Fatnerd rage incoming: Diablo for consoles.

[Tolya]

@Tolya

Having not played Skyrim I can't speak from experience. But I do speak from a standpoint of common sense RPG design. I pretty much disagree with you all the way. Most of the things you listed as bad I can say are good.

A more honest way would be just saying "that's what I think"... but ok, mr. common sense RPG design.

Firstly, there is nothing more annoying than a limit on how many items you can carry. And not for the reason you think. I agree that you will newer need more than one set of weapons and armor per character (maybe two if you are really bent on it). But all the extra loot, especially the generic shit items have a purpose. They are there so you can carry them to the nearest merchant and sell them so that you can have the money to buy the good stuff. The absolute worst and most annoying thing is having to constantly destroy/drop items you know would provide you with just the kind of money you need only if you managed to get to a merchant.

That is one of the basic misconceptions that people have about RPG games. That you HAVE to get tons of useless trash in order to have fun. Well, for me that's just hoarding and constant body-merchant treks are anything but fun. They are stupid useless time wasters which you can use to bloat your piece of shit RPG. Pen & paper RPG's had a good thing going: you had to bloody write (with your pencil!) down everything you pick up and a good GM could keep the game flowing without turning characters into trash collectors. Computer games automated this process and quite frankly there is nothing more annoying to me than being forced to pick up generic uninteresting stuff from dead bodies or chests. It's useless and it's stupid. Always been.

Skyrim handles this extraordinarily bad. Not only you can carry tons of shit (20 swords? not a problem!), but you can sell them only at specific merchants, which in turn have only very limited money. So, if you are hauling lots of loot, you will have to spend literally hours trying to find someone who will buy your useless shit and not run out of money. Actually, it happened because they were trying to fix the problem, but started at the wrong end. Certain shops will only buy certain merchandise, which is fine (no one is interested in warhammers in a tailor shop). Limited amount of money is also good - but it serves no purpose other than being "realistic", and also establishes merchants as sellers rather than buyers, and I guess that is supposed to have some purpose I can't see...

Again, Im going back to JA2, which has probably the best inventory system ever devised (Im at loss why no one else bothers to implement it). Considering that your characters travel a lot, they are not pack mules. They have limited space in their pockets (which you can extend via vests, or backpacks in the mods) and you just have to make do. That forces you to manage your resources wisely. And forces you to manage it AT ALL, not just hoard what you see and sell it later.

In Skyrim, at Breezehome, I have a chest full of stupid useless trash which I will never sell because I don't see the point in wasting time looking for prospective purchasers all over the realm. Im an adventurer, not a trader of used stuff picked up from zombie remains (who would want to touch a sword used by draugr anyway?!)

Now there are solutions to this, like say spraying merchants all over the map like in Bioshock/Borderlands or just making a system where you can send items to some chest in your camp or automatically sell them from far away. But just having a flat inventory limit that forces you to leave loot behind is annoying to no end. And it just creams of bad game design to include features that annoy players.

It does not "solve" the problem, it just makes it easier to offload the trash. Creating more landfills in a city doesn't help the garbage problem. Making people manage their resources does.

And the absolute worst thing that can happen to an inventory is not to have many categories. The one thing that angered me in Mass Effect (to name another RPG) to no end was that the shops did not have categories listed. And so I had to trudge through all items to select the thing I want to sell/buy. The thought of having that apply to my entire inventory that I have to access not once or twice per 5-10 hours of play but every time I check my drops would drive me insane. As for fonts, I can't say either way. Too small and it becomes a chore to read but too large and there is way to few items per page so you have to scroll down constantly making it a problem to keep track of what you have and how much you have of it. Now if only someone would come up with a system to group all items of the same type together...)

Categories and lists are solutions to an unexisting problem. In JA2 you didn't have ANY categories at all. You didn't even have lists. You just had icons representing items. Simple and elegant graphical solution. Categories are a must in hoarding simulators like Skyrim or Dragon Age, but dispose of that shit and suddenly you don't have to worry about having too many/too much categories, small fonts and stuff like that.

The one thing I do agree with you is changing armor and weapons on the fly and potions. These things should have a bloody cool down for the sake of balance. But other than that I think that as a rule gameplay > immersion. If a feature is going to help immersion but be needlessly annoying or angering to the player than it should be dropped.

Yes. A very good depiction of lost proportions between gameplay and immersion is GTA IV. You have a beautiful living city... and you can't do anything interesting because of "immersion and realism". If I wanted to be a poor slavic imigrant in NY, I would just jump on a boat and do it. I want to be able to destroy skyscrapers with my plasma powered jetbike, not waste time on driving idiots to play some pool.

