Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 both weigh the player down with encumbrance. Love it or hate it, it seems like it's here to stay.
Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 Revive Age-Old RPG Debate About Encumbrance - IGN
3 years ago by stopthatgirl7 to c/gaming
Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 both weigh the player down with encumbrance. Love it or hate it, it seems like it's here to stay.
I love durability systems when they’re done well such as in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. In these rare games, the designers have clearly kept the durability system as part of a carefully designed gear economy. Part of the intended difficulty of these games is learning to improvise and not relying on a singular weapon or tactic. The action doesn’t stop when your sword breaks. It often becomes more frantic and desperate unless the player has planned accordingly, and then they can feel rewarded for proper preparation. In other words, proper implementation tends to look much more like Resident Evil resource management than the classic Diablo money sink.
Unfortunately, most games do not justify these systems. In Dark Souls, Skyrim, old Diablo, and countless others, the durability system is more of a grindy chore that forces the action to stop whenever the player has to “return to town” to repair their stuff. The player dreads their gear breaking not because it’ll happen in the heat of action, but because they have to basically babysit their gear and put all action on hold while they regularly check their gear’s “health” and occasionally focus on getting it repaired.
You’re absolutely right! Been a long time since I played either and conflated the two. I should probably play them again, now that I think about it.
That it kind of the thing tho, if you just violently smash your sword around, it's gonna break. Like katanas are pretty flimsy and a german greatsword for example could just snap it off. Let's take elden ring for example and you use your sword to find an invisible wall, that's terrible for a sword and it would go to shit really quick. So i guess in a way it's realistic. But i really don't like it when games do that. All it does for me is that i'm never going to use the nice things in the game, because they break, then you need a new one or repair it or whatever.
I'm fine with encumbrance... especially in these Bethesda games. All they do is litter the world with garbage for the player to pick up and carry around for no reason other than make the game longer.
Well, a sword is probably not gonna break after striking someone's armor 7 times, but it is gonna get uselessly dull quicker than you'd imagine. Professional chefs sharpen their knives once a month or two, and that's modern steel mostly being used against softer stuff without a lot of force. Afaik, historically soldiers did re-sharpen their blades after every battle because one battle was all it took to dull a blade made of medieval era materials.
Do professional chefs really sharpen their knives that infrequently? When I worked at a pizza shop we sharpened that cheap chef's knife like every day. Maybe high end restaurants have much better steel? That seems pretty infrequent for the amount of use it gets though.
There are two kinds of "sharpening" you do: real sharpening with a whetstone, and honing with a honing rod. The latter is something you should do very often, the earlier shouldn't be necessary daily or even weekly.
BOTW/TOTK Zelda games are the only ones that get it right. It’s a core game mechanic and they give you enough weapons to have fun with it.
Eh. Can't say I had fun watching my higher end weapon break on the stronger, bullet sponge enemies later on, and replacing it with a crappy short swords that do barely any damage. ToTK though was certainly better thanks to fusion.
It was ok early game, but later it got super annoying for me. I played it on PC so I used a program that edited the durability for the items and made them and impossible value.
encumbrance is a completely reasonable mechanic to stop a player from carrying around 18 metric tons of items
Yes, encumbrance does stop a player from carrying a lot of inventory.
But my question is, why do we want to limit that behavior? Is the concept of living some items behind fun? Is forcing the player to make multiple runs to the same area to get everything interesting gamplay?
Personally I am getting pretty tired of doing inventory management every 5 minutes in BG3. It's not as tiring as some other games, but it feels more like a chore than gameplay.
because people have a limited amount of weight they can carry
there is an argument to be made about more elegant execution and better balance but I think it's silly to disregard the mechanic as a whole
this is just an example, and the effects on gameplay would vary widely depending on the genre, but just imagine if Tarkov had unlimited inventory space
you should have to risk multiple trips back and forth in dangerous areas if you want more loot, or otherwise find a way to increase efficiency such as using vehicles. If developers don't add ways of increasing efficiency or enjoyability, then the real issue lies in the execution of the mechanic, not the existence of the mechanic itself
because people have a limited amount of weight they can carry
People need to use the bathroom reguarly, but that's not an interesting game mechanic. So of course it's left out. Especially in the case of baulders gate or starfield, "realism" has entirely gone out the window when we are elves, wizards and space ship captains.
