is, we also discuss encumbrance as a game mechanic... because it's terrible.
#Starfield #Bethesda #Games #Glitches #Gaming #JimSterling #jimquisition #StephanieSterling #JamesStephanieSterling #Trans #PC #Xbox #Broken
It's not fair to judge this game while it is still in early access. Wait for the full retail version that will release in 2042 and will have all the same bugs still present, but at least by then there will be a fan patch out.
Top tier comment.
And heeeere come the moooooooods
This would be funnier if it wasn't so close to the reality of things
Lol, Bethesda is an early access company, they haven't formed yet you see.
@@TowerWatchTV Buying a Bethesda game is equivalent to putting money in a kickstarter that will never complete the stretch goals they reached.
"I can't carry any ore."
Top tier pun. Set up, paid off, 10/10
To be fair, when I enter a room I'm always sure to glitch into the door and then spawn into the middle of an ongoing conversation, so that's just mirroring reality. Probably.
There has been one (1) game where I actually enjoyed the encumbrance mechanic, and that was because it was actively connected to my choices. I could get a big backpack and carry lots of stuff, but have to drop the pack every time I fought. Or I could get a smaller pack and carry less, but fight wearing it. Or other packs had bonuses to how long food kept, things like that. The game was built around the idea that leaving town was something that needed to be planned, and the world design knew you'd be tracking through it a lot. It's called Outward and it really isn't for everyone... and it's ruined any patience I had for half-arsed versions of the same mechanics.
Kenshi has a similar feel to it, it also has passive levelling for strength to increase your weight capacity when at a high carry weight, and there are several backpacks you can pick up really early that reduce the weight of items you're carrying and allow for stacking of items. Beyond that, the squad-based RTS system allows you to run around the game world without anything on you while you have another one of your squad members lug around copper or iron ore and sell it without much oversight. There isn't any sort of mechanic for how long food keeps, but most of the game world is desert so the food is usually dried to preserve longer-cactus sandwiches are a staple of the game as well.
I've had a few experiences where I've run out of backpack space, just because sometimes there is so much stuff to carry and you don't always know what you're getting in to. High-level fights can also become pretty costly if you're sending your best squad members out and things go bad, so sometimes you'll send out a feeler or two and they come back packed with stuff when expeditions/fights go well. It's a balance of risk vs. reward.
Speaking of fighting, you can also drop your backpacks during a fight, the only issues usually being that most of the times in the early game you're getting your ass beat very badly. That could result in you getting separated from your stuff, kidnapped, without enough people to carry everything back, or you might simply lose track of where you dropped anchor if the fight is, say, in the swamp or jungle areas. Acid rain and other environmental hazards also commonly come into play.
Overall, playing Kenshi made me realize the encumbrance mechanic just doesn't have enough thought put into it for most games, and that it functions terribly in these first-person games it gets put in, pretty much every single time. You could make an argument for games that are predicated around looting, e.g. Escape from Tarkov or Dark and Darker, again games with the very necessary factor of risk vs. reward, but the only way you lose anything in Skyrim is if you find it and can't carry it. Rather, for games that have no risk of losing anything otherwise-after the very first time it happened in Skyrim, I can't recall being caught by guards and forced to give back stolen goods, and never got robbed-the encumbrance mechanic serves as the sole punishment for explorative players and players who know their way around all other aspects of the game: it simply slows people down and ruins efficiency. Your only risk is venturing into the game world and not being able to reap your full reward at all.
@@swudurshchurf2386 damn, makes me wanna play kenshi again.
My favourite anecdote about encumbrance is when somebody mailed Todd Howard a box of Bobby pins and asked him to weigh them, and actually got the official weight changed from 0.1 to 0.001 in Fallout 76. It's so indicative of how the mechanic isn't even based in realism and the developers just make shit up and make games objectively worse for it.
This. There is no thought into this overall fun flow.
RE’s limited items makes the horror more. You probably can fight, but there’s little to fight with, so running is an option that should be taken even if you can fight.
MH caps what you can carry into a fight, and while you can replenish, it wastes time in a timed mission, making players either more aggressive or cautious.
FE has limited weapon slots and makes them have durability in a game where every resource counts, ensuring that all star super units are not viable.
A system has to be thought out and fun or in service of the challenge or gameplay.
it's a mechanic which cannot apply realism to it, so I don't know why they bother doing it other than to annoy plaayers.
yup literally the first thing I do in any bethesda game when I start it is open the console and put in whatever command it is to adjust my carry weight to a reasonable amount
@@pootissandvichhere9135 Exactly. When including it, you must be able to explain in simple terms what the weight adds to the game, or else it's just taking away.
Every sword in every one of these games is way heavier than a real one
I used to think realism in games was about simulating real world physics and economics as game mechanics, but Bethesda and its fans taught me it that it's actually about the joys of getting locked out of your house and waiting for an hour for the locksmith to get you back in. Exciting!
That's something I dislike greatly; Bethesda still hasn't figured out that you can *smash* a box or *crush* a door, yet have the *absolute unbelievable gall* to have a companion in FO4 that *dislikes you lockpicking* and wants you to *smash* the lock.
I wasn't tricked with 4 on launch day, I bought it for almost 85% off with all DLC's included; was about 30$CAN. I can wait 15 years for it to come on sale and be fixed by modders.
"you might be clad in power armour, and be wielding an auto-shotgun, a missile launcher, a powerfist AND a weird spring-powered thingy that fires nuclear warheads, but the only way into this nondescript shed with its rusty tinfoil door is by having enough points in lockpicking, because heaven FORBID you just kick a hole in the wall with your size 20 boots."
@@peterclarke7240i think it comes down to everything in the game.
Like speech, you get 4 options, but its basically
B No (yes) (angry)
X yes, i guess (sarcastic)
A yes (move things along quicker)
Y huh? (Yes) (ask a question)
I know this is only the speech wheel for fallout 4 but it represents the way bethesda treats these games. Write a single path, and streamline it.
We made lockpicking, job done, we don't need any more mechanics.
Too many voice lines and Buttons, too much choice we can't afford to make branching paths, make all the dialogue lead the same way.
Neverwinter Nights' Hordes of the Underdark DLC solved the encumbrance issue that the main campaign had by giving you a shopkeeper genie. A shopkeeper genie! It was a tiny bottle in your inventory that summoned a shopkeeper who would take any items you didn't want. You could take him anywhere and sell items to him anytime you were out of combat. He was a character with a personality you could have conversations with. Keep in mind, Neverwinter Nights came out in 2002. It was such a creative idea, I'm disappointed I've never seen any other RPG game try a similar method since.
There are the good old bags of holding, pets in Torchlight as Steph said, there are quite a lot of games that give you a method of selling items in your inventory even when wandering the game. Some you get less than you would from a store, others give you the same. Some games auto-sell Trash loot whenever you pick it up, just giving you the money instead.
There have been many different ways to deal with these things, but Bethesda are not exactly creative thinkers, which has been highlighted by them stealing modders work many times over the years and trying to pass it off as their own
@@dahn57 Yeah, the genie shopkeeper being his own memorable character was what stuck with me after all these years, but I appreciate the challenge of having to write a full character. It is not something within the resources of some development teams, and too much of a writing challenge for others, sadly.
@@Katy133 You look at Torchlight, and it's just a dog, cat, ferret, bird or some other animal that does the selling for you in a shop, no dialogue and no backstory needed 😉
Just a woof, meow etc 😀
NWN was beloved and iconic for many reasons 💯
Jade Empire didn't bother with encumbrance, but I had to stop and think to remember that because they also pulled this same basic trick
One of the characters was the minor god in the Celestial Beurocracy who was supposed to make sure there were always merchants around to take care of your needs as an rpg protagonist. But that would be a lot of work so he just hooked himself into your party select screen and took care of it himself when you selected him.
The biggest problem I think is that bethesda has been adding building mechanics, which makes the amount of loot you need to drag around grow extremely significantly.
This right here, most of the things in my ship are building materials.
Agreed. You can even compare between Fallout 3 (junk but minimal uses, guns at least can sell) and Fallout 4 (everything is base building stuff).
Man, imagine if any of the final fantasy games from the past few years had encumbrance included. "Sorry Prince Noctis, you can't pick up that legendary tomb weapon from your ancestors cause you're carrying 83 tents, enough ore to supply a medieval blacksmith for the rest of his life, and the entirety of a Walmart's produce section in ingredients"
Actually FF did have inventory limits
@@sam7559 encumbrance and inventory limits are not synonymous.
@@tracyh5751 But they get at the same concept from different angles.
@@moonverine tbf ff still lets you have dozens of slots and there's no shortage of nearby merchants to sell excess loot to. 999 or even 99 of each item is very generous and is arguably hoarding for hoarding sake at that point. it aint the same thing as encumbrance which limits not only how many types of items you can carry but how many of each item you can
@@georgemitchell1394
It is the same thing, its just that one makes the choice of what and how many for the player. Already have 99 potions? Sorry, you can't just make another stack, gotta get rid of one or move on.
And theoretically you can reach the slot limit with an encumbrance system, and the game will chug trying to load your inventory.
It's crazy how realistic games look nowadays, I mean look at how characters clip through doors just like real people do!
I know right? Back in the day when characters clipped through walls they were SO much less detailed... (Also I like your avatar, what's this character and where are they from?)
They should have an option to "send item to storage". You could even have a companion load up and take the items if you needed immersion.
You could have a little drone fellow fly in and plonk down a platform for you to load boxes of loot onto. Then send him away and he zips off to your ship or an outpost. Maybe you can shoot down a faction's cargo drones, which gives you more loot in exchange for passing that faction off a bit more.
I'm assuming the game doesn't have this, I can't play it yet.
It's funny you mention that, because that's exactly what Baldur's Gate 3 does. It just has a "Send to Camp" option that sends your stuff to a traveller's chest in your party camp. You can send an item to camp at any time but need to be able to get away to your camp in order to retrieve it. There's basically never a reason to carry foodstuffs with you, and you can dump all of your vendor trash at camp and just... retrieve it when you're ready to sell in bulk. Also! ...You can send barrels, chests, and other heavy container-items there and keep THOSE in the chest to help organize your junk.
It's honestly a little TOO convenient, but better "a little too convenient" than "a little too annoying."
As for having a companion load up to ease your encumbrance burden, isn't that something Bethesda does normally? I know you can do it in Skyrim.
Starfield does seem like the kind of RPG where they could make up an easy excuse to send excess cargo off to some storage container somewhere, though, yeah.
Fallout 76 does that with the infinite scrapbox.
It's locked behind the subscription pay wall, though, because fuck you, Bethesda.
That sounds like a Baldur's Gate 3 solution, and we've been told that we can't expect developers to meet those standards.
It wasn't that long ago that No Man's Sky added a rocket you could equip and launch to sell whatever you placed in its inventory. I could easily see for Starfield an in game and lore friendly drone being called in to take items to storage. Easy solution. Hell, it can even be upgraded if you want.
The reason encumberance has been hanging around really has to do from way back in the earliest "Dungeons & Dragons" games, back in 1974, when it was a stated part of the rules. I play lots of early D&D. And while it can still be just as frustrating for many people, I really like it, cos the mentality of playing D&D came straight from wargaming. Everybody had to be a logistics planner to one degree or another, so having encumberance appealed to that spreadsheet-y nature of our brain that wanted us to engage with the careful use of resources and management. Thinking around which resources to carry and whether you should leave something out(because time was short and monsters would be chasing you) was the point, and it was thrilling. D&D specifically had pack mules and retainers that you could hire which were intended for this use, but the drawback is they could either be fickle and cowardly or vulnerable to attacks, and that would add some spicy drama to your game.
In video games there's a case-by-case basis where it makes sense, but I think "Diablo" kinda honours that tradition - "Diablo" wasn't really about loot, it was about killing Diablo. It was about being equipped and capable enough to get to the lowest level of Hell and kill Diablo. How you got there was the trick, and going down there was a really careful and serious undertaking, it was an expedition: You were expected to waste some resources and have some casualties, and what you'll be able to emerge with back on top would always fill you with suspense. So Diablo for me was one of the examples for me where the encumberance mechanic absolutely makes sense.
Where it does frustrate me? Probably the "Resident Evil" games, cos they were less about expeditions and were much more forward with no backtracking, and they are heavy action games. Or even more prominently those old Rare games for the ZX Spectrum in the 80s where you only had one inventory slot for an item at a time. Even that served its own kind of gameplay purpose back then, though.