[Tolya]

As a side note: there are mods to JA2 that make enemies drop everything they have. So every dead soldier drops his weapon, ammo and armor. Do you really HAVE to pick it all up? No you don't. You can't. You are a lightly equipped mercenary force which relies on being manouverable. If players could pick up everything it wouldn't change the game, only made it 3-4 hours longer - because probably that's the additional time you would have to spend sifting through that shit at some roadside merchants.

[Narkis]

Firstly, there is nothing more annoying than a limit on how many items you can carry. And not for the reason you think. I agree that you will newer need more than one set of weapons and armor per character (maybe two if you are really bent on it). But all the extra loot, especially the generic shit items have a purpose. They are there so you can carry them to the nearest merchant and sell them so that you can have the money to buy the good stuff. The absolute worst and most annoying thing is having to constantly destroy/drop items you know would provide you with just the kind of money you need only if you managed to get to a merchant. Now there are solutions to this, like say spraying merchants all over the map like in Bioshock/Borderlands or just making a system where you can send items to some chest in your camp or automatically sell them from far away. But just having a flat inventory limit that forces you to leave loot behind is annoying to no end. And it just creams of bad game design to include features that annoy players.

There's an even simpler solution to that "problem". It's really simple. Simpler than you might imagine. And it's real easy too. What's that miracle solution, you say? Why, take out all that extraneous crap that you feel obligated to collect. Make them unpickable, or zero-value or something (because I bet good money that there'll be smartasses who'll try to get filthy rich by selling them if they're worth even half a penny) But, I hear you cry, what about teh moniez? How will we buy our phat lewtz without teh moniez? Now, my friend, this is truly revolutionary, and it might rock your world, but: The devs set the lewt prices. And the random gold you always find just lying around. So they can cut out the middleman, and just give you more moniez directly. Or make it so you need less moniez to buy the lewt in the first place. In either case, mission accomplished. You don't have to steal everything that isn't bolted down. (unless you're ocd or a cleptomaniac, in which case I guess you do) And you'll still have enough monies for the phat lewt. Isn't it droll?

And the absolute worst thing that can happen to an inventory is not to have many categories. The one thing that angered me in Mass Effect (to name another RPG) to no end was that the shops did not have categories listed. And so I had to trudge through all items to select the thing I want to sell/buy. The thought of having that apply to my entire inventory that I have to access not once or twice per 5-10 hours of play but every time I check my drops would drive me insane. As for fonts, I can't say either way. Too small and it becomes a chore to read but too large and there is way to few items per page so you have to scroll down constantly making it a problem to keep track of what you have and how much you have of it. Now if only someone would come up with a system to group all items of the same type together...)

The one thing I do agree with you is changing armor and weapons on the fly and potions. These things should have a bloody cool down for the sake of balance. But other than that I think that as a rule gameplay > immersion. If a feature is going to help immersion but be needlessly annoying or angering to the player than it should be dropped.

All of these can be solved by competent devs making a competent UI and inventory, which Mass Effect's were very much not. So many other games have gotten it right (Ja2, Witcher, almost certainly more but I'm insomniac) that it's ridiculous to use ME abnormal shittiness as an example of anything, not when people are talking about how inventories should be done.

@Tolya: It's not hard to imagine why not more games have good inventories. People want to be able to carry three sets of armour and twenty spare gun, and still have room to obsessively hoard everything they find or agonize on whether they should keep their +3 Sword of Sodomy or trade it for the +3 Mace of Mutilation that just dropped from the poor bastard they just killed. People praised the Deus Ex inventory system, for Cthulhu's sake, and it was something straight out of the past century.

[Stark]

It's a laugh that having tabbed lists is apparently some arcade technology. If only backpack simulators had searchable merchants (or searchable maps) to reduced the nonsense, like Space Rangers. SR2 had plenty of loot, plenty of randomly generated stuff with small somewhat meaningful distinctions... but because you could find what you want and go and buy it, it doesn't take hours to scum through a dungeon to find the one good knife. Hell, even MMOs boil shit down to money or faction such that if you leave behind vendor trash sword #671,203 it doesn't matter, because you can get the 105 dollars some other way.

DA2 and Sacred 2, with either special junk piles for insta-sale or the ability to sell for part value anywhere, arguably avoid the vendor treks... but simply not doing itemisation in such a retarded way would work too. Like Toyla says, trying to solve an economic problem in a 'realistic' way with bullshit like vendor funding caps or special kinds of stores or whatever is utterly useless because the economy isn't even remotely realistic.

