Starfield: Proving That Encumbrance Is A Bad Mechanic (The Jimquisition)

I like Horizon: Forbidden West's change to a tiered inventory system: the stuff you can access immediately, the stuff you can refill if you need, and the excess that gets sent to a functionally limitless stash that you can visit at any rest point on the map. They don't try and give it a story reason, like the cute pet that does it for you; it just happens. It really improved the game play experience for me, as I also got frustrated with inventory limits in HZD.

Backpack hero!!! Review that game Steph!

Encumbrance can be good if it fits and you're right and mostly it doesn't. Like Kenshi? It fits in Kenshi, but that's Kenshi. It's about managing resources. That's...the only place where encumbrance belongs. It belongs in games where the most important mechanic is your stuff. I play No Man's Sky. It's built around...stuff and how you gain storage is a main part of the game and how you interact with the economy. It doesn't work in more action-y genres. It's annoying. I consider it a crime the way Bethesda does it. The way they manage their economy to loot ratio is infuriating. I get that they don't want you to immediately be able to buy a weapon that kills instantly.They are trying to slow you down so you have to work with the in-game economy. It would work if the economies weren't awful. I don't have a reason to buy anything because I can just loot or craft something better. If Bethesda wants you to engage with it's economy then they better make the trip worth it. It makes no sense in diablo at all. I hate it. Grim Dawn makes the same mistake. It makes those games worse. It's not a resource management game. You Just Want Stuff No Man's Sky mixed with Bethesda sounds like a nightmare.

I imagine you can disable encumbrance with a microtransaction. I haven't played a Bethesda game since Fallout New Vegas but even then I remember just dismantling a lot of weapons I came across due to weapon durability and encumbrance. That and hardcore mode was always turned off because the last thing I wanted to do was manage thirst, hunger, radiation, bladder, happiness, hyieine, and exhaustion like a damn Sims game.

Ive never commented on a patreon post of yours bc I always just watch on yt; however, this time I logged in to do so because I just disagree that much with your opinion about encumbrance lol. I've never disagree with you about accessibility or the gamers TM or almost any of your opinions. And even the ones that disagree with I say. "Heh. Cool opinion, I suppose," but I just wholeheartedly disagree on incumbrance because Bethesda games to me is not about shooting and looting it's about how your character fits within the world, and how You mold your character to be who you want to be within the confines of that world

This is a thought-provoking video! :) I broadly agree with your frustrations around encumbrance rules, especially since they trigger a stress reaction in me too. I think the ability to toggle them on/off could be a useful accessibility feature / customisation option. My flatmate mentioned that Fallout: New Vegas has a 'hardcore mode' toggle for survival mechanics and I feel like it'd be really cool if more games gave players the choice of how/whether to engage with 'realist' mechanics like that. However, since you challenged us to come up with counter-examples, one RPG that I think actually does benefit from inventory limitations (not strictly 'encumbrance', but hey, I tried...) is Moonlighter. I think that the playful elements of curses make inventory management a little less rote and more engaging, while the finite space available makes you focus on retail value and really reinforces that key cost/benefit analysis line of thinking that the game seeks to evoke, which for me is a satisfying and successful blend of narrative and mechanics. I also think it helps a lot that the top line of the inventory is preserved even when you fail to clear a dungeon, so you can choose what loot to prioritise in that safe zone, giving the player a greater sense of partial damage control over an otherwise potentially deeply frustrating mechanic. Also, I've only watched let's-plays of it but XCOM's shape-based equipment management is a potential counter-example of sorts too. It seems fiddly and potentially frustrating, but does lean into the game's key challenges of economic, strategic and tactical thinking and cost-benefit analyses to create a sense of partial realism in a way that (to my mind, at least) can enrich a player's experience of feeling personally responsible for kitting out a squadron of soldiers while under various restrictions. I also wonder to what extent the negativity we tend to feel towards the common encumbrance mechanic of being slowed down is due to psychology. There's an interesting case study that WoW players used to hate the way that the game tried to encourage them to take breaks (halving their XP as a 'punishment' for playing too long in a row) - but when the devs simply reframed the description of that same mechanic (as DOUBLING the XP as a 'reward' for resting), players viewed it much more positively. (Source: https://youtu.be/7L8vAGGitr8?si=cRY5IfkwhIX4jtHH&t=204 ) So this raises the question of whether/to what extent we might like encumbrance effects more if we were being granted a 'movement speed boost' from packing lighter! I suspect the answer may lie somewhere in the middle - it's just not fun to play a game where you are forced to move agonisingly slowly as punishment, so that aspect is a mechanical/design problem where the base speed needs adjusting, but the framing as 'punishment' may exacerbate the frustration it causes. I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts about this if you felt inclined to share them! :)

