Items In Open-World Games Are Boring

Did you guys know that I like Dark Souls? Here are some of my reasons as to why I find so many items, especially in open-world games, to be boring.
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[@razbuten]

Ey! So, I have been working on this one for a while now. Like, it has been on my mind since I released my Fast Travel video, so it is exciting to finally have it out in the world. Whether or not you agree or disagree with me, my goal here (and with all of my videos focused on open-world games) was to lay out what a perfect game FOR ME might look like. Chances are it is different than yours, and that is perfectly fine. Let me know what you would like to see from open-world games. Anyway, after the response to my last video, my next project is going to be how I would have written Book 2 of Korra, so if you’re into that, get excited. In general, I have a handful of things that I am interested in creating, so I figured that I’d take a minute to check in with you all to gauge what you’d be most interested in seeing. Obviously, I am going to make whatever I am inspired to make, but I am curious as to what most of you are interested in watching next. So, if you had the choice between a video that looks at Firefly, Remixes of hip-hop songs or D&D, what would you want to see first? Lemme know and have a great day. Thank you so much for your support.

[@destinwilliams8149]

Any video of yours is great so it doesnt matter to me

[@saketkanade8397]

I absolutely love your videos and look forward to all of them. I think one of the interesting things you did in the Avatar video was talk about power progression. It would be lovely if you could highlight other shows that do it well too!

[@destinwilliams8149]

@@saketkanade8397 me too

[@sagewaterdragon]

I think that going for the video on remixes would be for the best, if only so you don't pigeon-hole your content as stuff from the... geekosphere? I think you get what I mean.

[@WarpScanner]

I actually largely agree with you, the only thing I think I sort of disagree with is making a big deal out of items with a showy display of visual effects and sound. I actually think the way open worlds do it isn't *fast enough*. After combat, there should be a literal 1 button option to open up a menu of every item on the battlefield, select what you want to carry and upon closing the menu it by default sends everything to a home storage container next to a shop with the implication that you did all the boring back and forth fast travel already. And yeah, encumbrance in games like elder scrolls and fallout should be tiered, and you should be able to design and save "load outs" at your home base to select for any given mission you want to partake in. I largely agreed with you about fast travel as well, and I think I feel similarly about save scumming. All 3 of these things can make open world games really boring.

[@fosty.]

This reminds me of when my dad played Fallout 3. He picked up a scalpel because he thought it could be used to do surgery on someone, but I told him that it's just clutter. For some reason I felt bad for him.

[@Yoanka]

It's the realization that he's yet to feel the disappointment that video games are far less vast and dreamlike than we'd like them to be. (I don't blame game devs here, I know they need to have realistic time frames compared to the money a game is reasonably worth).

[@fosty.]

@@Yoanka Maybe, but he's been playing games since I've been alive.

[@ShiftTheMatrixGaming]

Thats kind of a weird thing to desire.

[@fosty.]

@@ShiftTheMatrixGaming Huh?

[@jessicalee333]

Aren't they one of the items required to craft some kind of medical kit?

[@PhilosopherFool]

When you had to sacrifice that fish for inventory space, I felt that man.

[@chrisakaschulbus4903]

i don't even know the game, but i totally understand it... if hitman had limited inventory space, i'd toss everything for the fish :D

[@Stevekolenshnikoff]

@@chrisakaschulbus4903 the game was resident evil

[@weabooslayer7007]

@@chrisakaschulbus4903 you never played RE4 before ?

[@GenerallyChaotic6839]

I can't like your comment i'm sorry but its at a perfect 420

[@lucasfranke5161]

@@chrisakaschulbus4903 That fish is actually a very important item in RE4. It heals you completely... which is very useful in a game you only get your health back through items

[@Rainygirl3100]

And then there's me, the human equivalent of a crow, who will go out of my way to pick up useless stuff just because it's neat and I like having things

[@PancakemonsterFO4]

Gonna hoard those cigarettes despite them having no real use...oh look, i can trade them in for Super Stimpacks at the Dead Money Vending Mashine

[@gothicfan52]

@@PancakemonsterFO4 I hoard cigarettes and cigarette packs in fallout because cigs have no weight and the boxes sell for a lot.

[@shsltrash820]

I grab everything that isent nailed down, but not for me to keep, I grab them to sell. Yeah I’m the guy who searches every urn for the 4 coins and picks up every wooden basket that’s worth 2 gold.

[@viktorkolaric4156]

I have a mod that lets me smoke those cigs in New Vegas, one cartoon gives you 10 packs and one pack gives you 20 cigs, of course they are counted as chems, meaning you can get addicted to them, but i mostly use them for decoration anyway.

[@ShyBug42]

I hoarded Nuka quantum’s just to put into my nuka cola machine at my base

[@GrippyGoth]

"Or a giant sword that only a true hero can wield" *watches Link spin like a beyblade through the forest*

[@DrSwoose]

*mowing the lawn with a big sword

[@memeier9894]

Yeah I dont know if he was so much wielding the sword so much as the sword was wielding the link...

[@somegoodsoup7008]

A true hero

[@robertmcdowell6084]

Beyblade, that's a word I haven't heard in a long time.

[@bradhaines3142]

not even a giant sword, you should consult final fantasy about that

[@DarienDragonFox]

Idk i like the fact i can carry 277 wheels of cheese

[@razbuten]

Dang. When you right, you right.

[@DarienDragonFox]

@@razbuten haha! Amen bro!

[@MiorAkif]

Lol

[@DarienDragonFox]

@Paul Martin no question, because its all the birds ill ever need

[@gregmccauley1687]

@@DarienDragonFox I never thought of it that way. Being able to satisfy a need for life is kind of op

[@internallyscreaming2788]

Spoilers: You’re gonna need that fish to get the true ending

[@sean.a.s7234]

You're gonna need that rock from level 1 to beat the final boss.

[@moanguspickard249]

Explain

[@spacelizard217]

@@moanguspickard249 explanation: when at the end Ada is is pointing gun at Leon he smacks her with a fish and escapes with plagas sample before island explodes. Also Luis survives

[@123crafter123]

@@spacelizard217 ?

[@Skele7ronfuckyoutubeitsmyname]

@@123crafter123 woosh. What he is joking about is the fact that you keep some items just incase you need them later.

[@scorkami1789]

honestly, the weird bag sounds you get when looting a chest feels so satisfying to me, i dont even press "take all" for that reason, i spam the "take each item individually" button and get an eargasm...

[@carlosvazquez2637]

Scorkami same

[@nmelody4414]

Yeah, it makes me feel horny for some reason to the point I watch an ASMR video about opening and closing a bag

[@scarlettthefox]

Same!

[@lucashoeth8555]

Mo Eniodunmo just bout to say that

[@frettchen1498]

*SHG *SHG *SHG *SHG I know what you mean

[@tssper3488]

I’m an indie game developer and this is has made me completely change my item system. Now everything has a use, either it’s used for crafting, armour, combat or buffs. This does mean I had to cut down on a lot of items but in the long run it’s more productive. This is like very indirective feedback to my game, thanks I suppose

[@nataliecohen9658]

Tssper _ what game u making?

[@Siilas29]

what is the game that you're making? i'm interested.

[@GALA89]

i'm interested

[@nightlight0x07cc]

Everybody spam "I'm interested"

[@ZarHakkar]

As a fellow indie game developer who is also staying on the downlow about what I'm making, I also have to admit I'm interested.

[@AnthanKrufix]

Open, Loot all.... Open, Loot all.... Open, Loot all.... *"A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON!"*

[@Reddead1275x]

*whispers under breath* uhhhh, fuck. Not again

[@rocketjumper1380]

*ah shit, can't I drop this thing?*

[@tenelum9865]

That scared the hell out of me in Skyrim. I just killed a few dudes and then opened the chest my tv volume was at 100 and I just heard “A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON!” I had to buy a new PS4 controller.

[@r99azm80]

@@rocketjumper1380 as I remember. It has a glitch to remove itself from your inventory when there're a dungeon that have another beacon near by. But if you pick it up from some chest again, that old hag will complain at you furiously.

[@brb2jndett254]

Anthan Krufix the nostalgia I’m feeling right now 🥰

[@colinwhitlock5148]

EA: So what you're saying is. .. *loot boxes*

[@udese730]

I won't like it to keep this 69

[@MarkKaranjaM4K]

Good one mate

[@Soumein]

"So everything from travel to encumbrance to combat, to money, to health should all be connected to each other in various ways." "So money should be connected to everything. Alright, let's sell them that stuff."

[@Xandros999]

I really took objection to that part. Not just because I dislike lootboxes. I don't really dislike lootboxes but they get old really quick. Just give me my stuff. No, because that's the de facto role that loot already plays: Ratfeed. If there were engaging mechanics for loot it wouldn't need to have this reward aspect. Mechanics involving the use, carry, storage, sale, and appraisal. Engaging mechanics as opposed to "green sword is money".

[@An_Ian]

No they call them "surprise mechanics" now

[@sunnysweet4183]

Me, a hoarder: *fervent disliking*

[@nottoofast]

*tragedy*

[@TheSpartanS196]

As a hoarder, I disagree: I liked the video because, SINCE I'M A HOARDER, I have to hoard everything I see and if there's something literally EVERYWHERE like in Skyrim/Fallout it just becomes boring. The Dark Souls route is the best, all items scattered across the maps have a placement that makes sense and they're a lot but not too much, a fair amount to collect and hunt.

[@connorsullivan2745]

BronevCURSE part of the fun is spending hours reloading a save over and over so that you can pickpocket some cool looking necklace out of a random shop-keep, or finally being alone in a house so you can have the pure joy of spamming picking up items as you run around

[@tyrstone3539]

BronevCURSE i hoard cheese in skyrim

[@dom3225]

Yeah qi hate when I have a space limit. Doesn't make sense.

[@nonchip]

"hollow knight's death mechanics, which i can't imagine an open world game with" there's a very unknown rpg you already mentioned that does it though ;)

[@odditoriumleviathan8725]

Kyra Zimmer do tell!

[@assassinpanda9958]

STOPYOURCLICKBAIT Bruh dark souls

[@FrankTheSparklez]

@@assassinpanda9958 is that a new ip? Never heard of it. Is it a sekiro clone?

[@michaelvaldivia2891]

@@FrankTheSparklez that's fuckin edgy.

[@MrAnonymous46]

@@FrankTheSparklez Honestly though Sekiro isn't even that similar to dark souls at all. If you want Ninja/samurai Dark Souls, Play Nioh.

[@nomadiclynx8478]

"Fast travel to a place and back takes 5 minutes " Bethesda loading time: " Hehehehehe no"

[@adriac1291]

ssd for life

[@originaler31er67]

Xavier Hines HOW ELSE AM I GOING TO RIDE ON A FLYING UNICORN WITH LASERBEAMS OUT OF HIS EYES.

[@Lucas-Nunes]

I know this has no sense with this comment but should i finish fo 3 only melee? I did new vegas and im finishing 4 now... Should i?

[@Goldenkitten1]

@@Lucas-Nunes If you did New Vegas then I'd say no. While FO3 is a great game it doesn't do anything different in terms of a melee only run and is in fact much easier than NV. While I'd recommend FO3 to anyone who hasn't played it before if your only goal is a challenge run then you've already proven you can do it by beating NV.

[@Lucas-Nunes]

@@Goldenkitten1 i was going to say something long but i forget about it,thanks then Oh i almost forgot(just want to say it really)i builted a cummunism bar and im finishing a hall of Hitler's big guns on fallout 4

[@thomaskirkness-little5809]

I tried to play Skyrim without fast travel once. Go across the entire map, return. Go across the entire map, return. I gave that up quickly.

