RuneScape has an excellent fast travel system. In fact, it has a whole bunch of 'em, and you have to work for them; either by completing quests, or by training your skills. You can also get items to expand your inventory somewhat, but they only work for specific item types.

Even if they think it’s a fun mechanic, they fundamentally fucked the amount you can carry imo. Should be higher than it is by default, because I straight up don’t want to waste skill points on that.

Then they’ve fucked the amount of cargo you can have on a ship. Either make it infinite, or ridiculously high even for a small ship.

I’ve got multiple freight containers on my ship, and apparently each can only carry about the same amount as my character??

Also you’re limited in weight but holding 5 heavy armors and 7 two handed swords in fine.

Picking up that silver spoon can tip you over the limit however.

A bag of holding still has limits.

Baldurs gate is a DND based CRPG

Although DND games usually handwaive encumbrance with bags of holding.

And you’ve got KOTOR and Pillars of Eternity and others that are clearly D&D derivatives, but solve the problem handily with a “stash” whose contents are never accessible in combat.

I have never understood the fascination with inventory management. I just want to find stuff, and use that stuff later on. If I wanted something as boring as my actual job, I’d just do my actual job and get paid for it instead of buying a game.

I have a friend who says it needs to go one of two ways - either encumbrance matters hard and is super realistic, where you can reliably carry 30-60 lbs of gear for long distances, and that’s it, or it just doesn’t exist and you can lug around as much shit as you want and abstract out the rest, because the middle ground where PCs can carry like 250 lbs of shit leads to a game where you’re constantly just sorting through your inventory about the best vendor trash you think you can packrat to sell while moving through a dungeon, and that’s slow and unfun. The low carry weight turns every interaction into “is it better than my current gear?” which is really easy to answer in the moment, and when weight doesn’t matter, you just hoover it up and sell it when you get a chance.

Am I supposed to be looting everything I see? If not, then why is it the major income source, why are so many random objects worth selling and taking?

This is so true!

I love how in Starfield your encumbrance and movement are aided or harmed by planetary gravity.

On a low gravity world I have had over 800/200 and run along with no issues. While on a planet with 1.6 or higher and you really can’t ignore the slowdown. You just can’t fast travel, but you don’t stop like in Skyrim, so I think that’s a positive step in the right direction.

I don’t mind encumbrance in Baldur’s Gate. I think people are only thinking of I got all this cool stuff why should I have to choose between it all. I see it as limiting cheese mechanics. It could limit infinite money by not letting people pick up every single item to sell. Or if there was no encumbrance why would I use tactics when I can just use barrelmancy? I have to fight these powerful opponents? Nah I’m just gonna hit em with x amount of exploding barrels till they die since I can carry every barrel ever.

I don’t like encumbrance, but I’ve never felt it negatively impact my enjoyment of a game. I didn’t even know encumbrance was this much of an issue honestly. It just makes sense in certain games, imo.

Edit: Could also be made a toggle-able feature or unlock?

Has anyone here ever thought “I would like this game more if it had encumbrance in it”?

Yes, I totally have. In fact even in starfield, I found pretty quickly that I was wishing the game would arbitrarily restrict my ammunition and medpack supplies, because the combat was more fun when I could run out of shots and healing in the early game. It’s not even the kind of thing I can easily do as a challenge myself because it’s so easy to pick them up and go “over”. I legit think starfield’s encumbrance system would be much better if it was more restrictive, so that I had to carefully choose my equipment and things, than the current “I can carry so much that gameplay is not meaningfully restricted, but not nearly enough to collect and sell all the loot I find”.

I posted upstream about the problem with encumbrance in this style of game. It’s not that encumbrance is inherently bad, but that most of the time in crpgs, it just seems to be ‘there’, it’s not in the service of any part of the gameplay.

Here’s another question though

“Would I like this game more if I didnt have my cool item right now?”

Hard to say yes… But in practice the answer might very well be yes. Challenge in games is rarely something you directly ask for, you want the reward after all, but often the fun is in exactly overcoming those obstacles, and not actually the reward. In that sense encumbrance might feel bad… but being able to grab every single item always could very well ruin part of the fun.

In the end games are sets of challenges presented in certain ways, and its just whether those challenges work well from a game design perspective.

A lot of people get very upset when games break their immersion.

So I guess you could argue being able to carry unlimited items does that. But so does carrying 15 two handed swords without a backpack.