i have to admit, this video bugs me. i mostly agree, at least about bethesda stuff, but i have to disagree that removing encumbrance entirely wouldn’t mess with the balance or hurt the experience for folks in other ways. not because it’s a great mechanic or anyone really likes it, but because the memory impact of removing the item limit could be pretty massive, which might slow the game down to a chug on machines with lower-end processors or smaller memory budgets. i’m no programmer, but from what i understand based on talking to gamedevs in the past, everything in a game’s inventory has to be stored in cached memory at all times to work the way people expect it to, i.e. without any delays or slowdown. without a limit on inventory size, you’d hit a point where you started to get slowdown every time you pulled out an item, and the sheer amount of memory usage created by your one character walking around with all that stuff could eventually concentrate the entire memory budget on caching your character’s inventory and slow all other processes to a crawl. that includes graphics stuff, enemy AI, effects, UI, game states (i.e. all discrete choices with mechanical impact), and so on. and because the reason for those problems isn’t visible to the end user, the game would end up getting pegged as totally broken simply because they didn’t fix an insoluble problem. and it *is* insoluble, because no matter how optimized the code is or how beefy a given processor or memory budget is, there’s still a hard limit on total cache. now, there *are* ways to mitigate this issue from a design perspective, and there *are* deliberate and controversial design choices around inventory management that don’t have anything to do with this problem. the six-item carry limit in signalis, for example, is almost certainly a conscious design decision built around encouraging careful resource management, rather than a way to address memory problems. sometimes memory usage mitigation and design choices overlap - weapon durability and crafting systems can mitigate memory issues, but there are plenty of other design reasons they’re put into games, legitimate or not. in both bethesda and larian’s cases, their design goals make not limiting items really difficult, if not impossible. one of the things people really value in both studios’ games is the fact that most items are interactive, right? this is a big part of bg3’s encounter and puzzle design, in fact - chandelier hinges are shootable, furniture is destructible, you can stack enough boxes to make getting onto the roof of a nearby building viable like in the famous matt mercer video. that means those items take up more memory than non-interactive items. i think we can agree bg3 would be a lesser game without these things. the item interaction is not as core to bethesda’s game designs, admittedly, but it does function as a vehicle for player expression, as well as being a font of memes and even the occasional creative solution. putting a bucket on a shopkeeper’s head and robbing them blind is a classic skyrim strat, right? (shame on them for removing that in starfield, by the way.) it would feel weird and off-putting for many players if that stuff no longer worked in a bethesda rpg, even if it made the game Better™️ in other ways. i know *i* would miss it. i’m not saying that i just *love* encumbrance in these games - i find it pretty annoying too, and i think it does make the experience worse overall. many of your points about things like skill parring are spot on. and again, i’m not a game developer - this is just what i understand from listening to other devs. i could be wrong, and i totally accept that. my only point is that, while i agree in theory that most games would be better without encumbrance restrictions, memory restrictions create a practical ceiling on developing this particular type of game, and the experience would genuinely be worse for lots of people if there wasn’t something limiting the inventory size.

I'd like to hear more Helium singing Thank god for You

I would love to see a Stephanie version of the Bethetic dance number... :D

Haven’t watched yet but already feel like this is going to be another “you didn’t give it 9/10 how dare you” combined with “the reviewers are all just jaded, it gets good 10 hours in” combined with Bethesda being Bethetic.

Thank you, Commander, for making me laugh and laugh and laugh. Much love. Tits!✌️😎💌

I of course haven't watched all of it yet, but this video is 20 minutes long and I feel like you could have the whole thing just be a bug showcase.