[@charliegentsch9576]

its pretty easy to play without fast travel, just take the horse carriage to big towns and run to quests from there

[@thomaskirkness-little5809]

That's what I did. I was ok until the Dark Brotherhood. I got fed up and started using fast travel.

[@krybling]

@@thomaskirkness-little5809 i wouldnt play it like that, skyrim is great for not having anything to do just enjoy the walk also use survival mods it force you to stop and have long term planning for where you going. fast travel ruins skyrim for me, it completely remove the feeling and satisfaction of adventuring.

[@SomeCanine]

Currently playing FO4 on survival mode and let me tell you that it gets old really quickly.

[@GothamiteYT]

Skyrim is poorly designed thats why

[@2GoatsInATrenchCoat]

I really embody the whole "Dragonborn" vibe in that my greatest joy is hoarding a chest full of expensive and shiny things. I'm materialistic by nature, but I'm poor and eco-conscious in real life, so gaining pointless items in video games is actually very fulfilling for me lmao

[@skylerlangford8740]

I do the same thing

[@mortache]

> "Items are boring" > *me excited for duct tapes and broken aluminium cans in Fallout 4*

[@briandavidgilbertclips7223]

Where are the FUCKIN FANS

[@nightlight0x07cc]

I made it a point in Oblivion to collect every torch from every container possible since they're zero weight. I have 1097 torches and counting.

[@rd30000]

INDUSTRIAL DUCT TAPE?!?! 🤤🤤🤤

[@mortache]

@@nightlight0x07cc i made a point to collect every repair hammer because oh damn those were indispensables

[@nautdead3197]

I might need this single crutch later better grab it

[@Linsquip_]

Best item: Scroll of Icarian Flight -Game: Morowind 1. Introduced with a character screaming loudly and falling in front of you. 2. Gives you 3, so you just have to try it out. 3. Awesome effect of flying across map in one move. 4. DEATH

[@zippo504]

Linsquip 5. Reload save from before death, obtain Boots of Blinding Speed, combine with Scrolls of Icarian Flight, and achieve CHIM as you leap from Morrowind to Solstheim.

[@Linsquip_]

@@zippo504 Step 6. Pull out enchanted ring with perminent lvl 1 levitate and pop it on before landing to survive.

[@crazyape515]

@@zippo504 wear ring of night vision and be able to see slightly while wearing boots. Or just turn into a werewolf and run across morrowind.

[@machinaanguis4998]

You survive by using a 2nd scroll just before hitting the ground.

[@austinseymour499]

You gotta use a second one right before you land, or get a tiny levitate spell to stop your momentum.

[@anonimo2932]

3:00 you could put the fish in it if: -reload the shotgun -unite the green and red herbs -then move the pistol's and sniper's ammo in the space in front of the shotgun and rpg -put a herb in the top left corner -move the submachine gun near the pistol -put the fish in the remaining space

[@razbuten]

I...this...I am so thankful I decided to check the comments for this video again.

[@anonimo2932]

@@razbuten you welcome, simple logic, it's quite sad that capcom didn't continue to use it. it's even sadder that capcom made RE an action game. I think another example to manager a good inventory is World of warcraft. you can have multiple bags with numerous items and even select to a quick numerical key if you need it.

[@seraphendipity]

This is why I like those systems. It adds a puzzle element and added gameplay in the same breath as dealing with player inventory. It turns something that was a chore to nerf game breaking infinite inventory into a fun experience. It isnt for every game, and would not be good in games where a slower and lower soace inventory does not work or add to the game (ie Minecraft, games focusing on grinding stats like Borderlands, etc.) but is still a great and interesting option.

[@theninjamaster67]

here's hoping they keep it up with how the last 2 games have been and if you enjoyed the actionish RE games hoping the evil within devs keep making those cause they def reminded me of RE 4 and revelations which are some of my faves

[@TheMonyarm]

I'm planning doing two things for this RPG i'm working on: The player can set any kind of item as "Junk", The player can sell all Junk items at once. So if you're at a point in the game where for example ebony weapons are junk for you, you can specify them as such, and sell them quickly

[@zapid6733]

Sounds like a great idea

[@absolute0pygmy]

Borderlands would like to speak with you

[@TheMonyarm]

@@absolute0pygmy Borderlands has that kind of system? Gonna have to check it out.

[@failedGraphics]

Divinity original sin 2 has that as well. Great game.

[@maddockemerson4603]

Amalur does that. Any individual item can be marked as junk and you can attempt to sell all junked items to most vendors. You can’t class all items of a particular type as junk so that’s different, but that might be more trouble than it’s worth anyway.

[@danieldkland]

I feel like The Long Dark is a game that expertly avoids most of these problems, mainly due to the very hardcore survival style. No items are useless, every item will in one way or another help you survive, but over encumbrance heavily limits this. Once you pass the limit - which is a lot more realistic and based off of stat boosts like coffee and a full stomach for a while - you slowly lose speed and get a higher and higher risk of spraining, especially on steep terrain. There's no fast travel in general, and dangerous wolves and weather to be encountered along the way to your next shelter, so the inventory has an incredibly important role, and inventory management feels a lot less like a chore, simply because you recognize what to pick up and what not to pick up in most cases.

[@lilidane8975]

You are absolutly right.

[@ossiehalvorson7702]

Just too bad that we'll have to wait for 2045 to actually have a full story.

[@amdobrantal1774]

​@@ossiehalvorson7702 Already done in the 11at century? Optimistic!

[@urinefetus]

The Father (I Hate Fast Travel) The Son (Minimaps Are Stupid) and The Holy Spirit (Items are Boring)

[@Simtar123]

Amen

[@goreobsessed2308]

Nah nah I'm old school fallout I'll keep the maps of all kinds

[@obelic1101]

Play minecraft. No fast travel unless you put in the work. Mini maps are optional and limeted and items have importants to sell or build or whatever.

[@TheSkypetube]

@@obelic1101 Minecraft is a dead game

[@obelic1101]

@@TheSkypetube cool opinion Play what you want. I'm just offering a game that someone might have forgot.

[@Meta9871]

What I did when I played Fallout 4 was use a “backpack eyeball”. Whenever I killed an enemy and the head exploded to a million pieces, I’d start looking for the eyeball, as you can actually loot the corpse by interacting with it. Boom, infinite inventory space, inside a fricking eyeball, no more overencumberance ever! I can move the eyeball just as easily as any other eyeball. Exept it’s... special.

[@thalesvondasos]

Also works with skeevers in Skyrim

[@f0lderfile]

big brain right here

[@onen6942]

You can also tell FO4 companions to loot infinite stuff. They have weight limits but no overencumbrance and ordering to pick stuff up bypasses their max limit check. It can be a bit of inventory Tetris with them too to optimize looting speed near the end of a dungeon, where you shuffle between their inventory and yours and an external temporary container (or just dump on the floor).

[@chris86simon]

But doesnt the eyeball despawn? Its not a personal stash. You cant just stack up on eyeballs and use them as storage space in a settlement, can you?

[@lukeb1663]

chris86simon no but you can pick the eyeball up and carry it with you as a pseudo backpack and it won’t de spawn if you’re constantly interacting with it in this manner

[@juleb.9530]

I actually like how it is done in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The amount of things you can carry is directly related to your characters strenght. In the beginning, you are too weak even to carry one full set of armour. you have to level up your strenght (and that happens super slowly) until you have somehow maximised the amount you can carry. But even then, you carefully have to pick which set of armour you want to use, how many of the gathered herbs you want to carry around, which weapons to have in you inventory. You have a horse to carry some weight with you, but you can reach your maximum really quickly. There are, of course, inventory chests, but those are rare. Even stealing and looting isn't that easy. stealing only works when nobody sees you, and that can be hard even in the tiniest farmers house as there are people constantly walking in and out, as you still have to pick a lock at nearly every chest. It's actually easiest at night but still a risk as long as you're not very good at secrecy and sneaking. Selling freshly stolen goods to normal people isn't possible as they will detect you're a thief. Looting dead people is easy (naturally), but killing people is not. Some idiots with swords can overwhelm you if you don't take care and let yourself be surrounded. At some state you carefully have to pick what to take to not be overloaded. Because here's the problem: once overloaded, you move super slowly, you can't use fast travel and you can't ride your horse, and the chance is very low that you can drop items and find them later on. And actually getting back to a place can take so long, you better don't do it. At least in KCD i find the satisfaction getting items is way higher than in Skyrim or The Witcher . personal opinion, some might find the game mechanics of this game stupid.

[@juleb.9530]

AND there is actually no chance you get bored not using fast travel. The beauty of the surroundings gets you hooked every time. It's a rather small game world, but there are so many interesting things to discover. I rather enjoy riding around on a horse and don't use fast travel often (especially as it takes way more ingame-time than riding a good horse)

[@perplexedcats7687]

I'm working on a mod at the moment that reduces the value of almost everything the player comes across in the open world. The value of food and sleeping at taverns is increased while the price of horses stay the same. Weapon and armor merchants no longer carry end-game items from the start, but I'm not sure where to add in that stuff. The purpose is to increase the economical difficulty of the game, but without simply making the merchants fuck you over, like with other economy mods. Right now it's just a personal mod, but would you be interested in something like that?

[@MrGhostTheBigRoast]

kcd inventory with magic horse inventory teleportation negates the good it does. oh i'm over encumbered in this persons house, i'll just send a bunch of shit to my horse from my inv menu and keep looting. also the pc can carry a whole bunch of shit on his person, especially late game. carrying 5 swords, 3 maces, 4 shields, 3 noble cuirasses and 2 days worth of food isnt exactly realistic. the inv management was the weakest part of the game for me. kenshi is a game that does inv the best as far i've seen. there's movement debuffs sure, but overloading yourself with rocks and running around also makes you stronger. classic grid inventory with expansions using backpacks, which you can drop and run away if being chased. good shit.

[@erickolb8581]

Wait, are there crossbows in this game? The game will be easier killing other characters if it has any sense of realism. There's a reason medieval lords had endless numbers of crossbowmen and why many Nobles and knights were whining about banning crossbows. The same thing is happening in modern times, not surprisingly, but they call 'em "assault rifles" instead lol

[@aname6104]

Eric Kolb I think I heard something about how they would be too op or weak, not sure but no there isn’t

[@burpyoshi9503]

I love some of the ideas in this but the part where you suggested that characters could pickpocket the player character and you could lose money/items without even knowing... Yeah this alone would put me off of any game ever. I like my stuff, I don't want anyone taking it.

[@kylej9150]

Same, there are certain concepts that seem cool and interesting on paper, but would clearly be annoying or bad if actually implemented into a game

[@TheZenytram]

only if that item despawn together with that npc, but if you can get it back by some means at any time it is not that annoying.

[@BrandonCuringtonOfficial]

Man you're not gonna like ARK

[@zed7038]

Gamers when hard thing

[@ossiehalvorson7702]

Depends. If they just nab something like 20 coins off of me, I'm not actually going to miss it, but depending on what kind of character I'm playing I might either put an arrow through their skull or knock them out to get it back, or just let it go. That's more immersive in a role-playing sense, and it's not like most sane devs would let some common thief steal your primary weapon out of its scabbard.

[@Brian-tn4cd]

Oh man that D&D example I've got a great memory of me searching a stable and my DM as joke said I found a needle in a haystack after getting a 20 and I managed to use that needle to kill our next opponents and it was great, and now my character carries darts because of what happened.

