Carry weight & inventory management

[Elhazzared]

Now inventory management is a part of most RPGs too. It tends to be the one of the worst parts of it, but it's there. That is why good RPGs give you an ignorable inventory management.

Wait, what? You assume inventory management is always going to be shit in RPGs? And thus a system so meaningless that it can be literally ignored is a good thing? And when one game breaks the status quo of bad design, you outright refuse to play it? Goddamnit Elhazzared, I will never understand you

You would probably like Dungeon Siege. You can transmute items to money in it. Torchlight too, you get a pet that sells your junk loot at town automatically. Generally speaking, ARPGs that streamline the whole itemization/looting aspect might be your thing - the polar opposite of what Underrail does.

Because that's not actually a hassle, that is part of combat. Running out of ammo can kill you so you have to plan acordingly. it's not so much a case of whether or not it is like that in the real world but actually something that is part of the actual combat dificulty.

Don't try to use ridiculous examples on me. You do know that realism in a game is always secondary to balance.

You mean *exactly* just like carry weight is part of combat? Getting crippled and encumbered can kill you so you have to plan accordingly. The only difference is that you WILL get crippled and it WILL have a major impact on combat. Running out of ammo WON'T happen unless you are very, very careless.

I shouldn't need to point this out, but it's not any more ridiculous than your viewpoint.

Inventory management makes sense in a rogue like. Let's take sword of the stars: the pit as an example. There are no shops or ways to buy and sell items. In this case, chosing what you keep and what you throw away is a good mechanic since there will never be money involved. So you have to decide, do I keep this extra weapon when I already have one of teh same? Just in case it breaks? Do I keep this component to try and build something with it later or do i throw it away rather than throw food away or some other component?

In an RPG where money takes place and there are vendors you do not need an inventory management system. All it does is breaking game immersion. It makes people stop doing their quest to go and dump stuff or sell stuff to then go back to do the mission. This does not beneficts the game in any way possible. I don't have a problem with things being done different, I have a problem with thing being done worse. When I first played this game and saw there was no limit to what I could carry I thought. Well this is different but Styg gets it right. There shouldn't be a need for a player to stop what he's doing just to go and dump/sell stuff, it is counter producive. Of course, the game was just far too early in development and only proved to have a much worse system instead.

I think I played one of the dungeon siege games, not much but can't remember much about it anyway. Torchlight was meh, all abillities were pretty meh, got bored very quickly. Sacred 2 had a huge inventory space and you could sell directly from the inventory at a minimal loss which was fine to sell the cheap items. Still, ARPGs are not the same so I won't be drawing comparisons to underrail.

Getting crippled already has it's penalties which need having nothing to do with getting encumbered. You only get encumbered if you want, just go back and dump items before that happens. There is no comparison at all. When i say run out of ammo, I don't mean, really having no more bullets, i mean running out of bullets in the chamber. If you need to shot but have to reload that round it can get you killed. Planning ahead as to when you'll have your reloads is part of the strategy and part of the difficulty. Yes, getting crippled is part of the difficulty too, but that has nothing to do with carry weights, getting crippled already has penalties of it's own and if for some reason getting crippled ties in with losing max carry weight so as to supposedly get you encumbered and get you further penalties, then all you have to do is increase the penalties for getting crippled and get rid of the weight system all the same.

[UnLimiTeD]

Well, Underrail isn't actually too far off then.
The problem seems to be that traders buy too much.
If every trader only bought like 2 or three items that they currently have an interested customer for, it's essentially a roguelike with gathering quests.
They could even reward you with specific items. No more pesky money to worry about.
It's quite interesting, actually;  If there was a roguelike that had selling and money, but the money was just a number that did absolutely nothing, would you pick things up?

[Elhazzared]

I disagree. Underrail has nothing of a roguelike, for example, the very stample of roguelikes are permadeath. There are other things too like procedural level generation, and while RNG exists and can screw you, RNG pertains drops or possible enemy conbinations you might find. When it comes to combat roguelikes are made of certainties. You know exactly what damage your weapon cause, there is no variable in damage rolls, at best there are hit rolls.