I’ve never found it fun or interesting tbh

I think encumbrance adds something really important to the game but it’s really delicate. Namely, I think the pacing of games is better when encumbrance exists compared to not.

What encumbrance does is force you to make some decisions about loot right now as opposed to later at the merchant. I have to decide to pick something up intentionally because I don’t want to have to deal with all this junk later. When I later go to a merchant, I only now have stuff in my inventory that either (a) I want to have on hand to use or (b) I think will be valuable to sell.

A game with no encumbrance does not enforce this part of the decision making on you. You no longer are required at pick-up time to make any part of that decision. As a result, players are less likely to interact with loot at all until they get to the merchant. At which point they now need to spend much more time sorting through their stuff to figure out what to sell or keep. In other words, the optimal way to play becomes simply clicking the take all button on every container you find and dealing with it later. I personally would find this interact worse as the chore of dealing with it becomes bigger and bigger and harder to manage with no in game penalty for doing this to yourself. Basically, players have to choose to play the game in a way that’s fun rather than being forced to play the game in a way that’s fun.

There’s also a second important thing that encumbrance adds to games like this: scarcity of resources. Not scarcity in a sense that resources of any kind are hard to come by, but in the sense that the player has to purposefully make decisions in order to amass things like gold or camp supplies. With encumbrance, I could still just take all every container until I fill up, but then I would have an inventory filled with worthless junk which might sell for much less. Or I might have less room for camp supplies. What I think most players will end up doing, though, is being more selective about what they pick up, enabling them to be more efficient with their sold goods and inventory space to prioritize things that help them succeed. Without encumbrance, this entire aspect of gameplay is removed.

Sure, it might feel bad in the moment to have to make a decision between two items for the sake of encumbrance, but I think the value it adds to the game is generally more than it takes away.

The only thing annoying with BG3 is that “sell all wares” only refers to those at the current character

I’d have liked it if stuff marked as wares would always be automatically distributed between the characters (or that there was a button to do this)

Also why can I select multiple items at once and move them between characters but not mark multiple items as wares?

Why can’t I save that every cup I pick up should go to wares automatically?

I feel as if BG3 could’ve made the whole carrying thing far less annoying with ways to do less inventory management

I facepalmed after realizing I’ve been lugging around that stupid

for the entire second act with it taking up inventory space.

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.

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

In BG3 encumberance is absolutely needed to balance the game. Heavy Objects are still the best way to cheese combat and that is with you being limited in how many you can carry. Building a Character in a way to work around this is absolutely possible and a valid choice for a character build. It is definitely not a meaningless aspect of your character.

It’s certainly a way to discourage hoarding and encourage you to use those consumables, especially since BG3 has an end, but I wish there’s a better method for it.

Sometimes less is more. If they put harder limits on what you can take into fights it might turn from a boring chore to an interesting choice, but all these games that dump every single item in your inventory and expect you to go against your hoarding instincts. Cyberpunk had the same issue, you get dozens, hundreds of consumables and but hey are all worthless, you can just spam the healing one 10 times per fight instead. It ruined something that could have been a really good immersive powerup otherwise.

It’s not a very well known game but I really like how Vampyr did it. You could only carry like 6 bullets/consumables at a time, but any additional items you pick would go to your stash. When you rest at home or visit the stash it refills any used items from it.

It’s such a good system and I will never understand why other games don’t do it the same way. You still get rewarded for exploration and finding items, but you can’t just spam dozens of them. Using them feels special and powerful (which they are since they are so limited), but you don’t feel too bad about using them since you know you have more of them at home, or can craft more.

I kinda disagree, keeps me from keeping a barrelmancer in my party at all times.

Inventory mods are often the very first thing I go after. I don’t care how unrealistic it is, I’m not playing a storage simulator.

They’re always the first mods I installed in skyrim. So many times you get a surprise dragon fight after just clearing out and looting an entire dungeon. I hate killing it and then not being able to pick up the bones because oooh no you’re already carrying too much!

I actually really like what starfield does. It’s a rolling scale, the more encumbered you are the more you have to pause and “recharge” O2. So being over by 2 won’t affect you a lot, but over by 100 sure will

In my opinion, it works best to make loot non-sellable. It takes away the need to fill your inventory with tons of garbage, just to carry it to the store. Instead, your inventory can be reduced to a size that meaningfully limits your options during challenges and forces you to select your equipment strategically.