[glossolalia]

by which i mean not inventory management in terms of one-use items, but as it applies to the player's core abilities and attributes, and the deliberate limit of space and differing item size/shape used to provoke strategic thinking from the player as to how much he can fit and what and why. i'm probably not making any sense here. i mean things like the case in re4, the stickers in smash bros brawl's subspace whatever, and there are probably better examples i'm not aware of.

i kinda like it, a lot actually, but i get this feeling that's just my ocd and everyone else in the world hates this kind of thing.

[haircute]

Do you mean like Diablo's inventory?
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Get Wild and Tough!

Get Wild and Tough!

[glossolalia]

yeah.

(holy shit, i didn't know the diablo games were on macs. i've been meaning to play them for basically forever, and now i have no reason not to. feeling stupid itt)

[Broco]

That's more or less the core mechanic of Shiren. Roguelikes in general have the deepest inventory system of any genre. There's a limit of 20 items, but you can extend it using pots which contain many items in one space. You also have incomplete information about what your items do and you often need to reason about their properties (what price is it selling for, what can it not be because you have seen it before, etc) to know what it's good for.
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[kerobaros]

[glossolalia]

[negativedge]

Diablo is basically what you're looking for. Then again, there's no real punishment in Diablo. It's just an inconvenience. You can leave an item on the floor, port back to town to dump shit, come back and the item will still be there.
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[Broco]

Well, you still need to decide to drop items when you're full in Shiren. As for the spatial aspect, it strikes me as a nod to realism that I haven't noticed either add or detract to gameplay in the games that have it.
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[alice]

I think it's pretty dumb. It is a very artificial way to limit what items a player can have at any time. It's a system that was invented to support games that just kill time and are designed to make them more effective time killers by limiting a players options so s/he doesn't exhaust them too early on in the game.

I'm just gonna go ahead and say cave story and pretend I made a really powerful point.

[WarpZone]

The Halo sequels subtly do this in a natural way: your hands (and back) are the grid space, and powerful weapons like a rocket launcher require both hands to operate.

Dragon Quarter lets you stack similar items on a slot, so typically small healing items take up little space while an unappraised suit of armor occupies an entire slot, creating some risk/reward situations.
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[Gin]

Man arranging the inventory in RE4 is like the game within the game

If not for the inventory I probably never would have made it through

thinking back it was just so dry

[CubaLibre]

Tetris inventory!

Because Diablo had it, all Diablo clones have it, whether or not it was a great idea in the first place. (After Diablo 3 comes out, all Diablo 3 clones will drop it, because Diablo 3 uses an MMO-esque one-item-one-slot arrangement, at least so far.)
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[glossolalia]

[dessgeega]

dungeon master on the snes, i took great satisfaction in arranging the items in my characters' inventories in a pleasing and logical way. the developers totally have a suitcase-stuffing fetish; their previous game ("sundog", maybe?) has a bunch of closets you can walk into on your spaceship that function as storage.
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[Cossix]

Most roguelikes are like this.

In ADOM every object has a weight and your character has a maximum carrying capacity. If you're carrying too much shit you get hungry faster (and move slower, I think? I don't remember. Fuck being Strained), and if you're carrying WAAY too much you can't move at all. It's not really concerned with the SIZE of the items, so you can be carrying like a fucking anvil and twenty weapons, but it does keep track of the weight!
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I play games sometimes

[BEIGE]

I like a little Tetris in my RPG. Keeps it saucy.

[Gironika]

STALKER had this, I think? I've only watched a friend playing it (PC not powerful enough etc) but he left a better suit and went ahead because his had an advantage I can't remember right now.
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[internisus]

Yeah I like this too. Maybe it's dumb but I enjoy it. RE4 is a great example... I find the sounds of moving items around and clicking them into place rather satisfying.

IIRC, Stalker items take up different size/space, but there's no spatial limit to what you can carry, so it's meaningless except for equipping weapons (because only guns of small size (pistols, small SMGs) can go in your sidearm slot, and only larger weapons (AN-94 Abakan with attached silencer, scope, and under-barrel grenade launcher) can go in your main slot.

Man there are many more games that have this "tetris" type of inventory but I can't think right now.

Halo is a good point, WarpZone! Insightful. That's precisely how a limitation like that feels.
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Thinking about videogames.