And as it should be! The real world sucks, people play games for fun. I'm just not sure where the fun is with encumbrance, just like I wouldn't find to stop at the bathroom way point every few ingame hours very much fun either.
inventory capacity directly relates to economic balance in most games, as opposed to bathroom and meal breaks which don't add to the gameplay loop in a positive way.
being limited by carry capacity isn't supposed to be fun in itself, it's meant to bring realism and balance to the economy. say you have to return to town to sell items, but you find a cool valuable sword along the way; you might have to sacrifice something of lower value like a consumable in order to fit everything in your pack. the sacrifice brings a level of adversity and decision making to the game, instead of a limitless mary sue character who mindlessly presses "loot all" and "sell all".
also, fantasy games are still realistic in that they follow the rules of their own universe. In the baldur's gate universe, elves and magic are commonplace, but there's no "canon" reason people should have unlimited carry weight or infinite pockets. If mages were able to power a self-propelled wagon which carries your items, then THAT would make sense, but an endless list of items hidden away in an inventory GUI kinda brings you away from the immersion, even if the game's premise isn't set in reality
If you give me inventory space enough to carry 18 metric tons but then make it so I can't move, that's not reasonable. Reasonable would be to limit the number of items I can carry and/or limit inventory item stack sizes.
The question revolves around reasonableness. You've designed a storage mechanism (inventory) so you have a mechanism in place to limit what players carry. Sure. You've created a stack mechanism to keep like items together in your storage mechanism because people will bitch about having 10 bobby pins taking up all your inventory space. Okay. Now you introduce weight as another limiting factor and slow them down when they already have to make multiple trips...unreasonable.
I do not understand how you are conceiving of encumbrance as another layer on top of inventory slots instead of an alternative to it.
If encumbrance and inventory slots were layered atop each other, there should be a state where you have used up all available slots while still having remaining capacity in encumbrance: a thing that never happens. I have never seen a game with encumbrance reach this state except maybe Soulsbournes and that's more about stat-gating equipment you can use than preventing players from carrying more things.
I don't mind encumbrance, unless it's painfully low. Stalker is a bit annoying with it, though it makes sense. Then when it's so high it becomes a non issue is also annoying because eventually I hit the cap. The one in bg3 is fine with me. I tend to choose my companions to carry specific items, so it's evenly spread out. Then I take breaks to go sell off my junk, usually every few in game days. I think I gave only hit cap once, I gave Karlach all the weapons I find and she was overloaded. I don't mind encumbrance most of the time.
Actually I think I'm the opposite. I hate encumbrance more when it's massive. When I played survival mode in Fallout NV, I found it so much more fun to only pick up essential items. I would commonly pick up water bottles and food instead of valuable weapons or ammo. I was usually way under my low encumbrance because I had a mindset switch to only pick up stuff that will allow me to survive the desert.
I'm a hoarder in these games. If I can store all my stuff back at my base like in Fallout 4 and Skyrim then I'm happy. As long as they don't pull the Fallout 76 stunt where you need to pay monthly for extra storage.
I've just found out you don't even need to build an outpost. Buy a home and you can decorate it with hundreds of storage crates (150 mass/crate)
That doesn't really matter honestly, you can build all of the stations you need and then pick up your resources. Also I believe there's some shenanigans to be done with outpost links, haven't tried to figure that out yet.
That said, you don't even need to build an outpost or buy a home to do this, the game gives you the best option right away. When you're shown to your room on the 2nd floor in Constellation there is a safe with unlimited inventory space. Run upstairs, grab 2k resources, run downstairs, craft your stuff, drop it off upstairs before you go. If crafting is a major part of your gameplay then this is really the best option I've found. And well, crafting doesn't need to be a large part of gameplay at all if you don't want it to be.
The game has done a decent job at having your prioritize certain things. If you want to have 1k+ cargo, you can but you'll give up some amenities - a ship I found has great storage space but has no shielding or weapons (and I think, not even a capability for it? TBD still), so even though it can carry everything I want it is more dangerous.
