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Annoyed About: Action-RPG Inventories
Written by Alec Meer on July 7, 2008 at 11:10 pm.
It scares me how suggestible I can be. I worry that one day I’ll walk past a sign saying “heroin makes you big and strong!” and that’ll be it. Most recently, I saw all the Diablo III stuff and duly thought “durrrr I wud like 2 play dat”.
So I load up Diablo 1 (now almost unplayable in this day and age. While it was scarcely inventive as sequels go, the improvements Diablo II made to the formula can’t be overstated). I play some Mythos. Most of all, I play Titan Quest. Amusingly, my Steam friends list revealed that several people I know have also been playing Titan Quest lately. My, what a coinkydink.
I’d slaughtered my way through a good seven or eight hours’ worth of beastmen and harpies before I had one of those catch-yourself-in-the-mirror moments. What was I doing? Theoretically, I was killing an awful lot of monsters, big ol’ hero that I was. Actually, I was obsessively picking up shiny things from the ground until a number of small squares on my inventory screen were full up, teleporting back to town to sell said shinies, then repeating the process. This was not, I realised, making me a better person. I’ll stress that I’m fine with a few hours of mindless hacking, slashing and looting (though I’ll tire of it before too long), so my objection is not to the basic nature of these games. It’s an objection to the fact my hacking, slashing and looting is so regularly interrupted by thankless commuting. And lo, I became annoyed enough with both myself and the game(s) to make some sweeping generalisations. Not novel ones I’ll admit, but as we’re in digs-at-gaming-clichés mode today anyway… Whee!
Thus has it ever been, thus shall it always be. It’s how RPG inventory systems are – from Diablo to WoW to Deus Ex, it’s always about running out of little squares to keep stuff in. But while story/character-led RPGs tend to be a little more restrained in their loot/inventory treatment, often sensibly employing it to prevent players becoming overpowered, the pure-action likes of Diablo, Titan Quest, Mythos et al actively make storage restrictions an essential mechanic of the game. All that relentless dungeoneering is extended and broken up by regular return trips to the shops. You don’t have to to make ‘em, but oh you will, because you need that sweet, sweet cash for better toys.
Some Diablolikes are more thoughtful than others, and occasional evolutions such as potion stacking have taken some of the pain away, but no-one seems in any hurry to replace the system. Instead, they’re going to increasingly ridiculous lengths to keep it on life-support. Titan Quest even has a button to automatically re-arrange items so they’re stacked as neatly as possible, maximising the available space. Well, I say automatic, but it doesn’t do it for you. You have to press a button every single time you want to rearrange, and half the time it doesn’t result in the right-shaped gap anyway, so you end up shuffling kit around manually. You should be saving the world from demons, but no, you’re mucking about with spreadsheets so that you’ve got space for an extra pair of bracers.
And Portals! I mean… These are worlds capable of incredible teleportation magic, the ability to travel instantly over miles of land, and what’s it used for? Shopping. Not banishing evil or revolutionising society or sticking one hand through so you can wave to your mum from the other side of the world. Just. Shopping.
Is it fun, this unending cycle of luggage-rearranging and travel? I don’t know that it is. It’s compelling for sure - but so’s watching all those coloured blocks dance around when your hard drive’s defragging itself. Creepily, from this compulsion has spun all manner of weird little tricks and delays that offer the illusion of personal achievement. They’re most common in MMOs – like buying additional slots in the WoW bank, or a 1000g backpack with two more spaces in it. Every time, I get this brief burst of pride. Yeah! I’ve won… more room! I haven’t achieved anything. All I’ve done is jump when the game says ‘jump.’
Would having more slots in my backpack make my game more enjoyable? No, it’d just make it slightly less annoying. Because that’s the horrible truth of it – WoW and cos’ inventories are deliberately designed to be annoying, so the games can forever hold the tempting carrot of less-annoying before you. Your reward for long adventures is convenience - but crucially never quite enough convenience.
Elsewhere, it’s less cynical but still this blindly accepted side-effect, like getting hangovers from booze or that horrible black bit at the bottom of bananas. No-one actually tries to do anything about it. Instead we get painkillers such as Dungeon Siege’s mule or Dungeon Runners’ Bling Gnome. They’re there to ease the burden of constant space-shortage, but in a way they just emphasise what a ridiculous, mechanical system it is. When a game offers its players so extreme a fix as a Gnome that can eat loot on the spot and crap out gold, it’s a pretty clear sign that a critical element of the game isn’t as fun as it could be. It is, of course, also a very canny way to lure free players into picking up the boxed copy.
If these sorts of lengths are being resorted to, why even try to mask that the inventory/shopping mechanics are totally artificial? Those Diablo-esque portals might as well just connect directly to the shopkeeper’s pockets, selling any item there and then with a right-click. That way you get to keep on killing and killing without interruption, without worrying that you’ve only got two squares left, so the next drop had better be a dagger or a bracelet and not a giant helmet adorned with 40 rhino horns. Inane, you say? No more so than the fact there’s a guy hanging around in a city somewhere with pockets full of infinite weapons, happy to buy infinitely more weapons from you (no matter that they’re dripping with bits of ogre brainmatter), even though quite clearly no other bugger in the entire world is buying anything from him.
Admittedly it’s part and parcel of the inherently statistical nature of RPGs, though it’s a deviation from the original D&D approach – where your character’s strength affects how much you can carry. That’s a take on the concept more common in RPGs that think beyond base hacking and slashing, and one I much prefer. It’s still a statistical limitation, but it at least has the pretence that this is something to do with real-world factors, not how many pixels are on the inventory screen or your character’s mystic inability to equip backpacks until he’s level 28. I oddly enjoy that Oblivion has a spell that temporarily increases your maximum carry weight. It was still artificial and ludicrous as all hell, but I chose to learn that spell, I chose when to use it, I elected when to augment it with a potion that increased the effect. It felt as though I was flexing the game and my character to my purposes, not simply being restricted by a cynical/pointless/archaic limitation on the developers’ part.
Of course, I’d still really, really like to see my character visibly carting around six sacks of potions and forty swords. That’s my idea of next-gen.
