Carry Weight?

[Gairnulf]

I think what you are descirbing was first seen in Diablo's inventory, or Arcanum's for a more recent example.

 

What struck me was when I read somewhere a developer actually admitting that they included personal inventories just to satisfy people who "wanted to have a feeling" their characters have personal inventories. Wtf, I wouldn't expect our intelligence to be underestimated in such a way, not from developers whose work on this project actually started with the backing by the same people who are now being "appeased". I mean, they should know their backers better than that.

 

The problem apparently comes from the attempt to please both crowds who want mutually exclusive things.

[Flayeriv]

Yeah, I'd rather have something or not have something than 'feel' like I have it and discover the feature is 'all show' and has no actual use. I mean, even aesthetic features exist to increase immersiveness and multiple choices with no change in result exist to enhance the roleplay function. This just seems superflouous.

[Lephys]

I think what you are descirbing was first seen in Diablo's inventory, or Arcanum's for a more recent example.

I remember both games using a grid for space, but I was talking about abstracting the space, even. You would have like 50 space, and item X would take up 10 space. In a grid, shape would be an issue. That's really the only difference.

 

And yeah. I understand that some aspects of game design come down to feelies, but I don't think you should incorporate arbitrary feelies in the face of mechanical/technical design choices that contradict those feelies. If feelies are deemed that big of an issue, then just forego the technical choice, and vice versa.

[rjshae]

People who like the carry weight limitations in the IE games perhaps did so because it provided a sense of realism. But what was the game impact? Not much really. You had to frequently move inventory around the party and/or throw away lower value crap. If you wanted to recoup the value of that crap, you had to make multiple time-wasting trips across already cleared real estate.

 

This is work for lackeys; it's why you hire laborers. You're adventurers, dammit! Go risk your neck or something...

 

Stash is an abstraction that eliminates a big source of tedium. Game play enjoyment-wise, it seems like a winner to me.

 

Anyway, this has been debated before.

Edited November 18, 2014 by rjshae

[Gairnulf]

People who like the carry weight limitations in the IE games perhaps did so because it provided a sense of realism. But what was the game impact? Not much really. You had to frequently move inventory around the party and/or throw away lower value crap. If you wanted to recoup the value of that crap, you had to make multiple time-wasting trips across already cleared real estate.

 

This is work for lackeys; it's why you hire laborers. You're adventurers, dammit! Go risk your neck or something...

 

Stash is an abstraction that eliminates a big source of tedium. Game play enjoyment-wise, it seems like a winner to me.

 

Anyway, this has been debated before.

Posing your question, what was the game impact, to myself, I find myself answering that for me Carry Weight was a limitation of a good kind, the kind that involves trading off one benefit for another. When my inventory is limited, I have better knowledge of ot because I can choose what to carry. At a relatively early point in BG for example, I stopped collecting studded leather armor and short bows from dead enemies, because they were cheap items and took up valuable slots. In PoE on the other hand, I don't have a limitation to my inventory space, so I can behave like a vacuum cleaner, which I find immersion-breaking.

 

That's unless I establish house rules, which would still only affect the number of carried items, not their weight, because there is no weight property to speak of, plate armors and daggers weigh the same on Eora apparently.

 

In the IE games, inventory slots were in effect empty space which you can monetize, and the goal is to monetize it optimally, by managing the inventory. That's being removed from PoE, and the inventory essentially becomes an equivalent of a Black hole. I don't see the fun in that, the challenge that was there is gone.

[SymbolicFrank]

If you can sell your first short sword for 10 gold, but your 10th short sword only sells for 1 gold and your twentieth for 1 copper, the inventory problem mostly disappears. Unless camping supplies, arrows, gems, jewelry, minor healing potions and such don't stack. Or only by type, when there are many different types.

[Shevek]

The more I play the beta, the more I tend to think that the personal inventories are pretty useless. Just quick items, weapon slots and a stash would have the same basic functionality of the current system and feel less clunky. They can just embed the stash ui where the current personal inventories are and grey it out during combat.

 

To be clear, I would prefer the personal inventories if they had proper stash and weight limitations but thats not gonna happen at this point.

