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.
“Add to Wares” and “Send to Camp” make encumbrance a non-issue on BG3
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