Kinda wild that Bethesda has been effectively making the exact same game under different names coming on for decades now.
Yep. It's not even that the games have the same structure and mechanics, which I don't mind. It's that they haven't improved *any* of those concepts beyond the basement basic level, and in a world full of games that run far better and *are* more evolved, there's no way Bethesda deserves to be counted as a top studio.
Starfield is very different though
I think Starfield has improved some@@JimSterling
@@jadedheartszmmm boot
Hell I like the game they keep making over and over, but I just wish they like, improved it a little lmfao
Compare this encumbrance system to the one in Baldur’s Gate 3. In BG3 you can hold a lot more stuff depending on your strength, you have a four-character party to work with, and you can access all their inventories simultaneously for management. On top of that, you can send anything to your infinite and permanent camp storage with a few clicks. It’s also easy to go to camp from nearly any location to grab stuff you might need or to grab a crate of stuff to sell.
In my BG3 experience, I only have to worry about managing inventory once every several hours. In Starfield it’s an absolute nightmare.
you do have to manage your inventory with regard what you have available when you are in a fight no running back to camp mid blow to get the potion you sent to the camp chest
@@graveperil2169 yeah but that kind of gear doesnt really weigh any noticable amount and you can just carry that stuff around constantly... like a spare weapon and a bunch of potions and scrolls
Here's a tip. Buy cargo holds for your ship. When on your ship, press I, then q, then q again. You can now store your inventory on your ship. Takes 5 seconds to store all resources, since it has a hotkey, which are most of what weigh you down
Compare it to Elden Ring: weight only matters for what you have equipped. Your inventory doesn't matter. Personally for RPGs that potentially have a lot of loot, this might be the best system.
In BG3 you can loot goblin to hell and back, in Starfield you can only grab some stuff before having to stop moving to let your oxygen recover. Its pretty clear which game is more loot goblin friendly.
If I had to guess, I would assume that the encumbrance mechanic is a holdover in a lot of RPGs because of their heritage from tabletop gaming. I also know, from playing at many DnD tables with different DMs, the encumbrance rule is one of the most ignored and handwaved rules in tabletop gaming, used mostly as a sign to point at when the player(s) try to do something physically insane (like carry a full chest of gold on their back): "You can only carry this much, sorry, the 2-ton dragon hoard will not ALL fit in your backpack".
Aside from that, I do see a couple of use cases for it, ones that are mostly ignored by games in the design phase. In theory, an encumbrance system or any sort of inventory limit system could be used to force players to make meaningful choices about what they will and won't carry with them. For example - if you can only fit the gold your just looted or carry the unconscious body of the victim (of the baddies you just fought in the dangerous dungeon) to safety, are you going to be a get paid or be a big damn hero? Of course, inherently, most games let you pack your inventory to the brim with random shit that you find lying around, especially Bethesda games. So they mechanically undermine this idea in its entirety. But I like imagining a game that uses this idea well - maybe even as a core mechanic. Like instead of dialogue choices the game bends around, you can only carry so many things back out of danger with you, and the game issues consequences for what you choose to come back with - then that dungeon/level closes and the next bit opens up, choices made, pragmatic or heroic.
All of which is to say: I think there's a place for encumbrance and inventory limitations in game mechanics and design. But I also think you're right, many games just implement them without thinking and hurt their own design, because it's not a good fit for what they're trying to do. Hell, I love BG3, but I think they've so severely nerfed the encumbrance mechanic in that game that they ought to have just taken it out of the game.
As an old school dungeon master I used to enjoy encumbrance 😌 I had a 10 week campaign AFTER a red dragon died while fighting another dragon outside his hoard cave. The players knew they got lucky beyond their dreams. Now they had to somehow get it out of there.
This had them making deals with various factions. Reneging getting imprisoned & tortured to find the counter spell thst would un-hide the cave entrance and other fantastic things. Including dealing with an infestation of creatures that live on large carcasses- then they invite predators. A whole ecosystem sprang up making the place almost as dangerous as when there was a live red dragon. 🤣
Oh and it got better. A mage then asked if using the bag of holding principle the entrance could be moved to another dimension then fused with a bag of holding. - of course said I 😏 but you will have to consult the demonology guild. Which they did. Then, it was found that DEMONS know way more about the mechanics of this than the practitioners. - the party then asked could they consult with a demon on how it could be done. - of course said I!
Long story short ( shorter 👀 ) a demon saw a chance to get access to our plain by …lying! A deeply technical ritual was described and the things they would need to perform it. the -party agreed and set off to get the items. Of course they had unlimited gold. However some of this stuff took them into the realms of true evil. The blood of innocence freshly spilled etc etc.
It ended with a demon lord co-opting his own demon who was about to trick the party. which set of an artefact in the mages guild who warned a council of city states that a true lord of the lower plains was seeking to come through. Alas the ritual didn’t have enough power for the demon lord. So he - disguised as an other lowly demon instructed them to get …etc etc.
To describe it briefly - mo money no problems in game form. - and all because of encumbrance 🤣👊🏻
@@T1tusCr0w This is an awesome story of tabletop encumbrance used well. Fun read! I also think this implementation of the concept would be almost impossible to incorporate into a video game at a systems level unless: one of the core mechanics is loot recovery logistics (could be a cool game!) or it's implemented as an individual occurrence for a specific dungeon or something. Even after BG3, games still have a long way to go to replicate the actual flexibility a human GM/DM running a game can use to respond to the astounding array of player ideas and choices. And again - very cool story, sounds like a fun as hell campaign!
I think the 2 design cases I can think of for encumbrance is
1- The game needs a way to prompt you to open your inventory so you dont hust pick up items and forget about them. I feel this could be a chieved with a rewarding system rather than a punishing one.
2- Limited run rouge likes. Encuraging the playing to commit to a strategy by limiting the resources they can carry. I thought Dave the Diver's encumbrance system added to the tension of grabbing the most valuable resources before leaving. It avoids feeling punishing by those resources you are giving up always being fairly available on your next dive
I agree with you. Encumbrance should be there for gameplay reasons. Not for the sake of it.
It's so weird that of all the things that D&D created that lingers over modern RPGs... Encumbrance is the thing that has survived without much (if any) change.
D&D players don't even really bother with it anymore to boot.
To be fair that's because it's a lot of pointless math. Pathfinder 2e handles it in a much more intuitive way for a tabletop RPG.
Back when I did D&D I'd somewhat hold myself to encumbrance even when those around me weren't held to it.
Figured could lead to Decisions that could be of potential interest perhaps, but... wasn't ever given enough stuff to even slightly risk the encumbrance limit even on my low strength builds that I did.
In my experiences, DM always just says unless you say otherwise I expect your items to be on the half-orc barbarian and my god, our half orc could have 10 rounds of just throwing javelins at you and not dent his ammo count.
@@darkangelgeneral Counting ammo is another bullshit mechanic that doesn't make the game more fun. "Oh no, I can't do the thing I specialized my character over 10 levels to do, guess I'm fucked now 🤷♀"
@@000Dragon50000 😮💨
I'm honestly surprised it took one of you 20min to evangelize PF2e.
I really enjoy the way Loop Hero deals with a full pack; it dismantles unused equipment and sends the parts to your camp. No encumbrance, just a little time pressure to choose from the equipment you loot or lose it for resources you probably need later.
One simple in universe fix would've been having a drone that just drops everything off at your ship 1st. Having ship limits makes sense due to cargo ship build options.
One simple out of universe fix would've been having the game be developed by people with skill, ambition, and capability
A drone drop-off is a good idea, but this is modern gaming we're talking about. You just know they'll monetise the hell out of that system. Want to ship a bunch a loot to your ship? That will be $2.99 per use please... Heck they already did something similar with Dead Space 3 and resource harvesting.
@@robcain8865 Considering all the "time savers" and mods they nicked and resold on Fallout 76, I really would not be surprised if they brought out a paid dlc to "fix" the issue they created. Typical Bethesda gold that is.
Hire a cleanup crew that pockets 10% and takes care of the loot like Solasta: Crown of the Magister does. or get some beasts of burden like Dungeon Siege had in 2002.
All I can think of of how BG3 handles encumbrance. Where you can get over encumbered, but you can also immediately send items back to your camp once you do, which means now I can just have an arsenal of explosive barrels I can immediately get to because I can just hit the 'Go to Camp' button, grab them, and then have at it.
Edit: And of course Steph covers it. Don't mind me.
That's bc Baldur's Gate 3 is everything Bethesda games could be
I feel like FromSoft has proven the best form of Encumbrance for an action game is to have Equip Load. It still gives an incentive to not just pack on the highest armour and biggest weapon, giving lighter builds an advantage in mobility, without punishing you for picking things up or wasting your time running to a storage.
In those games, you only stow stuff to make your inventory organized, not because the dev is kicking you in the balls for picking up all the stuff they put out for you to pick up.
The new 'encumberance' in armored core is also good too, where the strength of your leg pieces lets you decide how heavy the weapons and body and generator you can use are. Aside from being very demanding fromsoft games are just better in every way it seems. And personally I like demanding too.
@@4dragons632 I was lukewarm about Skyrim from the get go, I preferred Oblivion, but then Dark Souls came and utterly ruined Skyrim for me. Despite the two being different games I can't play Skyrim anymore after Souls.
Demon Souls had inventory weight to manage as well, and they NEVER did it again for good reason.
I mean technically Dark Souls 1 at least has a hidden carry weight, but it’s not actually meant to be a factor so it only comes into play when people intentionally bug the game by buying hundreds of copies of heavy armor and the only mechanical impact is that it stops letting you pick up items until you get below the limit.
@@4dragons632 It's not new. The first game came out in 1997. The series is 26 years old and every Armored Core game (even the one that came out for the original playstation) had equipment load based on your legs and arms.
@@4dragons632that's not new
I love that Bethesda has single-handedly made a great country song synonymous with terrible, poorly-optimized, paper-thin rpgs.
It's their god damn theme by this point. Seriously seeing the same bugs every god damn time does feel like coming home.
John Denver doesn't deserve this
@johndavidtibbetts7320 neither does Bethesda, but in the opposite direction.
@@johndavidtibbetts7320 West Virginia does.
Little Lies by Fleetwood Mac always reminds me of Todd Howard too.
Bethesda took that meme about wanting devs making shorter games with worse graphics the wrong way.
Years,they still gonna charge you 70$ dollars for shorter and worse looking games
They just ignored the "made by devs who are paid more to work less" part
I guarantee that people had to crunch terribly for this release, and are still having to crunch post release to fix all the things they weren't given time to address appropriately.
Honestly, if they didn't crunch and paid their workers more, and gave them reasonable hours, I would respect the lack of polish.
It's the "pay more for..." that sticks in my craw. Like, "No. Go stand over there with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA guys."
@@wesleythomas7125 Because it's those darn greedy actual creators wanting to be able to pay their rent and maybe send their kids to college we should blame. Not the shithook shareholders and directors and CEOs all raking in higher figures monthly than your bank account will see in your lifetime. No no. We need to kick and punch the poor sods next to us, not the bastards shitting on us all from on high. Thanks for your incredibly informed corpo-apologia take.
Encumbrance is the kind of mechanic that I would mod in if I felt like the resource management would add something (for example, sometimes I turn Skyrim into a wilderness camping simulator), but outside of resource management games in particular it doesn’t feel like it should have a place in most games. Equipment slots fulfill pretty much the same role of limiting what you can bring or do without feeling bad.
It works in Outward.
I'd never seen that game before, it looks good! IMO that falls into the realm of "resource management" being the core challenge.
Equipment slots don't limit you though. They are just an outline for button mapping. If you have equipment slots and no encumbrance it's virtually the same as equipment slots with encumbrance.
Only time I don't mind carrying limits is when it's actually tied into the mechanics/story in an interesting way. Like, if your mechanics and story are all about resource management (ex. Pathologic 2, where you are playing against the clock and inefficiency actually has real consequences that make sense in the context of the game), then sure. But outside of a few examples, it's pretty much always an annoyance with no redeeming aspects
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to fix this problem in RPGs without just removing it completely. Like, the only limited inventory systems I've ever used that were good are RE4-style tetris inventories, and those only work in a smaller world with sparse resources. Prey 2017 did it okay, too, with the stacking mechanic. I think that would work in a game like this.
I don't mind encumbrance mechanics at all if they are done right.
