It’s a debate as old as role-playing games themselves: should players have to deal with encumbrance?
The recent release of Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Bethesda’s Starfield have thrust the encumbrance debate back into the headlines, with both games employing a system that restricts how much stuff you can carry.
While each game employs systems and mechanics that let you carry more and more, it is inevitable that as a player, you’re going to have to spend a decent chunk of your time fussing with managing your character or characters’ carry weight limit.
In Starfield’s case, encumbrance is a big enough issue for some that they are willing to lose access to gaining achievements in order to increase the carry limit via console commands on PC. This in turn has made a mod designed to prevent the achievements from being disabled one of the most popular on NexusMods.
Encumbrance is supposed to provide a type of challenge, and realism. Though how realistic is carrying more than like, one extra weapon really? Also, it is a weird thing to get hung up on for “realism’s” sake. The best possible argument for encumbrance is forcing players to make choices. In roguelikes for example, you very often only get to choose from a limited number of rewards. In that sense it’s really fun, but you cannot go back on your choice. With encumbrance, if you must, you can keep all your rewards, but it’s just very tedious to do so. So instead of forcing the choice and creating dynamic gameplay, most likely you’re just forcing the player to do some tedious shit. Roguelikes deal with the hording mentality much better than a traditional RPG.
Another thing to note about encumbrance, is that there’s just so much random garbage you can pick up in these games. Someone else mentioned that in real table top rpg, you’re not picking 100 wheels of cheese cuz they might come in handy later. I think it’s honestly just filler content, and doesn’t really add to the game aside from the fact that if you couldn’t pick up that wheel of cheese, you’d feel slightly cheated. I wouldn’t call it lazy game development, but I think “loot” as a gameplay element has a lot of evolving to do. It feels good to get loot, but so often it has to be padded out to feel like you’re actually getting anything. You have to receive it often enough. It has to give some benefit or it just feels like window dressing. That’s a fine line that very few games handle very well at all.
I think it would be interesting to be able to hire a merchant NPC to loot for you. You’d lose a bit of the value (say, half), but the merchant would reinvest those profits to carry better items, and they’d give you a discount.
You’d have an incentive to look through the loot to take what you want, as well as an incentive to ignore the stuff you don’t. That way you get the immersiveness of an encumbrance system, without most of the tedium.
Right, at the very least it’d add a gameplay element to the tedium. Or maybe your character refuses to pick up random shit unless they have the right abilities/training. Or like in skyrim where you can’t see the characteristics of certain plants you pick up until you’ve leveled up in a certain field enough, but instead of not showing the alchemical properties, the item itself isn’t fully detailed - like it’ll just look like a generic mushroom, or a generic sword/gun/etc. And a player with very high skills in certain areas would unlock different characteristics of that item.
It depends on the kind of tabletop rpg. In old school ones you may have a cart and hireling to carry this stuff, so you would definitely take those cheese wheels to sell them or for food to your group that’s not so small anymore. Logistic was part of the game. But a part that’s easily lost depending on how you play.
Honestly, realism justifications for encumbrance outside of survival-type games where basic biological needs are the core gameplay loop have always been silly to me… but the latter one about wheels of cheese rings true.
To me the argument is “what does optimal play look like”? Without encumbrance, there’s no reason not to pick up every wheel of cheese, so optimal play is to pick up every wheel of cheese, which is tedious and dumb. But with encumbrance, every wheel of cheese becomes a tedious decision, and completionist-optimal play is to burn endless time ferrying stuff to the shops or storage or whatever. But as you said, making every wheel of cheese not something you can pick up breaks immersion.
So what’s the compromise that actually makes sense for the “wheel of cheese” problem? A realistic setting is cluttered with “slightly-useful” items. Don’t put so many “slightly-useful” items outside of settings with NPCs that will have realistic reactions to you stealing their stuff? But coding those realistic reactions (“uh, you’re The Savior, I guess you can steal all my food… a bit… okay that tears it call the guards!”) would be some more dev-work in these already-bloated projects.
But the problem still exists in hostile locales. A lived-in enemy camp is going to have store-rooms of “slightly useful” stuff. If the hero stops to raid the larder while massacring nameless Stormtroopers, is that a problem? I can see the immersion argument that “well, if you can, you probably should since you might need it and that breaks immersion” and therefore that justifies the encumbrance idea, but I also see Steph Sterling’s argument “this is just a game and I wanna!” And I have trouble defending realism in these games about butchering your way across the landscape without ever stopping to poop.