Oh God. Have I really written 800 words about how I’m annoyed by RPG inventories? I do get far too het up about these things. Don’t even get me started on how you have to buy weapons off your own employee in Mass Effect…
138__________________
Cigol says:
Please; email blizzard your suggestion above. Allowing us to sell directly from the inventory screen would save so much heartache. Maybe limit it to sales and force us back for purchases. I don’t know… just, do something because it’s a very laboured and annoying mechanic that I don’t even think adds to the addictiveness but takes away from it.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
MisterBritish says:
Perhaps gold (credits/caps etc) should be represented properly too? Maybe it would be entertaining to lug around your bodyweight in currency.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Whiskey Jak says:
Glad I ain’t alone on this one. Almost right after seeing the Diablo III footage I searched for my Diablo II copy, couldn’t find it, figured I “lost” it somewhere (more probable that my gf took the opportunity of us moving to a new house to “clean up” or something) and went directly to the Blizzard store and bought it back for 20$.
Two days later, seeing that Diablo II wouldn’t suffice, I went on my Steam account and bought Titan Gold Edition. I played the demo or something at work and liked it enough. I’m such a good little consumer… how depressing.
And I think I’ve played too much these last few days. My first reflex while reading this article was to put my pointer over the staff image to see what it was. Like I said… depressing.
As for Oblivion, my only grudge was when you see “You are over burdened” (or whatever the way that they phrase it).
July 7th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Dinger says:
Bah. The problem with RPG inventories isn’t that you have them; it’s that you have to have them. Most people in the world today end their lives poorer than the poorest RPG beggar, but they still have a place, however small, they can call their own. So why is it so tough for us? Why do we have to pack everything like were hopping the pond for the summer?
July 7th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
EyeMessiah says:
Like everything that sucks about rpgs, it has unfortunately become an integral part of the genre and will take a long time to shake off. Also like everything that sucks about RPGS it represents the things that were easy to port over from REAL RPGS at the expense of leaving the hard things (the R & the P most often) behind. So instead of immersing yourself in a captivating fantasy world where YOU are the hero, you get stuck with some crazy minigame where you have to find the optimal way to stack identical cloaks so when you go back to town you can desperately extract some meaning out from the lives of the 600 identical quill-boars\gnolls\murlocks you have spent the last two hours mercilessly killing.
I’m in despair! The world of repetitive number crunching CRPGS that miss the point of REAL RPGS has left me in despair!
July 7th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
capital L says:
I must admit I feel a guilty relief when a game just says “fuck it” and lets you carry a metric fuck-ton of stuff. KOTOR is a great example of this, and has the benefit of an easy excuse –the Jedi power to drag your shit along behind you! Freelancer had a maximum cargo capacity, but you could truck as many weapons as you wanted all over the universe, which was nice because it didn’t ruin the trade mechanic, but let you store up the better weapons until you could use them. Baldur’s Gate was an absolute prick about inventory management, but bags of holding seemed show up with increasing frequency as the infinity engine games progressed. (So, while I never did carry those fucking pants around in BG1, I had no problem trucking dead cats about in Icewind Dale II. Unprompted. Just in case, cause you never know right?!)
July 7th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Pidesco says:
You completely missed the point.
The problem isn’t the inventories, the problem is that Diablo style dungeon romps are all about getting loot and kitting yourself with it. They’re not about saving the world, exploring new lands, meeting new characters, playing through a story or even just killing monsters. Diablo style games are simply glorified loot collecting. For some reason this is incredibly addictive for many people, but the problem isn’t the inventories. If you took the inventory away Diablo would automatically crumble because there’d be nothing left to do.
RPG style inventories are fine as long as they aren’t all there is to the game.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Thrawny says:
I always liked the transmutation spell in Dungeon siege, instantly turns crap loot into gold!
July 7th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
PsyW says:
The Mass Effect quartermaster buys nonstandard weapons (i.e. NOT crappy hahne-kedar standard issue Alliance equipment) from his own money, to provide you and your team with better than normal equipment. Basically, Bioware needed to put a shop on the Normandy and this is a decent attempt at justifying it. Anyway, I maxed out my first character at 9,999,999 credits, so I think it’s fair I pay him for the weapons he paid for…
What you should really be complaining about is the stupid arbitrary 150 item limit after which you are forced to reduce new items to gel. Luckily, it’s quite easy to mod out in MEPC…
July 7th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
The Shed says:
Intense article man, well observed. These inventory things have been annoying since the beggining of time, but have simply been considered a necessary evil to any and all RPGers. Alone in the Dark had a good go at fixing the rubbish inventory, but in some ways it made things even more confusing (although overall I kinda preferred it; items became higher up on the list in terms of survival use rather than cost/value). Mass Effect had an alright inventory/ item use system, but they totally destroyed it with about a million items every few steps; leaving you to omni-gel any one’s that you had doubles of/ were of a lower grade. Man that was annoying. Cross-referencing them with your teammates too… Goddamnit.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Jochen Scheisse says:
And don’t forget the BLING GNOME!
July 7th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
TychoCelchuuu says:
Eastern Sun bumps up the Diablo II inventory to almost infinite or something, I believe. I guess hardcore players decided that the inventory filling minigame was not for them. I’m inclined to agree.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Jonas says:
To be fair though, the problem isn’t really that your inventory is limited, is it? After all, Halo’s or Call of Duty’s inventories are even more limited. The problem is that earning money is an important aspect of the gameplay, and the best and fastest way to do that is to pick up any useful stuff you find (which in these games is quite a truckload of items) and drag it back to town to sell it.
Note that you couldn’t sell items in Deus Ex, and so the inventory tetris just served as a decent way to restrict your inventory and make you pick the weapons you want to use.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Lh'owon says:
On this topic, this is what Fallout 3’s inventory will be like:
How does the inventory system work? Is it slot based? Or a never ending back pocket like with the original games?
It’s based on weight. No fiddling with slots. The Pip-Boy separates your items into categories for you – Weapons, Apparel, Aid, Misc, and Ammo. The “Aid” category is for things like meds, chems, food; anything that you can consume to modify stats. It also contains the books, as like Fallout 1, these are read/consumed and raise a skill (permanently). Also, Ammo has zero weight, as we didn’t want the player having to micromanage that aspect.
Bethesda agrees with you 
July 7th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Atacama says:
You only used 1 spell like that in Oblivion? By the time I got to level 15 or so I was continually stacking 3 of them plus a couple of capacity-upping items. Every time I upgraded I would take more strength to carry more loot. I don’t play RPGs in general so I found it pretty fun to have a game with such a strong loot mining component (I was saving up for all the battlehorn castle stuff…). But, if every game was like that I would completely lose interest.
