CecilRousso
Member
If it becomes a routine, then that person might have to rethink how he/she actually is playing the game.
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Eurogamer: Why I'm tired of Fallout 4 encumbrance
- Thread starter Zombie James
- Start date
If it becomes a routine, then that person might have to rethink how he/she actually is playing the game.
CrocMother
Banned
I like examining the components of all the crap in the world, remembering what parts each has and what's useful. I know what a lot if stuff is made of, what I need and what's valuable.
I've also started putting points into charisma so I can build work shops in my settlements because I've been having so much fun with it.
The games a time sink, it's supposed to be that way.
I've also started putting points into charisma so I can build work shops in my settlements because I've been having so much fun with it.
The games a time sink, it's supposed to be that way.
Gipsy Danger
Member
It's fine to be a time sink if what you are sinking the time into is meaningful but IMO in FO4 it isn't. So I just pick up everything because it's more fun to me.
smudge
Member
Why bother making you loot the items at all, all the junk could already be in your stash then you wouldn't even have to loot it.
Vincent Grayson
Member
Because the action of exploring and looting itself is fun.
smudge
Member
That's fine, however picking up everything comes at a cost.
Honestly, this is from the same group of elitist that complain about immersion and the rpg being taken out of Fallout. ALL the usual suspects.
What the heck are people picking up that is not helping them in some way?
It's only as tedious as you make it. Just because the player can use everything doesn't mean the player is actually intended to have everything.
smudge
Member
but if you can carry everything, then there is no thought put into the items you are picking up so it means nothing
-tetsuo-
Unlimited Capacity
But you can make the character choice to carry much, much more weight by speccing strength. Then more so by taking the strong back perk, which even lets you fast travel while encumbered at max level. If you are out and you really want to push your luck, you can gamble getting addicted to chems and buff up to carry more until you finish what you have to do. You can go even further down that path by speccing so that you don't get addicted to chems, and that you get better at making them if you want to carry so much all the time. Those very much are meaningful choices, they are just not ones people think are worthwhile. That seems strange, however, since carrying everything you find is apparently so important to so many people.
You can't be serious. I have 10 strength and even I have to leave my fat man and minigun behind if I want to get a good amount of stuff. No encumbrance, hey bring every weapon and grenade and mine I have. Why not. Prepared for all situations at all times no matter what. That is what we need, right?
CrocMother
Banned
I think building up my stockpile of supplies is one of theost fun parts of the game. I'm glad the game gives us a choice then (if you play PC)
Gipsy Danger
Member
What cost? The cost is sitting through a couple of loading screens. It only costs time. Bethesda games allow you to pick up damn near everything in the world and then punish you for it? That sucks.
Building it up to what end though? From what I've heard even if you are playing by the rules then you'll have more than enough materials to do whatever you want in the game. If you're having fun just watching the numbers go up then more power to you, but I'd rather be doing something else.
Vincent Grayson
Member
No, it means I got to explore and find a bunch of cool shit. That is fun.
NoMoreTrolls
Banned
It all means nothing anyway. It's an arbitrary restriction that holds only as much value as you place on it. So just because you feel like the encumbrance limit makes your choices "mean something" doesn't mean that others place any value whatsoever on having to read through every item and sort out their inventory for minutes at a time while they're playing.
Awful design? Not in my opinion. If you are a hoarder or a kleptomaniac then that's on you. I happily ignore worthless (to me) shit.
There's just to much cheating going on for me with the Pipboy in combat
Cheating? It's a fundamental component of FO3 and New Vegas, it was the way they decided to go with inventory. I'm not a fan of unpausable gameplay, unless they added the inventory system to the menu I don't know how they could implement it in any other way.
Right, but are you gonna fast travel back and forth for a bit of steel or leather? I can happily walk on by knowing that it's not needed. Ammo, caps, and meds are all weightless and valuable. Guns and armour with perks are all valuable and choices come in between something that you have modded or something that has an interesting perk and mod that eventually. To me these are meaningful choices
smudge
Member
Just because the game allows you to pick up everything doesn't mean you should. Yes the cost is tedium. That is the systems intention to give looting meaning. The intention is to make the player think about the items they pick up.
-tetsuo-
Unlimited Capacity
Uhhh, yes? lol
smudge
Member
You just can't take it all with you at once.
Just because the game allows you to loot everything, doesn't mean you have to.
I get RPG players are hoarders but in Bethesda games that is a logistical nightmare
NoMoreTrolls
Banned
But by and large it only means that people port back and forth from town to the dungeon to pick up most everything useful anyway.
