Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 Revive Age-Old RPG Debate About Encumbrance - eviltoast

Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 both weigh the player down with encumbrance. Love it or hate it, it seems like it’s here to stay.

  • Erk@cdda.social
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    1 year ago

    Has anyone here ever thought “I would like this game more if it had encumbrance in it”?

    Yes, I totally have. In fact even in starfield, I found pretty quickly that I was wishing the game would arbitrarily restrict my ammunition and medpack supplies, because the combat was more fun when I could run out of shots and healing in the early game. It’s not even the kind of thing I can easily do as a challenge myself because it’s so easy to pick them up and go “over”. I legit think starfield’s encumbrance system would be much better if it was more restrictive, so that I had to carefully choose my equipment and things, than the current “I can carry so much that gameplay is not meaningfully restricted, but not nearly enough to collect and sell all the loot I find”.

    I posted upstream about the problem with encumbrance in this style of game. It’s not that encumbrance is inherently bad, but that most of the time in crpgs, it just seems to be ‘there’, it’s not in the service of any part of the gameplay.