[@TuskForce]

good that it wasn't a hay in a needle stack

[@rydercromar2516]

I was DMing once and my players once killed an enemy using limbs from a basket of limbs that they found on the ground (I said they were improvised weapons)

[@medea8395]

@@zakksfarts6305 I mean, you could always go to r/lfg to look for some online games. While a lot of my friends weren't fond of dnd, I managed to find a few people online I've gotten really comfortable with playing with

[@hypnos2041]

ttrpgs really are one of the best games you get to play

[@xxraistxx3628]

Sounds like the perfect game is Minecraft

[@Eagervul]

I swear I came down here to write that. It handles it all. And diamonds need no funky animations and sound effects. They're just such a great joy by themselves.

[@stonecat676]

i mean....botw is pretty damn near a perfect open world game

[@commonviewer2488]

@@stonecat676 A more fulfilling story, some more enemy variety, and a way to overcome the rain. That's really all it needs.

[@user-wq9mw2xz3j]

@@Eagervul no, not anymore. Yes I know memories are always better than whats real, but in the old days it was actually hard to find diamonds. When you got them, it felt like a huge reward. Now you get plenty of them very easily, and its not that exiting

[@swapode]

@@user-wq9mw2xz3j Did they get less rare or is it just because players optimized the excitement away by stripmining?

[@saihtamw]

Most of your ideas sound really tedious. I don‘t wanna spend half my time gaming going back and forth between quests and vendors and being forced to leave things behind constantly because my bags are full. I don‘t need an infinite inventory, but at least have a good amount of space that I don‘t need to look at every single items (out if the hundrets that drop) to see wether it‘s worth it to pick up at all. And dropping items when dying that you can pick up again when coming back also sounds like a lot of extra clicking around to get everything back into place. Systems like these are fine in more „hardcore“ experiences like Kingdom Come Deliverance or Dark Souls, but in the run of the mill open world game I‘d prefer things to be made more time-friendly.

[@creativedesignation7880]

This could be easily circumvented by just having less objects over all and having all of the be worth picking up, instead of filling the world with useless clutter.

[@legrandliseurtri7495]

"made more time-friendly" You're talking about open-world games, which usually waste your time 90% of your playthrought.

[@saihtamw]

Another random Tristan uh yeah, and you would like that to be more tedious?

[@legrandliseurtri7495]

@@saihtamw I don't play a lot of open-world because I think they're generally boring. I'm just saying, if you're a fan of open-world, complaining about the time it takes to beat it seems strange.

[@senpai3723]

@@legrandliseurtri7495 well I really like open-world games, but the idea to have to go back and forth on places to get more leftover items just to return and do whatever you need with them is in fact time consuming, because it would simply be boring and the time im gonna spend doing that i could use to do more "fun" uselesse things like exploring the map wich is something sometimes useless but at least you get to know more exciting and new things, so the fact of don't wasting time on open world games don't fell weird to me at all.

[@cloutdracula8401]

It's interesting how every single issue has been addressed in some form and very clever solutions to this sort of thing have been implemented into Bethesda's games for AT LEAST a decade... exclusively by modders while Bethesda themselves have basically left it untouched since they started.

[@pyrioncelendil]

Nearly every single issue. I've yet to see a modder fix Skyrim's inventory system lagging to a crawl from having too many items. At least Fallout 4 ameliorates this by making trading and transferring items between inventories queued up and therefore relatively instantaneous vs one item/stack at a time.

[@kingofthejungle5338]

I remember my pops played skyrim for HOURS trying to figure out why he was walking so slowly not even realizing he was overencumbered. It was a hilarious moment

[@necromorphsteve4869]

I remember when I first played Elderscrolls Oblivion when I was in middle school. I spent so much time fascinated that I could put almost anything in my inventory and also drag it around outside my inventory as a physics object. Even it most of the items are useless, I was entertained just by the ability to have them as items. I don’t think we want to remove boring items, or even redesign the entirety of the games mechanics, I think we just need to make objects feel like they have more presence in the game world.

[@princessthyemis]

yeah!

[@tassmh7080]

I feel like Skyrim almost had it with the telekinesis spell, which allows you to pick up and throw normal items for decent damage, but it was difficult to acquire and then force yourself to use. It was one of my favorite spells, but I couldn't always justify using it.

[@mariosuena]

I remember when i downloaded the DLC "Battlehorn Castle", i decorated my quarters with a bunch of items. I remember using the paintbrush glitch with a folded cloth to make bookshelves and collect every single book and rare item in the game, in hindsight I wasted so much time lol but 10 year old me had so much fun with a sense of fulfillment knowing I had every unique and rare item in my possession.

[@Yokoshima333]

Morrowind was the last great exploration game. A great deal of lore, loot, and Easter eggs and almost none of it behind a "quest wall" (Save some deadric stuff, but even those are stand-alones). No mini map either. NPCs actually describe where to go, they use landmarks and road signs actually matter. And unlike every game since a lot of great, unique gear isn't tied to a quest. You have to actually go out and find it. And finding some piece of unique top tier gear you stumbled upon at level 10 is amazing. Even if you had to sneak/die a dozen times to see what was back there. Also, mudcrab merchant. And putting cursed items on NPCs via reverse pickpocketing that slowly kill them with no one the wiser was hours of fun.

[@David-un4cs]

I'm sure this is beyond certain practical technological limitations at the moment, but it would be interesting if characters always have to physically carry items. So picking up a wedge of cheese would actually change the shape of a characters backpack. Coinpurses could actually get full both visibly and practically. A character could only hold so many weapons physically even if they aren't encumbered. Like literally limiting swords to how many scabbards are on your character. Then after that point the characters has to physically hold excess weapons. Possibly impacting combat. A bit like Death Stranding where you physically place objects onto the character and can see them. More interesting and organic though.

[@Atoll-ok1zm]

The long dark does a wonderful job with their encumbrance system. Speed is vital for staying alive and stamina is important. If you carry too much you slow down and can get caught by wolves or be unable to traverse climbing ropes. Alternatively resources are sparse, so if you get stuck in a storm you are more likely to survive if you carry heavy food and fuel with you. Additionally some items are actively dangerous to carry, raw meat draws in predators. It constantly makes you think about your pack and what you need to have to stay alive.

[@michalchik]

I respect the fact that everybody has different kinds of games they like to play and this particular video author as of a good job clarifying his thoughts oh, but I pretty much find everything he's suggesting pretty much the exact opposite of what I want except the fact that I agree with the basic premise that items in an open world are pretty boring and largely waste of time. I really do like the Dark Souls system because it doesn't penalize you for carrying junk but does penalize you for equipping things the wrong way. Inventory management systems buy large have about as much fun for me as cleaning my room. The idea of them gradually having an effect on the characters performance is realistic but also the frustrating and dreary. Having to worry about whether or not picking up that extra flask of oil is going to slow you down just enough to make you lose the next fight sounds terrible. It takes the disappointment of finding mediocre items and turns it from a moment of boredom into I'm majorly tedious activity as you go through everything check everything's weight and space allotment and try and take some mental guess as to whether or not you can afford to carry it depending upon how fast do you want to travel and what sort of opponents you're going to fight. The suggestion seem to be very close to what I would consider to be the worst game possible. What I would like to see is a system where redundant items and junk items just didn't show up in the world. If necessary just have chests or lootable items that the player hasn't seen yet just disappear if they contain something worthless. Decrease the number of Rewards, scale them according to what the player already has and what the player needs. Throwing a little bit of Randomness so that there was an junk item or spectacular item that's inappropriate for the player and you can still maintain authenticity and uncertainty without the drudgery. Another technique that has made games more rewarding to me is simply allow junk items to have some basic value, be convertible into something useful at some rate. Eliminating fast travel, also sounds kind of terrible. Yeah that's a really exciting game, one that increases the amount of time you have to spend trudging the Same Old Paths where nothing is happening except for maybe some Random Encounters oh, just so that you won't carry junk around to sell off somewhere. I honestly have a hard time understanding how anyone could think this would make a game more fun. Put it in another type of boredom to discourage characters from holding on to boring items that they found in boring chests? I don't really understand the point of what this video author is saying. I'm not saying that he's not designing a better game for some people but wow this is just definitely not what I want to see.

[@tafu4049]

Well, he did state that he doesnt enjoy open world games THAT much. He just has a different opinion and view on things

[@aetherblackbolt1301]

I'll be honest, I think Razbuten just doesn't have a job that's mentally challenging enough for him or takes long hours. All this tedious management of "make administrative decisions or you lose the game" is all found in actual jobs where you get paid to solve it. If he had a job that physically and mentally drained him to the point of just wanting to lie down and rest, then I doubt he'd get excited at these prospects he's suggesting. As an example, I am a medical physicist in training. My job already includes maths, quality assurance, report writing, risk assessment etc. My brain is mush by the end of the day or week. I don't want to bother with inventory management as part of risk assessment because I'm already doing that as part of training. TL;DR Razbuten wants to emulate responsibility and smart decision making but can't get a real job to do so.

[@tomraineofmagigor3499]

well it depends on what kind of game you're making. Honestly in games like Skyrim I'd be ok with not having encumbrance. With games like fallout have ammo separate and have ways to increase the amount you can carry as you play. Having to move back and forth to manage inventory is just a waste of time. That can be a feature in a hardcore mode and get rid of fast travel in that mode as well but it just seems annoying in the base game. With that said resident evil games are a good example of when to use it. Looking at the horror genre you want to put the player on edge and limiting the inventory like that is a good way to do that. I think when it comes to this the most important thing is to look at the genre

[@TheZenytram]

for the fast travel bit. you are so stuck in the "rat race"/"plato cavern" of game design that you cant disassociate the bad job games do with traveling and the bandaid usage of fast travel. of course removing fast travel would be aweful in the games that use them, that is why they use it, to cover how boring it is to move from point A to B. the game must be made with the lack of fast travel in mind since the beginning. but that is hard, so just do what every one do and sell 3mil copies of it.

[@michalchik]

@@TheZenytram that's an interesting point. If it was possible to make redundant travel more interesting or remove redundant travel that would be a better designed game. As it stands though in sandbox games oh, you are faced generally with a situation where you might want to go back somewhere to complete a side quest or access a store or character now that you've run out of supplies, have for money, completed a quest etcetera. If you've gone down a path and seeing what there is to sehore fought what there is to fight it, the travel itself has the challenge and Novelty gone. Note that a lot of games don't allow you to fast travel to places you haven't been before. We're kind of stuck between, do you want players to have to fight their way back after they've cleared the obstacles and feel like they've made no progress against the world, or do you want them to just spend a lot of time walking through areas they've been and the remnants of challenges they've conquered. I'd be interested in your more specific suggestions on how to make things better. Let's for example take the Fallout 3 games, what would you do for paths between towns that you had already traveled over?

[@PowahSlapEntertainmint]

FOX ONLY, NO ITEMS.

[@yourehereforthatarentyou]

aka: no fun mode

[@eausterberry]

The problem I have with youe D&D example is that I think you're confused about why players like those item interactions. Players don't like the items because they have 5 or 6 uses, they like those items because they can COME UP with 5 or 6 uses. It's that moment of "wait guys... I have a plan that just. might. work." which you can't get in a video game because he only options are the ones the devs put in for you. In a pipe gives you the "fit in with nobles" ability, that wasn't your clever use of a pipe. That's just part of a pipe's stat block and makes 'get pipe' an mandatory extra step if you want to maximize your experience with the nobles. People play and interact with tabletop games in a way that you fundamentally CANNOT play video games because creativity in many situations often cannot happen beyond the preplanned mechanics the devs added.