Also, it's not like everyone who has no loot restrictions is running around swapping from pistol to fat man to minigun to junker every two minutes. Not everyone who has a large carry weight wants to trivialize the meat of the game (the combat). Wanting less tedium =/= wanting god mode (tcm).
There is already no thought into it. It's just a time sink where the stuff is basically already mine, but I have to travel through already safe and explored areas in order to reach it.
Compare that to the thought you put into deciding what to equip on Dark Souls, Pillars of Eternity or ARPGs in general. Not every roadblock a game throws your way increases challenge or complexity. Sometimes it's just an annoyance.
If the system feels useless and wrong, then speccing torwards it seems even worse. Not only am I doing something that's not challenging, fun or interesting in any way, but I'm sacrificing options that would let me do challenging, fun or interesting things because of it.
Closing doors to open others is an essential part of RPGs, but that's not what happens with the encumbarance in fallout. It's just a time waster, and then you close doors to waste less time. It's almost F2P game design.
Vincent Grayson
Member
This is why this discussion is going nowhere. You're fundamentally not understanding what I'm saying. The thing I want to do is fun, for me. There's no talking your way into me agreeing with you, because I already know what I enjoy, and it's not "you can't pick up everything". It just isn't, and it never will be.
Can you truly not accept the idea that some gameplay systems, no matter how you justify them, aren't going to appeal to some players?
Like, when FPS games just sort of decided that they were now going to add complex progression systems to their multiplayer modes. I know there were a ton of people who tried that, and found that they just don't like that system at all. It's certainly a meaningful gameplay system to have, and progression is something that many people enjoy in many genres. But it's also totally reasonable to say "I don't like that system or find it to add enjoyment to my game, because for me MP FPS games are about competition between players with access to all of the same resources, be it a system with meaningful choices, or just the old school system of grabbing weapons during the match."
so why even have guns that use ammo? Why not let me shoot bang everything non stop?
Thats the most satisfying part of the game to me, just because a limit on ammo is realistic, scrounging for it or having to buy it is NO FUN i'd rather just shoot stuff to my hearts content not worrying about ammo type capacity or costs.
being salty about weight limits is silly, its excellent game design for so many reasons, and those who are complaining about it on PC, where practically everything an option is baffling at best..
smudge
Member
CrocMother
Banned
That's not true at all, there are supplies like screws, nuclear arterial and adhesive which have a scarcity. I know what items have good components because I look at them in the menu.
Also you don't have to pick up junk at all, it's not necessary. Sounds like you light have more fun just ignoring it all together.
Why do you feel "no encumbrance" suddenly means "unlimited ammo"?
I played Fallout 3 without encumbrance. I still ran out of ammo for the big guns, scavenged for ammunition and weapons when my guns ran dry, and was resorting to melee plenty of times.
Just because you can bring your Fat Man and minigun doesn't magically give them the ammo to USE them.
So, from personal experience, having the best weapon in your inventory still doesn't mean you're prepared to use is if you don't have it locked and loaded, and I had PLENTY of experiences in Fallout 3 where having a Fat man in my inventory didn't matter one bit.
Encumbrance didn't affect the challenge or player choice of the game in any way back then. instead of worrying about whether to bringing my minigun or Fat man with me at all, I had to make an in-the-moment in-the-heat-of-combat decision of whether to use them or not, because even their resources were easily depleted.
I found that infinitely more exciting and satisfying.
Personally? I find it worse than Skyrim, because Skyrim's junk is just that: junk. You can safely discard it and move on.
EVERYTHING in Fallout 4 is useful, though. Every bit of garbage can be crafted or recycled into something better. That makes the inventory management so much more annoying and the inventory fill up so much faster.
CrocMother
Banned
Everything isn't useful. Learning the components, understanding what is useful and prioritizing inventory space is a fun part of the game to me. I think it'd be a huge mistake to remove weight from the base game when it can be modded out.
smudge
Member
I understand they don't appeal, I did say in a post earlier. My intention is to defend the system and why it is in the game. Not to persuade people to like it.
The system exists in an attempt to make looting meaningful.
Everything in the game can be useful. Doesn't mean it's useful to all builds, at all times, and for all modding. As soon as I started tagging items for the mods I wanted to use I stopped picking up items that had none of what I was after or I made the decision as to whether that particular item had enough of what I wanted to warrant it's weight. When I come across new recipes I'll add more items to tag, but I can already see what's abundant and what's not (for my character)
CrichtonKicks
Member
That's just silly- I put the same amount of thought in what to equip in Fallout 4 as I do in just about any RPG with the the singular exception of Dark Souls (because of the way equip weight works in that one). Fallout 4 has the same give and take in terms of how many weapons I take in the field and with armor upgrades I have to decide whether I prefer a pocketed or deep pocketed mod at the expense of another armor ability that I may find more tactically useful.
