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.
What about gear durability? I hate that shit even more than I hate encumbrance.
Yeah, encumbrance can be overcame but the durability thing is annoying. Especially when you can’t repair the gear.
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.
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.
Same. Like what kind of sword breaks after 3 uses.
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.
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 have never wished for encumbrance in a game that didn’t have it. I’ve only ever wished it was gone from those that do.
James Stephany Sterling
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)
I’m with you brosephina
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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.