The only inventory-related thing that’s really irritated me is playing all the way through STALKER without a single opportunity to use any of the rocket launchers I found, because they’re too heavy. I could have shot a mutant dog with one, but I wanted at least a helicopter to ’splode. Next time (and maybe with Clear Skies if it’s similar) I’m using a weight mod.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Paul S says:
Mass Effect is, IMO, a bad example as items are, generally speaking, pretty inconsequential. Yes, you need to zap up your armour and guns a little, but fiddly inventory management is entirely unecessary. The game just isn’t about that and if you ignore item upgrading / the compulsion to buy shiny new guns, the game really doesn’t punish you for it. It’s only really there as a concession to CRPG traditionalists who need their fiddling - do it if you like, but I ignored every shop in the game and had no trouble at all completing it.
It is weird though. The RPG should surely be about story and character (you know, “role playing) but as Alec said, it’s almost always about the clickathon and the Pokemon style obsessive collecting of slightly improved magic swords. This needs to stop, or at the very least, these games need to stop being called RPGs. Diablo is not an RPG. It’s an isometric fantasy action game. There is no roleplaying. At all. How the hell is it an RPG?
We need a new genre title. RPS - use your gaming big brains to create one!
Um. Please.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Mil says:
I agree that inventories as they currently exist in most CRPGs seem like a strange compromise. I could understand limiting the player to a couple of large weapons for plausibility reasons, but if you’re going to allow them to carry ten swords, why not make it one hundred or one thousand?
July 7th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
RichPowers says:
Diablo II, Titan Quest Gold, and Dungeon Siege II gather dust on my shelf because I’ve realized how much I hate collecting loot. The only thing more useless is collecting achievements in Team Fortress 2.
I’m disappointed by the number of RPG games that botch the item collection/management system. Making gold and acquiring items can, and should, be more interesting. At the very least, make transporting and selling more efficient.
Actually, I enjoyed gathering and selling cotton in Ultima Online. Yep, I would pick it in the fields surrounding Moonglow, load it into a pack mule, transfer it to boat, and sail to Britain where I could sell it in large quantities without flooding the market. (Screw portal traveling!) Roleplaying a merchant, doing my irrelevant part to globalize Britannia, was actually fun!
@Paul: The inventory system in Marvel Ultimate Alliance can also be totally ignored. At least some games give you the choice as to whether or not you want to screw around with items.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
yns88 says:
MisterBritish: Diablo 1 did that. Gold took up one slot in your inventory in stacks of 5000. So by the end of the game you either had half your inventory filled up, or rows of loot lined up the town square. There were some obvious problems with this: in order to buy anything expensive, you had to go and pick up all 15 piles of gold you had in town, and it ended up becoming hard to navigate without accidentally clicking on some gold. Not to mention the problems it had with multiplayer…
However, a better system is in most roguelikes, where each gold piece takes up a fraction of a pound in weight. Once it starts getting heavy, you’ve got to either stash it away somewhere or just spend it on something.
Also, like others have said, it’s really not the inventory that’s the problem; the inventory minigame is necessary in order to give the game any substance at all. That’s why you tend to only notice it so much in action RPGs, even though real RPGs usually have the same system.
Edit to Paul: The reason why Diablo is called an RPG is because it’s a descendant of the roguelike, which some consider to be an RPG. I personally would rather have all dungeon crawling games to be lumped into their own category; that way we won’t have all the genre-clashing that RPG fans get into.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Fede says:
The “cynical/pointless/archaic limitation”, as you call it, could also be an improvement. Let me make an example: Angband.
In Angband you have a fixed amout of inventory slots, because if you could take all the stuff you wanted you could escape from any situation.
So the choice to add the inventory limit comes from the fact that players should choose what they want to bring with them, and know they should avoid all things leading to a situation they can’t escape from.
This is not for saying that inventory limitations are always good, but to say that in some cases there might be a good reason for the inventory to be like that.
Oh, and could someone please tell me if the D&D approach is something like “STR decides how much you can carry”? Or (like in roguelikes) something like “STR decides how much weight you can carry”?
July 7th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Yes, quite clearly the looting & levelling is what really props Diablolikes up, but I suspect the loot-lust can still hold their players’ interest without requiring a bus trip home every ten minutes. I never want to go back to town - I’m always annoyed by the disruption of it and end up binning a load of stuff to delay it for as long as possible.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:00 am
yns88 says:
Fede: That is indeed the D&D approach. That’s why the Infinity Engine games give all characters the same limit to the number of items they can carry, but their max weight capacity is determined by STR.
An interesting variant is in the roguelike IVaN, where Arm Strength and Leg Strength are two different stats, and your Leg Strength mostly just determines your carrying capacity (which is incredibly important early on in the game, since just about any decent suit of armor will burden you down to exhaustion just by itself).
July 8th, 2008 at 12:05 am
Fede says:
yns88: I’ve heard about IVaN’s system, but I was wondering… couldn’t one simply get immFire resBlind and a huge amount of scrolls? Scrolls are light and if you can read them safely they should be a reliable life-saver, unless you can be insta-killed. So someone going on slowly shouldn’t have so many problems, is it correct?
July 8th, 2008 at 12:11 am
muggins says:
Yessss, loot. Precious loot.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:11 am
Sam Combs says:
I don’t know, I think the limitation of having only so much inventory space adds something to the game, when inventory management isn’t the whole game like in Diablo. For example, in Deus Ex. There really isn’t a point to picking up every single thing in the level, unless you’re OCD about it, since there’s no one to sell it to, and you can’t use half of it effectively anyway since you don’t have the skills for it. Items you need multiples of (medkits, multitools, lockpicks) stacked, so you could always hang on to plenty of those. The limited inventory space forces you to be practical and specialize. It also made the “blow everything up” style of play more of a challenge since you could only hold on to so many things that go boom.
The same goes for STALKER - I don’t understand why everyone complained about the limited carrying weight and quickslots. It adds another layer of decisions to the game - should I take this rocket launcher and dump that backup rifle I’ve been carrying around? Rockets are pretty rare, and my main rifle might break, but I do like to blow things up with rockets…
July 8th, 2008 at 12:13 am
BrokenSymmetry says:
Last generation’s The Bard’s Tale (for Xbox and PS2) had a system where all loot you found was automatically equipped when it was better than you currently had, and the rest was automatically converted to gold. It was widely criticized for streamlining the process too much, though, so gamers obviously did miss the selling process.