That give and take results precisely because I reserve a fair bit of my inventory space for scavenging. If I didn't have to keep space open for scavenging I could bring twice the weapon load into the field that I currently do. And that impacts how I play- it isn't just Fat Men or Missile Launchers. I typically only bring one energy based weapon with me which means that I often leave my sniper energy weapon behind which occasionally handicaps me for certain encounters and forces different tactics.
If I am heading into a mission where I feel like a I need a Fat Man or a Missile launcher then I have to decide if I'm willing to give up a large portion of my scavenging ability for that mission or maybe I also opt to dust off the Power Armor instead.
All of those decisions are tactically interesting to me and they all result from the encumbrance system.
Being basically forced to pick up everything everywhere would be worse for me. Encumbrance is a good reason to ignore most of the useless junk.
I think the weight limit is a bit too low currently, unless you're playing a strength character. That's why you have to be selling/scrapping something constantly. If the limit was 100 or even 50 more, I'd almost never have to worry about it.
I think the weight limit is a bit too low currently, unless you're playing a strength character. That's why you have to be selling/scrapping something constantly. If the limit was 100 or even 50 more, I'd almost never have to worry about it.
-tetsuo-
Unlimited Capacity
You just proved my point. Everyone wants to be able to worry less about inventory space but no one wants to actually build their character in a way where it happens. You said there was no meaningful choice towards it when, obviously, there is. If you want to be able to carry twice or three times as much as you do so that trips back to the workshop are cut to the minimum, you need to make that meaningful character choice and put the levels towards it. God forbid that you have to do such madness towards something that seems so integral to your character play style.
This doesn't change anything though. If you have no encumbrance. You can bring every single weapon you have. Every grenade, every mine, every trap, every healing item. This clearly makes traveling easier. I don't see what is so hard to understand about that. Just last night I stumbled into a pretty nasty fight that would have been waaaaaaaaaybeasier with my fatbman, or if I hadn't just unloaded all my mines because I was looking for screws and gears. As it happened, I managed the fight and it was a long and challenging encounter, one of the hardest I had been in in a game that has been incredibly easy as it so happens. I am glad I didn't have my fatvman with me to trivialize it.
Zombie James
Banned
Except it does.
If you choose to have a character that picks up everything they see, there are tools in the game that help you build that character. There are perks like Lone Wanderer that raise your carry weight and Strong Back that not only raises your carry weight, you can also run and fast travel while encumbered. Then you have armor crafting where you can produce armor that also increases carry weight.
And these choices come at a cost, as they should in any RPG. You may have to sacrifice offensive or defensive perks in favor of carry weight, or wear armor that doesn't defend you as well. You might not be able to hack advanced terminals or develop high-tech weapon mods for a while. But these are the choices we make for the kind of character we want to play as.
That's why using a console command to artificially increase carry weight feels like cheating to me. You want to play as a specific kind of character without going through the process of building one.
This is why I am hoping a RPG developer starts to include custom difficulty. Which means you can, for example, put combat on hard and loot on easy and then things like inventory can be unlimited or with different levels (50, 100, 200, 500, etc). Simple and a win-win for everybody.
It fails because the entire rest of the game trivializes it. It then becomes an annoyance, like some leftover mechanic from a different game.
Give me a Fallout that works like The Long Dark and looting becomes meaningful. You can't fast travel, hunger/thirst/sleep is a constant worry, enemies are few, but very dangerous; everything is scarce and eventually you'll inevitably run out of resources. Then looting becomes meaningful. But then, that's another game entirely.
On The Long Dark, I usually choose a house to stash my stuff, but even when I know the path there is safe, the time I waste going back and forth is a strategical decision, because walking back and forth is, itself, hard on that game and, by itself, consumes resources that are always scarce.
Don't Starve functions almost the same way. You can take care of yourself very well in your base, but the further you go from it, the more costly the trip back is, and the longer you stay away from the base, the more chances that you are in significant danger (and wasting resources, since eating raw stuff is a lot more expensive than eating stuff you can cook with the stuff you have at your base).
