The weight issue is most prevalent the first run through the game simply because you have no idea of what you are going to need. After a run through, you have a pretty good idea of what to save (and, as well - there is a lot of information about what to keep now available here, and on the wiki).

After you get used to it, it's not an issue. If it's a game-breaker for you, there are low-weight and no-weight mods available to take that facet out of the equation.

I bumped it up to 500 lbs. I don't mind a weight limit, but we need a storage chest to keep items that are potentially useful later on, like the flowers and rings in TW1. I always kept them in storage cause you weren't sure when you'd need them.

And we didnt have to keep recipe's in our bags so we could make potions. We learnt them and sold off the recipe.

Which was also stupid. At some point I stopped selling recipes (put them im storage), at least the ones with "excerpt from stolen witcher secrets from Khaer Morhen". WTF? Why would Geralt throw recipes onto the market, which were stolen, once he recovered them (pretty silly why they got out there anyway).

Regarding the realism of the weight issue: even the lowest possible weight is already too much to run around and fight with it, if you'd carry it in your backpack. Which backpack, btw.? It's magical storage and as such, why should it need to have a limit, anyway?

But at least you can pick them up. If you have item-limited inventory and you hit the limit and want to pick up a new type of item, you just can't. You might be willing to drop a few timber, but all your timber. And you don't want to drop something unique. With a weight-limited system, you can just drop a few timber and continue. Or drop nothing and walk slowly back to a merchant, which is also something you can't do with an item-limited system.

Honestly, weight-limited is far more flexible and generous than item limited. The only advantage of an item-limited system is that the game can show you everything you're carrying at once, because they know how many items you can carry. Weight-limited means you have to scroll a bit.

To OP... I believe that weight limit is a side effect of gravity... :)

Out of curiosity: has anyone used the mysterious merchant as a sort of traveling chest?

In any case, my experience has been always that junk collecting and amassing money isn't that useful in most games I have played, and that most of the stuff I can pick up at the beginning is practically useless, both in usage and money making, as the stuff found early on is usually very cheap.

As for what system can hold more items, depends... if you only have 200 slots on your inventory, you can only carry 200 items. If you have a 200lb limit on your inventory, and you can pick up items weighing .1 of a pound, you could carry of 2000 items.


How do you figure that?
Functionality-wise, W2's inventory is a mess compared to W1.
Capacity-wise, yes W1 had a limited number of slots, but within those slots, you could carry more than one item, depending on the item: up to 10 formulas to a slot, up to 50 herbs to a slot, etc.

Greatly mitigated by items being marked as quest items and many components being restocked on a regular basis. This isn't a game where you suddenly need ninety pieces of timber or a seemingly mundane paperweight that turns out to be a ridiculously vital magical token.

*shrug* You don't even need to craft body armor, which is pretty much the only reason why you'd ever have the need to stockpile leather and cloth. There's quite a few drops of very respectable armor and steel swords (considerably fewer for silver; I do try to have forged a robust blue meteorite sword in Chapter 2), and a more-than-respectable Quen skill. There's a few side quests for which certain materials in small quantities are critical, but they're side quests.

And most of them are worth very little for resale, making it even less useful for stockpiling for money.

So I add this as it was humorous at the time:

I used the Shovel to kill the Kayran-- It was magnificent. I wish I had FRAPs.
In that same run, as I looted every nook and cranny in the prologue, I ended it with 479 (pounds?) of items, using the 500 mod. So it is possible to gather quite a lot of items in just the prologue if you look absolutely in every spot.

When I sold all of those items off, they made the orens pile just over 1500, so it was not really worth it. It did buy a few books though.

That is cool, I think I'll borrow that idea in my new playthrough. :D
And for the other thing: http://www.fraps.com/download.php.

I beg to differ. I used a shovel to dig up some nice phat loot in cemeteries in Fallout New Vegas.

Back to the topic, people just pick up way too many stuff.

If you need more components for crafting, just meditate so that merchants restock (assuming that you already looted the surrounding for the required components).

Maybe you needed the cash, so you go and hoard weapons and armors which weigh a ton each and sell for 40 orens max. But if you think about it, your time is better spent farming monsters and selling the monster parts that sell for 9 orens and weigh 0.1 each rather than having to run back to town every half an hour or so to sell those few heavy items.

Maybe you kept something because of sentimental value? Oh well, I can't really say anything about that. But with a weight limit and the lack of storage space this is not really viable or practical. For example, I would dump Addan Deith without hesitation if I am encumbered or close to being encumbered.

That being said, you just need to look up the crafting diagrams sold by the merchants in Act 1 to know which crafting components you need.

I can see knife and trap spammers' problem with weight limit though. You have to carry a fairly large amount of knives/traps around and you have to get lots of timber and iron ore to replace the ones you used.

Don't forget herbs. Admittedly slow to gather a lot of them, but they weigh nothing, and some of them sell for quite a bit. I haven't gotten myself to sell the Blue Striped jacket yet. It's roughly equal to Raven's Armour which I prefer because of the lack of a hood, but you never know when it might come in useful. Honestly, most crafting diagrams I've seen in Flotsam so far just aren't interesting enough. The only think that might be useful is crafting knives if you want to throw a lot of them. And maybe Diamond Armour enhancement.

http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Jagged_blade

Try the Jagged Blade. Good damage for an Act I weapon, some chance to poison or cause bleeding, and two slots. Just the thing for killing the town guards.