There's a difference between spending a minute to offload your items into storage: then heading back out to the next adventure, versus spending hours hauling loot back and forth between one instance because if you don't, you'll be at a disadvantage.
But this IMO is just lazy programming. You shouldn't be overburdening your player with so many options, items etc., that they spend the majority of their game time just micro managing their inventory. That's not fun. The encumbrance mechanic shouldn't be a penalty for looting, only a minor inconvenience when you find a lot of loot or a lot of heavy items to add some realism/immersion.
@@Atari5732 thats less "lazy programming" and more "bad game design."
yeah I'm fine with it in an extreme survival game where I have to manage things like water and food and limiting the amount I can carry means I can't have an almost infinite amount. Its so annoying in RPGs and i'm over it. even BG3 has it.
You can mod this encumbrance mechanic out of Fallout easily. But yeah, by now Bugthesda themselves should be including an off-switch for that in the options.
I think encumbrance is intended to provide a natural stopping place for big games that don’t have natural stopping places, since you’d theoretically fill up your inventory, then go deal with, save, and quit. But instead it’s a system that feels like it’s been put in because it’s supposed to be put in and that’s where the thought process ends.
In the games where I think it works the best, it's a way to limit how many contingencies and resources you can hoard. For example, Neo Scavenger is a turn-based survival roguelike where what you can carry with you as you move around is a crucial issue, because there's no reliable access to basically anything (in the first half of the game at least, then you have reliable access to some things). So considerations of "Do I keep the sleeping bag and these bottles of water, when doing so means I'll get tired quickly?" and "I could use this shopping cart to carry a ton of stuff, but I'm gonna be real slow dragging a shopping cart through the hills" are actually relevant to one's success in the game, making it feel significant. I've lost characters and had to restart the game because I was overly greedy and took a shopping cart. I've died of dehydration because I got food sickness and hadn't brought as much water as I could because I wanted to travel light. And because it's using a combination of weight/encumbrance mechanics and inventory tetris a'la old diablo with different kinds of containers, it doesn't feel nearly as arbitrary as "you can only carry exactly 2 weapons and 3 potions"; as someone who's gone hiking a lot, it really feels a lot like when you try to stuff as much things as you can into your backpack without it getting too heavy.
When it comes to murder-hobo games or shoot'n'loots and such, it seems mostly just tacked on.
Depends. If it's low enough, then the game becomes about managing and leaning out the clutter to make sure you can carry loot back to sell. Especially in no-fast-travel playthoughs. Games like Stalker Anomaly show how to do it in a good manner I believe.
But at 300, funnily enough, is too high to do this effect. At that point, it should probably be optional.
Encumbrance is like stamina, health bars and weapon damage just a simple game balance design tool. And yes, players hate balance mechanics, hence cheat codes have always been in high demand.
@@MaxiTB Like those things it *can* be a balance design tool, and is so in eg Caves of Qud or Neo Scavenger, but in something like Starfield it is not used to balance mechanics, so at most it's a really poorly wielded tool, and one that might have been better not used for that project at all, like using a lathe to bake cookies.
Removing the encumbrance mechanic of Starfield would not significantly alter how hard or difficult the game is, because it doesn't significantly affect the management of the resources one needs to progress throughout the game. It only means some not-hard-at-all aspects take longer time.
@@Mewobiba Oh, I did not mean to imply that it was used well; it's Bethesda after all and all their games are horribly balanced and can be exploited/broken easily.
For me the worst part of encumberance is the search for the least valuable things to discard. A while back when I was playing Skyrim I realized I was just going through my inventory calculating “gold per pound” for everything once I'd gotten rid of the obvious junk. Then I figured out all the containers have unlimited storage, so I'd just ferry things from one container to the next until the start of the dungeon. I feel like if you're going to have encumberance in your game, you need to actually provide a good UI for sorting through the junk. Let me automatically dump all of the least value dense objects in a crate automatically. Or just advertise that it is actually division practice where you can also fight dragons sometimes.
That pistol whip clip is comedy gold and I can't get over it.
i can’t stop laughing at it. someone slap a todd howard face on that character and make a whole game of that.
it will outsell all bethesda games.
I think Project Zomboid handles encumberance rather well. Specifically because it exists in relation to its other systems.
Zomboid has bags or cars for you to carry more stuff with. Even then, cars make a lot of noise, need fuel, need to be maintained...
You can also outwalk zombies by default and you spend most of the game walking from place to place, so being encumbered is scarcely noticeable (Unless you choose to play with sprinting zombies but those are terrifying regardless). Even then, you would need to over-encumber your character heavily to be completely unable to run. It's a tradeoff between being a loot goblin and having the ability to run away from your problems.
I can't say I find it an entertaining game mechanic in itself, but I do think that Project Zomboid would be a worse game without.
Lovely video as always.
That game took the idea and built the game to incorporate it.
This is a little carryover from their 20+ year old engine is just that.
I tried out the no weight mod. Within a day I had so many bandages, bandaids, and rags the game lagged for 10s when I had to apply one, or remove the dirty and apply new one.
Now I'm using the weightstone mod with some tweaked crafting recipe and it's a lot better. Can still carry all the necessary tools in a fanny pack, but I'm not also carrying around 10 years of food and water everywhere.
I think the key there is with Zomboid being a survival horror with emphasis on the surviving, it's not so much 'fun' that it's aiming for so much as providing for tension, drama, hard choices, problem solving and the like with characters who are generally very vulnerable, so the mechanic is fitting because it adds to that aspect of the game and it doesn't really need to be adding to the 'fun'. Having to deal with item weights and encumbrance adds to its storytelling in a way that in a typical rpg it would not, because in a typical rpg the complexities of looting a wood burning stove from a forest cabin isn't an entire adventure unto itself.
@@Jcewazhere That's been an issue with Gamebryo for basically ever and probably why they implemented encumbrance to begin with in ye olden days; as your inventory gets bigger the obviously unoptimized way they handle inventory shows more and more until you just lag the game to a standstill by so much as looking at it. FO4 was particularly bad about this because of all the scrap.
I was going to say a similar thing, adding that despite not being fun by itself, it adds some tradeoffs and risks that heighten the tension of the game.
The issue is that most encumbrance systems do not actually serve any purpose. They don't serve as a resource limit like in Project Zomboid, you aren't making tough decisions on which resources to prioritize, you're just deciding what you're going to carry in each trip to your base/hub.
Country Roads started playing and I was already cry-laughing 😂 🤣 thank g-d for you, Steph!
I remember the good old days of Shadow of Chernobyl where encumbrance was an actual integrated part of the survival gameplay, because it forced you to choose how much ammo to bring on a trip, choose whether it was worth bringing so much extra medical kits and also whether you wanted to risk not being able to run from cloaking stalking monsters just because you wanted to take home all the new guns you found. Being considerate about your choices was a matter of survival in the game because it worked into its theme as an action-survival-horror-shooter; it also didn't feature tons of guff to feed a bloated crafting system. Also, good shit was rare to come by so finding someting useful was a treat. Oh well, at least we can still have the terrible game-breaking bugs - and from an actual AAA studio no less.
And yeah I can totally agree that it is very situational and then still can be considered a limit on gameplay-enjoyment. Perhaps in the far future some clever studio could come up with some sort of menu toggle so the end user could tailor gameplay to their preferences
As someone who actually does enjoy and love inventory management, they fucked up SO hard for Starfield.
Carry Weight:
- Base level is WAY to Low
- To few ways to increase it
- - Increases are way to low
- Resources weigh to much (even with two 25% reduction effects)
- Gravity of planets doesn't affect it (This would suck on high gravity planets but help SO much on low gravity planets, I'd use an outpost on a low gravity planet to store all my shit, would honestly remedy the issues MASSIVELY)
Storage:
- No source of infinite storage tied to crafting stations
- - The few Storage options that are connected can't hold fuck all (Finally found a planet I can build an outpost on for the first time after over 24 hours, massive storage containers can only hold 75 mass... wtf, and honestly don't even know if it's connected to the crafting stations)
- Ship storage would be cool, if it was lighter itself and I couldn't fill it within an hour after increasing it by 1.5k
Aid:
- Still haven't separated food from medications, why, I hate having all this food I pick up because I can't control myself making an unholy amount of clutter when I just want to use meds.
Gear:
- No forth piece of equipment that can have rarity so we can atleast decrease our resource weight by 100% if we wanted to.
Pros:
- Gear/Weapons of the exact same stack, 13 Grendels? atleast they don't take 13 slots
- Sprinting CAN'T kill you, if you sprint to the point it hurts you, it'll only lower your health so much before it stops, you can still run but you'll be half blind because of visual effects (Sucks that I have to do it in the first place though)
And lastly, the reason I like inventory management as a mechanic is because it's like a puzzle that I can solve how ever I want, and I have a hoarding problem which was okay until Starfield limited so much storage, I also like weapon durability because it gives all that crap I hoard a purpose.
I like the way encumbrance is done in Elden Ring. The game doesn't punish you for picking anything up, but you do have to put some thought into what your character will have equipped. I think that the mechanic can also be integral to just about any survival game like Day Z where the player facing consequences for their moment to moment decisions is the main game loop.
Agreed - equipment encumbrance makes mechanical sense, and I like how you move differently being heavily armoured to being buck naked. Extending that to the inventory just suuuuucks
I forgot about soul's games. I can see what you mean a bit. Though that is more armor and weapon mechanics. Same page fir survival games. I love The Long Dark, and weight is an important mechanic there.
yes elden ring is an amazing example of this, carry all the shit you want but you can only equip so much before you get slow
It's the Witcher thing of having a magic horsey in your pocket who can carry all the gubbins you're not using or want to sell. Perfectly valid "immersion-breaking" solution to prevent you from getting fed up and going off to play something less bloody stupid.
Also, yes to Day Z. Encumbrance works well in survival sims, where your choice between an empty pistol that you MIGHT find bullets for and that MIGHT save your life tomorrow needs to be weighed against the thick coat that WILL save your life in an hours time when the sun goes down and your still half a mile from shelter and a fire.
Just like weapon durability, I think encumbrance can be a useful game mechanic when it is implemented with thought and consideration and contributes something to the game design. When it is just included out of obligation with no thought or design, then it becomes bad.
Exactly: Every game mechanic should serve a purpose, either to the narrative or the game play. In a survival horror for example, part of the narrative is being desperate, working with limited resources to survive - it makes sense that you'd have a limited inventory and breakable weapon. It's literally there to put you on edge and add to the tension. Likewise, a game where accruing wealth is a priority, you should be hindered in your progress by being limited in how much you can carry, as the goal is literally to overcome that limitation. For an action game, or looter-shooter, where the point of the game is literally just "kill bad guys and take their stuff" inventory management or item durability doesn't make so much sense.
Like how breaking weapons over enemies does a double damage crit and you find them constantly? Oh but you all said you hated that in BotW...interesting how far the goalpost moves.
@@LadyDoomsingerWhat a hilariously limiting design mindset.
@@RobotMasterSplash1: "Serves a purpose" has a higher bar than just "afjacentish to a sometimes maybe helpy mechanic"
2: Take it from the guy with a game design degree, acting like that is NOT how ya get folks to take your design ideas seriously.
@@youtubeuniversity3638 Backpack Hero probably is one of the games where it makes sense the most as it's the whole game
Starfield is one of the most games ever bethesda'd. I can't imagine how proud Todd Howard is.
He really Todd it this time
And how(ard).
@@peterclarke7240 oo-er!
I'm not sure you can say that until it's released on at least three console generations.
@@RaunienTheFirst I’m sorry, but you simply aren’t cut out to work for a bawdy 1970s video game developer. Please finish working on this rigid body for me then pack your desk and go.
Bethesda has created a great sandbox that I am sure modders will turn into a great game in a few years.
This is the way.
Thats basically fallout 4 🤷♂️ i can't speak for starfield because i can't play it, but 4's gameplay was rough and unpolished and uninteresting and so was its story
Modders fixed the gameplay, but the story can't be fixed, so 4 is more fun to just Roleplay as the imperium of man or whatever. Play with the decent gunplay.
Nope. According to modders, and I quote - " *game is trash* "
Inventory management is one of my biggest pet peeves. The game grinds to a halt as I spend 20 minutes deciding what to keep and what to leave
One of the first things I do when I play a Bethesda game is look for a carry weight mod. The console command to give you a carry load of 5000 or something in Starfield was easy to find, but if console players don't have access to the console (which is ironic), my prayers go to them.