If the player is supposed to be funded from loot sales, don't design your loot management to be shit. If your loot management sucks and you're too retarded to fix it, don't encourage people to push shoppingcarts full of generic turds around for money. Its pretty simple stuff, but in Skyrim's case I think Beth honestly thinks in their cute little retard way that they're making some kind of living breathing world where the player is mayor of Junktown or whatever.

[AniThyng]

@Tolya

Having not played Skyrim I can't speak from experience. But I do speak from a standpoint of common sense RPG design. I pretty much disagree with you all the way. Most of the things you listed as bad I can say are good.

Firstly, there is nothing more annoying than a limit on how many items you can carry. And not for the reason you think. I agree that you will newer need more than one set of weapons and armor per character (maybe two if you are really bent on it). But all the extra loot, especially the generic shit items have a purpose. They are there so you can carry them to the nearest merchant and sell them so that you can have the money to buy the good stuff. The absolute worst and most annoying thing is having to constantly destroy/drop items you know would provide you with just the kind of money you need only if you managed to get to a merchant. Now there are solutions to this, like say spraying merchants all over the map like in Bioshock/Borderlands or just making a system where you can send items to some chest in your camp or automatically sell them from far away. But just having a flat inventory limit that forces you to leave loot behind is annoying to no end. And it just creams of bad game design to include features that annoy players.

Hmm. How about a system that instead of rewarding people with tons of junk to carry around for no other purpose but to sell as vendor trash, you just increase the amount of money you can loot so you can afford to just leave the junk there. And only strip your victims of actual valuables.

Er. forget I said anything. Didn't read page 2 i see.

[S.L.Acker]

They could make vendor trash into something that can be broken down and reforged and that would be an improvement. Why do I have to sell a a bunch of iron armor and swords to buy iron ore? For that matter why does armor that takes, say ten one pound bars or ore and some leather weigh more than the materials added?

Getting back on topic, vendor junk is worthless and most RPG's have known this for years. Most JRPG's just drop straight up money, Even Square used to do this until they started going full tard on us with the last two offerings.

[Thanas]

I find it very hard to believe that Baldurs gate, who was released almost 14 years ago, managed to be one of the best RPGs ever despite forbidding your party to carry more than two sets of armor. In fact, most characters struggled to even carry one suit. Have RPGs regressed so far in terms of realism that people actually think carrying 20 suits of armor is a good thing?

[LaCroix]

I find it very hard to believe that Baldurs gate, who was released almost 14 years ago, managed to be one of the best RPGs ever despite forbidding your party to carry more than two sets of armor. In fact, most characters struggled to even carry one suit. Have RPGs regressed so far in terms of realism that people actually think carrying 20 suits of armor is a good thing?

Sadly, yes. I guess it's from Half-Real-System-Halo-Cry, where you can carry 11!!1onethousandand5 different weapons with 10000 rounds of ammo, each, without pulling a cart.

I agree that you should be able to break down stuff to a degree in crafting, but the fact that you can only take the best of the loot and have to drop the bad stuff is a good one. Also, in Skyrim most vendors can't buy all the stuff you carry around, which is also an upgrade from the gold-generating vendors in older games. It still leaves you with 300lbs(or 150 if it are half-lbs as weight unit) carrying capacity, and any game that lets you carry 25 suits of armour in your inventory and still lets you see where you are going and fight with both hands is much to easy on the players, anyway.

[Thanas]

I actually found the need to do inventory management in BG and JA to be one of things that made sense and kept the game real. Like when you tried to have Imoen (waif of a girl in BG1) carry a 40pd plate armor she was significantly slowed and moved like a snail. Even more and she just collapsed. I liked that, it forced me to make the decision of "what loot is going to be worth more? large amounts of small stuff that anybody can carry or that one heavy high value item?".

I also like collecting things like unique swords in RPGs, but that is what the storage option in your Inn/Keep/home is for.

[Eulogy]

The Disagea series has an inventory system that isn't retarded. You have an Item Bag and a Warehouse, both item lists, and one list had way the fuck more space than the other (guess which one). Now, outside of battle you had access to both item lists and could organize how you wanted, but in battle, you only had access to and can only use the stuff in your Item Bag, the Warehouse is off limits.

But like any contemporary RPG there's a ton of stuff to collect in Disagea games, from stealing loot to getting loot from the bonus list. If your Bag is full you can't collect anymore stuff, which is a problem if you have forced battles afterwards.

