Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
How much can you carry?
CROW3
Member, Alpha Two
I love Bethesda games, but if there's one thing that makes me want to punch their devs it's inventory management. It doesn't matter if I'm in the shattered ruin of Boston or some backwater mine run by a band of (now dead) bandits - carrying my crap home is always a painful minigame of prioritizing profit v. usefulness because the system is based on weight.
This week, I'm having the same issues in KCD and Witcher 3.
For Ashes, Steven has talked about - but is still on the fence 3 different dimensions to constrain a character's personal (we can talk about mules too) inventory capacity: weight, slots, and stacks.
My questions are:
This week, I'm having the same issues in KCD and Witcher 3.
For Ashes, Steven has talked about - but is still on the fence 3 different dimensions to constrain a character's personal (we can talk about mules too) inventory capacity: weight, slots, and stacks.
My questions are:
- What system do you prefer?
- Why?
- Are there examples of your preference?
3
Comments
Having to prioritize and choose what you bring with you and what you pick up on the way means you can't over-specialize your gear for all possible encounters. Either you prepare for something specific or you go for the average and most common type of situation. It also means the game has to be not about killing for loot (large quantity of petty items). If most gear is crafted by players, that shouldn't be an issue since they it can be done in settlements.
My best memory of limited carried weight was in EverQuest. A friend of mine gave me a full set of bronze armour, in west Karana at the zone entrance for Qeynos Hills. A werewolf spawned there at night, it aggro'd us and neither of us was strong enough to beat it. I was reduced to a slow walk for safety in the next zone while my friend held the beast for a short time. We both made it, but I wouldn't remember this if weight had not be an issue in that game.
I dont ever want to see "Inventory is full"
I just want to see my character walk slow if I exceed the weight limit.
I also dont want to see any "trash" items that have 0 or low gold value. Why the fuck would anybody add "trash" items in a game that you cant even profit from by selling them to an npc?
I think this is a good approach. If players want to go over their carrying capacity i say let them. Having them RP walk everywhere while over-encumbered no matter the amount of items they carry is a good thing imo. This makes things easier on players moving materials around inside cities/freeholds between crafting stations and the markets. The flip-side is it polices it's self in open world as choosing to weigh yourself down this much can make you a target for ganking, but you aren't completely screwed if you decide to take one more rock than you would normally.
The only thing that really needs balance with this is the amount of weight you can carry and the weight of items themselves.
What I would like to see is for mules to become meta. By this I mean that basically everyone uses mules when farming. I'd like to see mules have a high carry weight, and for them to pick up drops from dead mobs automatically. Players would ideally have a low carry weight to make mules almost a necessity when farming.
The reason I want mules to be meta is so that players have a fairly large max capacity in order to have the agency to choose when to go back to the city to unload the mule. This plays into risk vs reward. It gives the players the opportunity to risk more mats that would dropped on death, for better farming efficiency.
Furthermore, players that are PvE-only types can choose not to use mules at all to make it obvious that they aren't worth killing for mats, at the expense for much lower efficiency. Normally, I wouldn't make suggestions to help PvE-only players, but I guess I would be fine with this as it also kinda helps everyone else figure out which players aren't even worth the time and corruption to kill.
It's part of the inventory management system and there to act as drag on bots/multibox and players camping an area too long. Needing to manage inventory leaves points of vulnerability for rival hunters.
I personally prefer stacks and slots. Dealing with weight usually increases decision making time in the vulnerable state of managing a full inventory. I want some friction, but right generally adds too much in my opinion.
I dont care for inv management. As long as I make sure to pick up consumables, meaning I have to visit a market, I am happy.
I see very little management in active combat these past few years:
Amount of bar slots
Identity of playstyles
Strategic cooldown usage.
Too much effort is placed in tedious gaming features in the wrong gaming genres and the important parts are left out.
The same feeling I get from singleplayer games becoming BORING open world ez mode achievement ticking activites and 'life simulators' instead of challenging enemies and cool environments, while mmos become instanced lobbies.
Focus on the fandomentals, limit the tediousness of the secondary aspects.
I am also a huge fan of camping in an area with my friends for many hours, instead of all of us being lost and driven around by lame ez npc questlines; not my ideal way of exploring and taking in the environment
Fair enough. But wouldn't weight increase the tediousness? I have found it to be so.
Then again you don't want any management system it sounds like. So in your ideal scenario if you wanted to farm an area you'd have to wait for a person stronger than you to leave rather than having built in windows of opportunity to attack them. Sounds like your stule. Not my preference but your style is as usual fairly consistent.
