I hate it, when that happens.

Of course! In an RPG, not only I try to explore first the places that look the least interesting. Ignoring the main quest is a must wheb you have all those juicy secondary, optional quests lying around.

In adventure games, where talking with everybody and trying to pick up every item is not only encouraged but often necessary to advance, I perform a more methodical swap (from right to left or vice versa). Even then, I will sometimes wander around trying different actions with a comedy potential, just to see the reaction.

Grrrr... I really HATE it when that happens. In a game, I think it was Witcher 1, I needed a gem to complete a quest and I had sold it earlier. So the quest became either unfinishable for me or only finishable one way. And the gem was ordinary gem, nothing special about it. Was really frustrated.

Ohhhhhh yeah.

On this issue: I'd like to take a moment to complain about finding an adequate "home base" is games like Fallout 1 and 2. There should be a building with many lockers, tables, shelves and fridges so I can organize all of loot and scavengings byt type: Storage for documents, keys, holodisks, passcards, caps, ect.. Storage for all the ammo and weapons. Storage for all the drugs, foods, organics. Storage for the tools, parts, miscellaneous.

The problem with Oblivion's scaling(iirc) is that they are tough no matter what level you are.....so a few rats or a guard or two can be a challenge to some on higher difficulties.

Ever play any console games/rpgs? Kingdoms of Amalur is notoriously bad for this. You get so many slots to put stuff and cannot get much past that without very high priced and rare item bags/backpacks to up your slots....and that is in ADDITION to all misc items like notes/books/keys all taking up the same slots(1) as a huge sword or bulky armor piece for some reason.

Of course I hear there are houses one can buy to store stuff, but I haven't found one yet and the game makes it hard to get stuff regardless(you have to risk being seen to get some items from some areas as stealth isn't perfect at early levels) in some cases.

I usually collect all somewhat valuable or useful loot and more so on the lower levels/early game when money is tight.

And as for Deus Ex: I more dropped the bulkier weapons as they took up way too many spaces(flamethrower/etc).

Simple solution: Toss it all in with that midget who helps you find that cap stash in that well in the one mission. ;)

This video made me sub that "man" who I thought was 14 but obviously is much older and married. Damn. :)

In The Witcher you have a specific pocket for the "only one of its kind" quest items so you cannot drop them or sell them, but for secondary quests where you need a more common object this could very well be the case. Happily, you can usually repurchase them or, if you accidentally used one if them as an alchemy ingredient, go hunt more monsters.

What was incredibly annoying was completely losing acccess to storaged items in the last Chapter, as you need an item that can only be obtained in the previous chapter in order to finish one of the optional quests that had been ongoing since almost the beginning.

I had that issue in Morrowind: There's no decent place to store stuff that doesn't already have an inhabitant who might not want you trespassing here. Daggerfall handled it reasonaby well (especially if you know that, at level 2, you can take a loan to buy your own ship; you have a year to pay it off, which is plenty of time to get powerful enough to be able to easily amass that kind of weather), but Morrowind did not. (Arena doesn't have any place to store items at all, but it felt less burdensome simply because there was less of a variety of items there.)

In my experience, console RPGs, once you get past the early ones, tend to sidestep the issue entirely by giving you unlimited inventory. Final Fantasy games from 5 onward (and some remakes of the earlier games) give you an infinite inventory; you are limited to 99 of any single item, but you can carry one of every item in the game (assuming you are actually able to *get* those items; some items are mutually exclusive, like FF5's Brave Blade and Chicken Knife). Dragon Quest 6 and onward (including remakes of 3 and onward) give you a bag with unlimited capacity (and in some DQ games, you aren't even limited to 99 of a single item); you do, however, need to worry about who is carrying what item, as you can't use items from the bag during battle.

Also, I note that the earlier Ultima games (up through Ultima 5) were like this, but then in Ultima 6 the developer put in carrying capacity limits (one of the many changes the Ultima games made over the years that hurt the series IMO; if feels like every Ultima game (except the first one for obvious reasons) has at least one annoyance its predecessor lacked).

With that said, one other annoyance in some WRPGs is when the game makes inventory management harder than it needs to be. For example, in Baldur's Gate 2 you can't trade items to a character who is too far away (and it feels like "too far away" is a bit vague), so you go into a character's inventory, start to trade the item, and are then told you can't. Then there's also TES: Arena, where the game won't even let you drop an item if there's no room, even if it's an item you don't care about (and items left on the ground disappear when you leave the area anyway).

I've seen this in many other games as well. Final Fantasy 5 does this, for example (it's the earliest JRPG that does this to my knowledge). Final Fantasy 1 (NES) has separate inventory for weapons, armor, and items, and the item inventory can't become full, so that problem is avoided there.

Of course, mentioning this reminds me of other early Final Fantasy games, specifically 2-4, where you have limited inventory space and quest items are stuck in your inventory until the game takes them away. This is especially aggravating in FF2, where most of the items are *never* removed from your inventory, so by endgame, nearly half of your inventory is filled with useless qust items you can't get rid of. (PSX version increased inventory space, but didn't solve the issue; GBA version gave you an infinite inventory.) It's less of a problem in FF3 (fewer quest items, and they're eventually removed, though the fangs stay longe than they should), and even less in FF4 (even fewer quest items, and they don't stick around, plus much more inventory space), but it's still present in those games (except in the DS versions and versions based off them).

Good info, but sadly some newer console RPGs still adhere to a weight/item limit....some can increase it with paid upgrades to weight/item limit via backpacks/houses/etc or stat increases to carry more, but many limit it severely. This is irritating in games where you can pick up tons of stuff and be told every minor/small item takes as much space as a larger item, or that you want to keep all the game notes/books/etc but are told you need to have weight/item slots.

To me, small items and papers/books should be unlimited in how many one can carry or done like Dragon Age and put in a journal/glossary/etc setup.

I haven't played console games in quite a long time. The ones I did play did have a limited number of inventory slots so you had to make multiple trips back to town to sell all the loot. The first time I played Fallout New Vegas Dead Money DLC I tried to take the gold and died. I hated having to leave all the stuff behind, it just went against all my hoarding instincts.

True enough.....I usually also want to save time and not have to come back to areas once I get higher stealth/etc just to loot a few chests and the like I couldn't before. Limited inventory and such hard to get items combined in the same game would just be BS plain and simple.

(By hard to get items I mean ones you CAN get with luck/skill and not items you cannot get as the game is not setup to allow it.)

What about items that are obtainable via glitches, but which are not intended to be obtained by the player?

(The GBA Fire Emblem games, particularly Sacred Stones, have examples of this sort of item that you can get by controlling the enemies.)

Yes, I patched the witcher 3 to be able to carry 100x and then lugged around everything :D