Exactly! It totally break the realism when your character doesn’t need regular bathroom breaks. That’s why I only play the sims.
The downside is with a realistic encumbrance system, you’d either:
A) Not be picking anything up, or:
B) Making so many milk runs your head will spin from the tedium of ferrying useless bullshit back and forth.
Being 70-80 hours into STARFIELD, there’s non-cheating ways to avoid the encumbrance penalty, such as the “Powered Assist” backpacks which lowers O2 / stamina consumption by 75% when overencumbered. You can also deposit your loot into your ship’s cargo bay and sell directly from it by pressing Q at any vendor.
In ITR/Into The Radius VR, a fully realistic military looter shooter survival horror like STALKER; I picked up and carried EVERYTHING, but through the use of an inane amount of utility items, such as a chest harness, backpack, lower back bags, leg bags, thigh bags, and so on. (My favorite thing to put in my belt bags was cake slices and energy drink cans, made for hilarious streaming content when you take a bite of cake in a dire situation)
I still spent like 20 real-life hours slogging knee deep through swamp to ferry back an entire inventory of artifacts worth 5K/ea.
So my takeaway is, people are gonna loot and hoard; if they do that, encourage it. If not, reward the player with more credits from missions and other things that don’t involve scraping and strip-mining every planet for every ounce of metal.
In TTRPGs encumbrance seems to be the #1 rule that players conveniently forget about and GMs only ever seem to bring up when they want to fuck with the players. It’s probably one of the more annoying, unexciting aspects of TTRPGs to keep track of. I like the approach that BG3 has taken, you essentially have an unlimited Camp inventory, but your personal inventory is limited. Is it realistic? No, absolutely not, but neither are Bags of Holding, which are basically a GM’s way of throwing up their hands to say, “Fuck it, I’m not dealing with this shit anymore.”
I’d guess less because they think it’s any kind of better to allow unlimited inventory than it is because manually tracking it on paper is tedious.
It’s not the same issue with a computer.
Absolutely, but video game designers actually amplify the issue by making so much useless shit able to be picked up and adding so many mechanics into a game, where as TTRPGs are often more focused. Starfield (or any bethesda game really) has hundreds of useless items that people can sell, random loot drops, and resources for multiple forms of crafting. It’s a fantasy future where we could just let folks “teleport” to a private satellite storage facility or something similar to a bag of holding. Instead we just make gamers focus on inventory management which I doubt anyone finds “fun”.
I think there’s a delicate balance and I don’t think we’ve hit it. I would love to see some data about how much time people spend doing inventory maintenance in the course of common RPGs. It’s one of those modern things like making expansive worlds without fast travel that just feels unnecessary.
It’s really not any different from the mechanic as it’s been used in previous Bethesda titles. The soft limit of depleting my oxygen meter rather than hobbling my speed is a little more forgiving, particularly if I’m still picking through a free fire zone.
And once I learned that I could sell to stores directly from my ship hold, my problems kinda dried up. It’s mostly learning what things in the field are worth hauling back to town when it’s not the apocalypse and duct tape just isn’t that special.
Absolutely, but you still have to learn that and it’s still work. Early on I had no idea how many credits “a lot”. Their defense/damage system is arguably unnecessarily complex in a way that adds to this. Do I need more corrosion protection, radiation, airborne, or thermal? Does it even matter?
Even with some of the advances, it still like an artificial problem that doesn’t actually make the game any better. It doesn’t really add any difficulty or challenge, and it’s certainly not “fun”. There’s still a lot of streamlining they could do.
You have no idea how long I kept rope in my inventory in BG3 thinking it’d actually be of use one day.
It depends. There’s a fine line between managing logistic and soreadsheet grade chores. Managing logistic can be interesting and it can bring a lot to the game. But if it is merely checking boxes and numbers on a spreadsheet it’s a chore that’s better left out of the game.
Zelda has a good system for this. You need to decide which weapons, shields, and bows you keep, but you have otherwise unlimited storage. It adds a degree of realism and management, without negatively impacting the gameplay.