I dont want to waste time managing crap with I am out in the word adventuring.
Weight makes all that happen.
Inv slots is bs. Always.
My back hurts.
Should've gotten more inventory slots in your back.
I am a fan of at least having weight in terms of gatherable goods, maybe no weight tied to armor and potions etc. In terms of that, I prefer Inventory slots, that DO stack decently high. Like a lot of people said, I want to see gathers maybe seeing a progression path of, at first having to go back and forth to a node every 15-20 mins, then unlocking a pack mule or cart, etc and being able to stay 30-45 mins. to extend their trips longer. (Numbers are just rough guestimates obv.)
Yeah - I feel like I’ve spent waay too much time in hefty RPGs (and a lot of ARPGs) beating my head against the inventory system.
From a gathering perspective, stackable slots, where weight isn’t taken into account (such as wow), is the friendliest and the least tedious to micromanage. If I want to focus harvesting stacks of something, I can split a stack across multiple slots and gather until all of those slots are maxed.
It’s also the system that has the least investment toward risk v. reward. There are very few constraints, and fits a world where material is sort of unlimited.
Since raw material is going to be scarce in Verra, it would make sense to add a weight + encumbrance dimension (that can be bolstered via mules).
Do you guys have opinions on the UX? (e.g. bags w/icons, a text-based list, etc)?
Hard agree on that much I guess.
What I would prefer is the diablo style inventory, where item size plays a role in how much you can carry. Combine that with a bag system where bags can hold a maximum amount of weight and each item has weight. This system would be about as good as an RPG system could mimic real life without having you actually carry shit around. In practice, I don't think people would enjoy such a system as much as I would.
What I think people would prefer and what I think Ashes will have is a system that is just based on a number of item slots that can be increased overtime with new gear. This, with other stationary and mobile inventories, mounts or mules is more likely to be what we get. I would doubt that wight would come into play because that gives STR-based characters an advantage.
It's a classic case of fun and gameplay being more important than realism or simulation. As much as I would like a brutal inventory system that makes you feel like you are hauling a lot of shit around. It is not fun for most people and would be a detriment to the game.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Survival games are the only ones I trully care about gathering inv managing and home building.
I low key am interested in a weight system because it'd make caravan looting impossible to get all the loot with only a three person group. I think it'd feel more tedious to manage otherwise though. Idk why you saying the diablo thing reminded me of that but it did. I still order slot based management over all though.
My thoughts on slot-based inventory are this: If I wanted to play Tetris id play that instead. Now its much more appeasing if they have an auto sort button, but it's just not my preferred type either way.
can we have a skill that lets us throw items at enemies, damaging them depending on the weight?
It means the developers either need to have illogical weight on armor, or physical damage will always be at an advantage due to the armor associated with mitigating it weighing more.
It means players would be able to carry gear with magical defenses easier, and so will be able to easily carry a better selection of such items - but due to the weight of heavy armor, players would only want one set of it at the most - giving people dealing physical damage an inherent benefit.
This is why we cant.
I REMEMBER THIS!
that's more a problem with putting chests in chests though.
My one thing is that they just won't bring out TES6!!! I don't want to play their other games...
Don't do that. If you are carefully tweaking the dials on the scale of fun vs. annoyance to try and sell things, you aren't going to end up with happy customers. It's a tricky thing to ask, but whatever inventory system you go with, you have to make it feel fair.
how would drop on death work.. quantity of items, percentage of items, percentage of weight?
Dropping a percentage of carried gatherables and processed goods.[4][5]
This also includes a percentage of the certificates a player is carrying.[6]
Better hurry back to town before the wolves come out.
Do not recall if that worked or not.
Do recall one time asking two clan mates to repeatedly kill me to quickly loose my karma when I was very, very red.. First death I literally dropped every single thing and dropped probably 2 years of playing the market to achieve.. it was a moment of faith in the clan mates as that second either one of them could have picked up and run off with the loot. Got everything back..
That being said, whilst I did enjoy having work arounds and what ever is determined I am sure the player base will initially find many more workarounds.. ideally I would like to see much of these issues worked out prior to launch!
That being said I would fine with a weight system as long it doesn’t scale with strength like some single player/ co-op games. (I’m looking at you Divinity).
They could always go with an escape from tarkov style system where you would have an unlootable bag (unless corrupted) but everything else be fair game. It would be nice to be able to gear up before roaming with potions and food and have the risk of losing more than just farm on death. I'd like to steal someone potions haha.