• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

"I might use this later, I better save it" syndrome

I've gotten out of this habit years ago. Partly from transitioning into playing hard mode only, party from threads like this. I now use items when I need them because I know there is no perfect time.
 
The story of my Skyrim life, at least for my first playthrough, and then again in Dragon Age Inquisition. Pretty much any game with hoardable collectibles. More games should have that "usefulness" ranking. I've been slowly breaking that habit more recently, though.
 
In survival games such as Rust, H1z1, or DayZ I get extremely greedy. Even when I know someone is going to kill me I continue stealing things out of backpacks of the people I kill. I feel like I need everything. I end up getting killed before picking everything up.
 
A good way to solve this is to have you get consumables pretty often, but only let you carry a few at a time. If you can carry five expendable gadgets but find new ones all the time that's the game giving you permissions to use them pretty liberally. The game just needs to make it impossible to hoard stuff.

Yeah, I like this a lot. I'm in the same boat with people who never use stuff ever because I might need it at some random point waaaaay in the future. In most FPS single player campaigns, I never use my grenades or rockets because they're often somewhat scarce, and I often find that I just beat the last boss without ever having seen what those weapons even do.

This actually happened to me with Bloodborne, where the Fire and Bolt paper (basically temporary buffs for your weapons) were relatively scarce, and I realized at the last boss that I had never even tried one out. On the flip side, your idea was implemented for their healing vials and anti-poison potions, which told me that I should be using them liberally.
 
I am terrible with this this kind of thing when it comes to health potions, etc.

I'll literally (in games were you can't easily refill them) re-load a save instead and try to do better instead of wasting a potion.

However usually what happens is I'll end up getting to the end of a game with a toooooon of saved up potions and things because I kept putting them off "in case I REALLY needed them" but ended up never using them hardly.

It's funny, but I don't actually do this in games like Dark Souls/Bloodborne (which are known to be quite difficult vs say, Fallout), because of how the potions refill when you go to a bonfire or drop from enemies, which is a LIFESAVER For me, no potion hording in those games.
 
A good way to solve this is to have you get consumables pretty often, but only let you carry a few at a time. If you can carry five expendable gadgets but find new ones all the time that's the game giving you permissions to use them pretty liberally. The game just needs to make it impossible to hoard stuff.

Shin Megami Tensei IV had different limits for different consumables (only 1 of the item that restores the entire party to full HP/MP, 10 of the item that restores a single character to full HP/MP etc), which I thought was a really smart thing to do.
 
I did this unintentionally in Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams.

I was having so much trouble with the final boss, wishing I'd have more healing items.

I decided to just go insane with grinding and beat the final boss that way, until I decided to head back into the store to buy some weapons and...

...then I realized there was an item section. And I spent all my money (which I had a fuckton of) buying a bunch of items and I breezed through the final boss.


And on-topic, I wouldn't say it's a game design problem, especially if it's post SNES-era. I'd say that happens due to the mentality (or, in my case, sheer stupidity and lack of observation skills) of the player.
 
TBH, it was never a big deal in Final Fantasy or most JRPGs though since you always have a Bag of Holding sort of thing going on with no weight restrictions but it really is a bitch with games like the TES series that punish you for not unloading frequently. I hate it and always end up putting in console commands when I can.
 
In RPGs especially I tend to think "I'll need these items later if the going gets tough", then when the going gets tough I think "It might get even tougher later, better keep them", then when it's genuinely tough, and near the end of the game it turns to "using items is a sign of weakness". And thus I max out my inventory with items I never use.
 
Top Bottom