[@NegraLi34]

That's not true. in LucasArts adventure games they had an engine where you could perform actions with items on just about anything(example: use cup on well could give you a cup full of water), that's how most of the puzzles were solved. One can imagine how an open world could explore the potential of something like this much better using a systemic approach instead of a narrative one

[@eausterberry]

​@@NegraLi34 first off, you're grossly underestimating the scaling issue of this in an open world game. If your game has 25 unique objects then they can be combined in 300 different ways, which isn't a MASSIVE amount of work for a full dev team. But lets say you open world game has 45 unique objects. That's 990 combinations you need to write an event for. Still not a disaster but doable. But at 100 items its 4950. At 200 items it's 19,900. And that's assuming you can only combine 2 things at a time (use X on Y) and can only do so in ONE way. If we say there are TWO ways to interact with something then these numbers double. Lucasarts games were small with orders of magnitude fewer things than any open world game currently on the market. Second off though, most lucasarts games did NOT have unique interactions for all items and world events. I replayed the first Monkey Island and Grim Fandango recently and I promise you the vast majority of interactions if you tried poking one thing with something random were something along the line of "I don't think that's right..." or "what exactly are you hoping to accomplish there?" THIRD off though, none of that matters because even if the devs DID write all the interactions and they DID all have meaningful outcomse, the player still wouldn't have come up with those ideas of be able to do new ones the devs DIDN'T think of. By the nature of how video games work, any usage of an item that provokes a reaction from the universe or NPCs had to be programmed in by the developers. There is no way to design an AI that will be impressed by a pipe that you didn't specifically tell to be impressed by a pipe. Unless you make ACTUALLY sentient and sapient AI with human level intelligence and at if you DO do that, you shouldn't be putting them in a video game because you're condemning what is essentially a living person to death at the hands of 1000 greasy 13 year olds over and over again. The point I'm making is that players can't feel clever for coming up with a solution if the devs already came up with that same solution, and if they devs DIDN'T then the player can't do it because the world won't react appropriately because the devs didn't tell it to.

[@NegraLi34]

@@eausterberry I don't think you understand what a systemic approach is. You don't have to write an event for every combination, what you do is you parent objects by use. For instance, a "breakable object" has a breaking animation and a force that needs to be applied to break. Now every child object of "breakable" breaks when a certain force is applied. If you have an object that can be filled, you assign 2 states to it, empty or full, and the content(liquid, small objects, etc). Now any bowl or cup can be filled with anything that is flagged as small enough to fit a cup/bowl. You could go even further and let a player fill a cup in increments for whatever reason that would be useful, like mixing liquids and stuff like that. The meaning of the outcome doesn't have to be taken into account by the dev either. In a systemic approach the player derives meaning by using the in-game systems to simulate something by a chain reaction(example: explode fence to release a phanter, phanter kills NPC). That is the concept. Like I said, LucasArts games implemented this in a narrative way by design(you need to solve a puzzle), of course not every interaction would work, it would defeat the purpose of their games. Some games already do this to an extent, they are called sandbox(just cause, minecraft, etc). How deep you build the system depends on the game design. Not every game benefits from having a huge amount of interactions.

[@eausterberry]

@@NegraLi34 but what if I don't have a cup and go "oh wait, my helmet can technically hold liquid". if the devs didnt consider that then no it can't. if you fill a cup halfway with one liquid then the other halfway with another because you know theres some weird interaction between those, but the devs didnt, the reaction wont occur. Also you cant systemize social interactions which is a big part of my point. even if you do fenagle the system at the big fancy diplomatic ball to let the guard dogs out and lead them into the ballroom and they start tearing the place apart nobody is going to comment on it. the guards will eventually kill the dogs and everyone will go on as if nothing happened. if people DO comment on the dogs it means the devs thought of that. a pipe can only help you look good to aristocrats if the devs considered specific clothes and items being impressive to them as a thing. The best physics engine doesnt solve the NPC problem. We can see this in New Vegas. The white glove society uniforms sre just tuxedos but you cant swap in Dean Domino's tuxedo and be disguised as one of them because it doesnt have the right flags. you still need the devs to include every possible flag for every possible thing and consider every possible interaction which isnt going to happen. worst case they try and fail and you get a bunch of insane reactions that make no sense because of technial tag interactions. systemic design without a reactive human behind it is inherently limited to prevent a lionshare of creative novel interactions. Especially social ones.

[@NegraLi34]

@@eausterberry Your point was that in a videogame people can't come up with a way to use/combine items that the devs did not predict, as opposed to D&D. The helmet thing simply depends on how far you are willing to expand on what you think are relevant/realistic interactions for a certain kind of object. Your "liquid combination" situation is done in multiple games, example alchemy in Skyrim, of course not every combination results in something useful. Using the same logic the dungeon master in D&D can deny your request if it's some bullshit like "I combine a rock with a watch and make a bow". It's a combination of items that does not make sense because of the nature of both. The bulkiness of the system is determined by the game designer to the extent he/she thinks it's going to help the game. In your example the fallout devs did not think that reactions based on clothing were worth being implemented for that one scenario. Maybe that added a complexity that was boring/overwhelming for the player to keep track of, or it did not occur to them. I don't understand what that proves. If you can't be creative with missions that is by design, either by incompetence or the knowledge that it would make the game unnecessarily complex.

[@sgtruru]

I love walking places manually in Skyrim but why, every 3 minutes, do I get attacked by wolves, bandits, skeeters, vampires, necromancers, dragons, etc.

[@Arkanthrall]

Because Bethesda thought you'd be bored otherwise.

[@TheZenytram]

@@Arkanthrall well you can almost insta kill them not so long playing it. and is boring anyway. skyrim is boring.

[@wilfredoandresquinonesruiz5263]

@@TheZenytram Ever played in hard mode without hud ? The reason of why is boring is because youre not creative enough to not make it boring

[@Meme_Knight]

@@wilfredoandresquinonesruiz5263 dude that's the whole argument with mods in bethesda games, if i have to use mods to make it interesting or creative, then the base game is probably not that good. And also i don't have to be creative to enjoy a game, Skyrim isn't a sandbox game where countless mechanics are at the player's grasp to do as they want, Skyrim Should give me interesting & creative mechanics for me to play it, not make it

[@wilfredoandresquinonesruiz5263]

@@Meme_Knight I'm playing on PS3 tho ?

[@ykyjohn]

It all depends how the items are intended to be used in the game. Nothing to do how item are gathered. Hence if the activity will be overwhelming in time, so it should be something really quick, because the excitement is to fill your storages with a bunch of item faster so you have lots of items to work with as the main focus of the game is not gathering items, having more important thing to like exploration and combat as quest lines etc. But if items are really rare like , all item you get are key items so it would be nice to praise the moment for a time to just make emphasis how important that moment is.

[@JMJackMcNally]

People who make the argument that you just shouldn't play in certain ways need to realize that players will _always_ find ways to optimize the fun out of games. A flaw in the game design of something isn't mediated by a minority of players roleplaying a bit harder, the issues are still there and people will still exploit them.

[@SultanOfSloths]

I don't know about this.. I've been finally playing through Dark Souls III recently and the challenges some people put themselves through are nuts. Surely the game is hard enough on its own, but once you master it you know the best weapons, the fastest and easiest ways to kill everything and the best strategies. I'm sure most people who have played DS3 more than once through did a run where they were insanely powerful and just destroyed all the challenge in it, but at the same time, look at the huge amount of players making their own challenges. Never leveling up, not getting hit once in game, only using magic or no weapons at all, hell there's a guy named SquillaKilla here on YT who did a run of 4 people using one controller to run through the entire game, without dying! A lot of players find fun in getting those numbers as high as they can, while others enjoy the insane challenge. As long as everyone has fun in their own ways, is it such a big issue?

[@sprazz8668]

Yes, it shouldn't be the player's responsibility to make themselves play in the most enjoyable way.

[@launder0]

@@SultanOfSloths how many people do that? yeah, youtube is full of that kind of stuff, but how significant is that number? in my exprience, when there's something too easy to abuse in the game you either do it and optmize the fun out, or feel like you're stupid for not using it... that's particularly true for the example in the video: travelling by foot in Skyrim is the most useless boring thing ever. Let's go from Markath to Whitestar? OK, 20 min walking, with a slight chance of killing 3 bandits on the way. Hooray!

[@jasonhymes3382]

@@SultanOfSloths But DS3 isn't an open world game. The original dark souls was though and people would do that. I spent a significant amount of time trying to get the coolest gear I could to show off to noobs in multiplayer. P.S. Dark souls 3 was a trash game.

[@jasonhymes3382]

Why not look to dark souls yet again on how to do this. Allow players to optimize if they have the skill and know how to do so. Optimizing in dark souls is a bit of a challenge in and of itself. I actually just recently played the game and tried to exploit it as much as I could. I ran around for a couple hours just collecting the best loot and shit. I killed the bosses in 2-3 hits but that was fun. Killing the bosses was my reward for working to optimize. I didn't kill the joy of the game because of optimization itself. Just because I reduced the gameplay to a comical level of easy does not mean I reduced the fun of the game. Some of the most fun things to do in Morrowind is to abuse the alchemy system. Nobody abused the system on their first run, mostly because they didn't know about it. But even so its incredibly fun and gives the game replay-ability. You used to be able to do something similar in skyrim but they patched it out. A lot of people love old games for this very reason. There are so many intricate things you can do to exploit the game from within the game world. Whats more fun than completing the tasks a game has given you in way not even though possible because of exploits. Sure, games shouldn't have easy modes but they also shouldn't prevent players from exploiting the systems. Its often times more fun to break the "rules". Especially in RPGs. This is a fundemental staple of the RPG genre. Every time I play an RPG I always end up testing the game. I always try to break it so to speak. Sometimes amazing things can happen to. Its really cool when the developers expect you to try to break the mold or rules. Its the reason dark souls has the master key. Its the reason killing an innocent NPC sometimes leads to unforeseen consequences. Exploitation is just an extension of that.

[@Catlord98765]

So moral of the story, DnD is best RPG?

[@razbuten]

gadoy

[@JarthenGreenmeadow]

No kidding...

[@jek__]

Literally speaking, tabletops are the only RPGs. Role playing is not a game mechanic video games take advantage of lol

[@ArkRiley]

@@jek__ That's not true, there are plenty of single player (some multiplayer, as well) games which encourage role-playing. The difference is that not every video game player is willing to interact with the role-playing aspect of a game. Imagine playing Wizardry and your party is named "Fighter," "Thief," "Mage," and "Cleric". Well, it turns out that most people don't play Dungeon Crawlers that way, they come up with characters to fill their party.

[@cabrondemente1]

white wolf games are more role playing oriented, dnd is more combat oriented. take your pick

[@YaBoiSebas]

I feel like Borderlands does a good job with inventory management. There’s so much loot that you’re constantly rotating weapons and making decisions as to what you wanna keep and how you want your character to play. They also explain how inventory space even exists with the Digistruct system.

[@EmperorsNewWardrobe]

Like a Swiss army knife, the ‘Swiss Zelda knife’ items with multiple uses in exploration, combat & puzzle-solving are the best. They often give you that aha moment of suddenly seeing how to overcome previous barriers

[@caiopatric]

So really the actual title is "items in open world games are boring, plus a general critique of open world games".

[@razbuten]

Sure, but that title is long as fuck

[@caiopatric]

Yea maybe. I guess i was looking forward to a critique of items and gadgets in general in videogames, because im the type of person that never uses consumables in games for example. i thought it was something connected to that. I agree with the video and like it, i just expected something different.

[@razbuten]

That is fair AND a really good topic (I’m on the same boat)

[@birthdayzrock1426]

@@caiopatric Why don't you use consumables?

[@gregmccauley1687]

@@birthdayzrock1426 I do though. Talking about stuff like potions worth a lot of gold you might find. A bag full of super low weight scrolls that you'll never cast and then maybe sell later or just fuck it because gold is meaningless. Those items are really important to roleplayers though, especially in the early game when you might be super weak finding a good scroll or a potion when you are broke is nice. They should stop appearing as loot or something later. Leveled loot is at fault here, tons of garbage meaningless items for the sake of it. Items should be really good, really interesting, really useful, or really valuable.