Isn't it funny how "realism" defenses in games are always a sliding scale? I mean, it's "realistic" to have a weight limit, but then why not have your suit breach whenever something penetrates your armor and consign you to death by suffocation or exposure?
They should add a suit breach though
That could have been cool, and to have like a consumable "suit patch" item like duct tape or something to repair it.
Realism in games (and fantasy in general) is ALWAYS a sliding scale.
in the case of games in particular, there needs to be a balance taking into account when realism improves the experience and when it hinders it.
For example: having characters take bathroom breaks, though realistic, would be a pointless inconvenience in most games, but it's completely justified in The Sims because the goal of that game is to simulate domestic daily life.
These people just want to feel "hardcore" for playing something that feels "realistic". It's not actually about realism, that's just the excuse.
Because that's how games design works lmao, your argument is pure whatabaoutism.
I do not like encumberance when the game encourages hoarding. But otherwise, inventory limit and encumberance with methods to work around it is fine. Its not the encumberance, its the hoarding mentality that these games encourage me, and then punch me with its limitation. Like.. huh?
Okay yes. I spent some time playing space engineers in which you must collect A LOT of minerals and ores. But you can make a mega shit load of containers to offload your encumbrances. You need to hoard, but the accessibility of containers to hoard into makes it balance well. As long as the system is done well it is enjoyable. If it is not done well it is not enjoyable.
Stardew has possibly the best system I've ever played with a highly limited inventory. It SOUNDS like it would be a hinderance, but it's not meant to be. It feels like it was carefully considered and implemented in a way that works with the game. It forces you to think and plan around it. You have to consider how much time you have in a day and which tasks to prioritize in a way that's actually fun.
I always wind up putting a chest in the mine 😁
That part. If I'm meant to hoard and loot constantly, then don't limit what I can hoard and loot.
I like the encumbrance system though I recognize it's not for every one. I would prefer it to be incorporated into a survival mode or togglable in the menu. If you can change difficulty you should be able to toggle other gameplay settings.
@Legacyartist genuinely asking, why do you like encumbrance systems in games designed for gathering loot and resources for upgrades and stuff. I get it if it's part of the themes of the game but idk..
For all of BotW/TotK's problems, including a form of encumbrance with certain items, the designers at least understood that putting a limit on general resources would demolish the point of the entire game. You have limited weapon/shield/bow/food slots, but Link can pick literally anything else off of the ground anywhere he explores without limit, and that is so important to the gameplay experience, especially in TotK where the general resources became infinitely more important due to their use for weaponry.
TotK has one of the best open worlds I ever experienced. Jim/Steph hates on the weapon durability because they personally don't enjoy it, but without that mechanic there'd eventually be no point to explore most of the game. Limited weapon/bow/shield slots and weapons breaking go hand-in-hand with each other to create a game that keeps the desire to explore and find new weapons and attachments high. It's not a worse game for it at all. Jim/Steph just hates it and acts like it does make the game worse when all it is is personal preference.
Kiryu Kazuma carries a whole grocery store in his pockets and I wouldn't have it any other way
I haven't seen a Sterling video in a long time and have to say I envy your voicework. Voice training is so tiring, I'm really glad of what you achieved!
Thank you! I’ve just started it and it’s been really tricky.
@@JimSterling I've definitely noticed the change! Any tips you can share?
As someone who's been watching the entire time, i didn't even notice until this comment,
@JimSterling I knew your voice sounded different! I thought I was just hearing things lol. 😂 I kinda don't want to personally myself since looks too hard and I sound fake, but I also don't want to be misgendered and I don't like how my voice sounds masculine.
Hey Stephanie I just wanted to say that as a younger trans woman I am constantly impressed and inspired by how you stick to your guns and hold to what’s right, all while working in an industry that’s constantly trying to push you out. Much love from across the pond :3
Jim isn't trans he's just a big bullshit artist.dont trust anyone on TH-cam just because they where a dress now.the man is lieing too you.
@JuanRomero no you see it's relevant because it's literally impossible to look up to someone who isn't the exact same as you
Some people are so shallow that they have to make everything about their identity especially when it doesn't need to be
what a sad bot
@@jacob-2271 did you not see "younger"? Young people are, usually, still finding their way in the world and the existence of people who mirror their own experience can be comforting/inspiring to see. It's not shallow to feel that way or to reach out to say so, let alone a case of "making everything about their identity."
It is however very easy, from a position of relative independence/confidence, to spend your time snap-judging others. You know absolutely nothing about this person beyond the post above.
@JuanRomero @jacob-2271 Oh piss off you two. Maybe she feels a particular kinship with Stephanie because they are in a similar boat? Being LGBTQ+ is stigmatised, hell even illegal in many places around the world. We literally get killed for not fitting snugly into your norms, even in places where being LGBTQ+ is and has been legal for a while.
Being open about our identities is dangerous, thus being a public figure and openly transitioning takes a certain kind of guts. It hits different.
The girls that get it get it, those that don't, don't. If you don't get it, you're probably not that girl.
I remember metal gear solid 3 having a mechanic that ticked over in the background, you could only have so many weapons or equipment on fast select at a time and all others were stored in your backpack. Each item or weapon had weight however, and the more weight you had equipped, the quicker your stamina would drain, which coupled with the health and stamina mechanics made for an interesting idea. It needed polish i think, like most of snake eaters mechanics, but it was decent enough to build from
That is one of the few games I thought not only was it implemented okay, I didn't have much issue with because there were techniques and strategies you could do to get around those issues.
I like it in The Long Dark, the carry weight makes you plan a loadout before going on a trip, taking the bare minimum you'll need while leaving the rest at your base. I feel like the game would become very unbalanced and broken if you could carry infinite items at all times. It would feel less like a post apocalyptic survival game and more like a min max rpg stacking every buff and being able to answer any problem that comes your way no matter what. If people want infinite carry weight that's their perogative and should feel free to remove that restriction. I just personally feel that it adds to the challenge of that specific game
Yeah, encumbrance is a tool to use in balancing a game. Bethesda games are certainly not the sort of game that really benefit from it.
Well, the load you're carrying ought to change things. It is cold survival. One thing that I thought could be an additional factor in The Long Dark was how exercise affects body heat, but maybe warming up quickly with a heavy load made things too easy.
I don't feel like you're describing encumbrance here, you're describing "loadout".
Loadout is a much more flexible concept, with numerous limits, and can serve as creative constraints, player assistance, or even a mini game. E.g. two main weapons, two augments, and ten healing items, etc.
Encumbrance is relatively thoughtless and uncontrolled. One number. Everything counts against it, even common crafting resources. And every item's "weight" usually has no correlation whatsoever to gameplay importance or usefulness, but only verisimilitude. Frequently no way of knowing what's important or worth keeping. Player ends up hauling sacks of garbage.
Like, in Skyrim I was carrying hundreds of thousands in gold. How much more "fun" would that game have been if I had to take into account the weight of that gold?
@@greenredblue I don't think there's a wall between the two concepts. I would argue the limited inventory in a survival horror game like signalis is a loadout, but if you called it encumbrance you wouldn't be wrong.
In a Bethesda Fallout game it makes you decide what your trump card is going to be. Do you want to spend a lot of weight on a fat man or a missile launcher or do you want to hope that small arms will be enough for the current mission.
It's always a good time when Stephanie talks about Bethetic Bethesda
I kinda miss the Toby Fox lobsterclaw dance though.
@demizson576 she did one a month or so ago, I think. Can't remember what episode.
@bubbly12ish she goes by Stephanie or James Stephanie, actually. As far as I'm aware she doesn't go by just Jim or James anymore. Please be respectful
@bubbly12ishBot
@bubbly12ish they made a mistake. You are not a bot, you are a bigot
There's only been two times in games like this that the emcumberence systems have really "worked", and that was because of how they were narratively utilized. A quest in Oblivion has you sent to recover a ring in a well that is far, far heavier than you can normal carry, becuase the quest giver is trying to kill you by drowning. The end of the Sierra Madre dlc for new vegas has a bevy of gold bars that are far far heavier than you can carry, underscoring the themes of greed destroying oneself. You can carry maybe one or two out of the dozens of bars, which feels right for the heist genre.
Other than those two instances of devs actually thinking about narrative uses for the system, it is absolutely just a damn nuisance.
Playing New Vegas followed by Fallout 4, and then hearing what the main plot of Fallout 3 was just proved to me that Bethesda doesn't have good storytellers since New Vegas is the only one that is compelling from end to end. It's no surprise they wouldn't come up with a story based reason to make those things valid in gameplay.
The end of the Sierra Madre was brilliantly done in that regard. Underscoring the theme with mechanics is something that too often gets ignored by even well thought out games.
Unfortunately the Sierra Madre end is kinda kneecapped by game mechanics as it's possible with a bit of trial and error (or a youtube tutorial) to sneak out with all the gold.
@@originalscreenname44 People need to remember, New Vegas wasn't created by Bethesda Game Studio but Obsidian.
@@LdyVderWorking on a tight timeframe with Bugthesda's garbo engine no less
Bit late to this discussion but I felt the inventory limit worked quite well in Fallout: New Vegas. If you're just playing the regular game it is just an annoyance, but playing on hardcore adds a whole new layer to the game. Hardcore mode adds a need for sleep, food, and water, while also making things like ammo actually have weight. What this means is that instead of just going from objective to objective looting everything, there's an added preparation step that helps make each adventure feel more engaging. You have to be very specific about what you take with you, since you can realistically only carry 2-3 weapons with a couple magazines of ammo, armor, basic food and healing items if you still want some leftover space for the most valuable loot. It makes every choice more meaningful, and actually makes the game feel like you're surviving in a wasteland instead of blasting your way through a post-apocalypse themed shooting gallery. Combine this with the ammo type system and you've got something that's genuinely interesting. Its fun to prepare and have that preparation pay off, and sometimes its even more fun when it doesn't and you have to improvise and scrape by with what you can find. I played through that game twice before trying hardcore and that playthrough was by far the most engaging one. I haven't gone back to normal mode since.
I do find encumbrance an interesting mechanic if the game treats it seriously, and is generally going for a more realistic, survival based aesthetic. Stalker and Escape from Tarkov come to mind, where your carry weight and inventory/backpack management are actually a big part of the game. I remember having to get used to your bullets actually weighing a lot when Stalker came out, and it forced you to think more tactically about what you were going to bring with you. Tarkov is all about trying to optimise the value of the items you get out with per backpack slot.
That said, Starfield does not strike me as going for the same style of slow paced, tactical sim based on the footage I've seen...
I love this survival inventory aspect, but imo Bethesda never has put that much consideration into their games. The potential is there but they’ll make a paper clip weigh the same as a book, nothing stealable is ever particularly valuable, and all food items give the same nearly useless benefits. New Vegas is case in point that their mechanics can be interpreted and implemented in a much more effective way, especially with survival mode.
I frequently mod/cheat out carry weight limits whenever possible. So far, it's never had an impact on game stability in anything I've ever played.
Stability? You mean balance?
Same. That's one thing I do consistently like about Bethesda games, they always let you use the dev console. 'Course, Starfield disables your achievements if you try to use the dev console, but there's already a mod available to protect against that.
Has it lead to spending 3 hours in inventory menus digging through tens of thousands of different items in searching for the one item you need at a specific moment?
@@Sonichero151you sell the stuff you don't need?
I remember cyberpunk bugging out because I had to many crafting resources. Granted that was a bug that got fixed. Otherwise you probably won’t use enough resources to clog up a game if the devs programmed shit intelligently.
Now I'm imagining an encumbrance system, but instead of dropping things to lighten your load, you have to mine increasing amounts of helium so you can attach balloons to everything you own.
Metal Gear Solid 5,
but without the "Mining helium" bit 😅😂
Oh god, that could make a hilarious mechanic in the right game. You have to hack into the ground to get helium, to fill a balloon that follows you around and carries your gear, but enemies, and angry birds, will attack the balloon strewing your shit all over the floor. Might make a fun little mechanic for getting stuff back to base from a mission. You kill the bads, fill up a balloon and load up the gear then you have to escort the balloon home and defend it from interlopers on the way back. Kind of sounds like one of the madcap weird mechanisms you'd see on something like caves of Qud actually.
@@shayneoneill1506
Yeah that sounds like a good idea lol 😅 .
Would even have a bit of risk vs reward to it,
As the more stuff you try to carry back with you,
the bigger your balloon would need to be,
Which would make it a bigger target.