[bort]

i think it's pretty retarded and almost the worst compromise between handy abstraction and realism (cause you have to do a puzzle, and fuck puzzles). wouldnt be so bad if games ever had auto-arrange buttons.

what i would like to see is a game where instead of laying out your items in a mysterious square in space, you fit things into a backpack or on your hands or whatever, and the game knew enough about the shape and volume of each item to determine how/where/what you could carry. maybe there would be a 3D BAG SYSTEM and all your shit would be shoved in there, with physics and all so that little items would fall down and take up the bottom of the bag and so on and so on.

i actually don't know if that would be that neat but yeah, i don't like this at all.

i remember this being especially loathsome in deus ex, where i'd somehow end up picking up knife after knife after knife on accident and throwing them all away

[haze]

Raw Danger had item space management! finding backpacks and fannypacks to increase your holding limit. it was just implemented badly, when you were full and needed to drop stuff.

[tacotaskforce]

I wish more games would have an inventory like Ultima 7(8?)'s. Your bag was a literal physical bag which, when opened, would show all your stuff sitting in it wherever you tossed it. Pick up tons of stuff and you'd have to dig through it to find something you left at the bottom. The most efficient way of sorting stuff was to find smaller multi colored bags and then organize your junk with them, i.e. spell components in the green bag, valuables in the yellow bag, and so on.

The recent Alone in the Dark used its realtime inventory as a bullet point, but I don't know how well it was handled.
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[BIGJ420COOLDUDE]

you can hold up to one thing at a time in trespasser

[BIGJ420COOLDUDE]

in deus ex the dragon's tooth takes up 4x1 spaces even though it's basically a lightsaber. wtf

[Toptube]

Dungeon Siege and Titan Quest have auto arrange buttons.


Thank god.
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[Gin]

Alone in the Dark's inventory is pretty sweet, he just looks down and opens his jacket, he has four spots for bottles/cans on the right and five slots for miscellaneous stuff on the left, and his gun holster and flashlight in the middle such that the inventory is arranged linearly in a half circle, accessed most simply by rolling the analog stick to point to the item. You can also have item combinations hotkeyed so that that you can just do a few button presses to bring up the desired combo.

You can hold one thing in the left hand and one thing in the right, and various heavy or large objects like axes or chairs will take up both hands

[extrabastardformula]

[Daphaknee]

i like this for placing fish in my endless ocean aquarium
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a/v club

[Baines]

[Mr. Toups]

[BIGJ420COOLDUDE]

[Mrow]

Though fooling around in Nethack or ADOM are what make the games fun, if there weren't surprises to them I think the games would lose all purpose.

I never liked spatial inventories because they're never done right, four rings are as big as a sword? UO's was interesting I think certain bags had item limits and your character had a weight limit, and then those containers themselves had weight. So you'd really want to use a bag for your regents, or a chest for inside your hour.
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:3 Mrow

[Baines]

[jjsimpso]

[bleak]

I hate the inventory restriction in Angband. It's so, so heavy handed. And lazy. And bad. 20 item limit? Okay sounds good, but when you play a mystic that can use every spellbook(there are more than ten), and needs to carry around scrolls of phase door, recall, staff of teleportation, potions of ccw/healing, leaves you with such little room to actually pick up loot off the ground that it isn't a consideration of strategy or whatever, it's just a huge pain in the ass.
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Okay!

[bleak]

I do love the RE4/Diablo style of inventory management, though. Hell even the previous REs did it well because their inventory management worked perfectly with the survival horror genre. I do agree that in Diablo the system is kind of pointless, but there's something so basically pleasing about the whole thing that I can't put my finger on.
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Okay!

[Mrow]

[Vehicular Manslaughter]

[bleak]

Well, granted. But that's just the most extreme circumstance of playing any sort of band variant. Most spellcasters get 5 or so books, and I believe in Angband you actually have to carry more items to make sure that you don't get fucked instead of the 3 or 4 that EyAngband necessitates.
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Okay!

[Vehicular Manslaughter]

Eh, I've played mages a bunch recently in Vanilla and while you do run into weight restrictions in terms of risking being slowed because you're carrying too much gear, this is because mages are such weedy little dudes. Once you get into stat-gain, it stops being an issue.
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[bleak]

Which is why it's just a huge pain in the ass, really.
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Okay!

[Vehicular Manslaughter]

I really don't find it that annoying. If you're carrying that much gear, either most of it is stuff that you were planning to sell or you need to make more efficient choices about what "essential" gear you have. It's a strategic choice that can definitely be made to minimize concerns over inventory space/weight.
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