[@adamsagehorn3520]

Bethesda did make an open world game that did many of the things you said. It was called Morrowind. And over time it changed it mechanics to be "friendlier" to gamers. You would pick up mysterious items that were for some unknown purpose then sell it and break the quest it was for. You could only fast travel at certain points and ended up traversing over the same terrain again and again fighting the same beasts or trying new ways and finding new adventures that took your attention away from the quest at hand. Encumberance meant NO movement and weight of gear determined stamina drain and speed of movement. Clothing influenced people and certain items influenced how people regarded you. These elements were stripped from games. Some for the better some for the worse. My favorite aspect is I liked the map being uncovered as one journeyed instead of having a whole map unless one finds a map of an area.

[@JarthenGreenmeadow]

Wait what? I thought Morrowind was a meme. This sounds like a game that should be released now.... One of my main gripes of open world games is how you can see the entire map. It ruins the adventure aspect.

[@JarthenGreenmeadow]

Also exploring the map makes fast travel make a lot more sense.

[@ExecutionDbl9]

This is a fair comment. Yes, some of these features made the game better. Some of these features made the game worse. Oblivion, Skyrim, and the Fallout games have improved in many ways over Morrowind. They have regressed many ways over Morrowind. In the end I still love them all. But Morrowind does have a certain something special about it.

[@gregmccauley1687]

@@JarthenGreenmeadow fast travel is necessary because quests send you all over the damned map in Skyrim and Oblivion. Not always the case in Morrowind. You can play the game in mostly 2K graphics now with an absolute truckload of mods that make the world staggeringly large and full with interesting and fun quests. The issues newer players would have are the movement speed (it's very slow at first, but with fortify speed it can be insanely fast, like traversing the entire worldspace in literally 30 seconds real time), and the combat system with melee. It's a diceroll system that is invisible. i.e. you swing your weapon, the animation hits the enemy, but you miss. That's because the dice rolled low.

[@gregmccauley1687]

@@JarthenGreenmeadow Also if you are going to give it a try, fatigue (stamina) affects everything in the game. If your bar is low, the prices you can haggle to vendors will be lower. Your spells will fizzle (i.e. fail to cast, yes that's a real thing). You will miss your attacks. Also Magicka doesn't regen automatically, but you can install a mod called fair magicka regen so you aren't crippled if playing a magic caster (the most fun way to play imo due to the ability to fly at super fast speeds with levitate, among other things, there are also items that anyone can use that cast levitate if not playing a caster). Oh yeah, and the dialogue is not voiced, so you have to read. You get used to it fast.

[@grantjohnson5785]

So, what you're saying is, Runescape actually has a pretty awesome inventory system (including losing most items and all gold upon death) despite *zero* fanfare for just about any new item. Got it. Meanwhile, Breath of the Wild hits a decent middle ground... except for the whole carrying infinite amounts of raw ingredients thing. Fantasy game: the more you carry, the harder combat becomes. Also Fantasy game: have a Hermione's purse.

[@1Pineapple]

Alot of good points! I like the idea of making weapons upgradable rather than having such a large quantity available! I remember Fable 3 has a mechanic like that, where each weapon has 3 different "challenges" that you would have to complete for the weapon to get those upgrades 😊

[@SirThinkALot42]

One thing I actually thought kinda worked in Fallout 4 was the fact that the random junk you find throughout the game was useful not simply to sell, but for crafting as well. It wasnt a perfect system, but it did give some reason to care about what I was collecting beyond being able to sell it.

[@samd2013]

Agreed completely, I remember collecting spoons and bowls in Skyrim only to discover that they were useless and I couldn’t even sell them for that much. In fallout 4, a toy car will give you a screw and piece of wood. A mug on the table will give you ceramic, and bigger heavier items like a desk fan will give more useful things like gears. Crafting and settlement building was dependent on how much junk loot was stored in your workbench. Fallout 4 Survival Mode gives item collecting, settlement building, and crafting a much larger purpose in the game than on normal mode.

[@christopherr6284]

@@samd2013 Yeah but IIRC, Survival Mode didn't come out when the game did. So, people like me had already put 500+ hours into the game and was 100% done with it when Survival Mode came out.

[@samd2013]

Christopher R I also played the game at launch and soaked in hundreds of hours before survival mode came out. I started up a new profile on survival and I’ll never play the game any other way again.

[@krybling]

yes i build a fort out of pencils it was great

[@midnightblue2009]

@that guy, over yonder If you decide to play it that way than yeah. You know you have agency in the game to do it differently. Role play a little. When I collect toys in the world I bring them back and place them in my sons room. I put nice plates and cups in the kitchen. I collect pillows for the beds. I have to decide if I want to keep this nice thing or use it to upgrade my stuff.

[@sonicroze]

Personally, I kinda like that there's so much useless junk in open-world games. It means you have to think harder about what IS useful to you, or why you want to carry around ten tankards in your satchel? I remember a dragon attack happening outside of Whiterun when I was playing Skyrim. A couple guards died in the scuffle and I went to loot them since it wasn't any use to them. Since it was a light weight item, I opted for one of the wooden shields with Whiterun's emblem on it. When i went to sell it, I noticed it had a different emblem from another shield I'd picked up from somewhere. So, I found each Jarl had their own logo and there were 7 of them. This led me to do some redecorating in my player home. Though... waiting for a dragon attack or natural causes to finish off the guards eventually turned into "Can I kill them and still get away undetected?" The answer? Yes.

[@jackpatrick3082]

Far enough

[@dr.phylisphical9294]

They need to have more interesting loot and loot locations

[@SirBearingtonSupporter]

Sort by gold to weight ratio. Weight doesn't just mean the arbitrary weight but also the bulk of an item. I did this in Diablo and Darkest Dungeon the same way I did it in Skyrim. That said, I've agreed with this video for about 5 years now. And it's honestly why the modding community thrives (not just because developers don't fix game breaking bugs).

[@birdstwin1186]

I do too. It sounds like this video creator has ADHD. He must get a visual flash across the screen everytime he picks up something. This is a horrid suggestion. It would be better if he stuck to zelda and not try to bring all that crap to other games. I like the trinkets scattered about in Skyrim. The background items int he world feels open, more immersive. If you dont want to pick up that stuff then dont. Also this guy has never heard of inventory management.

[@Amakka88]

Loot junk is very different to "think harder about what IS useful to you". Remember the saying one man trash is another's treasure? I hate games with just "filler loot" so annoying, especially if you cant figure out if it's junk or not.

[@willbuchanan8920]

I'd rather be able to go round and pick items up than not at all, even if they're useless. I feel the solution is to make 'junk' items more useful and less like clutter or scrap than get rid of them entirely. They add to the immersion of roleplaying games despite their impracticality.

[@yoongis_garden]

Or just be like me, an actual dragon probably, and hoard literally everything.

[@Rabbit_Hill]

I think Nier: Automata is a great example of the “dropping items on death” example. When you die, you drop all of your non-necessary plug-in chips (which are modular perks that actually incorporate the inventory organization concept you spoke on!) (the necessary (but removable) chips being ones that allow you to have a HUD, a mini map, and more. There’s even one (your CPU) that just kills you if you remove it). Extra details aside, when you die, all of your installed plug-in chips stay with your previous body on the ground. If you want them back you have to run/fight your way back to your body, otherwise they’re gone forever and you have to deal with finding/buying/upgrading other chips to make up for your loss. This is also incorporated into the “network” feature. When a player dies, as said before their body and chips are left on the ground. When you have the network feature enabled, you can see the bodies of other players laying where they died. With no cost to you, you can choose to revive them and have them fight alongside you for a short period of time, or you can take a small amount of their chips (which act as a temporary buff, granting you their power for a small amount of time), some money, and a couple items that were in their inventory. Players can also create their own death message that displays on their bodies to other players when investigated. While you can’t type your own message (for fairly obvious reasons), you can build a sentence from an extremely diverse set of words and phrases allowing a message that ranges from serious, to poetic, to self deprecating, and even humorous. Occasionally people even use them to warn other players of potential dangers up ahead (and having to choose from a long list of presets prevents them from spoiling what will actually happen).

[@user-sb5fm1gk7l]

You make it sound like getting those chips is actually at least a little bit hard.

[@kangaruri2157]

I’m so happy to see Nier Automata’s super fucking cool item system here. Something else I like about it is that some items are just really difficult to find, and there’s a certain satisfaction in picking them up and realising what you just got. It’s basically impossible to get White Boar Meat unless you kill and loot a white boar, and because you only get one item per dead animal, chances aren’t that high. I think I went my entire first playthrough (all main endings) without ever even killing one. Similarly, I need to agree on the death message feature - it’s stunningly cool how nice people can be. In the End Of YoRHa credits sequence, you’re given the opportunity to say some pretty scary, upsetting things, but nearly nobody did it. And, again me agreeing, the Repair/Retrieve function on corpses isn’t infinite. I think during your third playthrough, Route C, it starts to fail on you, and all corpses that you repair instantly turn against you. Pretty weird, but super cool. Long live YoRHa.

[@jft0986]

@@kangaruri2157 God dang Ending E, got my tears flooding out all night (literally till 7 a.m.)

[@Ryotaiku]

I hated that mechanic in Automata. Losing those mod chips felt like my character was being physically downgraded, whereas in a game like Dark Souls it just feels like progression is being halted. When it stops happening in the second half of the game, all I could think was why it couldn't have just not been there at all.

[@christiangaston7954]

I was just thinking of this during the video. I didn't frequently die in Nier but when I did it meant that area was particularly difficult, and made it all the more stressful to try and regain my main chip set. Once when I died the second time in a row (so my main chip set was forever lost) it was the first time in a long time that I genuinely felt a real consequence to dying, and it took a long time to find chips like it again.

[@jjkthebest]

Grid systems always feel so artificial to me. I like the idea of a functional encumbrance system, but those grid systems aren't that imo.

