I Hope Every RPG Steals Avowed's Brilliant Inventory System
You won't be wasting your time managing 300 swords in Xbox's new Game Pass RPG
With a title like that I was expecting something more than making some items weightless and giving you the ability to send stuff to camp and disassemble from anywhere. I mean it's nice but, these are all features other games have already done are they not?
Those games didn't pay Kotaku for a fluff piece.
They are, you're correct. I don't think it would work in every game either. Inventory management can be a powerful tension and choice device and getting rid of that isn't always a good thing.
Extreme inventory QOL often just turbo charges hoarding behavior and makes individual items feel meaningless. Just pop it in the bag, who cares, it's all weightless anyway!
Don't get me wrong, sometimes easy inventory is great, but I think inventory management gets a worse response than it deserves a lot these days.
/rant
In Avowed they focus on management of weapons and armor as a tool for discretionary encumbrance. These items directly effect gameplay and therefore matter more to the player.
The smaller items that are all weightless effect gameplay indirectly and would make managing encumbrance a bit more convoluted.
Seeing as Avowed is more of a boiled-down rpg than what it is directly compared to (Skyrim), that extra time spent managing trivial items in an inventory just seems like a waste when the game itself is really trying to be a streamlined version of meatier rpgs.
I was going to say the same thing. A "send to camp" button, scrap button, and most small stuff is weightless, is the sum of the articles praise.
For sure a nice quality of life feature if the focus of your RPG is elsewhere, but there are games where the choice of what to carry and keep is a driving part of the gameplay.
Lost me at "It's a really good game". It's an ad
Interface looks very similar to SkyUI 🧐
Those features though, I hope other RPGs consider them carefully:
This is just way too casual/reductionist imo. At least make some mechanic that justifies sending items. Like an item teleportation spell or something. Imo it's okay if some RPGs will be as convenient as this, but asking for every RPG to be like this is just too much.
Its not casual enough to me. I hate inventory management and prefer to get to the game. I like a collection system were once you have it you can always destroy it and re-recall any time you want. Its fine if you have to go home or stuff with it. For perm things anyway. For consumables I like the way elden ring did it where you unlock a capacity and then choose how to dole it out again in a collection way in that once you have unlocked a potion its an option.
Sure, I sometimes prefer simpler systems too. It depends on what I want to play currently. I'm more trying to say we need all kinds of games. Imo, complexity and flexibility of all those systems, like character stats, perks, inventory, etc - is what makes "RPG" an "RPG". If you take a bit of it away it becomes an "ARPG" like "soulslikes" and other similar games. If you take even more of it away you get "slasher", "3d platformer", etc. I'm a big fan of ARPG and 3d platformers like Spyro or Soul Reaver, but it's totally different kind of games.
I don't like it, it's cheap and too casual. It's fine in some games, but I prefer most of my RPGs with as much immersion as possible. If you're going to do this, I expect you to have Magical Backpacks all around, and it would be even better if they behave like an actual item you can lose/get. I like how Chinese Xianxia solved this problem in high fantasy worlds: magic items with subspaces to store things are super common and even low tier bandits hiding in the mountains might have one or two lying around. Every system in an RPG should be designed and tailored to max the possible immersion you can get from the game. Don't make something just because it's convenient, make it something that adds to the experience and the lore of the game.
Every system in an RPG should be designed and tailored to max the possible immersion you can get from the game.
Having to deal with inventory management doesn’t always improve immersion. Inventory optimization doesn’t immerse me; rather, it gives me a puzzle to solve.
There are ways to make inventory management fun, and there are ways to make inventory optimization that actually matters. But I guess you could call it a puzzle, a very light puzzle, in the same way you'd have to think how to pack stuff for staying two weeks in a single medium-sized luggage. And I don't see how that detracts from the gameplay at all. Having to solve problems in a game is hugely interesting to me (and to many many people).
Usually the point of having limited storage is to convey the intention of the game designers that you shouldn't be hoarding every item you come across. In the same way, if you have unlimited storage, it tells you that you should be picking up everything. Conceptually, I'm fine with both, but making the player make choices that matter is way more interesting to me, and makes for a better game most of the time. For example, Extraction games are a clear case of how inventory systems can actually become a core part of gameplay, and it's obvious that those games would be less interesting if you just had infinite storage. ARPGs are also a big example of this, it's made so that you have to pick and choose loot before coming back town, and the game wants you to come back town, it's an important part of the gameplay loop. Outward has one of the coolest inventory systems I've ever seen, and it's super simple, just by having your stuff inside an actual backpack on your back, that affects combat, and can even be damaged, and you have this nice assortment of different bags to choose from, with different looks and traits. CRPGs have limited/realistic inventory systems where you have to spread loot among your party members before having to go back to civilization. Survival/Survival Horror games are heavily dependent on the fact that the player has limited inventory to create scarcity and make the player make choices.
Again, casual inventory mechanics have their places, but saying it should be in every RPG/Game is just wrong. Can you imagine a dark/low fantasy RPG where you can just have unlimited health potions in your backpack? The premise is instantly ruined.
Well, that article succesfully turned me off even trying the game… It’s a list of immersion breaking stuff that makes it impossible to forget it’s just a computer game…
The packmule in Dungeon Siege was a good integrated inventory mechanic.
A good game knows to explain game mechanics with lore. Games that break the 4th wall and by knowing they're games tend to struggle to be immersive. It can really obliterate environmental storytelling too.
You can't drop items in the game and you can't see item comparisons. Surely, this is less about design choice or more about band-aiding their archaic inventory system?