It seems like the idea is that I can put my storage into a home base (be it Lodge, Outpost, or home), show up, craft whatever, drop off whatever else, and then continue on my way. The home in Akila city is cool but far, so def not ideal for quickly transferring and collecting resources to craft, but outposts and The Lodge are pretty reasonable.
BG3 is easy, pick up everything you send and pass it to Karlach and whoever else is in your party.
Starfield let’s you give some to a follower but not much, it feels like they don’t actually want you to loot in starfield. You can fix it with player.setav carryweight #### tho in seconds and bypass Bethesda’s poor game design
Because there was a Jimquisition video about this topic the other day so IGN decided to hop on and add nothing to the conversation.
I prefer no inventory or encumbrance but just collections. Perm objects once you collect you have it forever and if you get a new one it just auto converts to coins or whatnot and consumables you get a number in the collections and if it is 0 then you can't use it. Sure its not realistic that a character can carry tons of crap but they stick in magic chests or unlimited space motorcycle trunks or whatever anyway. Just pretend your character is only carrying the equiped items and every thing else is in the magic mcguffin that allows you to essentially carry around a bunch of crap but take the inventory management aspect out. I play to have fantasy and have fun. Not organize crap. I have to organize crap (or at least should) in real life.
And both games have mods to remove it. A non issue
"We don't have to release a good game, if players have problems just let them mod with the tools we didn't give them"
(not at all saying these two games are bad, or bad for encumbering though)
ampersandrew's point was much more relevant towards a non-issue. At least in BG3's case (can't speak for Starfield) the game was definitely made with encumbering in mind.
And both games have a strength stat to mitigate it. Additionally making it a non-issue.
Not everyone is playing on PC and can mod their games.
While I do think encumbrance in a Bethesda game is pretty pointless I do believe it serves a purpose in BG3. Barrels full of all sorts of liquids are extremely useful, their drawback is that they weigh a ton. Encumbrance exists to prevent you from being a barrelmancer. I think you can also pick up any chests, so you can just carry away all the chests you can't unlock and then break them somewhere safe (or move them to you lockpicking character etc).
One of my questions on Starfield - can I roleplay as a hoarder, picking up every possible piece of junk - cups, pencils, etc - and store it all in a couple of cabinets or containers as some kind of infinitely huge repo?
...because I swear to god, for whatever reason that seems to be my favorite part of Skyrim and Fallout 3 for whatever reason.
If that mechanic isn't in Starfield then I lose like half my motivation to play :)
Based on what I was reading last night, there's a chest in The Lodge basement that has unlimited storage space. The trick is, you just have to be able to get your stuff there.
Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't really have an encumbrance system. It has a "send to camp" button that basically negates 99% of that. Camp supplies? Send to camp. Bunch of valueable loot items you only intend on selling "pick up and add to wares" the "send to camp". When you're ready to sell things between adventuring shove it all in a backpack, give it to someone stronk, and teleport to a merchant.
@stopthatgirl7 Thanks, I hate it lol. I still loved both #baldursgate3 and #starfield but dislike the inventory busywork. Also the vendors have limited money to buy my loot. These games are retraining our old looting habits and I don't know if I like it.
I haven't played Starfield, but on Bg3 you can do a partial rest (not using any camp supplies) you can initiate this standing right in front of the vendor when you leave camp after the rest your vendor will have money again. You can repeat this until you run out of things to sell.
I’m a pack-rat in games and ive only hit the first (of three) stage of encumbrance two or three times in Baldur’s Gate and I’m in the final act. And my character is a bard with 8 strength so he has no muscles which means the lowest encumbrance threshold. I wouldn’t consider encumbrance even a little bit of a problem in BG3 since if you ever do become encumbered you can just move stuff from your player character to one of the NPCs used as a pack mule.
You can also send stuff from your bag directly to the camp chest without having to go there. On pc it's right click send to camp, on ps5 it's square button send to camp. I'm not sure if there is a limit as to how much you can send there i havent hit it yet if there is. You can access camp from anywhere but a red zone so no real reason to carry what you are not using.
go to feed...
go to feed...
What about gear durability? I hate that shit even more than I hate encumbrance.
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