[@tyrowolfe3034]

I actually really appreciate The Long Dark for all of the reasons mentioned in this video. Clear set goal (survive and explore) in open world maps that do not hinge on or even use fast travel. All items are useful, all items are weighted and take up space, significant penalties for being over encumbered especially because your enemies are faster then you. Plus your ability to place things and organize outside of containers is superior to ANY open world game I've ever played which I really appreciate. You can easily place things on shelves, the floor, etc with no pop up menus its all free hand and really smooth. Every item matters, your stats don't effect your items but thats because your items are basic logical things like Ah yes this wool sweater keeps me warmer then a cotton T-shirt. The weaponry is universally applicable and only varies in how it can be used (I.e. game play style) and never upgrades to a better version of itself, meaning you have to get BETTER with the mechanics to use it better (skill building on the player level is just as valuable as stats making the game easier in my opinion, thats one thing Minecraft did really well). You have to maintain your weapons AND your clothes! which makes them extremely valuable BEYOND just oh yes these help me. Not only do they help you, but they degrade rapidly and need to be treated with care. Ammo is very limited and you have multiple ways to acquire it but all are more difficult. There is significant risk in most everything you do and unpredictable events thrown in. Heck some enemies you can't even kill for most of the game you just have to avoid them or you get instant death or an extreme mauling (i.e. bears unless you have a gun/bow and plenty of time and patients and a good vantage point) And there are stats too! They're leveled by sacrificing time (which has weight), calories, and hydration to sit and read a book and learn. Or by practicing basic survival skills. These skills are things that can not be improved through more efficient game play or skill on the players part, making leveling actually valuable. Meanwhile the things that can be improved by player skill are left without stats attached. A perfect, or really close to perfect, approach at a balanced leveling system in my opinion. The stats, like fire starting, also help with the immersion aspect truly making the player feel how frustrating and difficult it is to start a fire having never done it before, or even with experience but in poor weather conditions or with poor material. One of my favorite things, though it occasionally gets annoying, is how discomfort plays a role in the efficiency of your character and how often you're cued on to enemies or falling health by audible complaints by the character. "Ah I'm soo cold" or "I'm starving..." and the complaints get gradually more intense as your condition falls. Also risk of injury such as a sprained ankle or hypothermia increases, which effects game play down to the ability to walk. Trapping is a bit OP in the game, but I think its okay for an open world game to have one or two spots in the range of maps that allows you to play "easy" and just survive at the sacrifice of a more stimulating play through. The rest of the map isn't like that, and if you're going to do the exploration aspect you need to abandon these safe havens where its easy to survive and move on, again risk vs reward. Do you want to survive just doing the same exact thing every day? Or do you want to adventure? Time has weight in this game. Traveling is interesting because of snow depth, enemies, weather conditions, foraging, and the landscape is attractive. Traveling on foot is almost a privilege in this game depending on the map you're in because of the frequency of snow storms. All in all, a GREAT open map world format. There are so many other things I could list that I like, but I think this summarizes what relates to this video. And the best part for me? Despite the inherent difficulty and risk of the game, its a logical format. And surprisingly easy and fun to play... Which is great for someone like me who has a very hard time adapting to more purposfully challenging games, games that require you to "figure the game out" first before you find any success defeating bosses or getting rare items. There is so much flexibility in this game you can approach it from a hundred angles because your goal is so basic, so real. Survive using practical real items we're all familiar with.

[@sagewaterdragon]

You showed a lot of Fallout 4 footage in this video, so I was surprised to see that you completely avoided talking about how F4 managed to make its junk relevant. While there weren't a lot of complex roleplaying activities to be had with Duct-tape & Desk-fans (which would be the worst possible tabletop game), making every single item in the world part of the crafting system was a great idea that made me excited to see what each building held. It made finding a workman's shack as big of a deal as killing a boss, and that was cool.

[@razbuten]

So I have some thoughts on crafting systems that I considered touching on in this video, but I decided to leave it for a potential future video as it would have added a lot of time to this one. Maybe that was a mistake, but oh well. Short response is, yeah I’m glad there is a use for the junk you pick up. It fit in well with the major ideas of the game (end of the world/limited supplies). Still, I’m more interested in finding items that have value beyond being used to make something else (although that is always a good element to have in addition to the other stuff)

[@johnathannorton444]

Relevance != Not boring. Something can be relevant and boring simultaneously. Not that I disagree with you. It's just logically it appears to me that you are equating the two.

[@Harlandgg]

As someone who played most Fallout games, I disagree, since it make the whole purpose of the game to be a garbage collector. In my opinion, items in an open worrld game are not always to be collect. Their primary reason to exist is... Just that, to exist, to give the environment a story, to add to the context. The idea that every items should be looted in an open world game is a fundamental problem in modern design. The world should not be designed to suit the gameplay, the gameplay should be designed to suit the world it is built into. It's I think a mandatory mindset to achieve immersion in a game. And that is the kind of mindset Rockstar has with their games.

[@EvilParagon4]

Boi I got so excited when I found desk fans. Then there was this place that had like, 13 in one room as I rounded the corner. Man did my eyes light up.

[@johnathannorton444]

@@Harlandgg I'm with u on that. Good points my dude.

[@zedhead90]

I think many of the issues you discussed are contingent on the nature of the game. In early Zelda games, you have a small, contained open world where everything is scripted. You can’t loot bodies of fallen enemies. You can’t rummage an npc’s home for everything they own. You can only loot where and when the game allows you to. This makes it a lot easier to make most items you get feel special and keep the iconic chime from becoming a tedious chore that you spam a button to skip as fast as possible three items in. You also can’t sell anything, making anything you pick up inherently essential. Compare this to BotW, a Zelda game that modernizes its conventions to games like The Wild Hunt, and you’ll find that there is much less theatricality to the discovery of new items because there are so many. I’ve noticed that a great deal of the games that you’ve referenced as taking steps in the right direction take place in smaller game worlds (Dark Souls, Zelda, Hollow Knight), but many of these mechanics only become a nuisance when applied to the kind of world you can get lost in.

[@Siegberg91]

Zelda at least makes trash items somewhat usefull as you dont want to waste good stuff on weak enemys

[@TheBrazilRules]

The thing is that they could put an chest in every room in older zeldas with some item inside, but they chose not to. Items had to have a purpose to be in the game. In modern Open World games there are a lot of items that are there just to make it more believable, but have no purpose in the gameplay. It is like in Fallout 3, in which there is a mod that forces you to use some junk itens to fix your crippled limbs, and then you start picking these up.

[@YuYuYuna_]

Ehh I disagree on that last note "...many of these mechanics only become a nuisance when applied to the kind of world you can get lost in." I strongly disagree that to be able to get lost in a world it has to be the size of an IRL country or state. I'm much more of the opinion that quality is better than quantity and especially so when it comes to space I can explore in a game. For example the games I go back and visit are the ones with memorable worlds and a large variety of spaces and experiences within them. As fun as the assassin's creed games are, I could not be bothered to go back and play through them again as the world building, design and experiences just aren't memorable enough. What I remember in those games is the ACTIONS I did, like running around with a bunch of guards chasing me and doing other goofy stuff, but I don't remember anything about the worlds the games take place in. They're just not special or uniquely presented to me. They look pretty, but that's about it. Compare that to a game like Crosscode, which has become one of my favorite games of all time now, and in that game I've replayed it 3 times already now and every time has been a blast. The gameplay is incredibly fun, the world is gorgeous but also unique and each region of the world is very aesthetically different and has its own tone and atmosphere. Music also helps a lot with the experience and memorability of areas in a game too. Personally I feel "medium to medium-large" worlds the best size for variety and size while not being 80% empty space 20% actual content and areas I feel a reason to explore. There's no point in having a game that is the 10x the previous game or "the largest world in a video game to this day" if the majority of it is just reused rocks and buildings or tree clusters, etc. Now I'm not saying that developers need to fill up all that space with content, actually I'm saying the opposite. I want developers to start making worlds of the size they can ensure where I go in the world there's something to do and not just "wow massive world where 80% of the space is a pointless time sink to walk across"

[@harrisonthompson]

dear razbuten, love your stuff! i would just like to point out that from my perspective lost time in game is its own consequence to me in real life. the real life consequence is just as real to me as a game based consequence that results from time mechanics and restrictions. the onlt reason i can see myself caring less about the real life loss of time is if i had more of an abundance of it. in other words i concede that If i had tons of time then a time mechanic/consequences in game would be more important to me. but i dont have a ton of time atm, so i feel like its unnecessary often times.

[@ThePhiloctopus]

I really enjoyed collecting grey clothing sets in WoW, some of which were instance drops and so required planning to collect the full set. They often had a backstory and they looked nice when equipped as you walked around town.

[@shroomzBacteria]

this dude wants to play Vanilla EverQuest more then he will ever know

[@aadis6659]

You have the right idea, but your solutions don't actually fix the problem. If you had fanfare or pictures in the inventory for the same countless generic vendor trash weapons and armor, nothing would change except for it feeling like the player is being patronized. The reason getting an item in Zelda feels great is because each one opens up new possiblities. When you get the Hookshot, you know a whole chunk of the world opened up. When you get the Deku Leaf, you know your way of traversal just changed. Even getting weapons in BotW feels better than the average open world game because weapons break, so each weapon is functionally a Kirby copy ability, a disposable little bit of variety you'll lose and replace every so often, and so you're more inclined to care about what you'll find next.

[@NecromancyForKids]

There is also fanfare for picking up rupees.

[@isodoubIet]

"The reason getting an item in Zelda feels great is because each one opens up new possiblities. " Except in BotW, where getting items is about as fun as doing your tax return. Just a bunch of busy work you have to do to get to the actual game.

[@cabrondemente1]

*wrong* you get the fanfare (or a smaller version of it) whenever you open a chest, even if said chest only contains a some arrows or a green rupee

[@manorothpitlordextraordina4041]

He talked about the items needing to affect gameplay as well

[@legrandliseurtri7495]

What you are describing about the hookshot opening the world is an entire genre: Metroidvania. Not really the same as open world, even if the two can overlap sometimes(Hollow Knight).

[@CapybaraFourteen]

I found your channel last year and I've been re-watching all your videos through again, and it literally blew me away that you don't have a million subs yet. You deserve it man. Your videos are such top notch high quality, and I hope you blow up like you should soon man!

[@saquilkazumy4465]

Imo Outward does a really good job at managing the items

[@TiffanyJLeung]

In Borderlands 3 when a really rare or legendary gun drops there's a really nice "ting" sound that catches your attention and feels very satisfying

[@tomraineofmagigor3499]

the biggest issue I found with that was they had a bunch of events where they dropped legendries like candy. It takes away the satisfaction. There needs to be a good balance to loot and BL3 went too generous with it

[@01100101011100100111]

2:32 "...playing Inventory Tetris in games is something I find a surprising amount of joy in." I've never felt more understood by a KZbin video before.

[@Vladislav888]

I absolutely hate it. Auto-sort is a Godsend.

[@fobo3361]

Its a huge reason i love stalker, or more specifically stalker gamma, cuz it'll take you HOURS to get a new gun in that game, and the process of looking around trying to find the right parts, and tool kits, and finally a gun thats worth using your resources to upgrade is huuuge, finally getting to fire something you've been holding onto and getting it nice and shiny isn't something ive experienced in a game before, outside of stalker gamma

[@terrypark3690]

I love your trying to fit in and eventually leaving out the fish when you're talking about how item systems like that makes you think hard about what to keep.

[@Al_Thor]

I'm now having ptsd from the mention of losing items when dying because I recently fell into the void in the end, lost all my end city loot and the 70 levels I had.

[@JollyJuiice]

*Big F*

[@dejavu1512]

Press F to pay respects

[@hambasri1053]

F

[@jefftparker]

Go out and see the world.

[@sevencats4964]

F

[@josf1045]

"everything in you inventory does something different" hideo kojima: *laser beam eyes*

[@LunamrathP]

"On paper these should be my favorite types of games." On pen and paper? ;)

[@arcticheroh]

I love hearing opinions and writing them down. You guys always help me as a developer.

[@roberth4395]

2:04 Good for you. I on the other hand despise games like that and either drop them or mod the stupidity out of them. Limited inventory reduces the fun as you habe to run back and forth all the time. My time is limited and I don't want to remember how much time I wasted on a limited inventory system on my death bed.

[@Katalmach]

8:00 A good test of whether the items are actually having an impact in the world is the following: Imagine the game was an ASCII roguelike. Imagine you had an experiment with a level 15 enemy and a selection of level 15 items and an experiment with a level 50 enemy and a selection of level 50 items. Now imagine you could not see any absolute numbers in the game, just the relative/percent HP of the enemy, your own percent HP/mana, things like that. If the combat feels different at level 50 compared to level 15 then the items are having a meaningful impact and you've advanced to a new stage in the game. If the combat is largely the same then the game is relying on bigger numbers and visuals to convince you that you have advanced in the game.

[@angelamazakas2624]

As someone who does game dev (programmer) your videos are great 👍 they really make me think about everything I put into my game, and how things should function

[@o0Avalon0o]

9:53 Which variant of Fairy fountain is that? I love it!