Other RPG’s that had very little in-game economy, like Jade Empire and Lord of the Rings: The Third Age were also criticized for missing for what to many is an essential component of RPG’s.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:13 am
Andrew Doull says:
Years of developing roguelikes has left me convinced that not letting the player sell anything is the best way to combat this particular inventory scourge. The trip to town component is just too much like work, and the lack of game world breaking inflation and infinite shop purses just as inexplicable.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Cradok says:
I miss those dancing blocks of colour from the defrag… The XP one is all boring.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:25 am
yns88 says:
Fede: I can’t really say for sure, since I haven’t gotten past the second dungeon. The game’s kind enough to reveal the identity of all scrolls, potions, and wands, and there’s no BUC status on items, but in order to make up for that the monsters are incredibly difficult. That said, going slowly and searching a lot really would help; sometimes stepping on a mine can kill you in one turn; this is even more true when you’re carrying a wand of fireballs that can explode at the slightest disturbance. However, only a fraction of the animals you kill can be safely eaten, and food quickly goes rotten unless tinned, so there’s a real limit to how slowly you can go.
(oh, and sorry for going so off-topic, here, I’ll try to get back on again)
Andrew: Sure, that’s one approach for it, but the problem you get into then is that the only way to buy things is to collect piles of gold lying around. I prefer either having shops within the dungeon or making sure that the dungeons never get too deep, and having the shopkeepers only willing to give you money for rare, quality items.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:26 am
Noc says:
I liked the system in the Baldur’s Gate games. Not the inventory management system. (Strength-based, okay, but why does a suit of full plate armor take up the same space as a scroll? The limited-slots thing was a little bizarre, though they helped it out in BGII with item boxes.) What I liked was that instead of these inane random drops (Magical Axe of Lightning off a cougar?) slain enemies just dropped their entire inventory . . . but most of it was junk. There’s no reason to collect fifty longswords and suits of leather armor off fifty dead goblins; instead of pack-ratting and gathering everything you see, you take a few choice magical bits from the officers and leave the rest for the crows. It keeps the acquisition thrill of Diablo (”Ooh! Look what THIS sword does! I’m keeping this.”) but tosses, to a great extent, the ridiculous packrattery.
What I’d like to see is a system based simply on bag slots you equip in your inventory. You can have belt pouches and stuff that hold small, quickslottable items, a backpack for holding supplies and crap, maybe a satchel . . . all of it giving you limited inventory space, but making the management important. You can’t carry everything you pick up, and you can’t have it all available at the push of a button, so you need to figure out where crap gets stashed on your person. And the result, if you decide to play the game in “pick up everything and sell it” style, is that you’re all hung over with bags and sacks and such in comedic and possibly combat-impairing fashion. Give everything a clear, real-world mechanic instead of this abstract “inventory space” thing, and see how it pans out from there.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Ginger Yellow says:
I think you could keep the loot lust and drop the tedious inventory management/recycling if they just made the drops worthless, GP wise. You can’t lose the loot lust and still have a Diablo-clone be a Diablo-clone. But if you make loot about being something to equip rather than something to sell (to a vendor), then you don’t have to faff about with portals and the like but you keep the addictive nature of those games. If you find something really cool that you can’t use (an awesome crossbow when you’re a melee specialist, say) then you can trade it with another player, but no NPC will take it off your hands.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:31 am
BrokenSymmetry says:
This subject reminds me of Halo’s innovation (within the FPS genre) of only being able to carry 2 weapons. This very strict limitation (compared to previous games in the genre) added a great strategic aspect to the game.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:34 am
Noc says:
Sam Combos: I think the complaint in the article wasn’t about limited space.
The mechanic in Action RPGs has NOTHING to do with deciding what to pick up or not. It’s a given that you’ll pick up everything that’s not worthless and then run back to town to sell it then repeat. It’s not about making sure that you’ve got the equipment you need on you . . . it’s about trying to gather as much expensive junk as you can then open a portal back to town, sell it, then repeat the process until the end of the game.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:35 am
Steven Hutton says:
I’ve been replaying diablo 2 and yes the endless return trips to town are problematic I don’t even bother picking up potions or none blue items. I can’t say I’ve ever had that problem in wow though. Everyone else I know has a full compliment of huge bags which are full to bursting. I ususally have at least 20 bag slots free. I play a warrior who carries around a whole bunch of extra gear and a warlock who loses a bunch of space to shards and enchanting mats. I think this has something to do with the insane reaction I have to seeing other peoples full bags. The disorganisation pierces me to my very core.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:35 am
Tom says:
There is no cow level…
But seriously, Diablo is an insane game. Have you ever watched somebody play a character at the highest level?
Truly disturbing, especially when you know that this level 99 Barbarian this someone is showing off to you is just one out of 10 level 90+ characters that that someone has…
Anyway, he doesn’t really cares about picking ‘things’ up. its just killkillkillkillkill.
Much like fps, like doom, which too alow you to carry lots and lots of very big guns, but still stay agile, even though you don’t even have any feet…
July 8th, 2008 at 12:39 am
sinister agent says:
Diablo and TQ and WoW and the like are deliberately designed to be annoying, forever holding the tempting carrot of less-annoying over you.
This is exactly the feeling I got from Morrowind and Oblivion, too. I like Oblivion (though compared to what it could be, it still falls desperately short, I reckon), but after playing it for more than a few hours a week, I invariably get the creeping feeling that I’m just playing it because I’m hoping it’ll get less irritating and make me less useless at something.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Stick says:
Another alternative:
Bard’s Tale had everything non-critical automatically converted to cash. Of course, that game’s central mechanic wasn’t loot collection…
I s’pose it’s hard to separate the Woo! Purple Unique Set Item of Extra Shiny from the Inventory Tetris of Blaaargh.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Janto says:
How did people find Two World’s idea of ‘distill multiple basic objects into more powerful objects’? It seemed like a good idea in theory, what was the actual application like?
I quite liked Throne of Darkness’ approach to loot, the really important stuff was ingredients for enchanting your kit, you could sacrifice magical items to the gods for spells or xp, can’t remember which, and you had seven dudes to control, so there was never a huge inventory issue until you got to a fixed portal. There was some inventory messing about, but it was a lot less painful than Diablo.
