It’s a debate as old as role-playing games themselves: should players have to deal with encumbrance?
The recent release of Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Bethesda’s Starfield have thrust the encumbrance debate back into the headlines, with both games employing a system that restricts how much stuff you can carry.
While each game employs systems and mechanics that let you carry more and more, it is inevitable that as a player, you’re going to have to spend a decent chunk of your time fussing with managing your character or characters’ carry weight limit.
In Starfield’s case, encumbrance is a big enough issue for some that they are willing to lose access to gaining achievements in order to increase the carry limit via console commands on PC. This in turn has made a mod designed to prevent the achievements from being disabled one of the most popular on NexusMods.
It’s really not any different from the mechanic as it’s been used in previous Bethesda titles. The soft limit of depleting my oxygen meter rather than hobbling my speed is a little more forgiving, particularly if I’m still picking through a free fire zone.
And once I learned that I could sell to stores directly from my ship hold, my problems kinda dried up. It’s mostly learning what things in the field are worth hauling back to town when it’s not the apocalypse and duct tape just isn’t that special.
Absolutely, but you still have to learn that and it’s still work. Early on I had no idea how many credits “a lot”. Their defense/damage system is arguably unnecessarily complex in a way that adds to this. Do I need more corrosion protection, radiation, airborne, or thermal? Does it even matter?
Even with some of the advances, it still like an artificial problem that doesn’t actually make the game any better. It doesn’t really add any difficulty or challenge, and it’s certainly not “fun”. There’s still a lot of streamlining they could do.