[@isaiahweaver159]

My take on it is if every item feels special in the same way, no items feel special. Having mundane stuff for common items makes the unique items more impactful. In Fallout 4, among a world of duct tape and nails, a legendary gun sticks out. In Skyrim, the endless coins, iron swords and gems are juxtaposed by Meridia's Beacon and Red Eagle's Fury. Unique items are unique because they are obtained completely differently to everything else, which is why the looting of common items has to be uneventful. If every item is treated as if it's special, why would the player throw anything away or, in the worse case, keep anything at all?

[@fenchellforelle]

*a new hand touches the beacon!* sorry i just had to haha but i agree with your statement.

[@ArkRiley]

I actually had the opposite feeling in Fallout 4. I got a bunch of legendary items that weren't good in any respect, but finding some duct tape or super glue? Now that's a keeper.

[@fenchellforelle]

@@ArkRiley hm yeah adhesives can get pretty rare depending on the area. At some point i started turning that worthless settlement preston sends you to in the beginning into a vegetable starch farm and that pretty much solved the issue. As for guns, i personally use the legendary modification mod, so even that 10mil pistol with 15% increased limb damage can at least be dismantled for an effect chip to use on my other guns, but yeah, some legendaries are downright trash.

[@reneekoh]

This is why botw is so interesting even 80 hours into gameplay: items don't stop getting interesting because we break stuff all the time

[@MarktheSuth]

was looking for this comment.

[@steveh1474]

and the fact that the only things you can interact with are absolutely useful. its not like Fallout or Skyrim, where items can be as mundane as a pen or bucket. the mundane items in BOTW, like an Apple, is a healing item, or Big Hammer is a weapon to smash a monster with, or smash rocks. rocks are items like Flint, to make fire, to allow the player to fastforward through the day and night cycle, or you might get other rocks like Rubies to make gear that resists fire and heat. but Bethesda makes sure to give you useful items like the empty glass bottle, that doesnt absolutely nothing ever. its not that items as a whole are boring, its that bad devs make games filled with boring items. its not rocket science. good games dont give you things that are truly useless.

[@bitsnthings]

@@MarktheSuth haha someone had to say it XD

[@meandmetoo8436]

@@steveh1474 having pen/forks/bucket be items is about immersion not gameplay.

[@SanilJadhav711]

@@meandmetoo8436 ^This , I agree wholly

[@ghostofpunk3386]

great video! what is the game at 1:44?

[@tabula_rosa]

Tibia had really good items. There was a weight limit you couldn't go over and on top of it you had a limited amount of slots that you could fit items per bag, had to physically sort your bags, you could put bags within bags but then it made it in-feasible to get to your deeply stored items during combat bc of the limit on the amount of space the UI on the right side of the screen had for opening inventory slots. And on top of all of it, if you died, you drop your top-tier bag that everything else is stored in and have to race from town (missing all of the equipment you had when you died) to try & get it back before another player loots your corpse or it rots away with all your shit on it. I've never had a more tense experience in a game, and it was just from the way the game handled inventory management

[@GamingallGenres]

7:23 - I wonder how many takes it took him to land a 20 lol

[@DLTyrus]

I'd say about 20 times on average.

[@Oliolli3]

After 14 takes he would have had a 52% chance of having landed at least one 20.

[@mynamesbigmynamesbigmyname4757]

@@Oliolli3 probability don't work like that

[@Oliolli3]

@@mynamesbigmynamesbigmyname4757 Do the maths. The chance of landing 14 not-20s in a row is 48,7%.

[@ultimaxkom8728]

@@mynamesbigmynamesbigmyname4757 Show me the maffs

[@bekkayya]

"Just dont play that way"/"just dont use it" is never a valid argument. Mechanically its unfun because you know you are playing sub-optimally (everybody plays the meta, come on), and artistically it is not what the designers intended you to experience. The only time I would "just not use it" is if either of those two were untrue, such as if the publisher forced the developer to include some bad drm or something.

[@razbuten]

This is a very good comment.

[@TwiggehTV]

Also sometimes it just isnt an option to "not use it". Im thinking about quest markers and how they water down the experience by having you ignoring the world and just following the compass. "well just turn it off then" - nope, impossible because quests are designed around the marker system so nobody tells you where to go, leaving you to finecomb half the gameworld for pretty much every quest. GEE THANKS GUYS

[@JZStudiosonline]

It depends on the mechanic. I abhor the magical mark n track abilities that have even infested stealth games. MGSV is a great example. I'd like to be able to use to binoculars, but I can't since I can't disable the magic tracking that I hate. On the flip side, the game lets you turn off the reflex mode to make being spotted more difficult. Seems kinda backwards. A stealth game forces mark and track mechanics, but lets you disable the reflex mode to stay in stealth.

[@Mary42877]

The optimal way to play is the one with most fun, and no, not everyone plays the meta.

[@brandowhitemusic]

“Just don’t play that way” is like telling an audience they might have a better viewing experience if they pretend a bad movie is good.

[@ellw7830]

dude you would love the long dark. it would be really cool to see you do a video on it someday

[@ratnapkins7853]

Dragons dogma combines encumbrance on both equipped and carried items. It also goes off of thresholds rather than a curve. And they affect things from stamina and speed, to knockback resistance.

[@EvilParagon4]

I disagree. You're point: "This would cause the player to choose between whether it's better to collect a lot of loot or have full access to a prefered playstyle" Right there, you say "prefered playstyle", but forget to mention that collecting a lot of loot might be a secondary prefered playstyle. Right now you've not caused a choice, but a dilemma. That's a dilemma that might be enough for someone to put down the game. Loot collecting and combat are two different areas of the gameplay. Integrating them in a way that's not favourable to the player will cause people to drift away from the game because it's not enjoyable.

[@AdmiralTails]

Yeah, I definitely have to agree here. Something like that can only really work if the game somehow makes having a bunch of loot irrelevant to certain playstyles, which I don't think would ever work in an open world game. It would just end up invalidating playstyles, or at least making them more cumbersome (like forcing agile stealthy characters to go through an area and kill everything, then backtrack through it to grab loot now they they wouldn't have to try to sneak around while encumbered).

[@wylie2835]

And this causes him a dilemma because there is no choice. What you are speaking of does not exist. A mechanic that pleases everyone. Games have to pick and choose. And every preference has every right to be represented.

[@GoreGutztheImpaler]

Man I absolutely love the gameplay loop of explore, combat, scavenge. I love going back to a place you built up and using the things you went out and gather, to build better weapons and armor to make the gameplay loop even easier or more enjoyable.

[@Rimpala]

You know what, what happened to treasure? I'm talking about loot that you expect to be worth venturing into a tomb or dungeon for. And not just fancy weapons and armor but vendor "trash" that is extraordinarily rare and beautiful to look at, that you wouldn't mind displaying in your player home. Examples could be idols, jewelry, intricate works of art, weapons and armor that's meant to be more ceremonial, the kind of stuff you would expect to be buried with some past emperor or king. The kind of stuff Indiana Jones would risk his life trying to find. The kind of stuff that "belongs in a museum". Having vendor trash most of the game and then having a rare treasure chest with those special kind of items would actually make dungeon crawling a lot more fun.

[@TheCosmicUprise]

Dragons dogma does exactly what you want with inventory management, making you heavier the more total items you have in your inventory

[@tournesole_881]

I'm maybe a bit late to the party but I know a game called The long Dark developped by Hinterland studio (It's like 20 bucks on Steam) that manage inventory and weight mangement very well. I's a survival game so it makes sense that it's easier but still. What you decide to bring with you is really a core mecanic of gameplay and that the one time where I didn't found inventory mangement frustrating. Great video btw.

[@kennedytheretard975]

Me in Fallout New Vegas: Oh cool... new stuff... When im in a battle and get new stuff after the battle: F*CK YEAH NEW STUFF

[@justnoob8141]

When you find lower level stuff: Oh well, I think I gonna see it FO4: **WORKBENCH INTENSIFIED**

[@GothamiteYT]

New Vegas is designed 100x better than 4 or Skyrim

[@justnoob8141]

Gothamite and by better, you mean just a large empty Garry Mod map?

[@GothamiteYT]

Just Noob good thing theres more to design than just making a map

[@justnoob8141]

Gothamite what design? New Vegas is just literally Garry Mod flat map with desert skin

[@IsaSaien]

great video, but i completely disagree. the things you are asking for seem to drive towards having items be tedious and annoying, the encumberance system you talked about, gradually slowing you down and whatnot, is used in dragons dogma, i hate it. its tedius and it makes items feel less usefull, sure id love to carry some extra healing, but if its an open world game with limited fast travel that means i will be wasting a LOT of time to be able to carry something. so the punishment for bad inventory management is losing time, wich you claim is not a good punishment, at least we agree on something. and i dont want some flamboyant music or animation when picking up a fork from a table in TES or the witcher. the reason zelda games have those animations is tradition and because most chest items are actually important, it would be impossible to make an open world game in wich you can interact with every item like a bethesda game allows you to and still make every item meaningful, they are not meant to be "fun" you dont walk to the kitchen IRL and start playing with forks, but if you are a thief and you find a silver fork you might want to snatch that, that is the point. inventory management can be fun, but when its done on an open world game, especially with limited fast travel, it can be very tedius and boring, instead of being engaging. and finally about looting for better gear and looking at numbers, i feel like thats fine honestly, in a game about looting gear you want to have that, its part of the experience and i like doing that in games like diablo, borderlands, skyrim or the witcher, but to be fair that could just be habit. now, i loved re4 inventory system, but i would HATE a system like that on skyrim, i would mod it out or just not play the game. however it makes a lot of sense on a different kind of game, like runescape's inventory wich had a limited amount of space for things you could carry but your equiped gear didnt use any space. basically an inventory system must work with the game, theres no factually better inventory system, skyrims inventory isnt meant to be engaging, i would hate that, but a zelda game must have very important items. and a resident evil game MUST have resource management. open world game arent all the same, and fallout shouldnt have the same system as TES, but regardless of that, i cant really agree with most of what you said here, but i respect your opinion and your video has good quality regardless.

[@razbuten]

I appreciate you big time. I think at the end of the day, everyone looks for different things in games, and the stuff I would find interesting is almost certainly annoying as fuck to others. Regardless of our difference in taste/opinion, I really appreciate your really well thought response and general kindness. If more people on the internet had your tact, it might actually be a nice place to have meaningful conversations. Thank you.

[@IsaSaien]

@@razbuten im glad you think like that, massive respect! Keep on doing your thing

[@holamovie9343]

I agree. getting slowed down is such an unnecessary pain.

[@ENCHANTMEN_]

I second the Dragon's Dogma issue, all that did for me was change what I considered to be "overencumbered" from 100% to whatever the lowest threshold was. Same thing in Dark Souls.

[@Madhattersinjeans]

@@razbuten Adding penalties to using inventory tends to create more problems. Dark souls gets away with it because it's mostly a combat oriented game they can afford to spend some time refining how fast/slow a character moves with more or less loot on them. The problem with adding penalties means the players are forced into juggling their inventories for more of the game, aka more busywork for the great reward of...moving a bit faster. And increasing the value of all loot wouldn't necessarily fix the problem of making loot mechanics more interesting. It could turn players into scavenger rats who become fixated on finding magic items instead of interacting with the world. Meaningful upgrades to weapons is a neat idea which also does away with trash items but that introduces a whole other game mechanic which brings it's own set of issues. I like the idea of having more ways to use your game items even going so far as to use them as extra inventory for a player run shop in the game. Selling the items off to build up some player run market (legitimate or black market). Some of the value with the real world DnD loot is players can use their deception to use a worthless item and sell it for more or a variety of roleplay situations which would be tricky to emulate in a game. But you could take a few common occurences such as deception for selling the item more than it's worth. enchanting it and refining it turning it into a magical weapon with unique traits for the player over time breaking it down melting it and using the scrap metal to forge something else entirely. The only real limit is how much dev time you have available to add useability on your items, but I do like the idea of having unique ways to use those items.