The most joyless loot experience I ever had was Dungeon Siege.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:48 am
EyeMessiah says:
In deus ex I once picked up every movable object in Unatco HQ and moved them all into my office. Including stuff that you couldn’t put in your inventory so I had to carry lamps e.t.c. one at a time. It took a long time, but once I was finished I was happy, and my office was filled almost to bursting point with awesome things.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Fede says:
yns88: Andrew’s idea could be applied in many a way. One example could be this: entirely remove gold from the game. Usually what you need to buy is life-saving stuff, so, knowing that monster X often drops commodity Y, you can get from the enemies you kill all what you need. Not only for potions/scrolls/other but also for better weapons and armor. Of course this is just an example, you could do it also with different mechanics who might avoid you to hunt monster X to get commodity Y, for example.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:51 am
Dolphan says:
I’m playing Diablo 2 as well - planning to complete it for the first time. The trips to town are massively irritating. I like getting new stuff, sure, but I think I’d enjoy the game as much if I couldn’t sell items. The enjoyment comes from getting new stuff to equip (and most of all from levelling up and getting new skills to use to beat down tricky enemies or massive hordes) not the constant town portal spamming.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:01 am
gulag says:
Has anyone mentioned Stalker/Deus Ex/System Shock/Witcher yet? These crappy inventory systems just aren’t going away…
July 8th, 2008 at 1:02 am
Deuteronomy says:
Stalker’s inventory system was not a square based system friend. It was weight limited.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:08 am
Sam Combs says:
EyeMessiah: I guess that was part of what made Deus Ex great - that you could carry around everything in the level, do almost anything you wanted to, but it never required you do do anything like that, it was the player’s choice. Off topic, sorry.
Deuteronomy: You’re right, it has the squares, but you weren’t limited by them. It had the same feel, however, since you were still limited by weight.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:13 am
veerus says:
At its most basic level we strive for bigger and shinier toys and since those toys cost money, we pick up whatever crap we can find off the ground to be able to sell it for money to buy the next best toy. The problem which inspired this great rant is that these games force us to pick up a lot of useless items so we can sell them to be able to afford that shiny toy we saw for sale. The solution seems simple to me — cut out the middle man. Instead of monsters dropping rusty axes and copper helmets, they could just drop money. Or if that’s unrealistic enough, they can drop their teeth or brains or something else that’s small, stackable and can be sold to townspeople so they can make their favorite pie out of it. The point here is to eliminate random worthless loot and substitute it by a small currency-equivalent item that doesn’t take up inventory space. Leave the item drops to the unique monsters whose loot actually matters. If D2 was this way, I bet you could go through the most of the first act before even considering going back to town.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:18 am
Tony says:
Though it’s not anything close to a CRPG, the SNES RPG Earthbound had an interesting mechanic.
You could purchase an item called a “For Sale Sign,” which, when used anywhere in the world, caused a customer to run up to you, and you could sell an item to them.
Of course, that game is quirky as hell and that doesn’t fit in every setting, but it was very helpful.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Arathain says:
One of the things that bugs me is the veritable explosion of loot that occurs every time I kill a bunch of things, 99% of which is utterly useless to me. Even if something drops that I might want (when identified, it’ll turn out to be useless as well, but you have to hope) I have to wade through acres of non-magical junk or weapons I can’t use just to pick the stupid stuff up. I’d like to see far fewer drops with a higher chance of being useable. Why do magic wands keep dropping for my Barbarian? Why enormous axes for my Necromancer? It would be easy to have the loot tables select for what you can use.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Simone Spinozzi says:
The Gothic Series never had any inventory limit, you could take with you whatever you wanted at no price. However each merchant did have a small amount of money or some items that you could buy were only in certain cities, so item acquisition was limited only by it becoming purposeless
July 8th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Tunips says:
If I recall, Throne of Darkness had a system where the various shops were just another window on your inventory. And the collection and sale of loot was about more than just money. You could melt down stacks of useless items, and forge them into something much pointier.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:01 am
The Discordian says:
I did love having 3 donkeys in my party and wandering ages in Dungeon Siege before selling everything to the corpse looter later on in the game. I turned down party members to make sure I had room for donkeys…
This sword is only worth 2 gold? Fuck you, I’m taking it anyways.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Orlandin says:
Let me start by saying I agree that the D&D method is a great way of managing the loot situation, but the other ideas are junk. The point of the loot system is to make decisions on what you want to keep or drop. Is it an upgrade, or keep it to sell. Keep it for a backup, or a different fight situation. I see inventory as another place to add strategy. The item eating gnome….that is just dumb.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:06 am
Atacama says:
@Sam Combs
I agree with you in general, but the problem here is that the sensible decision is not the fun decision, and STALKER is tough enough that I had to take the sensible decision.
Some people like that kind of thing though. I also can’t play stealth games because waiting 2 minutes for the guard to wander off (sensible) instead of just vaporising him (fun) doesn’t work for me.
Almost on topic: typewriter ribbons! Now, compared to that padding the game out via shopping trips is mild. Loot that can keep you alive vs save points that permit you to turn the machine off and go to work…
July 8th, 2008 at 2:29 am
perilisk says:
It’s been mentioned before in the comments, but the best solution for the problem you’re talking about is just to remove item sales and allow unlimited gold storage. If you can’t sell items, there’s no reason to grab a bunch of crap you don’t need. Add some res scrolls for your hirelings and some sort of repair item for your weapons and armor and there’s no reason to go back to town except for quests.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:44 am
malkav11 says:
I *hate* Halo’s gun restriction - it might add strategy, but at the expense of tactics. And the tactics are a lot more interesting in an FPS than long-term strategy.
I tend to also hate inventory limits, seeing them as mostly an annoyance. But there are ways to make them more interesting and less annoying. Removing the size-based slots, for example - these are easily the most irritating thing in Diablo and Titan Quest’s inventory systems. Doing away with selling - it’s fine to have specific treasure items and the like, but I should feel free to leave the standard equipment lying there, snagging only things that are genuinely special and interesting. Crafting - being able to break down loot into building blocks for shinier loot is neat.
Honestly, I thought the Witcher did a pretty good job - the inventory system could’ve been a bit cleaner, but your gear went in specific slots on your body and so you only took actual upgrades, which were rare. Everything else was some sort of small utility item, be it flint and tinder for starting campfires, or alchemical ingredients for making potions (by far the most common), or the potions themselves, etc. Only a couple of specific kinds of items were worth selling, so you didn’t have to loot everything and then run back to town all the time.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:59 am
Quirk says:
I really like the STALKER solution. It’s fairly early on that it dawns on you that carrying around the abundant weapons you find on dead bodies is rather useless - they don’t sell for nearly enough to make it worth your while. Inventory then becomes about keeping things you need, instead of carting useless stuff to shops. And, best of all, you can drop off cool toys you aren’t planning to use in the near future in a stash at the Bar or with the scientists and pick them up again when you swing by later.
That said, even in Diablo II, how often did you buy weapons from the shops? What did you use that extra cash for? After the early game, most of the stuff I used was, if I recall right, stuff I’d picked up. I suspect most of us ended up ferrying stuff to the shops out of a misplaced sense of thrift, rather than because it was in any way necessary.