So you would have to decide whether to do a lighter run for safety,
Or whether you risk having to repair your balloon and reacquire more helium with a heavier run.
Starfield 40 , Forspoken 50? Ok...... 🤔
The best way to look at this mechanic is when it's done in isolation - for example, Steamworld Dig. You play a steampunk robot miner, and dig the earth for precious metals. That's a game where it's just part of the game loop - you dig for ore until you run out of space/light, go upstairs to sell your stuff, and come back with an upgrade of sort. It might be light/carry capacity, but it might be health, damage, water, or something else. If you remove the capacity limit, the game kinda breaks.
Now that game had fast travel, and fun ways to move around the map. It sucks that you have to leave stuff behind, but it's marked, and the way to home base and back is relatively short and fun. From what I heard about Starfield right now, the trip back and forth isn't fun, so maybe that's the problem - they made a bad mechanic very visible, and thus it affects the experience far more than it should.
Now, while I generally agree with Steph, both on the show and on this issue, I feel they failed to elaborate why it's bad, and just called the game stupid for having it, and people who enjoy it masochist, and honestly, I like Steph too much to not say that this time, they done goofed...
Got to disagree there. Steamworld dig has a couple of mechanics that mean you have to go back to the surface frequently, carry capacity is only one of them. You'd still have to go back just as often to recharge your light or whatever, so it really wouldn't make THAT much of a difference.
Bethesda COULD have made the player able to fast travel while overloaded, but they are still stuck on the same systems they used in Morrowind etc.
Bethesda games are NOT management games, which is why you can hold 10 swords, for example, even though you really only need one. Dig IS a management game, designed with the idea of going back to base often. Ah, Dahn57 put it well before me.
@bobmcbobbington9220 Thanks for saying it out loud, but we still found a genre where carry capacity IS welcomed. Moreover, I think I just realised why Steph opinion is so strong on this - they probably just hate managing simulators. Which I get, it's completely fair, but that would explain their behaviour toward carry limit and weapon durability. Maybe. I might talk out of my ass here...
To add on to BG3'S encumbrance being tolerable, it has an ACTUAL reason to be there unlike most of these games! When an item or character falls, is dropped, or thrown at something the damage done is associated with the weight and height of the object, character, or item.
Also, where in Starfield you NEED the heavy stuff (building material), in BG3 you kinda aren't really supposed to carry the heavy stuff (explosive barrels) around - but you can, if you want to. And if you accept that there's a limit.
plus makes sense stronger /bigger characters carry more
@@cas4047That really is the solution in BG3. Just give it to your character with higher strength. I never had to slowly crawl to a vendor to unload gear in BG3.
No, it isn’t good or necessary in any game, period.
There doesn’t need to be a weight limit or a limit on how much items you can carry to make the effect of an item attributed to it’s weight in combat matter.
These are the exact excuses Jim mentioned.
BG3 as it’s predecessors may be one of the best games of all time but the weight and item limit is still shit and completely unnecessary.
@@DrZaius3141 You can also store the heavy stuff in your camp storage so if you have a reason to want to take it with you (keeping a stock of explosive barrels around can be a valid tactical play!), you don't need to CARRY it EVERYWHERE.
Encumbrance or inventory space systems CAN be a really engaging and interesting mechanic, if the game actually uses it to have you make real meaningful choices about the things you carry, which isn't really a thing in bethesda games. The fact that bethesda companions are most notable as being packmule expansions to your inventory really makes the point
A very good example of this being the first Resident Evil, the extremely limited inventory space really made you plan out your routes and consider every single interaction with enemies, especially when combined with the limited resources and limited save slots.
Game was awesome
Signalis limits your inventory for the exact same reason but apparently it's trash according to JSS
@@clarissa1643 6 items is still pretty shit. That is RE1 level of bs.
@@clarissa1643 JSS just never will admit that games that want to be more as games not always have to focus on being "fun" and accessible. Signalis is a horror game that tries to be frustrating. The limit is not supposed to be a fun challenge. It is supposed to be a chore. Forcing you to repeat actions just like the narrative is a loop.
Signalis "good ending" is achieved by playing "bad" being hit a lot and die a lot.
@@rickydo6572That depends on the types of games you like, that to me is a game I will never play, I have ADHD, executive dysfunction sucks and I can't plan, if I try I have to literally write it out because I can't remember, so I just don't bother, or I cheat.
In contrast, while you can't carry limitless quantities of items because it's tied to your STR score, Baldur's Gate 3 allows your team to carry entire corpses around in a belt pouch so that the party Necromancer has some zombies on tap.
thank you for this info it may serve me well on another playthrough ^^
This is so brilliant it's not wonder it slipped my mind. Was always wondering what the point of this option is.
You can just pretend that your wizard reduced the size of the corpses, allowing you to pick up unlimited corpses :D
Bag of Holding: Don't leave home without one.
@@maninthemists2299 I didn't know it was a thing! Apparently, there's a chest of the mundane in the tower in the Underdark, which can be used as such?
It's staggering to me that people thought Bethesda was going to release a game that wasn't horrifically bugged. BG3 has it's bugs, but they are very few (that I experienced) and only 1 repeated later in the game.
Xbots are that desperate to believe anything for an exclusive
For me expecting the worst makes my expectations less likely to be trashed.
Everyone who says this either hasn't beaten BG3 or gotten extremely lucky. Larian dropped the ball hard in Act 3 and people have been complaining about game breaking bugs in that act for weeks now.
I'll accept a few bugs in BG3 because it's really good enough to be worth it, but I'm not gonna go through misery just to play Oblivion with guns in space
I've got 16 hours, the only bug I've experienced is more of an oversight really, when you select the option to hide your space suit in cities, people treat you like you're wearing one when it really seems like it shouldn't. Personally I think it's the best game they've ever put out. Hell, I don't even mind the encumberance. I've got 3000kgs of cargo hold space for a reason. My only complaint is that your max encumbrance should scale with the gravity! Gravity is 10% of normal? You can carry 10 times as much stuff. Gravity is twice as much as normal? You can only carry half as much
I have some RPGs use inventory limits - not encumbrance per se but in the same vein - to good effect, when they're dungeon crawlers. By limiting what you can take _in_ you increase the tension of the dangers of making an expedition in - and God forbid if you forgot to bring your warp wire. In combination with character resource management this can be pretty effective. Some of those same games allow you to carry _out_ entire stacks of identical items to take back to town to repeat the loop.
If you don't have that kind of combination of mechanics going on, the game is probably better off without needless inventory management.
Yeah, having a (huge/limitless) vault and only being able to carry a few on your characters is perfectly fine.
In a similar vein, DQ has limited items you can have on your characters'including equipment, but modern games added an infinite Bag (it makes Torneko's quest in DQIV much more bearable).
Every single time I opened a treasure chest in Tears of the Kingdom and was 'rewarded' with a weapon I couldn't carry I was so stoked! I loved the realism! How could you give it a 7?!
BOTW/TOTK dont pride themselves on realism though. Nor any of its systems that are so hated by some
@@TerranigmaQuintet Funny, 'realism' is the argument I was met with when I complained about that and other things back when BotW came out.
@@TerranigmaQuintet oh you're right, that makes it a fun an enjoyable mechanic now! Thanks for clarifying, now it won't be a frustrating pointless waste of time!
That's what you get for not breaking your weapons fast enough to have room :V
Erm... If they don't pride themselves on realism, then why have they made it so you get over-encumbered?
I mean... That makes even LESS sense than saying "oh, they aren't supposed to be REALISTIC... that's why we've included this really fun mechanic where your weapons deteriorate."
Come on, get a GRIP. 🤣
Honestly, the few games where I think encumbrance actually works is not in survival-horror games but in pure survival games. Something like The Long Dark, where your limited inventory is part of the survival challenge. Where I have to choose between going outside better prepared for the trials or less encumbered so I can bring back more food and medicine. A game where everything about surviving is a challenge and the inventory is just another well-crafted piece of the puzzle that adds to the challenge.
But Starfield? I don't understand why there's really an encumbrance system in it. I don't understand why the ore that floats and hovers in the air before your own eyes weighs you down. I don't understand why it chose to make the stamina system now actively hurt the character when it's empty! Or how it empties so much quicker the more you carry so you need to slow down to a crawl every few steps just so you don't literally die from the weight of your own backpack!
And speaking of things that don't add anything to Bethesda games, the shopkeepers need to no longer have a currency limit on how much they can buy! All it takes is sitting in a chair in the very store I'm standing in and waiting for the cash to refresh and continue selling! There's no penalty to waiting there, there's nothing that actually requires I do a quest in a certain amount of time, it's just more pointless, mindless waiting! If somebody, anybody could give me a good reason why it's a benefit that I need to wait for ingame weeks just to empty out my inventory to a store and finally be paid for the hassle of clearing out all of the pirates, collecting all their stuff, dealing with the encumbrance of hauling it all back, only to be told I need to sit down and wait before I can open the same menu multiple times just to finally sell the stuff, I'd love to hear what they'd have to say simply because I could really use a good laugh!
Backpack Hero is definitely the exception that proves the rule. Since your inventory is the sole source of your power, and dropped loot disappears when you leave a room, it turns inventory management into an exciting puzzle rather than a chore. Deciding between taking a consumable that helps you now, or a combo piece that helps you later, can make or break your dungeon run. You need that kind of opportunity cost in order for inventory limits to be a worthwhile game mechanic.
Haven't played that, but Death stranding is the only game so far where I didn't mind encumbrance and durability systems. I may have even enjoyed them.
I like games where you can wear more backpacks in exchange for stacking debuffs, Like Cataclysm:Dark Days Ahead. Arbitrary weight limits just feel like I am doing office work.
@@Heldemon
what a copout lmao
@@EstradaDuran-sg6co What?
@@noodledoodle9408 Cataclysm makes inventory management both interesting and dreadful. Need to clear out a small town but can't stuff enough rocks into your stockings to prepare beforehand? Better hope you can run faster than the dogs.
I do like how you have to plot out what you're going to do in detail beforehand because you don't have the strength or space to bring all the tools and the loot you get with each specific type of tool (unless you have power armour and a massive vehicle, you cheese). You often spend the beginning of the day planning like it's a management game. From there it's a balance between grabbing perishables and shinies. You even have to carefully consider where to store it once it's off your character, lest it get destroyed by a horde, yoinked by bandits, set on fire by a roving zomborg, or teleported away by a portal storm.
I'm of the opinion that basically any mechanic can be interesting and meaningful and add to the experience of the game, but encumberance is very rarely given the consideration required to make it interesting. It's also the kind of mechanic that's probably not ever gonna be fun.
It's the sort of mechanic that should be reserved for high-stakes immersive survival games like The Long Dark, where deciding between a moldy chocolate bar and a blunt knife is genuinely a valid conundrum that enhances the experience.
@@peterclarke7240 Yeah it makes more sense in The Long Dark, but what doesnt' make sense in that game is the magnifying glass being the only primitive fire making option available. You can't craft an ember box, a bow drill, nothing. Before their big patch I would always play with a mod that added an ember box and some primitive fire making. I started that after I starved to death waiting for ... any sunlight at all on time. A god damn bic lighter would last you longer than most play throughs of that game, lol.
yeah, encumbrance in RPGs probably stems largely from how D&D used to be much more of a resource-management survival game, with lengthy expeditions through the wilderness and prolonged stays in dungeons. it made more sense in earlier additions because they also clearly provided ways to work around it; carts, wagons, pack animals, and hirelings were all far more important when the expected play was "you're going to set up an extensive camp on top of this dungeon and have like ten guys you're paying unblock passages for you over the course of a weekj so you can get at more loot".
i don't have an issue with limited carrying capacities in games so long as they're not unfun, and while "unfun" is very subjective, i think there are some clear design choices that often contribute.
Signalis' inventory never bothered me, because the resources were for resolving encounters and you could fairly easily restock in the field, besides running back and forth retreading old ground already to solve puzzles. there were lots of chances to pick up stuff i didn't have room for the first time around, if i needed another sealant patch at all in the first place.
a game like Fallout 4, on the other hand, made "looting" its entire gameplay loop. encumbrance limits technically contribute to that, but "looting" and recycling your weapons all the time is kind of an unfun skinner box of a gameplay loop IMO, so it sucks.
but importantly, it isn't the encumbrance limit that makes it suck. it's the entire game design around how much you're looting and why.