[@andreybugaenko9677]

About hilarious inventory interaction - backpack with items work as kind of armor and all hits from back will have a chance to damage items in inventory instead

[@Ironcydeus]

Ark does a great job in implementing urgency to the inventory. The fact that you have a cap on your weight carry that you can put points into challenges you to prioritize what items or farm does and doesn't matter. It's also especially fun to have an insanely high weight cap and be too heavy for enemies on flying dinos to carry you away

[@jamesburgess2k]

Speaking of fast travel, you know a game I've yet to fast travel on (other than to see the animation)? Spider-Man The perfect example of how enjoyable map transversal effects your want to fast travel, with web swinging being one of the best ways in gaming.

[@razbuten]

I didn’t even think about using Fast Travel in it because I enjoyed web slinging so much (although I do think those subway bits are pretty rad).

[@JZStudiosonline]

Or if the map is just fucking huge. I kind of hate that fast travel has become so prominent in racing games, maybe outside of just doing race after race, though the drive to locations should be a good breather period. I mean... the entire point of the game is to drive around right? So... why spend so much time fast traveling and literally skipping the core of the gameplay?

[@Calvin_Coolage]

@@JZStudiosonline Because some people don't like making long drives from point A to point B. And sometimes people just want to skip the inbetween to get to their destination. But in a game like NFS 2015, where the map is so small, the only fast travel you have is back to the garage. This is because of the Rep system and collectibles, where every drive has the potential to help you level up or find collectibles. And I like that, because in NFS Carbon, I'd just fast travel unless I wanted a police chasr.

[@Siegberg91]

The Problem comes from quest designes when they are only get this and come back then people will always use fast travel

[@roguereaver634]

JZStudios I think the recent Forza Horizon 4 has done a decent job making fast travel the less appealing option by making you pay to use it until you've got some collectibles, and only allows it to properties you own.

[@Forblaze7]

I feel like your video had the implication that there's a single perfect loot system that works for all games. Zelda (pre-botw) made a big deal about getting new items because actually were a big deal. They usually opened up new areas and introduced entire mechanics. Skyrim doesn't make a big deal about its items because they're mostly the same thing. Skyrim has to have a lot of trash items though, because it's a way to get you to return to town and establish a gameplay loop. Similarly, Resident Evil has an inventory system that works how it does because it wants you to make choices about what to take. Skyrim or Zelda don't want you to have to make that decision because it isn't a part of what they're trying to accomplish with their loot. I definitely agree that Diablo, Skyrim, Borderlands and Witcher 3 loot systems are boring, but I think you need to recognize that they're trying to accomplish something different than Zelda and Resident Evil.

[@Splozy]

yeah a skinner box. Which is what hes criticizing.

[@stevelarry3870]

Well it's always going to be a skinner box, unless you want 90% of your time in Skyrim spent collecting gear that doesn't make you any more powerful. I don't get this natural adversity gamers suddenly have to those mechanics. Yeah, they exploit your brain to make you feel good? That's literally what games are doing the majority of the time you play them.

[@Splozy]

@@stevelarry3870 Non-linear games do not need to solely rely on drip feeding you little tidbits of content and loot to be engaging and fun. I'm not saying they shouldn't or can't use this to great effect but RPGs have trended into this area now where they have reduced the quality of, or straight up abandoned other parts of the gameplay in favour of this sole gameplay loop. What happened to things like challenge, storytelling, writing, consequence, failure? But don't think about that! after you kill these bad guys we'll guarantee you +1% extra damage! Games like rimworld are closer to RPGs than modern Bethesda and similiar games.

[@stevelarry3870]

Splozy Nothing happened to challenge and writing and consequence and failure. In fact I would say they are better than ever. Anybody can say “they sacrificed cool things to get this cool thing so we shouldn’t have this cool thing” and it’s a pretty common argument, but it doesn’t stand up without examples. We are living in the golden age of gaming and it’s easy to point to Destiny and say “hey look, that’s got a mediocre story and focuses on loot” without having to consider that the loot is the entire reason it exists. While there may be a couple examples it’s not a trend and the only trend skinner boxes are creating is more fun and engaging games. And no, Rimworld isn’t an RPG. Modern Bethesda games are. Rimworld is not closer to being one - because it isn’t one. A game having infinite choices because of procedural generation doesn’t make it an RPG. It makes it a management game.

[@Papada00]

Yes. I agree with you. There is no one design fits all. And he's talking about looting in fallout 4 boring. Wtf is he talking about? I cant relate because i find it fun collecting stuff. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

[@Rockin2The80s]

In terms of weapons in games, there is a very good older game called Dark Cloud originally on Ps2. How this game handles weapon mechanics, as far as upgrading in order to make weapons better or to then evolve the weapons, is, in my opinion, the best representation of how developers should approach weapon collection in games.

[@nevisysbryd7450]

Dark Cloud had my favorite equipment upgrade system to-date. While the actual variety of changes in gameplay loop by those upgrades was actually pretty small by the late game, the basic system of leveling weapons using sockets and turning old weapons into new upgrade items was one of the most innately enjoyable progression systems that I have ever interacted with.

[@accusatori]

This helped me figure out part of why Bloodborne is SO appealing to me, despite not being the kind of open world/RPG I usually play. It does restrict the space you can enter, but each space is so densely packed with interesting things that I don't get tired of dying constantly and having to run back through the whole thing, and I feel like it's worth it to explore ALL the spaces of each area--because I know I WILL be rewarded with little interesting things, even if not literal loot. For the most part, at least. This is also what made RDRII more fun I think, although it was still a little too physically big for my tastes--which is forgivable, because the ways to move through the world are natural and fun and it serves the story of the world to have a long horse-ride, sometimes. Like, even if it's kinda aggravating to me on some runs, it feels appropriate and immersive that it takes 1 billion years to ride from the city at the bottom of the map all the way up into the snowy mountains to hunt some bears. I think my least favorite open-world of the past few years is the Witcher III, honestly. :/ So much about the game is really fun, but the world feels inappropriately sized in relation to the player, like Geralt is too tall for the spaces? At least, that's how I remember it -- kinda weird.

[@BigDBrian]

4:40 so basically, demon's souls was a better example? the item burden system is completely pointless and only tedious, though.

[@Bluecho4]

Agreed. Demon's Souls had a full item burden system - not just an equip burden - and most people who endured it were glad to see it gone in all later Soulsborne titles. It wasn't particularly fun to make multiple trips back to the Nexus to offload materials. It was just a chore.

[@navdragoni]

The problem with demon souls, like all RPGs, is the excessive amount of useless weapons and itens. There are like 4 variations of herbs, 10 variations of healing itens, about 4 variations of 10 different types of upgrade materials that weights tons and give you no use when in the inventory, like 60 different weapons and another hundreds of head pieces, body armor, leg armor, gauntlets, rings, well, you get the picture. Maybe It could work in a game with a better "item economy"? It's mindblowing the amount of crap they put in those games. You have to make active research to know how to use most stuff and you often end the game not having touched half the itens you got. You don't even know what they do.

[@navdragoni]

Having said that, I actually love Bloodborne for 2 things (among others): How there were fewer weapons that really counted, and the lack of equip burden.

[@streamusdarkwater5016]

That’s why I love Minecraft. You drop everything on death and everything has a use

[@phantomic109]

*Cries in Dragon Egg*

[@aarontheperson6867]

@@phantomic109 You can brag to your friends with that actually!!! Also, the only true useless item is the poisonous potato. It's designed to be a disappointment.

[@phantomic109]

@@aarontheperson6867 Yeah, I knew I was forgetting about something less useful.

[@Natsuxc74]

@that guy, over yonder it doesn't

[@nico_o4]

@@aarontheperson6867 I mean.... you can make a poisonous potato farm and use them to keep an area loaded by throwing them into a portal or something. In minecraft the only limit is imagination lol

[@rmt3589]

Love this. Helped clarify what I wished for in games but could never put into words. I think lowering drop rates will help a lot, making it so each item is important, but you don't need hundreds of each one. So, a slime might drop slime once per 3 killed on average, but recipes could use a percentage of that slime. Instead of each slime dropping 15-45, and needing 100 of them per craft. So each individual item can be valuable.

[@marcopohl4875]

If I ever get the chance to make the "everything MMO" that I came up with recently, I'd invite you to design the inventory

[@Party_Magician]

I like and agree with most your stated ideas in separation, but can't help but feel like two of them (more severely limiting inventory space and punishing encumberance, and making small items more useful by providing a non-obvious use case) would be horrible to actually play if implemented together. You would like to throw away or sell some unnecessary items to be able to access more game style options, but without knowing which ones are really unnecessary and which will open up new possibilities, you're stuck between locking yourself out of content without knowing it, having to slug through the game in a way you don't want because of encumberance, or resorting to metagaming, which takes away from the experience by ripping the player out of the game.

[@SepticFuddy]

"A simplified version of [DnD mechanic] would make the game more interesting" Well, he early open world computer RPGs were basically intended to model an SP tabletop RPG campaign as much as possible. Departing from that mentality is what's caused them to grow stale and unrewarding. Just compare Morrowind to Skyrim, from the perspective of substance. Exploration is encouraged and rewarded, fast travel is only from silt striders to certain destinations, navigation is realistic by relying on landmarks and directions rather than a quest compass, no attempt whatsoever at story railroading, designing a class by tailoring your own background rather than grinding out perk trees, more worthy playstyles than just "stealth archer". Item looting in Morrowind was so interesting to me as a kid that I basically ignored almost any questing and just ran around exploring all the parts of the map and trying to steal the coolest weapons and armor I could find. In Skyrim after a few hours of exploring I just chugged through the quests while staring at the quest marker and stealth archerizing. MGSV (and Peace Walker before it, though not precisely open-world) had a neat and unique gear system- your gear gets researched by your crew, whom you loot from the world around you. Kidnap the best scientists, engineers, doctors and tell them what to design for you. Use your fancy and highly interesting gadgets to come up with ever more ridiculous ways of kidnapping more and better crew. Zelda's success with item looting can also be attributed to just how few items you get in those games, and how much effect they then have. I still remember what it felt like to finally get the Giant's Knife/Biggoron Sword the first time. In The Witcher 3's case, I did find it a bit tedious how often you trade up on gear, robbing me of the feeling that I had found any worthy upgrade. On the other hand, when I finally decided to bother with getting the actual witcher sets, I did find that pretty rewarding. Especially with the DLC to add runes and whatnot.

[@SepticFuddy]

@oh yeehaw yeehaw Says the dude on a video discussing the finer points of video game design

[@jackpatrick3082]

@oh yeehaw yeehaw dude seriously, how sad are you

[@styno9295]

Ah yes, the biggorons knife, how fast you broke....

[@Jackpkmn]

the biggest problem imo is that the stealth archer archetype is just straight broken as a way to play. You avoid most of the consequences for your actions, you do more damage, you take less damage. There's just no downside.

[@Slender_Man_186]

Styno nah, Giant’s Knife was shit (the one you bought from a store), broke it after about 5 swings. The Biggoron Sword was kickass though, but the quest to get it was a bitch and a half.

[@AssaultDragoon]

I think the game you are looking for is dragon's dogma. Weight is mechanical, in fact some areas require you to carry more stuff to traverse them( windy canyons) and having less loot makes you faster and lose less stamina while climbing. The consequence is that you are easier to knock down.

[@AidanRatnage]

In Skyrim whenever I was over encumbered I just opened the dev console and raised the limit. At 7:22 how many takes?