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.

  • kobold@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I got sick of the constant quick travel back to merchants in BG3 and decided to just install the mod that multiplies my encumbrance by 9000x. the item management in that game is a giant pain and the gold economy plus encumbrance is an artificial barrier to getting them from merchants that simply adds playtime for no actual benefit.

    Realistically speaking, if you want a useful encumbrance system, you should be thinking: what is the goal of an encumbrance system in the context of this game?

    In BG3, it serves a few purposes:

    1. physical consequences. reduced movement speed, damage from jumping, etc are all part of D&D rules, which is useful when you’re in a kind of situation where, say, you need to get a giant boulder across a huge gap and put it on top of a button that opens the gate while in combat. but outside the context of combat, doing this is meaningless, as the player can simply overcome this problem with time, which is annoying more than fun.
    2. limit access to the number of options a character has when confronting an encounter. it’s not feasible to carry 99 potions of greater healing on you, and encumbrance is a general strategy that prevents this from being as effective. at the end of the day it does not solve this problem
    3. express limitations on what a character can do with their environment. encumbrance affects how much else you can carry, such as throwing a big rock at an enemy to do a lot of damage. this is irrelevant in the context of inventory vs. how much you can affect your environment; it can easily exist independently of an encumbrance system.

    I don’t like encumbrance in games in general. It makes games more fiddly, and forces the player to engage the system with no real addition to the fun of it. Limited inventory slots are similarly frustrating in games to the scale of Baldur’s Gate. BG2 solved both of these problems by giving the player a billion bags of holding, which also had the added benefit of making inventory organization easier in a system that was largely left the same from its predecessor since it probably was built on the same codebase. BG3 had no such codebase restriction, and its type sort system sucks (the search bar is a lifesaver). Encumbrance very much feels like a “This is how it works RAW in 5e, so we’re going to do it this way” decision, which is funny because in plenty of other situations the devs decided to stray away from RAW to make the game a lot more approachable.

    I don’t know if the goal of encumbrance is to prevent players from taking everything as much as possible or not - but if it is, it utterly fails at that goal

    • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      BG3 does give the ability to send stuff from lootable locations directly to camp, which solves half the problem. If I could sell stuff directly from camp the other side would be solved.

      There is a valid argument of part of thee reasoning being determining what is really important to you prevents you from picking up literally everything and breaking the economy. But Starfields economy already seems pretty broken in my favor. I significantly upgraded my ship on both my first and second visits to New Atlantis. So I’m having a hard time feeling overwhelmed by the encumbrance.

      • Hannes@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        An inventory management button that would automatically distribute wares to the character with the least carried stuff would already hope a lot - especially if we would be able to save that every cup, fork, etc would automatically be marked as wares and if there was a way to mark multiple things as wares at the same time (and if " sell all wares" would sell everything from all inventories present and not just for the talking character)

        Selling wares remotely that are in camp and having an option to automatically send everything marked as wares to camp would also help a lot

        I feel as if BG3 could do a lot more with the “wares” marker to make the weight limit less annoying

        Moving cups and plates from one char to another just isn’t fun

      • Sas [she/her]@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        If Volo is in your camp you can sell him your stuff. It’s not a dialogue option but the button on the bottom left. His gold and potion supply seems to refresh as well.

    • mrnotoriousman@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I finished my first run the other day and had no inventory issues. I did stop picking up every single thing not bolted down about halfway through the game and still ended with a surplus of 25k gold. You can select multiple items and send to camp/stronger party member or add to wares for quick sell. I was a low STR sorceror so just sorted by weight and sent it all over to lae’zel whenever I was carrying too much. Didn’t really go out of my way to go to merchants