I gotta agree with this, encumbrance can be good particularly to stop players picking every trash item up and selling that to eventually get enough for the most powerful stuff, like who wants to carry 20+ items worth 2 coins just to try get to 40 that little bit faster, it just requires thought, if the player can't pick everything up then the area needs choices within the items that they can pick up, either there's health, or gold or something else that they might be tempted to carry on them in the area and that in turn fuels a decision which the player owns
There are SO very few games that get it right. But there ARE a very rare few of them out there.
It has a place in more gritty, grounded RPGs. It really does not belong in a power fantasy type game.
I can see some appeal to encumbrance in specific types of games. For instance, an expedition style of game where you need to balance versatility in the field with the ability to carry it all there. It makes some amount of sense for there to be a planning stage on your way there as part of choosing party members (for instance) and balancing what it is you're going to use - then on your way back to determine what's more important to bring home. I can even see it as okay in something like Diablo (after 3) where going back to town is effectively free so you can check your loot for upgrades, dump everything else, and get back to the action after a bit of a breather that you probably needed anyway.
Like all systems, however, it needs to be balanced. How frequently you need to do that needs to be balanced with how long you're supposed to be out on your expedition between points where you can dump loot. Even then, it has to be clear about *why* the system exists. For D3, it's basically a pacing mechanic and an extension to the "fanciest pants" sub-game of hunting for better loot - but everything they did tried to make that experience as quick and painless as possible, including the often decried "at a glance" system for determining if a new piece was better or not, and just replacing scrolls and tomes for portals and identification with baked-in mechanics - because who playing D2 didn't leave town with a full tome of each every time anyway?
I'm ranting about Diablo 3 again, sorry, it's the last game Blizzard made that was worth it (after they stripped the market) and I'm coping. Back to the point.
There are other systems - especially in survival games - where max inventory is literally a balance of more ability to kill vs more healing items. Then adding the threat of not being able to loot enough to get enough money to afford your next expedition *can* be a compelling gameplay mechanic that's actually worth engaging with. Again, intentionally added for a mechanical reason, it can actually have a purpose, even being fun. It's still a system that needs to be there intentionally, and intentionally balanced for what it's supposed to do.
Skyrim, Fallout, and Starfield have little reason to dump as much stuff on players as they do, beyond cries of "realism" - saying "oh, it *should* be in the game, so put it in. There's no thought to the balance of how much you should carry or how much money you're supposed to be getting on expeditions, or even what an "expedition" should be, given how much of the world they leave to random chance. It's just there to be there, and dealing with it is the player's problem. Not balanced, not curated, no thought or effort into it at all beyond "we tossed it into the sandbox, go play with it." Maybe that is the point - "don't grab everything, and just engage with what you want" was actually a need part of the old Elder Scrolls games as they were coming out. Broom and cheese hoarding are still funny memes to anyone worth meme-ing with. It still needs to be balanced, especially when you're dealing with things of actual value - both in terms of things to sell, and ammunition (which is basically what weapons in Breath of the Wild are, low-use durability is still stupid, but that's another rant)
Either way, the point is - inventory and loot are mechanics, and like all mechanics, they need to be examined and balanced instead of just thrown into the game. If there's no point in having them, or having limits on them, there needs to be something else there instead. However, that would involve making something intentionally, instead of just cramming in what worked for someone else without adjustment - even if that someone was yourself, previously - and we all know which one the AAA execs would rather demand.
I aint reading all that
I am happy for you tho
Or sorry that happened
No.
Fallout should have carryweight though, the games are about surviving in a wasteland, would Dead Money be able to make any point about letting go if you had magic pockets for all the gold? would you pay attention to the environmental story telling of items if you could take all without thinking?
I think there is a difference between encumbrance, and inventory space limits.
Inventory space limits are granular, so the decisions you make can be relatively more impactful. And easily visually represented.
Numerical weight limits are much more abstract, and I think that's part of why they feel so unsatisfying. The difference between 149.99 and 150 being what causes your character to slow to a crawl is blatantly, unavoidably arbitrary.
If you're picking up so much stuff that having individual inventory slots for each item feels ludicrous, then carry capacity should be unlimited.
Where limited resources is a core theme, inventory slots can serve a thematic purpose.
Do I drop the ammo or the health to fit the puzzle piece? I need to carry the ribbon, can I make it back to the save room without these extra bullets?
There is tension there. Backtracking can still be frustrating, but the first decision of what to drop is not empty. The player decides what has value to them in their situation.
In any game where collecting loot or scrap is a core mechanic, capacity limits only serve to hinder the core experience. Because the choice is always going to be drop the least valuable for the most valuable, and value is fixed by the game. So you just compare numbers like a spreadsheet.
@@stm7810 In theory I agree with you, the Fallout series of games is one where encumbrance *can* fit, but Bethesda's fallout games (at least 3 and 4, haven't played 76) where never much about survival even in the early game; they very quickly move to a power fantasy where survival is never a challenge outside of high-powered combat scenarios. And as much as I love Obsidian's work on New Vegas (incl Dead Money), while there's a bit more survival aspects to that it's still very much secondary.
Not gonna lie: the balloon gag at the beginning had me laughing way harder than it rightfully should. xD
As to the meat and potatoes of the video, inventory management is - by far - my biggest frustration with any game with an inventory limit. Be it item slots or, indeed, encumbrance. A big part of this is because I suffer quite severely from what I've heard people call "Mega-Elixir Syndrome," named after a super-item in some RPGs that fully restores your entire party. Mega Elixirs tend to be extremely rare in games they're in, which prompts me with the quandry of "Well I shouldn't use it now, what if I REALLY need it later?" And when "later" finally comes, I ask myself again: "Should I use this now? But what if there's an even BIGGER need later?" Inevitably I'll finish the entire playthrough without once having used a Mega Elixir because I always think "but what if I need it later?"
Having to deal with a limited inventory only exacerbates the problem.
There should be an option. Just tie an achievement to keep playing with the mechanic and everyone else can turn it off. On that note I actually thought it was ridiculous how I carry half of Kvatch with me in Oblivion and restricted myself playing with only one sword, one wand, the set of clothes on me at the time and 10 potions in Oblivion. On another note I just typed 'tgm' in Skyrim because I could not get into the roleplaying with that one.
Perhaps a bit of a hot take, but I thought I hated encumbrance in Skyrim until I installed the "Rich Merchants" mod and found that it fixed all of the problems I had with that system. I don't mind choosing what to pick up from the ground in a game where you can pick literally everything (even worthless things), but having to bounce around two major cities to be able to sell the crap I had because no merchant was rich enough to buy all the stuff I had to sell was the real dealbreaker.
So in a medieval fantasy world it kiiiiind of makes sense that merchant money is an issue, but in Starfield... uh, my guy this store is run by a quadrillion credit megacorp what do you mean you can only buy 8,000 credits worth of goods from me a week at 10% of its actual sell price?
Bethesda is such a great entry to open world games experience for people...
But if you're like me and you're a vet of this type of game... And you have played recent titles like the new zeldas, the new god of wars, the new zero dawn games, Elden ring, witcher 3, and even cyber punk and some assassins creed games are evolving the open world genre far more so than anything bethesda is doing these days.
I can't do this with Bethesda anymore lol. The cod of open world games. Same crap every time with a new coat of paint. And I'm usually that guy who defends samey games if they are fun enough... Golden eye 64 and perfect dark 64? Ocarina of time and majoras mask? Halo 3 and halo 3 odst? DooM and Wolfenstien? Red alert 2 and tiberian sun? These are some of my fav games and some of the best games ever made...
But there are degrees. Do the same kind of game for a few years in different and interesting ways? I'm fine with it. Sometimes even for it 100%.
Do the same thing pretty much for decades? It's time for a change up bro... It's getting old lol. I was even okay with fall out 3 and fall out new vegas. But yeah at this point? When sooo many other open world experiences show us what we can have... This old crap is really aging lol.
@@soyborne.bornmadeandundone1342 I disagree, but I do get where you're coming from. I like the zanny low-stakes open world design of Bethesda games but I do feel like open world games in general have evolved -- Cyberpunk, despite its flaws, has one of the best virtual cities ever. It's just big enough to FEEL big, but not big enough that it becomes a chore to navigate. It feels JUST the right size. On the other end, Elden Ring is pretty much the perfect open world game, where the player has full agency on what they discover, what challenges they can tackle, and how thorough they want to be (with no checklists or map markers reminding you that you didn't loot this one chest). Having said all that, Skyrim is still my favorite open world map of all time. It's relatively small compared to maps these days, but it feels massive. It's layered, varied, and dense. I think Bethesda does this really well and I can't fault the for sticking with this formula, especially since no one else is really doing it this way. But I do wish Elder Scrolls 6 (whenever that comes out) takes into consideration the lessons from Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom -- they don't need to change the way they design worlds, but perhaps a change in the way quests are structured and exploration is handled would greatly benefit their games and break this "formulaic" thing they have going on. We'll see, but keep in mind I haven't played Starfield yet (will start today) so I don't have strong opinions on this game yet!
That's why it's so stupid. They decided that limiting merchants' gold wasn't enough, they also had to limit you on how much you can carry AND make it so you only get the best value when buying/selling if you have a certain skill high, that you can usually only level up by buying and selling and it takes forever. It only serves to hinder you at the very start when you're trying to get your character to actually progress, because after like ten dungeons and two dozen quests you'll have more gold and items than you'll ever need, and by that point your character is likely already decent so you really don't need that much investment anymore. It's no wonder that when replaying people end up abusing exploits like hidden merchant chests for gold and useful items to help jump start their character.
I notice that carrying capacity is something that gets complained about a lot whenever the player has to actually deal with it, but it more or less gets ignored and forgotten about in cases where the player doesn't. For example, in RTS games, there's a limit to how much of Resource your miner can carry at once, but you as the player don't care because the miner is working all on its own. In Torchlight, the dog does the legwork for you. The more automated the inventory process is, the less annoying it gets.
So maybe the problem isn't that encumbrance exists. Maybe the problem is that the player has to spend too much time dealing with it.
I like inventory limits in games like Valheim because without it you'd lose some of the adventure and challenge. In BotW the game gets too easy if you can just carry around infinite weapons and it's generally better if you have to make a choice or a sacrifice. It's not that much different than having a talent tree that asks you to specialize vs. simply having a system where the player character eventually has access to every skill and ability.
However, in Bethesda games, Inventory has always been such a PITA that I simply choose not to engage with it beyond the bare minimum.
Yes, this!
There’s such a vast difference between a well thought out mechanism that captures the game’s intended feel and the theme while balancing the challenges faced by giving players occasional choices they understand… compared to arbitrarily reaching the point of playing the Menu Game of sorting through earned shit of unknown worth and being penalised with worse gameplay if you don’t.
I totally agree. When a mechanic is there to halt your progression and enjoyment, either change it or get rid of it.
A bit of a tangent, but when you mentioned Baldur's gate 3 being a bit unruly with inventory management I was reminded of this: A lot of that might be because the game doesn't tell you that you can ctrl + click and shift + click to choose multiple items to send to camp or select a mass of items to do the same respectively with much more ease.
It took me seeing someone streaming the game doing it and trying it myself to realize it wasn't a mod and that BG3 doesn't tell you this at all.
I think encumbrance can be a good system…when done right. I’ve played games where the only items with weight is equipment with the idea being that you need to heavily invest into strength in order to use the better weapons and equipment with the idea being that you’re sort of picking a class in a game without a class system. Most importantly YOU CAN STILL LOOT EVERYTHING as you just send everything you don’t want to carry back to base instantly.
Even in this scenario all it does is waste time. I think that was a really good point she was making.
In BG3 constantly managing loot was a pain. Many games I play I'm stuck in inventory screens for what seems like hours in a single playthrough.
I think it would be better if we dropped the concept entirely.
There's a mod I discovered for Fallout 4 that I found indispensable, and it's so simple I'm surprised Bethesda didn't think of it. Actually, this is Bethesda we're talking about, so maybe I'm not so surprised. I really liked the limited and pointless base building because I'm weird, but you needed a ton of resources and the stuff your settlers find takes too long to gather. So, this mod gave you a beacon you could toss into an outdoor container to have the loot you collected brought to your base.