Jim Sterling release a video on this earlier this week
Probably just a coincidence…Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/9KMbTUwpwbI?si=dJ5LyfMeEg5Ts74M
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Holy shit I’m out of the loop. With as much respect as is possible has Jim sterling always been a woman? Like seriously I’ve seen the name a TON, but never actually watched a video lol
Now, on-topic, yeah, I agree with 100% of what she said, and said word for word some of the stuff she did just earlier today lol.
No she used to be a man. I used to watch his old videos on YouTube, and only a few month ago i remembered it, and looked if he had a podcast, so i started listening to the jimquisition podcasts and was really confused how he’s not in it. Only then they said James Stephanie Sterling i finnaly got it. She seems to do fine, she’s also a wrestler now.
Yeah I caught the introduction of “James Stephanie Sterling” and was like… -record skip- wait what? Not that it matters, just was a surprise, and I couldn’t find anything specific googling lol
“Add to Wares” and “Send to Camp” make encumbrance a non-issue on BG3
Just don’t carry every piece of trash you come across?
But credits tho.
Yeah! They make good for cleaning out NPCs who don’t have enough credits to buy the expensive stuff but enough credits to be the useless junk.
Then don’t clutter my world with infinite foam cups literally everywhere highlighted with the scanner drawing my attention and distracting me so I’ll inevitably pick it up,just for it to be something that’s just going to get dumped into a container or an npc?
If you want every piece of clutter in your game to be lootable, every piece of clutter in your game will be looted, if only to get it out of the way.
But want to pick up useless glob of slime nr. 385!!!
Don’t riddle your game with trash and call it gameplay
No one called it gameplay. It’s simply immersion.
It’s literally 100% on the gamer if they insist on carrying every item they find. There isn’t even .00000000000000001% responsibility for the developer. Carry capacities are a mandatory part of good design.
Isn’t this just typical of pretty much every game of this type?
It’s part of the game style, is it not? Any action/RPG-type game I can think of has encumbrance as a mechanic, so I don’t see how this is something to write about.
My issue is, encumbrance is fine if it’s engaging. Limit me to a few weapons and pieces of armor. But if ALL of the junk is going to be lootable, then make it 1. Worthwhile and 2. Not a hassle. If you give me a shiny, so help me imma loot it, and if it’s actual trash, that’s just a big waste of time and disappointing
I don’t disagree.
Just saying I pretty much expect it from this type of game.
Not really. Some have space-based inventory instead of encumbrance, some have no limit, and some don’t have many items to pick up.
Weight-based inventory is relatively rare in my experience, though it’s very common for Bethesda games.
Personally I think a good encumbrance system is a good thing in games. For example, look at the Demon’s Souls remake. You can carry as much adventuring gear (heals, grenades, etc) to make your life easier as you like, if you have the stats for it. And if you need to pick up a unique item that is beyond your limit, it can be sent to your stash, which is what the original was missing.
The alternative is to limit consumables, ammo etc to some arbitrary number. E.g. You can carry 5 heals and 5 throwing knives and 50 arrows. If you don’t want knives but want more heals? Fuck you.
I don’t mind the idea of an encumbrance system where it makes sense. Like, the idea of being able to carry whatever you want into combat feels obviously wrong to me, since you can just overwhelm any challenge with endless inventory - like you just grinded an endless supply of healing potions and smart-bombs. Encumbrance caused by your combat-relevant inventory creates the idea of a “build” of your character, it creates interesting decisions about which combat gear you’re going to keep available to roll with (or non-combat gear if your game’s core loop isn’t combat-driven).
Although I do see the argument that it shouldn’t be coupled to a weapon-durability system. I like weapon-durability as a way to make players fully explore all of the gear available instead of just getting “The Good One” and then never ever switching and making the optimal strategy super boring (yes, Steph Sterling, I’m That Guy) but it means working on the “build” of your character is constant fiddling and decision fatigue.
Either way, all that falls apart when it’s stuff you’re only carrying for saleable loot or for crafting materials. Unless you have an interesting and fun gameplay mechanic to provide supply-lines, that’s just adding tedium for the sake of realism. Yes, it’s not realistic that you can carry unlimited bricks, but taking that away doesn’t add anything interesting to the game, it just adds tedium.
Bethesda has been lowering the base carrying capacity for a while now. It was 300 in Skyrim. 200 in Fallout 4 I think. Around 100-150ish in 76. I can see why it’s impacting people so much. Even more so when your ships carrying capacity is also limited.
