Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 Revive Age-Old RPG Debate About Encumbrance
Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 Revive Age-Old RPG Debate About Encumbrance
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.
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.
It's such a trash game mechanic because it forces realism where there is none. You have faster than light travel in your game? Why don't you have teleporters? You have magic in your game? Why don't you have a Bag of Holding? If you are going to impose the constraint on the player for balance or gameplay reasons then at least make it fun, have a mechanic that is interesting in some way. Maybe teleporters and bags of Holding are expensive to build or don't get unlocked until you collect 10 flippityboos but at least reward progression and picking up objects and don't turn every decision into agony.
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.
RuneScape did it pretty well for sure yeah I always felt like there was a good level progression for items like at level 60 in old school bronze items were just straight up trash lol
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.
It’s not “here to stay” it’s a feature that is used or not used depending on the level of realness wanted. Some are fine with hand waving away encumbrance, some are not.
If you’re playing a walking simulator, it is kinda part of the immersion.
If you’re running around killing every Greek god under the Sun, but suddenly you pick up your 7th weapon that’s just chains with something at the end of it, and BOOM you can’t move anymore cuz your too heavy, then it’s getting in the way. Instead of implementing encumbrance they just, limit you to 6 weapons and tada, they could explain it as “it’s too much weight” but they won’t give you the option for it to happen as slowing you down would kill the pace and feel of the game.
Baldurs gate is a DND based CRPG and Starfield is a
loadscreenwalking simulator. Of course they have encumbrance.Baldurs gate is a DND based CRPG
Although DND games usually handwaive encumbrance with bags of holding.
Fair, depends on the game. CRPG’s will tend to have it in. I mean for example WotR and Kingmaker you can get a bag of holding if you buy it or put stuff into strength on characters or etc in order to not have to worry about it much but it’s still there, and not spending the money on it or building any characters with strength means you will be limited.
bags of holding.
It's true. The character in my current campaign has two bags of holding and a bag of devouring.
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.
In BG3 it is a balance mechanic. Heavy objects tend to be completely OP and are used to cheese combat. encumberance limits this and even allows building your character specifically for this playstyle.
In Bethesda games encumberance is in part there to protect players from themselves. If every object can be picked up (and that is a design principle in those games) and every object has a Value, then the optimal strategy is always to grab every single object you can find and then sell everything at once. If that does not sound like fun to you that is because it is not, but still i know multiple people who play those games this way even with encumberance in place. Players will always find a way to ruin their own fun, the only hing you can do is to put systems in place that disincentivise these behaviors.
My issue with it in Starfield (and any game in its genre) is that the game seems to be confused about how it feels about encumbrance. 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? If so, why do merchants have such low credit stores? Am I supposed to be collecting cool stuff to display? If not, then why all the display objects? If so, why have my companions constantly nag me about bringing junk? Why make ship storage so low? Or, am I supposed to be carefully considering what I want to bring as loot? If so, why is there so much of it and why isn't there some way to quickly see what's worth taking? Am I supposed to spend an hour after each combat carefully weighing what to take home?
It's entirely unclear what they want. If they want looting to be less of a game loop, junk items should have no sell value and missions should be more of a reward, and item value/kg should be easy to assess. We should be quickly able to discard valueless items from inventory. Otoh if they want looting to be a bigger part of the game, I should be able to readily carry and sell my loot and doing so shouldn't make me so rich it breaks the economy.
It's one of my main complaints, not so much about starfield, but pretty much anything in this genre. It feels like they can't tell if they want me to loot everything or not, the design is fundamentally at odds with itself.
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.