You would go through a building or location and grab the things you wanted to keep. For role playing purposes I always tossed everything into a dumpster. Then, you throw in the reusable beacon. After a few minutes the game would spawn a caravan at the nearest settlement which would then walk, in real time, to the beacon's location. Sometimes you might even run into them on your travels! They would load up everything in the container, turn around, and walk back. They would also drop the beacon into the shared settlement item pool as long as they were connected through a trade route. Which I thought was a nice touch and meant you didn't need to constantly craft new ones; it's a durable looking item in the inventory screen so having it not break kept up the illusion of immersion. It was such a great change to my game and is MORE realistic to me than the game just saying, "You can't carry more stuff or have someone from the town come and get it because reasons..."
I remember in Fallout 1 the encumbrance system added a lot of tension. But that was also an RPG with a huge emphasis on survival. And you could eventually just get a car that you could chuck all your shit into, turning the inventory management thing into a way of denoting progress and power scaling.
Bethesda hasn't made a proper RPG in idk how long.
Yeah, but that's because those games are doing it right by adopting the 80s action film approach, where the big, beefy Jesse Ventura guys get to carry a mini gun because they're big, beefy Jesse Ventura guys.
Never mind the fact they couldn't actually carry a functional mini gun, with all the ammo and power packs, and still be able to fire the damn thing for more than a second without dislocating their spine in six places, it's all about the FUN factor. It's about the suspension of disbelief.
Games are supposed to be FUN, Goddammit! 🤣
Elden ring does that, you can carry all the armors and weapons but only the things you equip effect your weight.
I'm always amazed at how bethesda gets a free pass for all the glitches their games have every time...other studios have been ripped apart for less ^^;
For Bethesda...
...It just works.
TBF, their games tend to be bigger in scope. That's not an excuse, just an explanation.
@@1IGGused to be an excuse until they re-released skyrim like twelve times in a row and it still looked like garbage
@@1IGG I don't think that's the case either. I think they just don't care that much about fixing bugs. Remember that Todd coined the term "It's not a bug, it's a feature." He thinks they're funny and doesn't mind leaving them in.
There a plenty more games that are bigger and more complex with not a fraction of the bugs and glitches Bethesda is famous for. This is Bethesda being Bethesda.
@@Sabbathtage I'd say the majority of the bugs are a result of their ancient (20+ years) garbage engine. To this day it has stuff like game speed tied to physics in way that speeding up the game 10x makes objects start flying around in an explosive fashion.
You know what I've always wanted to see instead of encumbrance, a way to send your loot straight into a chest, or locker, or something that the character would automatically have access to. And each item received that goes into that container, would automatically be placed into categories like junk, and weapons, and armor, and etc etc. Of course, that's probably just wishful thinking.
it's in BG3!
@@luttman23 It's also in Pillars of Eternity
After years of playing wow when guild wars 2 came out and I found out it had an unlimited inventory just for crafting ingredients you could access almost everywhere I about had a heart attack
Yeah, like why can't I just get a list of all the loot in the area and I can just sift through what I want and don't want once I've cleared the hostiles?
"realism is among the absolute worst defences against something a videogame does, ever" weird how that wasn't the case when Jim argued that Aloy in HFW doesn't wear makeup because it's not "realistic"🤔
Shameful hypocrite.
"Benedict Encumberbatch" absolutely killed me.
As a person who has played Skyrim dozens of starts & maybe finished three times, I can with confidence say that even with the most advanced comprehension of inventory management & loot management, that encumbrance should be an optional feature. Especially considering that even I who play with encumbrance on have mods to get rid of weight of most ores ingots, ingredients & potions.
At this point I'd be confused if Bethesda launched a game without game breaking bugs. This would be one of those tests that I'd take to make sure I'm not in a simulation or in an alternate universe, or timeline, or anything other than this reality.
The setup for the ore joke was comedy gold.
9:48 I felt this way playing Horizon Forbidden West. So many skills you had in the first game were just removed or hidden for no real reason. Example: Overriding machines for an infinite duration requires a specific armor in one of the last towns in the game when in the first game you could unlock it from following a single skill tree in less than 4 hours of playtime
If the problem is too much inventory items, the solution imo isn't limiting the inventory space. It's giving us less items to pick up in the first place. I really dread sorting through trash to figure out what i need and what i can sell. I really love when games only let me pick up things that are useful
So you want fewer decisions and less skill in a game.
Sorting your inventory and picking through junk is not a skill.
@@RobBCactive The idea is that rather than dropping a mountain of trash with a gem in the middle, skip all the trash and just drop the gem. Maybe drop the cash value of the mountain of trash in actual cash, rather than garbage you need to kill the pacing to go and sell.
@@RobBCactive found the chartered accountant
That's why Dishonoured and other immersive sims feel so much more liberating. In Dishonoured, you just have health, manna, ammo and tools, and they each have a limited number you can carry. This allows the levels to be designed around a reasonable limitation of useful tools/weapon uses which forces the player to navigate the levels creatively and skilfully, and use their limited inventory more effectively.
Encumbrance itself isn't bad it's just implemented in a lazy way a lot of the time. There are quite a few games (think grid style inventories in Deus Ex and RE4) where being able to pick up absolutely everything would make the game too easy. It can also take away interesting decisions like taking a large weapon at the cost of other supplies. There is a way to do inventory management correctly.
Yes. Encumbrance works alongside survival mechanics, but it's bloody frustrating in a game where looting is part of the gameplay loop.
@@peterclarke7240 I think it's all down to implementation. There are a lot of management heavy games that people enjoy because they're management heavy. I'm all for options that allow players to tweak things how they see fit but removing any management system from a game players find annoying is going to result in games not even having health bars because dying is annoying.
@@snowxboarderxljsIn fairness, the players that don't want management heavy gameplay won't play games focused on management. JSS might be complaining about encumbrance en masse, but notably when she calls out specific examples *none* are games that benefit from it. The encumbrance mechanic should contribute to gameplay, whereas in some of these blockbusters that include it out of habit or to tick a feature on a list it feels like it's actively working against you. For example, I quite enjoy resource management in games like Minecraft because that's what the game is about (particularly modded), but it was a tedious pain in Horizon Zero Dawn even though it was much simpler, because it got in the way and didn't even balance the game in most instances.
@@bosstowndynamics5488Counterpoint: there is a paragraph on how Torchlight handles this mechanic in a positive way.
In a game like Resident Evil and other survival horror, it's a balancing tool to let them be more generous with player toys since they can only carry so many, and a playstyle choice because you have to balance utility, healing, and ammo. In a game like Darkest Dungeon, it gives some risk versus reward of taking items in and also blocks the player's need to maximise loot in a game that punishes that instinct. In a game like This War of Mine, it forces you to decide what you need the most to keep going another night to make you feel good or bad depending on how right you got it.
In a Bethesda game it... well.
i think encumberance and weight should be a system reserved for something like a hardcore/ironman/realism mode. same for weapon durablity. make it an option if you want it, not a literal burden on every player.
Yeah in those types of games the micromanagement of items is part of the fun. Every new thing you find is a decision
Weapon Durability makes sense in a Post apocalyptic world like in Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas (By Obsidian, but using the gamebyro engine). While the originals didn't have that system, giving use to older weapons to repair current ones, and rare items having some risk/reward to using them.
@@austemousprime
Plus it gives an extra use for weapons looted off of enemies, instead of becoming vendor trash or just left behind.
Or - or we go with options beyond that, start with "Let me carry everything" next step is "Super strength" where as long as you don't try to pick up a statue or otherwise have a bag with 100 hammers you probably aren't affected followed by "Lifter" where you carry about 2-4x what you otherwise would be able to carry "Realistic" you can guess that one and "Wimp" Where you carry 1/4-1/2 what you would otherwize be able to carry
@@atticusshadowmore3263 Wait what? I've played games before, hell, I run a MUD which DOES have weight limits for your inventory depending on your strength, BUUUUT! This is NOT supposed to be fun in the slightest. To the contrary, it's supposed to artificially slow your progress down, and perhaps, sometimes, force you to go back, store your good shit (which you can't use yet because it's too high level, stuff like that), sell other shit, then come back and face the same monsters again. It is a time waster. That was the standard in the early 90s text-based Internet. Then Ultima Online came out, then World of Warcraft came out and wiped us out (by replacing our lovingly written stories and descriptions with cheap animations), but this stuff never changed, apparently.
But I'm surprised TRRRRIPLE A single player games keep doing this. Not just doing this, but doing this soooo bad. I don't play Bethesda games (but I'm considering Starfield in 2024 when it gets patched and on sale) but I've played Cyberpunk, thankfully someone found a vending machine exploit which removed the useless grind. And even in that game I was going back to the apartment to store some stupid pants or jacket in my closet, which, turns out, never had ANY role and I could have just burnt it. But you never know! Eventually there's a whole ecosystem of websites which whole purpose is to serve you ads before telling you if what you found is good or useless. Because the game won't tell you, while having limits on what you can carry! (And of course in a game like Cyberpunk, you can have "common" item being 100x more useful than something "epic".)
And the worst offender in this category was Horizon Zero Dawn! OMG how idiotic that was! There's 100 different components you can carry multiples of in a single slot, you have 100 inventory spots, random NPCs want to have component 37, 71 and 13 to give you something, you never know what they will want. So you have an inventory of EVERYTHING in the game, dropping useful resources, keeping at most 5 of each one, just to keep 100 UNIQUE items JUST IN CASE. WTF was that game!
(No, in my MUD you won't even hit the carrying weight limit until you're like level 20, even if you never train strength. Yes, if you can't carry something, you don't have to drop or destroy it, you can simply teleport it to the city. The difference from what Steph shown in BG3 is that my implementation puts it in a donation box which anyone else can access, so people can just take stuff from there and sell in the market before you get back. In 2023 of course there's rarely more than one player playing, so it's single player dungeon now, so apparently I have the BG3 system for ~25 years ;))
I like playing survival mode/good survival games so encumbrances when done well is important, but it should never punish you, it should make you value things and reward you.
And it really shouldn’t be a paywall solution, I’ll mod a backpack in before I’ll buy one.
But in these scenarios it belongs, because I turned my game into a “eat three cans of food a day” simulator with illness, sleep, and water drinking. In a much more casual game mode they don’t need to be nearly as harsh on the bag limits.
My biggest issue with the game is the blending of "quality of life" skills and "build defining skills". If you're going to give the player limited skill points to spend on things, those things should represent meaningful choices about how you intend to play. When you mix in skills that ANY player would need it makes things get stupid really quick. A lot of games do this with crafting skills where you pick between a point in a useful combat skill or that same point in crafting leading to everyone not doing any crafting until they've maxed everything else at the very end of the game or if it be an MMO style game, just making a crafting mule character to craft items for your actual character. "quality of life" skills should either just be the games baseline (like Sterling suggests) or automatically level up with each level letting your spend your skill point on actual build defining skills, or at worst have a parallel skill system where every level you get a point for your build and one for quality of life/crafting type skills so you never feel like you're sacrificing the fun skills for the banal ones.
As for realism, I agree but would also say that while games should take realism as a goal and chuck it out, intuitiveness should not be. It's realistic that firearms need to be reloaded but I don't think it hurts a game if they just don't need to be. However there is an intuitive sense of what a firearm does and is for that should be adhered to. If your shotgun is more useful as a bludgeon than a gun then it's not intuitive and doesn't matter if it's realistic or not. Same with swapping armor mid sword fight. I don't care that it's unrealistic. I care that a player intuiting the implications of weapons and armor on a game system wouldn't think that swapping armor mid sword fight would even be a sensible thing to do. If game designers INTEND that to be a sensible thing they need to make that swap not be armor and instead be an enchantment or combat stance or whatever. It's not about a game's realism, it's about the "readability" of the systems at play.
I have kind of a similar problem in Monster Hunter, where all the meta builds are totally clogged up with skills that boost your damage, so you effectively can't use any defensive, healing, or quality of life skills because you'd be making every hunt 5% longer (and that adds up over a thousand hunts).
If it were me, I'd implement different shaped gem slots. Triangles would be for gems that give offensive skills, squares for defensive skills, circles for healing-related skills, and diamonds for quality of life and miscellaneous. Most endgame armors would have maxed out triangle slots so everyone gets a universal baseline of damage skills that they can always fit. Pretty much everyone wants to have good damage, but the choice between more defense, more healing, and more quality of life I could see being a lot more subjective.
