You''ve given me an interesting thought there Dak Lozer. If you allow the player to hold to much then they will which end up having the player blame the game for not having an easier way of orgainising their inventory.

I''m curious, those of you who have played Diablo2. I heard that you can use storage places in the game. Can you tell me if you think this is good or bad and why. I havn''t played it as you can probably guess.

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!

The chest is ok, but it holds less than what you can carry. What would have been nice - they have this somewhat in Darkstone - is houses. A place to call your own and camp for free with only a theif or two to bother you. Players can upgrade their security system for their house as they get more cash. It will give people a place to call home and theives jobs. To add a bit more security, you can always include or sell unpickable chests to store in the house.

A restrictive inventory has never been to my liking. It''s admittedly a matter of taste, but any time I have to deal with inventory management, I''m doing something I don''t enjoy. Any time a game forces me to do something I don''t enjoy, that''s bad.

Key''s to a good inventory...

Flexible storage and adequate capacity. Overextending capacity at the cost of lowered character abilities, but not at the risk of this whole exploding backpack idea. I wouldn''t enjoy that.

Easy access to items. Quick access functionality (Ability to swap weapons or use items at the stroke of a key.) Diablo''s belt was a good example, though it shouldn''t be limited to specific items. Also, the key should access inventory, not a special slot like in Diablo. I''d much rather Diablo had a key you could assign to drink a specific potion, but the potions were in your inventory. Having to pause every few minutes to refill my belt was not fun. Thus it was an annoyance feature. Didn''t add anything to the game for me.

Diablo should have added a weapon switching ability with an adequate switch time built in for balancing. Shield or off-hand switching would have been good too. Armor switching would have been nice, but not really necessary, and should impose a lengthy switch time penalty simply due to the nature of removing and wearing armor. The Bioware/Black Isle games should have added this armor switching ability too, again with the lengthy switch time penalty. Inventory screens in that game consumed the whole viewable area. Another bad thing. Neverwinter Nights has a transparent inventory. And from the E3 demo, it looks like they have item quickslots that are flexible enough for any items. I noticed weapons and shields being put into them, but no armor. Oh well.

Here''s an overall rule of thumb. Any action that is used even semi-frequently should never take more then 2 keystrokes or mouse clicks. Any more then that and it will be considered tedious to some degree to a good portion of your market.

Inventory management did not make Diablo I or II a better game in my eyes. It didn''t make Baldur''s Gate or Icewind Dale better games in my eyes. right now I can''t think of a game that did have what I thought was good inventory management. The Final Fantasy games had open ended inventory as far as capacity, but they still had a cumbersome element to them (partially due to the lack of a mouse interface to the game. Get a clue Squaresoft)

How about having the graphics of inventory items shrunk and pasted onto the gui. There's no limit to you inventory, but as it fills up it just starts to cover the viewing area of the game screen which acts as natural encumberance?

Then you can just drag and drop items onto your character or left click on an item in the inventory to use them.

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!

Edited by - Paul Cunningham on August 24, 2000 10:36:43 PM

The nice thing about UO''s inventory system was that it was highly customizable. You could drag your bags anywhere on the screen. The bad part was extracting items from the packs...certain items like earrings are a major pain in the butt to pickup because you have to click and drag them exactly on the few pixels they existed on (lets not mention trying to take earrings off your paper doll ).

Jagged Alliance 2 had an inventory system that mixed the weight and space limitations pretty well in my opinion. They had varying size boxes representing your inventory (ie the smaller ones couldn''t hold an m-14, but they could hold several clips).

How about hybrid system that has a soft limit for the weight and a hard limit for the volume? The more you carry the slower/less agile you are. That would give you an incentive to carry less if speed and agility were more important to your character class. I guess that would depend a lot on the game mechanics, though.

Paul, can you pls explain abit more. You suggest having items lying around the viewing area of the game? Like ontop?