Sayonara, EyeMessiah Sensei.
July 8th, 2008 at 3:09 am
El Stevo says:
I never had to worry about inventory size in Final Fantasy…
July 8th, 2008 at 4:04 am
hansmuff says:
My guess is that the travel time and assorted clickery in inventory screens and shops was left in D2 to lengthen the game artificially. Nobody likes to read “nice but too short” in the reviews. I’m not endorsing the tactic, just speculating.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:18 am
Whiskey Jak says:
@Charcoal:
HAHAHAHA! Pure Genius I say! I think Alec just found his perfect game!
July 8th, 2008 at 4:52 am
Krupo says:
“I always liked the transmutation spell in Dungeon siege, instantly turns crap loot into gold!”
+1
“I miss those dancing blocks of colour from the defrag… The XP one is all boring.”
And the Vista thing is like non-existent and mysterious. WTF?
I think you’ve just pointed out why I preferred Colonization over most RPGs -> it’s all about collecting and selling crap, but with a real ‘economy’ thrown into the mix.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:54 am
Redford says:
In older RPGs items had both weight and size. If an item put you over your limit in either of these, it couldn’t be carried. In newer RPGs, this is some how too confusing and games force you to use inventories to stand for size, with no limits on weight. A few games created rather amusing takes on this. Neocron, for example, had a box based inventory with infinite size, but limited weight. This meant if you had a lot of large light objects (ammo), you had to scroll through several screens to get at what you wanted - because the inventory window was small compared to the items that were in it. Terrible.
I liked the old days better.
July 8th, 2008 at 5:15 am
F'yth says:
I’m another of those people playing Diablo 2 again. The constant trips back are kind of annoying, I agree (it doesn’t help that the grand/large charms take up such a large portion of my backpack).
That’s why I pretty much only pick up wands, scepters and the stuff I need.
July 8th, 2008 at 5:28 am
th15 says:
I think the action RPGs need something to break up the pacing and allow the player to calmly get his shit in order every once in a while. I too get annoyed by inventory systems, but I can’t think of a better way to afford players a temporary reprieve.
July 8th, 2008 at 5:40 am
ThaYoost says:
well-written… loved it..
July 8th, 2008 at 6:04 am
Albides says:
th15,
I agree. I played Diablo II again not too long ago, and recall that by the time I got around to Thone of Baal, I got bored with clicking my way though the seemingly endless battlefield. The only other way to break up the monotony is through more scripted events and sidequest interruptions while dungeoncrawling, so we’re treated to a bit of convo and some of the clicking after that at least becomes meaningful.
On the subject of inventory, short of the bling gnome, I’m not sure what else one can do. Having a large inventory is sort of an appeal in these games. We like collecting things even if it is just to sell them. There’s the expectation that we might be able to buy something better, even if that’s more rare than a non-sexualised female character (to make a topical metaphor). Having a small inventory also makes such extravagant loot-drops rather unnecessary. A sort of transmute spell sounds all right, but how to make it accessible to everyone without it coming off as the blatant gameplay allowance that it is?
July 8th, 2008 at 6:41 am
malkav11 says:
Personally I would far rather collect a meaningful upgrade (or tactically diverse optional equipment) irregularly than showers of meaningless loot constantly.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:51 am
Tenorek says:
This is why I like Divine Divinity. You could carry as much as you wanted in the inventory. There were no squares. just a page of open space that you could jam as much stuff in any way you liked. The only limitation was that of weight, and even then all it caused was that you had to move slower, which is somewhat realistic. The more you carry the slower you are likely to move. It just makes sense.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:59 am
devlocke says:
Am I the only person in the world that just doesn’t care? As a person, I have a limited ability to carry stuff. When I’m playing a game, I just don’t see any reason that my character should have an infinite ability to carry stuff. I take note of the inventory systems as much as I have to, in order to play the game, which means I make decisions based on how they worked it out for the game in question. But it never even occurred to me to get upset about it, if I had to choose to drop stuff or portal back or whatever.
It’s been a while since I played Diablo 2 but I don’t remember ever being short of cash or freaking out because I had to keep making trips or anything. Never really noticed anything I couldn’t do without so extremely that I absolutely couldn’t drop something, if there was something I wanted to pick up, or alternately not pick up, if I didn’t want to drop anything.
I wear cargo pants because I like having lots of pockets. I’m a fan of carrying tons of stuff around. But jesus, it’s such a little thing in most games. And it makes sense to limit inventory.
July 8th, 2008 at 7:19 am
DigitalSignalX says:
Great read, and agree completely that a decent RPG doesn’t need the tedium of inventory management for mindless sell loops, rather they need the thrill of item choices. A STR system does that to some degree, but agree it’s still easy to fall into the cycle.
It reminds me of GTA’s mindless trips to make NPC’s happy ends up being half of the game.
My favorite approach is the crafting method, sort of like Lineage II’s. Where instead looting random useless items, you loot occasional stackable materials for creating your own items. The odds of a complete item dropping are extremely rare, and it’s value is significant only as sale to other players if you can not use. I’m surprised crafting seems limited only to persistent world multiplayer games, while single player focused titles generally only allow for modifications. In KOTOR for example, you were responsible for looting and assembling parts for better light sabers as well as robot parts for your droids.
Maybe we would just be exchanging kill loot n’ sell loops for grinding for mats to craft.. but at least it would add a layer of complexity beyond money=success.
July 8th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Albides says:
I’d wager it really is just a compulsive sort of behaviour that makes some people return constantly to town to sell loot even though they know full well they’ll never buy anything. There’s nothing rational in it.
Which makes sense, as games like Diablo and Titan Quest are 90% compulsion.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Evil Timmy says:
I’m replaying Diablo II this week, so all the pains mentioned are excruciatingly acute. First, why do I have to spend so much time clicking on a dozen stacks of gold on the floor after every battle? There’s no reason not to grab it, and coupled with the items and TPing every ten minutes, I’m spending more time on loot triage than I am actually playing. Deus Ex’s inventory was, at least, all about strategy. A GEP gun or assault rifle and shotty? Hold on to mods to make a better weapon insanely good, or keep a more flexible and open inventory to take advantage of every situation?