So how did the devs solve this problem? Simple. They made a one-way portal to the Warehouse you could use in combat; you can send items from the Item Bag directly to the Warehouse but you can't get items back unless you can access the Warehouse normally. This creates room when you need it and lets you keep your junk yet doesn't allow you to have your entire storage available in the middle of a scrap.

Secret of Mana 3 had something similar. you had a ring of eight different items, that each had up to 9 of the same item in the ring. You also had a storage option that can stash consumable items up to 99 of each item, yet can't be used in battle. The ring of course can be used in fights, and unitl the fight is done that ring was all you had. Equipment had their own space, so no worries about your spear taking up too much room.

[Stark]

Whoa whoa ingame effects from inventory? I think you'll find its just there to increase your damage numbers!

Even Torchlight had the pets, and Sacred 2 had that wierd goblin dude, for sending shit to storage.

Hilariously no shooter in the world lets you hoard guns in this way anymore, because its not interesting. The idea that vendors that can't dispose of your list of garbage is an 'upgrade' is bizarre, however. Just remember all that trucking around vendors is just replacing a sales menu with a giant road you have to walk down - adds nothing to the game... except a few extra hours of playtime. lol!

[Vendetta]

I find it very hard to believe that Baldurs gate, who was released almost 14 years ago, managed to be one of the best RPGs ever despite forbidding your party to carry more than two sets of armor. In fact, most characters struggled to even carry one suit. Have RPGs regressed so far in terms of realism that people actually think carrying 20 suits of armor is a good thing?

BG isn't without its problems though. Mostly because they didn't think just one level of abstraction was enough. Oh no. You had a hard item limit as well as a weight limit, and every item counted the same no matter its weight. So if you were carrying nothing but a bag of tiny precious stones that weighed fuck all each and you wanted to pick up a single arrow, sorry buddy, can't be done.

The second game patched it a little by adding subcontainers, but choosing either weight limit or item limit and sticking with it is much preferable to having both.

[Stark]

Games that use item number limits need to think carefully about what they actually want to limit, though. MMOs don't generally give a fuck about ammo, food, quest items or often even pots, which are all kept elsewhere. If you limit number of items, you better have a good reason for the player to need to waste slots on xyz whatever poop.

Frankly I love the way Ultima 7 did it. Overall weight limit you'd never reach, and 2D bags that meant the more you carried the harder it was to find anything. :V

[Stofsk]

I liked the way Witcher did it. Item slots like swords and armour were difficult to exchange which makes sense, while your pack contains small items and things like crafting ingredients like flower petals and seeds and shit. Which is fine because you make money by doing quests primarily and only a small portion of your revenue is generated by selling items. There are still problems with that system (namely, having dozens of bottles of potions in your pack) but it feels more real to me than any other cRPG I've ever played.

[Agent Sorchus]

I just want to point out that the Bards Tale is one of the more fun games (yes I'm talking the adult humorous Bards tale) I've played, yet it has no real inventory and has a lot of what would be termed vender trash, but the vender trash is automatically turned to gold after you pick it up and get a chance to see what it was. No hassle and gives people who want to know that that stuff is there a chance to see it.

[Stark]

Witcher had a quest bin too, so nothing important could be dropped/lost/forgotten or occupy actual useful space.

I liked the holster system, especially since they let you use the larger spaces for anything smaller, unlike some games. But the game didn't fetishise constant equipment upgrades and shit either.

Skyrim is more like Diablo in that respect, but Diablo is liek an MMO where shit you don't want to use probably isn't worth fuck-all to sell anyway.

[Purple]

A more honest way would be just saying "that's what I think"... but ok, mr. common sense RPG design.

Actually, the full transcription would be: What I think is common sense for RPG design. And what I think is common sense is outlined in my last paragraph. Gameplay > immersion. Just like in your Skyrim merchant example. Different merchants only buying specific kinds of goods makes sense from an immersion standpoint, but it is extremely annoying from a gameplay one. Ill touch on that one more later.

That is one of the basic misconceptions that people have about RPG games. That you HAVE to get tons of useless trash in order to have fun.

It might surprise you to know that there are people out here (me included) who absolutely detest having to drop or not pick up items and just watching our loot waste away. The most egregious example of this was Diablo 1 that actually had your gold factor in as an item. So if your inventory was full you could not pick up a single coin more. Seriously? A god dam coin weighs so much you can't carry it? Fuck that.