I don't agree with that dichotomy in a game like this. Certainly in the deeply simulationist roguelike I stan (cataclysm dark days ahead plug), that's appropriate, but this game is fundamentally silly and arcade style so I don't think the trouble has anything to do with realism. The solution I'd have personally in something like this is to eg. allow you to carry up to 6 weapons, 1 of each wearable type of item, and a certain amount of aid items in your "active" inventory, and then have everything else you loot automatically go to your ship inventory which is huge or infinite, but restricted in how you can access it (personally I'd still have ship inventories be finite, but enormous). Let perks increase your number of slots in a particular category, rather than increasing carry weight. Have resources and 'notes' go to the ship automatically as well, since it doesn't really have any impact on the game to be carrying these on your person. Plus, I'd do what modders have been doing for a while and make decorative junk items have no value or weight. Let me pick up as many blenders as I want, I'm just going to use them to decorate my juice bar and play house, who frigging cares.
I'd also remove vendor credit caps, but make the amount of cash you get from loot pretty trivial compared to what you get from missions, so it's just not that appealing to sell 15 cheap machineguns. And while I'm wishlisting, I'd love to be able to set up an auto-sell filter, eg. 'sell non-unique weapons below a particular dps'
Yes and it flows through to the skill system too. 8 points for carrying more crap across yourself and the ship, and 4 more for increasing companion inv. Even more if you include pockets upgrades on suits.
Are these good skills? Not for the player to choose but to be available in the game. What's the balance here? What's the decision, carry more crap at the expense of doing more damage? Is that good choice to give the player? How do you balance encounter difficulty around that? You can't the player has to choose encounters based on their gimped pack rat skills.
Every part of the game needs a single big mod overhaul to pick a coherent direction.
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!
Amazing people make articles on... Nothing, essentially? It's just encumbrance, right?
I was expecting it would at least go into detail and explain or compare how many items or units of weight you can carry, if it slows you down gradually or if it pretty much freezes you on the spot, differences with previous well known franchise games but no, none of that either.
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.
That's not even realistic. I know that Starfield isn't meant to be a simulator, but if you put in something to try and be "real", you should do it right. Gravity would affect the weight of something, but the inertia is still the same. Moving and stopping a big object in space with no gravity at all is still hard to do.
Cool! I haven't played yet, I like how that sounds
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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.
I really wish Baldur's Gate 3 had a shared party inventory. It's already partway there, I can still move a potion from Astarion's inventory to Shadowheart's inventory now matter how far apart they are. It'd just be nice if I could save a few minutes of inventory sorting if everyone just pulled from one mega inventory that added everyone's encumberence together. The way its implemented now just adds several unneccessary steps that don't even matter because of the magic pocket system.
I get the complaint with starfield since transferring stuff to your companions or ship is such a pain with their awful UI, but it's not even an issue in BG3.
99% of the time my party members have plenty of room to store all my shit, and in the rare occasion they don't it's a sign I have tons of shit to sell. On the even rarer occasion I run out of room in a situation where I can't easily leave, I can just send my extra crap to camp. Mind you, besides Shadowheart(Str 18) me and my party members all have base strength.
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
Playing a barbarian with bear aspect: "What encumbrance?"
I facepalmed after realizing I've been lugging around that stupid
spoiler
hidden Harper's Chest w/ the high lockpick DC
for the entire second act with it taking up inventory space.
Smashing chests in BG3 has no negative effects.
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:
- 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.
- 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
- 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
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.
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
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.
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
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If I'm playing an immersive misery simulator like a heavily modded S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly then encumbrance and inventory space plays a vital role in not only immersion but also gameplay systems like loadout choices and how much supplies and medicine you chose to bring and what that means in terms of how long you can stay out and how much loot you can carry back to base.
In games like Starfield and BG3 I find encumbrance mostly meaningless and annoying, and just exists as a means to slow down early game economy by preventing you from picking up literally everything not nailed down and selling it off. And in the end I typically end up thinking there are probably better ways to accomplish this that doesn't leave you with an annoying encumbrance system as a byproduct.
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.
That's true. I forgot about Barrelmancy since I had a team of low STR characters and didn't really abuse that facet but you're absolutely right.