Stupid drops are frustrating, though, and since everything’s an abstraction already, devs should always make the fun choice that lends itself to gameplay and strategy. Basic mobs should drop ’skins’, or anything that stacks and is readily salable or craftable (pots, repair, upgrades, etc) to keep you adventuring. Better items should be limited to tougher boss types, quest rewards, stores, and chests. I’d be happy to never see a two-pound bat drop a 50lb set of magic armor ever again. It brings up a stupid question that everyone asks and nobody answers: where do they keep it?
And speaking of which, what the hell is wrong with everyone in RPGs? They’ve got nothing better to do with a fortune in gold and museums worth of rare artifacts than to scatter them in chests (placed every 15 feet; I’m looking at you, NWN) and under rocks all over the world? Wouldn’t someone, a fellow adventurer or force of evil, maybe collect them together at some point? Is some poor sap tasked with cataloging where everything was stashed? Or is it possible that the thousands of mobs we’ve all slaughtered over the years weren’t truly the bad guys, but instead were simply cranky and weary because they couldn’t remember which of 14,207 chests they left their car keys in?
July 8th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Feet says:
I really can’t stand the brown bit at the the bottom of bananas. Strangely I was eating a banana for breakfast while I read this, and low and behold, brown bit. I was all like, “Huh”.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Jetsetlemming says:
You’re NOT looting and constantly going back to town because you need to, or because the game is forcing you to, at least for Diablo. Think about it; what are you using that money for? Are you saving up to purchase better equipment? Fuck, no. Everything worth using in Diablo is FOUND, not BOUGHT.
You use money to refill your scrolls, repair equipment, and rez your mercenary. These things are so cheap in comparison to the amount of profit you bring in by collecting nothing but magical items and equipment unique to your class, never returning to town but once a quest, and do absolutely fine.
You can’t, however, resist the call of teh lootz. I know I can’t- I have to pick up everything remotely valuable, and constantly am teleporting back to town, selling everything, then coming back. Pisses my friends off to no end, they hate waiting for me and are in a constant struggle to speed my ass up. 
I hate their rushing though, and end up having more fun with Diablo single player than on bnet.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Optimaximal says:
One solution = Progress Quest
100% automated inventory management
July 8th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Malagate says:
What I would like to see is a system where what you are carrying is shown on your character, like as has been mentioned before. But more than that, a system where pieces of worn equipment can increase your inventory space, for instance a cloak with lots of pockets in it or a belt with lots of loops for more pouches. This way you could have a big backpack that has food and misc. utility stuff inside it, spare weapons strapped onto the backpack, a coil of rope and some pouches attached to your belt, a scabbard strapped to each thigh, throwing knives in your boots and a cloak with pockets full of useful stuff to use in a pinch. Of course strength would also be a limiting factor, but I’d find it spiffy to actually look like you’re carrying lots of stuff.
July 8th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Jetsetlemming says:
@Malagate:
I’ve said just about that very same thing in bullshiting with friends about game ideas. I’d love to see a game with no arbitrary weight or size limits- you can carry what can fit in your backpack, which can be any backpack or bag shaped object you find, with all the items physically simulated in the bag. Weapons are kept in holsters that you wear, customize, and have different options for such as where they sit on your body and at what angle. The more shit you’ve got, the more awkward and slow your movements, effected via a system like Euphoria where the weight of what you’ve got in real time effects your character animations. Character’s strength stat lowers the speed reduction amount of having heavier gear but does nothing for the awkwardness of being bristling with guns and items sticking out every which way.
July 8th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Kieron Gillen says:
I have a design for an Indie-RPG lying around which takes some radical solutions to this issue. In short: Conan doesn’t fucking shop.
KG
July 8th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Malagate says:
@Kieron, well Conan was a Thief, a Warrior, a Hunter and a King. Not necessarily all at the same time, but yes he’d never shop. He just takes it. I thought there were already a bunch of games where you could just take whatever you wanted as long as you were good at stealing, sneaking and kicking ass?
@Jetsetlemming, hah that’s exactly what I had in mind. As a game where you can put arms, legs and mouths anywhere you like on a weird creature has been made, then it must not be that hard to have a system where you can place carryable items on a player model wherever they’d possibly fit.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:30 am
cullnean says:
money? he is conan and he TAKES!
unless its the robert jordan stuff which was shit!
July 8th, 2008 at 10:46 am
muscrat says:
You should have Seen Resident Evil 4s inventory…
Such an inventory in an action / survial horror game… Shuffling through it on a gamepad…. Yikes.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Malagate says:
If Conan walked into your bar and just took a whole Ampulla of Wine, and the barmaid, would you try to stop him? Fuck no!
I’ve warmed to the concept, more games like that please.
Also @ muscrat, I found that it wasn’t so bad in RE4, I mean anything you wanted to sell for huge profit was conveniently in an infinite treasure inventory, the only problem was when you were hoarding healing items, grenades and buying big guns. If you left it in it’s natural state then it would quickly devolve into madness and hours of obsessive rearranging yes, but as I liked to see it all neat and tidy I actually enjoyed colour coding the herbs and weapons. Oh so sad…
July 8th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Dan says:
Imagine if someone made a version of Pac-Man in which you could only eat 16 dots before you had to pop through one of the side warps to drop them off…
July 8th, 2008 at 11:34 am
cullnean says:
ok so the tried and tested inventry is poor but whats the altenative we can foist upon the industry, lets reinvent the wheel people.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:37 am
AbyssUK says:
I had an epic quests to the Trafford Centre once… got danked in the House of Frasier instance by 5 lvl 60 Perfume Demonstrators… had to respawn and take a bath.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:39 am
antonymous says:
this inventory mess exists because all diablo-likes are strictly descendants of Angband, one of the bearded roguelike grandfathers of the genre. The whole design with the base camp/town and the hack/loot/sell cycle stem from Angband. Of course there are other roguelikes which have made it a goal to eliminate all this repetitive crap, like Dungeoncrawl shops won’t buy anything and the inventory in that game is limited by weight.
But, the commercial games are still stuck in the early-1990s design schemes of Angband and its myriad variants, because along the way “grind” somehow replaced the whole “gameplay” thing for the punters.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Kurgol says:
Developers have obviously never played D&D, I want Bottomless Bags!
July 8th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Shanucore says:
I think I’m just about the only bugger in the world that loved it, but ‘96 RPG Albion had strength-based weight restrictions that factored in the weight of gold. Sometimes that stuff got reeeeeally heavy.
In a slightly less vexing take on the formula, your characters shifted between unencumbered, encumbered, and unable to move, which was also affected by their fatigue. I quite liked this as it meant that you could try grabbing extra loot but you’d best not let your characters get too tired to lug stuff to a nearby storage location or merchant else you’d be screwed.