D&D at least gets around it in a sort of imaginative way with the encumbrance system by making it based around your stats. That's why I play a half ork barbarian. I can carry my entire party on my back and than some.

Well, for me that's just hoarding and constant body-merchant treks are anything but fun. They are stupid useless time wasters which you can use to bloat your piece of shit RPG.

Yes, the whole process could use some automation. That much I can agree on. Like the system I suggested to allow you to remotely sell items you pick up immediately if you don't like them. You can even justify it by saying that the party members not currently with you run off to the shop and sell it.

Computer games automated this process and quite frankly there is nothing more annoying to me than being forced to pick up generic uninteresting stuff from dead bodies or chests. It's useless and it's stupid. Always been.

I completely disagree here. There is a definitive sense of growth to having your character kill his or her enemies, loot their equipment and sell it off so that he or she can buy the stuff he or she wants. There is enjoyment to be found in knowing that your enemies are feeding your growth even after they are dead. That and its just realistic.

Skyrim handles this extraordinarily bad. Not only you can carry tons of shit (20 swords? not a problem!), but you can sell them only at specific merchants, which in turn have only very limited money. So, if you are hauling lots of loot, you will have to spend literally hours trying to find someone who will buy your useless shit and not run out of money. Actually, it happened because they were trying to fix the problem, but started at the wrong end. Certain shops will only buy certain merchandise, which is fine (no one is interested in warhammers in a tailor shop). Limited amount of money is also good - but it serves no purpose other than being "realistic", and also establishes merchants as sellers rather than buyers, and I guess that is supposed to have some purpose I can't see...

That's actually a quite good example of what I was talking about when I said gameplay > immersion. The things you mentioned are quite innovative in terms of realism. But there is a reason why they have not been done recently. They are just plain annoying. Unlimited cash merchants that buy anything from you are just a convenience required in anything D&D inspired. Like you said your self, those mechanics serve no purpose other than being "realistic". And when something like that is implemented without care for gameplay this is what happens.

Again, Im going back to JA2, which has probably the best inventory system ever devised (Im at loss why no one else bothers to implement it). Considering that your characters travel a lot, they are not pack mules. They have limited space in their pockets (which you can extend via vests, or backpacks in the mods) and you just have to make do. That forces you to manage your resources wisely. And forces you to manage it AT ALL, not just hoard what you see and sell it later.

That sounds horrific. Not only do I have to drop most of my loot and thus waste resources I could have otherwise used but I have to constantly evaluate and reevaluate what to keep and what to drop. Every time I kill something I would have to sit down with a pen and paper (or alt tab to excel) and calculate the projected value of selling it at the nearest merchant in order to get the optimum gold income in the end. All the while I would know that the optimal outcome is the one denied to me. How can you even play the game with all that frustration happening in the background?

In Skyrim, at Breezehome, I have a chest full of stupid useless trash which I will never sell because I don't see the point in wasting time looking for prospective purchasers all over the realm. Im an adventurer, not a trader of used stuff picked up from zombie remains (who would want to touch a sword used by draugr anyway?!)

Try playing Mass Effect, KOTOR or say Dragon Age. Or if you don't like Bioware try just about any RPG game on the market and see normal non "realistic" vendors. Than it won't be annoying to you.

It does not "solve" the problem, it just makes it easier to offload the trash. Creating more landfills in a city doesn't help the garbage problem. Making people manage their resources does.

But like making people manage their resources as you so nicely put it this also only adds a layer of work and anoyment for no realistic gain. Do you find a game about recycling and carefuly managing your household fun? I don't. Furthermore, you seem obsessed with loads of loot being a bad thing. Well I have to ask something. Is anyone making you pick it all up? As far as I know, in most games you can run through the whole thing just fine even if you pretend you can only carry the things on your back. No one is ever forcing you to claim all those items. I respect your opinion and all. And it is your right not to like hoarding items. But if you don't like it just don't do it. But for some reason you seem to want to blame the system for allowing you the possibility of doing so in the first place and allowing us that disagree with you to enjoy the game as well.

Categories and lists are solutions to an unexisting problem. In JA2 you didn't have ANY categories at all. You didn't even have lists. You just had icons representing items. Simple and elegant graphical solution. Categories are a must in hoarding simulators like Skyrim or Dragon Age, but dispose of that shit and suddenly you don't have to worry about having too many/too much categories, small fonts and stuff like that.

