If that's true, it changes the correct interpretation of his text.

My own gripe about inventory management, is ARPG's like Path of Exile and Titan Quest give you tons of loot that you can't possibly store all, but all loot got random properties and you spend a lot of time in such a game going through your stash and wondering what to sell, as object X gives a good a, but a rather worthless b and c, while object Y gives a lesser a, but a worthy d and e, but you don't want to miss out on a good a and then there's oject Z which has worthless b, worthy d and a f you really like. What do you throw away, what do you keep? And they also interfere with the properties of other items, so you spend endless time comparing different settings and looking at the 'dps' and resistances it gives, while wondering what will be better: better base attacks or objects that give rather worthless base attacks but enhance your spells?

Titan Quest is especially faulty of 4. mentioned above by Luned: the loot dropped is mostly far better than what the merchants sell, so the merchants don't make any profit, they just lose money buying all your loot. Even less realistic is all the amount that gets dropped by even the lowliest foes. The economy in PoE and TQ is awash in magic items.

You read it right if you draw the conclusion the reason I like ARPG's is not the loot drops. It's easier combat than CRPG's when my mind is too tired for a Baldur's Gate battle in which you need to think more, while in ARPG's it's just hit the right button at the right time.

I was like you for a long time. I cured myself when I started playing Skyrim.

I realized that my instinct to hold on to things "just in case" was a habit born from bad design decisions in old school games. Yes, it is bad design to give the player no way of knowing whether an item is important or not. So, having played Oblivion and killed the fun with my inventory nit-picking, when I found myself picking up dozens of potatos in Skyrim, I stopped one day. I said to myself, "Self, you must stop this. It is not fun for you. And you don't need this stuff. Really. You dont. Leave it." And my life in rpgs became happier. I stopped picking up potatos. I stopped hoarding three different waraxes because they each have a different elemental damage bonus. If I have the space, I'll carry something heavy if it is valuable. If I run out of space, I drop it.

I now have fun prioritizing in a more practical way. This character is an alchemist, so he will keep the roots and berries, but he won't worry too much about leaving that two-handed hammer. This one is a heavy armor user, so he always is on the lookout for better armor, but when he finds it he just dumps the inferior suit he is wearing.

I have gotten myself in the situation where my party could really only carry the necessary armor, weapons, and potions with no room for profit looting. This party ended up collecting only light valuable things like gems, and they did a lot of compare-and-switch looting. And they spent very little time in merchant shops.

It's a fun liberating way of doing things in rpgs for me. And I like it. And I like the design decisions that incentivize it. Even Bethesda's. It used to bug me that you would find only 1-3 gold pieces in any one place. But now I realize that it encourages searching everything, which I do want to do. And if I can't take all the loot in the room, at least I will have bagged the 50 gold that is scattered here and there throughout.

Cheers!

Evidently, you have NOT played Planet Alcatraz. YOU WILL NEED THOSE SPUDS!

Yeah, playing 'inventory management simulator' is my least favorite part of RPGs. I'm playing Risen right now, and that one pushes a lot of the right buttons for me, with the exception that every last creature and person in the game is a highly nimble fencing expert. There's no apparent limits of any kind to the inventory system in Risen, and it's easy enough to find stuff, with the different tabs for different categories of items. Two Worlds also had an interesting mechanic where you could simply drag one piece of equipment onto another similar item and it would 'level up' and gain better stats.

5. Make the game drop parts of various rare collectible armor sets that aren't very useful now but would become very powerful if you'd ever manage to complete the set. ;)


I can see that this is the way to go in order to have more fun and I hope to get there some day, but it's not that easy to overcome the OCDs. I'm very guilty of what you described above, like collecting weapons of types that I don't even use, just in case I might find out about their usefulness and switch to them at some point ... I guess it also has to do with me not liking replays, so instead of saying "ok, maybe my next character will be an axe-wielder" it's more like "if I don't ever use an axe with this character during this one and only playthrough, I will never know what it's like". But in the end, by trying not to limit my options, I'm actually limiting my fun, like you said. And after all, if I prefer to use swords instead of axes or something, there's a good reason for that. So yeah, good point.


I liked that very much, too!

One game that I found very odd in this regard is the first Witcher. At least as far as your weapons are concerned, you are very limited, and you hardly ever find better ones than those you already possess. So picking up weapons is mostly useless, which means in theory you should just concentrate on the rest of the game and don't worry about looting. The weird thing is that there are loot containers in every random house nevertheless, although they mostly just contain stuff you have no use for, but - OCD kicking in - you never know. I believe this might be a redundant remnant of Neverwinter Nights, the engine of which The Witcher is based on. In NWN there's a lot of loot containers, and sometimes the loot is really helpful if you're not well equipped yet (at other stages is mostly worthless junk). But in The Witcher you're already as well equipped as you need to be and you don't seem to get anything better for most of the game, so the loot system is completely outdated, unnecessary and distracting.

I also enjoy games with huge (or even unlimited) inventory system much more than games with limited inventory. It also allows more interesting approaches to crafting and such.

best Skyrim mod ever - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=66200826

That would be a pretty cool mod for making the game a little harder, but other than that I wouldn't use it.

For me it's a little more complicated, but I totally relate. I've quite many a game at that same point. What usually gets me is when I have a lot of items of very similar usefulness, but because of the wide variety of stats, it's not clear which piece is better. Often when I reach "inventory paralysis" I'll just instead quit playing...

I prefer games that have fixed upgrades, simply because it cuts down the clutter and annoyance of sorting through loot. It is one of the reasons why I enjoy Zelda, Metroid, and La-Mulana.

Games with randomized loot are my bane. I was looking forward to trying out Borderlands 2, but in practice it is a total grindfest. Especially on Ultimate Mode...*sigh*

Same here. Makes it feel more special when you get something that usually has value too. Selling hundreds of meaningless junk is quite boring as well.

I agree. It's actually one issue that the later Ultima series suffers from.

(Of note, Ultima 4 and 5 had inventory management done well; you have an unlimited inventory and don't need to worry about who is carrying what. Ultima 6 threw that all away.)

Incidentally, inventory space issues are one of the reasons I've decided that, in Might and Magic 4 and 5, armor is not worth the hassle. (Armor breaking when you reach -10 HP is another reason, and many enemies ignoring AC yet another.)

That's definitely part of it. It it were always easy to discern which items are worth keeping and which ones are inferior, it wouldn't be that much of an issue (unless all the items worth keeping don't fit in the inventory ;) ).

5. Merchants have limited money, and that money is not enough to sell a typical amount of loot.
6. No option to drop anything you've picked up; the only way to get rid of an item is to use it up or sell it.
7. If your inventory is full when you find an item, the item silently disappears, even if it is a key item. This can make the game unwinnable.
Edit: A few more:
8. Items come unidentified, so you don't know if the randomized loot is useful at all until you go back to town.
9. The game frequently traps you in dungeons or has plot events that send you across the world, making it so that you often have no access to a town.

@dtgreene:
ArvanEleron is streaming Ravenloft on the GoG Twitch channel and in about 9 hours of play he didn`t even find a single merchant in the game, so the inventory of his party is totally full.
So, having no merchant at all in a game is another point that adds to the inventory blues.