Of course being stuck in the middle of a room unable to move until you’d discarded a ton of stuff was really annoying, especially as dropped items disappeared for good. Still, there was an element of risk-reward in there, as well as time management and planning. When you actually have to *think* about this stuff, it works.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
K says:
I love selling tonnes of junk.
In STALKER, I haul around a corpse (usually of a distinctive enemy) stuffed with armor, ammo and guns; a body-bag, if you will. And run back and to at a transition point, transferring junk from one to another, until I reach a map with a shop. :/
The best items are almost always found in RPGs, so shops are almost pointless. I end up treating “gold” as some sort of score. Purely a status thing.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Calabi says:
I think its part of the players fault, they want every item to be worth something. I mean honestly what hero would go into a dungeon looking to loot from orcs.
“I want your hairy, stinking amour, your club, are those boots? and your teeth”
He’s there to find the big loot, at the end, in the large chest, defended by the huge……
How about instead of the loot exploding out of the corpses you have to get your hands dirty and rifle through its pockets and orifices. Rifle to far and you could end up with leprosy or even worse be named a Necrophiliac.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
CajoleJuice says:
“I’d slaughtered my way through a good seven or eight hours’ worth of beastmen and harpies before I had one of those catch-yourself-in-the-mirror moments. What was I doing?”
I just want to say I was thinking the exact same thing just a few days ago while playing Titan Quest. And I swear, it had to be after about 7 or 8 hours as well. In fact, I’m convinced I blacked out and wrote this article.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Yhancik says:
It reminds me of a conversation we had once on RPS (I think.. or did I dream it ?) about things in games that are more of an annoyance you have to get through than a real, interesting challenge (as the faceless combines in HL2).
About the inventory discussion, Stalker became much more enjoyable to me when I installed a mod that allowed me to trade with any Stalker. I think it wasn’t a bad idea. It’s not as unrealistic as allowing you to walk around with a houseful of stuff, and while making things a little easier, you still have to choose wisely what you’ll keep in Your inventory.
So, as it has been stated several times, it’s probably more about the economy in the game that the inventory micromanagement.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Rockeye says:
I thought the Morrowind/Oblivion mechanism of having the weight of what you were carrying affect the speed you could move at was interesting - I tried basing a mage character around a light-weight/fast moving idea, using only summoned weapons/armour that weighed nothing.
I think they could have gone further with the idea; instead of the ‘you are over-encumbered’ message and stopping you moving, they could have tried having no hard limit to how much you could carry, but making you move ever slower.
The other thing with Morrowind was that no trader in the game had enough money to pay a decent price for decent loot, so it was only ever worth having the best stuff you could actually use rather than grabbing everything shiny.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
18Rabbit says:
@K The first step to overcoming an addiction is admitting that you have a problem.
I decided to get my loot fix from Dungeon Keeper 2 (I’m still pissed at Titan Quest for corrupting 2 characters and couldn’t think of a character I wanted to try in D2). I’ve found that I often run back to town just to break up the monotony of killing endlessly (and to see what else is for sale). I don’t think I’ve hunted until everyone was full yet. I think DK2 with the transmute spell, insta-travel back to town that arrives near the merchants and/or pack mules gives options for lots of different play styles. But really it’s all about the loot.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Ian says:
@Calabi:
“How about instead of the loot exploding out of the corpses you have to get your hands dirty and rifle through its pockets and orifices. Rifle to far and you could end up with leprosy or even worse be named a Necrophiliac.”
I can’t decide whether that would be the best Game Over scenario ever or the worst.
July 8th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Derek K. says:
Maybe I’m weird, but I think D2’s system works well. You triage items, ignore a lot eventually, but at the beginning, when you’re broke, you hoard. Creates a nice dynamic, as you go from “Arrows? Those are like 50 gp!” to “Eh, it’s just a blue, who cares?”
And at least in D2, if you had unlimited space, you’d have unlimited charms, and thus unlimited power. The only thing I’d like to see is the store being closer to the portal. Having to run to the store was a bit of an annoyance. But I agree with the idea that D2 doesn’t force this on you at all - it’s those of us that can’t stand not having every piece of gold. If you just ignore all the stuff you don’t care about, you do just fine. Gold is, after a bit, meaningless. And yet we want more and more of it.
Also, D2 was 8 years ago. They did a hell of a lot of stuff really well. The fact that it *still* has a thriving community says that it really did do a pretty good job. So back off my lil’ friend.
Also, on Twenty-Sided DM, someone proposed that all the “diablo-clones” be renamed TPLs - third person looters.
And yeah, back off the quartermaster, man. He was hustling his ass around scoring new stuff for you, and 95% of the time, you looked at it and went “Oh, that’s nice. I’m glad you spent 15 hours in negotiations and had to have unpleasant sex with a tusked alien to get that shotgun. But mine has a RoF that’s .1 faster, so no thanks.” I’m surprised he didn’t just shoot you in the head screaming “HOW’S MY STUFF NOW, ASSHOLE?!”
July 8th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Voidman says:
Want a sensible approach to inventory management, try Jagged Alliance 2 1.13 mod with new inventory addon. Essentially: no rucksack=no carrying lotsa shit, pistol holster has got a valid application and you learn to chose the body armour with pockets and straps or you won’t have spare clips handy when you run out. Entirely new dimension to the game all thanks to the mod community, bless them!
July 8th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Dave says:
I just started playing Titan Quest recently myself (thank you, Diablo III announcement) and am liking it quite a lot.
It’s actually a couple of steps ahead of Diablo II and similar stuff, in that Identify is automatic and Town Portal is free, and it has that sweet transfer inventory space (which, of course, could be much larger).
Even paper & pencil D&D 4th Edition has gone the way of simplifying and reducing inventory and shopping. Non-magical items normally have no resale value. Identification is free during any rest period. Magic items can only be resold for 1/5 their price (or converted into an equivalent amount of generic magical “stuff” to assist in enchanting items). DMs are encouraged to tailor loot to the players’ desires so they don’t wind up selling much stuff off. You don’t need to carry weapons made in four kinds of metal, nor carry an extra blunt weapon.
July 8th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Kestrel says:
OTOH what about adding complexity, rather than stripping it down? With Morrowind I spent endless, obsessive hours working the head of the mage’s guild up to the point where I cou
The roguelike Linley’s Dungeon Crawl fixes this by… not letting you sell stuff in shops (although you can sacrifice items to relevant gods if you want). As the manual notes, shopkeepers don’t want to buy your battered old junk.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:20 pm