Even with very few items it would make sense to have items split into categories simply for ease of reference. Why would I want to go through 10 images to check which is armor and which is my war hammer? Especially when I could just go to weapons and equip the thing I need. It's the same thing as with real life. Some people prefer to put all their items on a pile in the middle of the room and eyeball it. And other people prefer to have 100 neatly filed and labeled drawers.

Yes. A very good depiction of lost proportions between gameplay and immersion is GTA IV. You have a beautiful living city... and you can't do anything interesting because of "immersion and realism". If I wanted to be a poor slavic imigrant in NY, I would just jump on a boat and do it. I want to be able to destroy skyscrapers with my plasma powered jetbike, not waste time on driving idiots to play some pool.

Having newer plaid GTA I can't tell. But it sounds to me that you dislike the game becouse you dislike the plot of it. And while that is a valid complaint I guess. I can't really see what it has to do with this discussion.

[S.L.Acker]

Purple, you have issues if you actually spend time calculating the cost of dropping one item in favor of another. You could also, you know, backtrack for the loot you missed if you really care that much. Heck when you think about it D&D sized gold coins would get heavy fast, carrying 8000gp should weight 80lb.

[Purple]

Purple, you have issues if you actually spend time calculating the cost of dropping one item in favor of another. You could also, you know, backtrack for the loot you missed if you really care that much. Heck when you think about it D&D sized gold coins would get heavy fast, carrying 8000gp should weight 80lb.

Half ork barbarian here. Strength is my strong stat.

And yes, I do want to maximize my gain. The worst part is that some games have items vanishing after you go too far away. And others won't let you leave for an area with a vendor until you clear the whole scene. And that can be extremely annoying. Having to drop an item or not pick it up and thus lose the gold I would gain for it forever due to idiotic game design makes me want to bash my head against a wall in rage.

[S.L.Acker]

Purple, you have issues if you actually spend time calculating the cost of dropping one item in favor of another. You could also, you know, backtrack for the loot you missed if you really care that much. Heck when you think about it D&D sized gold coins would get heavy fast, carrying 8000gp should weight 80lb.

Half ork barbarian here. Strength is my strong stat.

And yes, I do want to maximize my gain. The worst part is that some games have items vanishing after you go too far away. And others won't let you leave for an area with a vendor until you clear the whole scene. And that can be extremely annoying. Having to drop an item or not pick it up and thus lose the gold I would gain for it forever due to idiotic game design makes me want to bash my head against a wall in rage.

Do you collect every bit of change you walk by IRL as well.

[Executor32]

I hear if you're not a goddamn hoarder, games are more fun. In the case of Skyrim, I only ever pick up gold, jewelry/gems, shit that I want to use, and maybe the occasional item with an enchantment I want to burn.

[S.L.Acker]

Amen, though I also tend to stay close full to capacity just because buying crafting materials can get expensive.

[Narkis]

Ditto. I can't remember a game like these that I didn't end up swimming in cash by the end, even if I leave dungeons strewn with more crap than the local landfill. Skyrim is no exception.

[Thanas]

I find it very hard to believe that Baldurs gate, who was released almost 14 years ago, managed to be one of the best RPGs ever despite forbidding your party to carry more than two sets of armor. In fact, most characters struggled to even carry one suit. Have RPGs regressed so far in terms of realism that people actually think carrying 20 suits of armor is a good thing?

BG isn't without its problems though. Mostly because they didn't think just one level of abstraction was enough. Oh no. You had a hard item limit as well as a weight limit, and every item counted the same no matter its weight. So if you were carrying nothing but a bag of tiny precious stones that weighed fuck all each and you wanted to pick up a single arrow, sorry buddy, can't be done.

The second game patched it a little by adding subcontainers, but choosing either weight limit or item limit and sticking with it is much preferable to having both.

Item limit made sense - who can carry 400 arrows anyway? The subcontainers were a good solution, I agree.

But I never run out of projectiles in combat except for one or two times where I forgot to stock up, so...success, I guess. .

[GuppyShark]

I hear if you're not a goddamn hoarder, games are more fun. In the case of Skyrim, I only ever pick up gold, jewelry/gems, shit that I want to use, and maybe the occasional item with an enchantment I want to burn.

Finally! Some sense.

You are not obligated to carry loot. At first you will be scrounging for every scrap of value, that's logical. Later, when you're punching dragons in the face, you will turn up your nose at some bandit's leather armour and crappy iron sword. And this is correct. Leave the vendor trash. You don't need it. Just take the coin, any magic items and the few things that are actually of value.

Everything in the game that people are critical of in this thread seem to be intentionally trying to point towards the realisation that just because it's loot doesn't mean it's worth your time.