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.
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.
I played a Barbarian with the bear aspect (and before that, the gear that granted you double carry capacity), and I still found myself encumbered since I kept looting all the heavy stuff I could sell.
Even after clearing out all the loot, I was still left with a ton of scrolls, potions, poisons, etc. that I was “saving up” for a potentially difficult encounter, all taking up 75% of my carry capacity.
It’s certainly a way to discourage hoarding and encourage you to use those consumables, especially since BG3 has an end, but I wish there’s a better method for it.
Sometimes less is more. If they put harder limits on what you can take into fights it might turn from a boring chore to an interesting choice, but all these games that dump every single item in your inventory and expect you to go against your hoarding instincts. Cyberpunk had the same issue, you get dozens, hundreds of consumables and but hey are all worthless, you can just spam the healing one 10 times per fight instead. It ruined something that could have been a really good immersive powerup otherwise.
It’s not a very well known game but I really like how Vampyr did it. You could only carry like 6 bullets/consumables at a time, but any additional items you pick would go to your stash. When you rest at home or visit the stash it refills any used items from it.
It’s such a good system and I will never understand why other games don’t do it the same way. You still get rewarded for exploration and finding items, but you can’t just spam dozens of them. Using them feels special and powerful (which they are since they are so limited), but you don’t feel too bad about using them since you know you have more of them at home, or can craft more.