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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
It’s a debate as old as role-playing games themselves: should players have to deal with encumbrance?
The recent release of Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Bethesda’s Starfield have thrust the encumbrance debate back into the headlines, with both games employing a system that restricts how much stuff you can carry.
While each game employs systems and mechanics that let you carry more and more, it is inevitable that as a player, you’re going to have to spend a decent chunk of your time fussing with managing your character or characters’ carry weight limit.
In Starfield’s case, encumbrance is a big enough issue for some that they are willing to lose access to gaining achievements in order to increase the carry limit via console commands on PC. This in turn has made a mod designed to prevent the achievements from being disabled one of the most popular on NexusMods.
Personally I think a good encumbrance system is a good thing in games. For example, look at the Demon’s Souls remake. You can carry as much adventuring gear (heals, grenades, etc) to make your life easier as you like, if you have the stats for it. And if you need to pick up a unique item that is beyond your limit, it can be sent to your stash, which is what the original was missing.
The alternative is to limit consumables, ammo etc to some arbitrary number. E.g. You can carry 5 heals and 5 throwing knives and 50 arrows. If you don’t want knives but want more heals? Fuck you.