Now there do is at least a roguelike that uses money and a barter system now that I think about it and of course it has a limit amount of inventory space. it's called dungeons of dreadmore which I'm sure you all know it. So what happens in DD when you hit inventory limits? There is to ways to deal with it. The later expansions introduced a sort of home portal which is a place you can go from anywhere and you just drop items on the ground and use that as storage so you can sell everything. Nothing is left behind. Before that existed it was just extra work, you drped things by the stairs and kept moving the whole stuff even if it took 10 trips. Eventually you'd find a store and sell all. Just busy work when an infinite inventory would have beneficted the game much more... Sword of the stars: the pit had a limiting factor on that which was food but there was no money or traders so it worked well.

Now if there was a roguelike that had selling and money but money had ultimately no use, then money was not money, it was points and I wouldn't care as I don't play score attack games.

Now the current problem is not that traders buy too much, is that traders don't buy everything and that they pay too much for what they buy. The previous system was better where they paid less, you needed to repair items more often to get their money worth but it already paid too much much, at least later down the line anyway.

Idealisticly, the traders buys all and you have no carry limits. If you follow only the main quest you'll end up deprived of money, it shouldn't be impossible to beat the game but definitly make it hard. If you do some sidequests, let's say about half of them (assimung that a third can't be completed because you don't have the skills and you are always limited in which skillset you can have) then you'll get just about enough money to get everything you need, from ammo to equipment. If you doo all sidequest possible or half but explore then you'll have some extra money to throw around however you like. This is a very good system. it takes care of the money problem. There is no immersion break in having to stop midquest to go dump/sell stuff and there is no chore in even trying to sell the items.

Even from a realistic point of view (and again, realism takes a backstep to balance) you are a living in a world where you live off what you can scavenge. There are no worthless items, everything is worth money and money is a very precious commodity, especially now that the world has gone to hell. It makes sense that you'd carry everything and sell everything even if it took you time. You certainly wouldn't leave loot behind for someone else to get the money instead of you.

You can say that the current system tries to work like a roguelike where it forces the player to leave items behind, however it doesn't. the player always has a choice whether or not to take it, it will just take more time and break immersion. Selling items follows on the same page. You cannot stop a player from selling everything, you'll merely make the plyer waste several hours to be able to do so.

The leason taken from this is. A few people will like it. Some people will dislike it but still suffer the system to play however these people are probably going to finish the game once more likely just follow the storyline since they don't need to do more and then they'll never play it again. And some people will just be so frustated with the chores and disrespect of their time that they will give up on the game and consider it a waste of their money... Let's consider the previously implemented system where no one had complaints about it. Everyone liked it how it was, even if a few people like it better now, everyone liked the old system! The only problem was too much money floating around and that was very easy to remedy.

[Hans_Sanitizer]

I too have stopped playing this game because of the inventory issues. I gotta take Elhazzared's side on a lot of the issues.

Some stuff that was mentioned earlier was about how it seems that having a crafting skill is necessary in the game.

I would think that perhaps having a dealer that would take items as payment for crafting kits, or repair services would be nice.

I think being able to pay for services like armor and weapon repair, or healing with items you accumulate would be a great addition to the game, and maybe would solve some of this item sale restriction irritation that a lot of us feel.

I still think a junk dealer should be added to the game, who gives a worse deal than other dealers, but still takes your leftover stuff us hoarders carry around.

We shouldn't really be making the realism argument at all either, that goes out the window pretty fast with dealers not accepting items. I mean it's supposed to be a desolate place, I would think people in poverty would be happy to take any of your items at a price they knew would serve them. Also the rules of supply and demand would continue, you would just continue to sell items for less and less money if you kept bringing them in, as far as a real market would go.
 
In short I just think the game lacks options for those of us who echo the same frustrations as Elhazzard.