[Sheikh]

People who like the carry weight limitations in the IE games perhaps did so because it provided a sense of realism. But what was the game impact? Not much really. You had to frequently move inventory around the party and/or throw away lower value crap. If you wanted to recoup the value of that crap, you had to make multiple time-wasting trips across already cleared real estate.

 

This is work for lackeys; it's why you hire laborers. You're adventurers, dammit! Go risk your neck or something...

 

Stash is an abstraction that eliminates a big source of tedium. Game play enjoyment-wise, it seems like a winner to me.

 

Anyway, this has been debated before.

 

Now you are choosing between 2 evils. That is never wise. They both suck by themselves and we need some third options and there is an infinite possibility of them. Stahs points is one.

 

I like an even more simulationist approach where you cant hide a halberd into a backpack because you cant in reality. So you would need to either wield it or put it somewhere on a pack mule. Meaning you would have realism derived limitations regarding space and how many this and that you could realistically carry and a flexible weight limitation - you can overburden yourself, but the more you do this the more you waste stamina which I think exists in this game and the slower your character would move around.

[Silent Winter]

^really don't like taking simulationism that far - for one, it punishes a player who wants to have a halberd as their secondary weapon (even though such may not be much more powerful in game than a longsword), or specialise in halberds and have a halberd of fire and a halberd of ice for different opponents.

- and for another, it would involve adding 'halberd strapped to back' animations (plus every other weapon than daggers / shurikens) - unless you just want to simulate the effects but in-game see the halberd only in your pack as now.

 

I also don't want to lose the personal inventory space, even if we do have the stash:

1) I'll use it to organise my most-wanted equipment/scrolls/whatever among different characters - (I like to roleplay the cleric holding the potions and the mage holding the scrolls in BG, for example)

2) I can do a playthrough without using the stash except as a 'drop to ground' substitution

[Sheikh]

So you would prefer not to have that simulationist approach for gameplay reasons?

[Silent Winter]

^basically, yes.

As I said earlier - a little simulationism is good, taking it too far makes the game more cumbersome than fun.

Where any given person draws the line is naturally down to personal taste.

 

(Side note: I'd also enjoy playing a full-on simulationist rpg - something akin to what I imagine Kingdom Come:Deliverace is going to be like - just not what I want from PoE)

[Mlatimudan]

I don't really see the problem with a stash, think of it as a cart you lug around(or a beast of burden does for you), you can't really unpack it all the time but when you make camp, sure why not, in fact if they just add a line of dialogue about a cart from a companion or the hero I think everyone can be happy, roleplayers, simulationists, lovers of gameyness, and people who don't care alike.

 

Also if you hate it just don't use it, your carry weight is restricted by slots anyway so even if you were Hulk Hogan you couldn't carry more then you have slots.Which makes sense since even a light pack of a huge volume will encumber you just like a small but heavy one, maybe even more.

[Flayeriv]

 

Also if you hate it just don't use it, your carry weight is restricted by slots anyway so even if you were Hulk Hogan you couldn't carry more then you have slots.Which makes sense since even a light pack of a huge volume will encumber you just like a small but heavy one, maybe even more.

Most of us here seem to be saying that we like the existence of the stash, it's just the method used we don't like. We'd prefer it to make in-world sense.

 

Fact is, unless the game declares that we all have bottomless backpacks, there's a lot of things that we shouldn't be able to carry - or at least a limit - in order for any feeling of simulation to exist. Otherwise it's just a mechanic that has no actual real-world association.

[Niknud]

I have always been a fan of everything having a carry weight including your gold/silver/copper.  I actually liked how torchlight 2 used pets to run back to town to sell for you.  I think this game could use a similar method of hiring merchants at rest areas that will take your items on consignment to town to sell for a % of your profits. 

[rjshae]

I have always been a fan of everything having a carry weight including your gold/silver/copper.  I actually liked how torchlight 2 used pets to run back to town to sell for you.  I think this game could use a similar method of hiring merchants at rest areas that will take your items on consignment to town to sell for a % of your profits. 

 

If time is a significant element in this game, then the labor cost of hauling the stash back to the camp could be abstracted by making the rest times longer. Hiring merchants (or laborers) as you suggest, could then reduce or eliminate the time loss.

[Flayeriv]

Oh gods, carry weight of silver and copper.

I mean, I know I use this all the time in regular games but oh gods.