My case for Encumbrance: it's meant as a limiter. Just like there are costs and benefits to going with a certain weapon or armor builds, the encumbrance limits are there as a cost for certain playstyles. This isn't always implemented WELL, and it does sound like Starfield has it's balance way off. But I also wouldn't say it would be better gone from something like BG3. I routinely have Karlach or Lae'zel carrying a whole ass explosive barrel as a reserve surprise for tough fights. But this comes with the cost of eating up 40 lbs of their carrying capacity. If I could just have infinite barrels in their inventory, it would be less fun.
I will say, I've seen some novel concepts for encumbrance/inventory limits in some TTRPGs that might be more engaging as a system without being a pain in the ass. A more simple one is Pathfinder 2E/Starfinder's method where they really only care about how many BIG things you're carrying. So it's easier to carry all your resource and trash, but still limited on how much GEAR you are bringing with you.
The other end is Blades in the Dark. Their system wouldn't be very applicable to Starfield, since it is a harvesting style game. But could work with plenty of others. And they basically use a shrodinger's cat kind of logic. Any given character will have [X] things in their kit, but what SPECIFIC things are left unknown until the moment you encounter something that might need a tool. So you didn't PLAN on bringing your thieves tools, but then you found a lock and said "yeah, time for thieves tools". The primary limit is what your character's specific skill set and role are.
Solasta also had an interesting solution that they managed in-universe. Early on you set up a contract with the Scavenger's Guild, and they basically go around and pick up all the trash loot FOR you after any given mission/encounter, and then sell off anything you don't want.
My only exception to the encumbrance is survival games. I’ve been playing Valheim a lot and switching between exploration and scavenging is part of the game. They have lots of different things can help with encumbrance and makes it feels like a fun experience to prepare for an item run.
in the fallout games when i would get overloaded i would carry around a severed limb as my unlimited storage
Encumbrance is a shoddy fix to a common problem, hoarding. But instead of fixing the hoarding issues with proper tools, they just penalize the players instead.
literally just gotta add in some kind of searchable storage with decent filtering options and they can let you hoard to your hearts content but they won't cause they're dumb and won't do new things cause new=risky to their rotted corpo brains.
@@batt3ryac1dI can understand how it started back in the SNES era. Memory was limited, and so you had to limit how big inventories got to compress that data. But in modern day, where games can be 50 GB+ memory is no longer a limitation that they must work under, and so there is no use for it anymore.
Yes! the solution is to have LESS to take in the first place. These games are smattered with junk you don't need for the sake of content.
@@bobmcbobbington9220 no I wanna hoard 999000000099999 screws and plates and scales and microscopes and stimpacks
@bobmcbobbington9220 the proper solution is to have a fixed inventory slot for each item in the game. And then allow like 100 of that item and auto discard the excess. This is how FF8 does it, and limited inventory is not among the many criticisms I've heard about the game.
I think Mass Effect had decent encumbrance mechanics. Each weapon had its own weight stats and you can use any weapon you want but have to many weapons and you have slower ability cool downs.
And that's part of why Mass Effect is undefeated as the space RPG.
Mass Effect 1 is probably my favorite game of all time tbh
I'm having flashbacks to ME1 and time spent in the lockers. Never mention that again!
@shis1988 mass effect is not an RPG lmao play some actual RPGs for once
Agree! Although i think its different from encumberance b/c it doesnt relate to inventory at all. You can pick up everything. Its just about weight of weapons vs cooldown speed. If picking up items increased weight and increased your cooldown time, that would be super annoying
0:11 RTGame has corrupted my mind. Whenever I hear Country Roads I just think of the apocalypse…
The best inventory system to date is that of the 2000 game Deus Ex. They somehow managed to give the inventory management some gameplay elements making it actual fun (fun? Crazy right?) Because the inventory is a grid with squares and each item was made of of a number of them in different shapes. So there is a bit of a puzzle element involved and being clever about it can actually get you one or two squares extra. Plus there are the one square items, usually the consumables that you can use to fill up any holes you have on that grid. They also use it for balancing and force you to make a choice: Really powerful weapons like the rocket launcher take up a lot of space so it really is a trade off keeping one of those on you. Loot hoarding is completely absent, everything you find is something thats useful in some way, or completely useless and the tedious endless collecting to vendor it later just wasnt a thing.
How did that ever even become a thing? Who likes that? Who actually ever thought it is fun after completing a level and killing all the bad guys, you have to backtrack through the entire thing and click on highlighted glowy things? And not because you are searching for something, like a hidden quest item, but just to collect gold? Why not just give that gold to me as a mission reward? Why do I have to scrape together my reward from the ground like some god damn animal? I guess its just a very lazy excuse for "content". Zelda never needed that. You do the dungeon, you get the item, and use that item in creative ways in the next dungeon. How come 20-30 year old rpg's get this completely right and why are we stuck with this mindless cynical hoarding and pathetic excuse for gameplay? I already got my actual job that provides me with more than enough of that shit.
From Software realized encumbrance was a problem: After Demons Souls featured a carry weight, all the future games that followed did away with the system, so weight only matters for the gear you actually equip and you can easily loot everything you come across (The biggest problem for Demons was specifically the Brushwood armor set: anything you didn't have the carry capacity for was dropped automatically, and that armor was basically the precursor to Havels. So if you couldn't carry it, it was dropped, and would be gone by the time you returned from the item storage)
Looking forward to playing this game in about 5 years when it's ready.
"I can't carry any ore" is an absolute banger if a pun, not gonna lie.
I mean, I love your videos Steph, have for years, but I seldom actually burst out laughing.
I totally agree with jimmy, encumbrance was so annoying. I would stop picking up things. Even with 40 percent more carry capacity, I d still pick up things and be like ...oh no....I hope it doesn't put me over the weight limit.
Honestly, hard disagree on signalis. If you treat it like a puzzle I found it really engaging. It forced me to constantly be making gameplay decisions that other games just hadn't. Figuring out the minimum possible amount of equipment I needed to handle upcoming rooms. being forced to only carry things that I would actually use en route so the inventory space was clear when I found new equipment. Not bringing any healing with me and immediately using the heals I find. Intricately planning out my route to be as efficient as possible because every time I pass through a room I thought I cleared there's a chance that a downed monster gets up again. Honestly, if you're smart, there's barely any backtracking to pick things up because you can just grab everything while you're puzzle solving. It really forces you to play it differently than you would most other games. There are some changes that I think would streamline the game a little, like having the flashlight and the eye be permanent upgrades like the radio. But I think too much more than that and the game would lose something that makes it unique. Though I also realize I'm the minority in this opinion.
you're not the minority, other wise inventory management wouldnt be a thing in most games.
routing is huge for inventory management type survival horror games, both inventory management and routing don't have much of a point without one or the other, they work well together, although the whole ferrying things to storage might be something that can be done better, i think the point should be that you shouldn't be hoarding things anyway because you'll never use it all, so maybe even the storage should be small instead of huge or infinite, so the focus is actually on surviving in the moment instead of hoarding things for the future, using the items instead of storing them for later should be better for gameplay, although the player may feel it is a waste
For real, making the flashlight and camera take up inventory space is such a weird decision, and the fact you have to unequip them just to use a stun baton is very counterintuitive especially in pitch black rooms where the flashlight is mandatory. And let's not forget that the camera is rendered obsolete by simply taking a screenshot...no downside to making them function much the radio.
I love that BG3 has shined a light on all the seams of the AAA industry and shown us what a game could be if not for corporate greed. Everything else is embarrassing by comparison and they know it.
BG3 is fucking terrible though. Its bottom of the gutter shite that should never have been released in the state it was in
@@All-Outta-Bubblegum Literally everyone disagrees with that opinion
The entire video was about encumbrance. BG3 honestly isn't a great comparison because encumbrance can still be a nuisance there. There are many rpgs without encumbrance entirely.
without corporate greed from hasbro? one of the greediest companies out there?
@@supergold9390 You can send everything to camp, with unlimited storage without having to use a loading screen at all in BG3. So, yeah I'd say he's got it spot on with BG3 showing how to do it. The only way you're struggling with encumbrance in BG3 is if your brain is too encumbered to figure out how to push shift, click 3 times and warp your inventory into the camp storage box.
In defense of Resident Evil’s inventory management, it pretty much comes down to the management being a puzzle. If you’re blowing away zombies to make running back to the item box easier, you’re probably going to run out of ammo for the boss fights. You need to choose which monsters you down to ease the burden of going back without potentially soft-locking yourself. The biggest problem with this, besides the potential for a soft -lock in the first place, is when you go somewhere on a first play through without the required item then you have to go back and get the item that you may not have known you needed. But personally speaking, once I’ve had the initial run under my belt, I do enjoy needing to work out what items I need to get and what I can afford to bring with to get those items to do it in the most efficient way possible.
When it comes to Bethesda games however, there really is no justifiable reason to include a carry capacity. There’s no substantial amount of pre-planning that goes into a dungeon crawl in those game to make you consider what you can afford to bring with and what needs to stay behind. Never mind the fact that looting everything of value in most given dungeons is going to bring you from 0 to over encumbered anyway.
I feel like only the first completely blind playthrough with a game like resident evil is the most genuine experience and having to replay the game to enjoy it more by not having the game screw you over by not coincidentally making the right decision is a bit bad.
It truely wouldn't be that bad to have metaphorical keys not take up inventory space right?
@@jacob-2271That’s definitely a good counterpoint. I guess I could point out that in 1&2 playing with Jill or Claire respectively _mitigates_ the problem by giving the player a lock pick and more inventory space, but I’ll accept that simply mitigating the problem won’t be enough for everyone.
I don’t have a definitive answer to the issue, but it’s not something that I’ve considered. If they put their mind to it, maybe someone could think of a way to balance holding unlimited key items against holding limited weapons, ammo and healing items.
And as much as it sucks in a blind play through, I think there still needs to be the possibility of getting somewhere only to realize there’s a key that you’ll still need to find, but I would agree that upon finding said key the player shouldn’t be punished for having a full inventory.
Also bare in mind that if the game is well designed, the player should be shown what keys they need to collect before they’ll actually need said keys, or the keys should be nearby once you need them. I’m not going to advocate for having a five mile long hallway filled with powerful respawning monsters only to reach the far end and realize you need to go all the way back to find a meticulously hidden, one use key on the other side of the map. Think of the card suit keys in RE2. You would come across heart, diamond, club and spade locks before you had to enter the rooms they were locking, so you would know what to be looking for to open those doors and wouldn’t be blindsided for not having them as soon as you could use them. Then once you reached the point where you need the sewer medallions, the medallions were relatively close by and didn’t need excessive backtracking to get. Still needing to find the medallions but not having to backtrack to an item box because I didn’t know I was going to need open slots to pick them up would be appreciated.
"Bethesda's most polished game to date"
Low bar to set, but okay.
Solasta did a decent one too: There's a guild that cleans up the battlefield after you go through. You have limited space, but you only need to pick up the useful stuff. The scavs'll come and sell all the garbage for you (and take a cut for themselves, but oh well)
That's a fair one, like how some games have had an in inventory sell window that gives you less than standard price, but saves all the faffing around 😉
Not just that. Before selling the stuff off, they let you look through it, decide what you want to keep and what you want to sell. I actually got some stuff that I managed to miss in containers like that. Oh, and they also give you a better deal for it than if you were to sell it all in the shops. Basically, so far, this is the most convenient mechanic I have encountered in games like these.
ooooh, there's a scavenger's guild that sells the abandoned junk for you, but take their own cut?
That is actually some pretty phenomenal overbuilding on top of being a useful mechanic! :o
I get the Country Roads joke all too well, but I will always describe it as my trauma song 🤣 I lived in WV for several years, and this song is played/sung/performed constantly. It's sung more than the flipping national anthem, and is, for all intents and purposes, the state anthem and the anthem for any WV institution. I had to call the DMV during the pandemic, and the hold music was a terribly timed loop of Country Roads, where it restarted the song every 30 seconds, hard cut. I listened to that for over an hour. Mind-breaking stuff.
Steph's helium voice was SO adorable. I wish I could hear it all the time 🤣
I am not a common TH-cam commenter, but encumbrance is not an inherently bad mechanic.
It is just another mechanic to make you make decisions about what you care about. Take what you NEED, not pick up whatever you want to sell later.
The encumbrance cycle of dropping off stuff allows for downtime in the game, and cool-off periods from the core loop as well.
F:NV's Survival Mode adds weight to aid items and bullets, which forces you to decide what you NEED, and what is VALUABLE.
Encumbrance CAN be done badly, as mentioned Signalis has too small a limit. But that does not make an entire mechanic of play "bad".