Bethesda games are not survivor games; time is meaningless for one, few things acts as resources and even them are usually only scarce at the beggining of the game. You can go back to your home with a click and a loading screen at any time and the challenge is not staying alive, but surviving the next wave of enemies. In this context, deciding what to loot or not is not an interesting choice, because there is nothing that supports it. There is no aditional danger or risk involved in a trip back to town; there is no waste of resources or precious in-game time. Again, stuff on the ground is pretty much already yours, they are just restricted behind a time sink. And time sink challenges you to what? Not have a real life job or dentist appointment?
Has the follow-up article been posted yet? GAF got a shout-out: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-11-18-fallout-4-encumbrance
My rubric for judging game mechanics, applied to encumbrance:
1. Is it challenging? No
2. Is it interesting? No
3. Is it fun? Hell no
If none of the above, is it necessary?. I'd argue that no, it is definitely not necessary. There are plenty of different ways to deal with limited inventory space that doesn't involve slowing the character to a crawl and forcing them into a menu for 10 minutes.
1. Is it challenging? No
2. Is it interesting? No
3. Is it fun? Hell no
If none of the above, is it necessary?. I'd argue that no, it is definitely not necessary. There are plenty of different ways to deal with limited inventory space that doesn't involve slowing the character to a crawl and forcing them into a menu for 10 minutes.
Scrupulous
Banned
Can't you just drop it and get the follower to pick it up. even if they were full they still pick stuff up I got piper carrying two fat mans a mini gun and a pretty weighty sniper rifle while still carrying all my junk plus her armour. After all that shit picked up some power amour pieces I needed to.
And I just explained, with limited ammo on hand, having a hundred guns won't make it "easier" if you have no bullets in 90% of them. Fallout doesn't exactly drop Fat man ammo like candy, after all.
It almost would feel like a satisfying REWARD for being so thorough in scavenging the world you explored, right? I know. I agree. If you take the time to go off the beaten path and stumble upon a stash of grenades, I'd be thrilled and happy to use them. Good job on me for finding all those good items and saving them for a particularly hairy encounter.
I had an encounter with a nasty fight in Fallout 3 that would have been WAAAAAY easier with my fatman or my mines, but I unloaded them all against Deathclaws in a previous encounter. And tossing screws and gears at them certainly didn't help me.
As it happened, I managed the fight and it was a long and challenging encounter, one of the hardest I had been in in a game that had been incredibly easy as it so happens. I'm glad my Fat man didn't have ammo to trivialize it.
CrocMother
Banned
I think it's all three of those things. Ppl clearly have different opinions which is why it's good they left it in the game because its way easier to mod out then back in.
smudge
Member
Which is why I am in favour of this being optional. You don't have to loot everything in this game. That is why the system exists. You do not need every single piece of loot you find, you only need a small fraction of the amount of items you come across. Encumbrance becomes annoying when you try to loot every single item in the game. I rarely have to manage my inventory because I only pick up items I need/want
Dance Inferno
Unconfirmed Member
This is why I won't play any RPGs on console anymore. I can't imagine playing Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 without modding out weight limits. It's such a pointless mechanic. Dark Souls lets you carry as much as you want and it's still challenging as all get out:
Yes, but imagine how much MORE challenging and enjoyable it would be if your character couldn't move after holding 100 swords and tufts of moss?
... Nobody wants that game.
MMaRsu
Banned
But you already do that in this game lol
Zombie James
Banned
There are multiple.
Chinese Cartoons
Banned
I have max str and all 4 points in the perk itself and even I have to go back and drop loot multiple times, I can see why the general audience might not be a fan of it.
MMaRsu
Banned
Yes but Dark souls is a totally different game. Not even comparable
I'm not saying that there is no thought about character build or equipping in fallout (sorry if I gave that impression), I'm just pointing out that games without a carrying limit are not automatically instawin dumbed down games.
"scavenging ability" is not a thing is my point, because there is no skill to scavenging other than having free time on the real world. It's not like hacking or lockpicking or charisma where you know that if you don't invest in those points, then some things will be denied to you; it's like a F2P game where if you don't invest money, it only means you'll take a week longer to reach max level.
The notion that deciding wheter or not to fast travel to towns and then run back is tactically interesting is what surprises me about a lot of those posts, especially the ones that complain about the game being too easy or dumbed down otherwise. It feels like people are so starved for anything interesting that they are latching on to this just because it is something that is not holding their hands.
There should be less hand holding in today's RPGs, I agree, but this is almost like saying bad UI makes the game more tactical.
MMaRsu
Banned
Its been like this ever since Oblivion. I dont see why its a huge problem all of sudden. You can specc your character to make him or her be able to carry a ton.
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