[Lephys]

Oh gods, carry weight of silver and copper.

 

I mean, I know I use this all the time in regular games but oh gods.

, The thing about that is, when you've got a stronghold (as you can in PoE), and coffers and such, beyond the simple coinpurses of 6 individuals, eventually people will begin to trust that you're good to your word. So, even if you aren't carrying around 1,000 gold pieces, they'll trust that they can contact someone at your stronghold and procure the funds in a timely fashion. Not everyone, of course, but some people.

 

This is also where a good reputation system comes in.

[Niknud]

 

Oh gods, carry weight of silver and copper.

 

I mean, I know I use this all the time in regular games but oh gods.

, The thing about that is, when you've got a stronghold (as you can in PoE), and coffers and such, beyond the simple coinpurses of 6 individuals, eventually people will begin to trust that you're good to your word. So, even if you aren't carrying around 1,000 gold pieces, they'll trust that they can contact someone at your stronghold and procure the funds in a timely fashion. Not everyone, of course, but some people.

 

Personally I think the idea of carrying around thousands in gold and silver is just a absurd idea.  The weight alone would be a logistical nightmare as you are traveling.  Which is why I always enjoyed games that gave a realistic weight to the money you carried.

[Flayeriv]

 

Lephys, on 24 Nov 2014 - 6:11 PM, said:

 

Flayeriv, on 24 Nov 2014 - 6:08 PM, said:

Oh gods, carry weight of silver and copper.

 

I mean, I know I use this all the time in regular games but oh gods.

, The thing about that is, when you've got a stronghold (as you can in PoE), and coffers and such, beyond the simple coinpurses of 6 individuals, eventually people will begin to trust that you're good to your word. So, even if you aren't carrying around 1,000 gold pieces, they'll trust that they can contact someone at your stronghold and procure the funds in a timely fashion. Not everyone, of course, but some people.

 

Personally I think the idea of carrying around thousands in gold and silver is just a absurd idea.  The weight alone would be a logistical nightmare as you are traveling.  Which is why I always enjoyed games that gave a realistic weight to the money you carried.

Heh, there's a reason that most people with money either buried it, had it in a chest or otherwist locked it up safe and sound and only carried around what they needed. That sh*t is heavy.

[Lephys]

Personally I think the idea of carrying around thousands in gold and silver is just a absurd idea.  The weight alone would be a logistical nightmare as you are traveling.  Which is why I always enjoyed games that gave a realistic weight to the money you carried.

Oh, I do too. I'm just saying that in that era, if you had any kind of renown or reputation throughout the region, people would probably actually deal with you without waiting for you to produce, right then and there, hundreds of heavy coins.

[Sheikh]

And then you arrange for the money to be delivered. Like the jew in Ivanhoe of 1982.

[LadyCrimson]

Gold coin weight is why I'm glad we live in the era of digital money. Even stacks of paper money are very heavy in large amounts.

 

I've never minded some weight/space limitations and I think some games should have/need such, but not because it's ever realistic. The idea that an adventurer could run around with even 2 changes of armor + 1-2 extra shields, clothes, and several weapons + food + camping supplies + money isn't realistic and just ends up hampering the pace of gameplay if it's too strict in-game. It's not just the pure weight value, it's the logistics of the awkwardness of carrying multiple bulky items without dragging a wheeled cart behind you.

 

If one likes the micro-management of having to consider the .5 weight of a coin or apple, that's great - I like micro-management stuff too sometimes - but it's not really about realism.

[Sheikh]

Yeah but digital money still needs to be backed up by gold, otherwise we will fall victim to inflation.

[Flayeriv]

...So that part where we moved from the gold standard over a decade ago...

[Marcvs Caesar]

Isn't PoE supposed to be a successor to the old IE games and funded by people who liked those games? Because the more I learn about PoE, the less it seems to be like the old IE games.

 

The more believable and deep the game is, the more immersed I'll become while playing it. So ideally it shouldn't be possible to carry anything which the character can't reasonably carry himself, to combat this you could have a horse/mule/wagon to carry the items.

Of course I'm aware that this isn't appealing to everyone so a compromise should be made, and the system used in the old IE games was that great compromise.

The system that seems to be used in PoE is not believable so I very much dislike it.