In BG3 encumbrance is so pointless. The increased carry capacity and reduced armor weight make it a non-factor. The few times you actually reach it you just sort by weight and send some of the heavier stuff to camp. You can even do it during combat. So they should have just gotten rid of it. You are bringing all your resources at all times anyhow and the inventory manamgent is still terrible.
The current system is just a minor inconvenience because you will have to go to your camp when you reach a vendor and want to get rid of some of the extra stuff. I would much prefer it if they either stick to the base rules, with base weight values and encumbrance starting at 5x the strength value. Then one would have to make actual decisions on what to bring. But right now, even with 8 strength you never have any issues. Or they just get rid of it.
And that's how I feel about encumbrance in general. Most games have such absurd high carry limits that the system doesn't add anything and just becomes an inconvenience and annoyance.
I kinda disagree, keeps me from keeping a barrelmancer in my party at all times.
Tbh I could do without in most games. I spent more time throwing stuff than shooting enemies in starfield so far
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 played a Barbarian with the bear aspect (and before that, the gear that granted you double carry capacity), and I still found myself encumbered since I kept looting all the heavy stuff I could sell.
Even after clearing out all the loot, I was still left with a ton of scrolls, potions, poisons, etc. that I was "saving up" for a potentially difficult encounter, all taking up 75% of my carry capacity.
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.
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.
Thing is, what's the alternative? Either you put a hard limit on the inventory, or you give players an infinite inventory. The latter can be made to work, but it also takes away the element of risk.
Perhaps 'inventory size' could be tied with difficulty settings. If you want a Deus Ex-type experience where you really have to be picky about what you bring, maybe that should be down to the player; and so should a huge inventory that lets you bring everything everywhere.
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
I agree, I don't mind much of how they handle encumbrance itself except for the constant nagging from my companion. Personally, I just don't think they interrogated the concepts of encumbrance at all - which isn't surprising of course, bethesda design seems to have so many sacred cows it may as well be a holy dairy.
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.
Not so much for these games, but this conversation had me thinking about alternate mechanics for loot sales in the open source game I work on, and I think one solution is to have any loot of any value use more of a pawn shop/consignment mechanic. Rather than selling guns individually maybe you can put your crate of used weaponry up for sale on the black market, and then you have to wait for a buyer. Might take a long time depending on how much they're worth.
There's two online games I play. Guild Wars 2 and Genshin Impact. Guild Wars has you filled with your inventory a lot, especially as a new player. It's a massive turn off. Genshin just has a big mega inventory where items are sorted by tab (like character upgrade material tab), and has practically infinite inventory size. It technically has a limit of like 9999 but that's not going to be anywhere close to what a normal person gets. Definitely prefer that system.
Both those games should label a ton of unusable items as trash, so when you pick them up, they go to a separate tab. Just today I spent like 20 minutes managing my inventory in Balders gate, and it was a pain to survive until I found another vendor.
My approach to this problem is that I just select the easy difficulty & just throw away all the crap that would make the game easier. (if I picked up 100x random shit from goblins I could make my character stronger from the extra gold, but I choose not to) Also I just disregard crafting as well. I know that I could play on normal (or hard), fiddle with all these systems & make my team strong enough to deal with any challenge. it's a choice, since I'm playing a single player game for my own enjoyment, might as well make it challenging on my own terms.
The only game I've played where encumbrance is interesting is Death Stranding. In everything else it's just a nuisance.
In previous Bethesda games I eventually just started doing calculations in my head constantly about whether the stuff I was grabbing was worth the weight involved. I'm still not quite at that point for Starfield, but I'll get there.
A UI fix to do that for you was modded in almost instantly, I'll be installing that one tonight I think. The vanilla game is much better than I expected but I'm finding it too easy if I cheat in infinite personal storage, and too much of a cognitive burden to constantly weigh every loot item in my mind.
the only reason im overencumbered is because i have like 20 guns i wont drop 😂
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