I'd like to talk about the purpose of weight capacity in a game, beyond just the simple reduction to "it's more realistic." Some games give you all of the numbers: weight of each object, how much you can carry, and how much you're currently carrying. Some games (modern FPSs mostly) restrict purely the number of items you can carry regardless of how much they might 'weigh'. Still, other games eschew this entirely (e.g. many JRPGs) and allow you to carry 99 Tents and 99 Cabins and 99 Great Big Swords as well as whatever else.

I find myself wondering what in-game functions are supported by restricting how much a character can carry.

The less you can carry, the less you can bring home to sell from a long haul. Diablo is well known for this (though really it just forces repeated laps to and from town) but even a game like Fallout sees the same restriction (and the lack of teleportation/quick travel makes the limitation even more tangible). This puts a cap on the amount of resources a player can gain from an expedition, as it were; you may need to make choices on what to bring to town to sell and what to leave behind, perhaps not knowing which is more valuable.

Carrying capacity also restricts your flexibility; this is its primary use case in modern FPSs (which allow you typically a primary weapon, a sidearm, and some kind of utility item) but it comes up in other games as well; while it might be nice to have two kinds of rocket launchers, a grenade launcher, a flame thrower, two kinds of chainguns, and several rifles - something for every occasion - you just can't carry them all. This very often meshes with the previous effect: you now need to budget carrying capacity between:

• your ability to address different situations with the ideal weapon;
• and your ability to carry more junk to sell for money.

Fallout 3 (and New Vegas unless you kicked in Hardcore mode) ignored the weight of ammunition and 'chems' (stimpacks for healing and other things that granted buffs) but its predecessors did not; stim packs were light (and expensive), but first aid kits and doctor bags were heavy, adding your ability to address character injury to the 'what do I carry' budgeting.

Items are resources (either they serve an intrinsic function or they can be sold for currency or maybe broken down and used to build things that serve one of those two purposes) which ultimately assist the player accomplish tasks; restricting how many you can have puts a limit on your resources. Additionally, it does add a touch of realism to the game. ;)

Does it have any other effect that I'm missing? What do you think?

Having to make choices on what you carry makes a game more interesting. If you had the ability to drag every possible weapon, upgrade, potion and god knows what else, with you then you would care far less to evaluate what you would need and the game would become more of a collect, use and sell quest. Having to pick a tradeoff adds an edge to the game (I feel great when I kept that one potion of resist frost in skyrim and suddenly encountered five frost .. ghosts (name escapes me))

It also reduces complexity, in my opinion. It's something I do anyway actually - even if I can carry a ton of stuff. Carrying thirty types of potions with you makes it hard to find what the potion you need is. Hotbars don't solve the problem, only delay it and shift it. Eventually, if your game doesn't pause on open inventory, you'll hate having a ton of things, or if it does pause you'll hate spending hours in your inventory to find that one sword that does slightly more damage to frost ghosts (yes, still don't remember their names).

I generally prefer smaller inventories for those reasons. Trade-offs make a game more fun for me, and simplicity makes it easier to play. I rather focus on gameplay than inventory management (who coined that term - a "UI game" ?)

From a more personal point of view, I hate unrealistic inventories. It tends to break immersion a bit. Most players are just so used to that acceptable break from reality that they no longer care. I think that (slightly off topic) these breaks from reality remove some of the real challenges faced by adventuring, and thus force designers to have to come up with other, artificial challenges to make adventuring harder, thus further breaking reality.

That's my 2 cents anyway.

In RPGs, carrying capacity is also a mechanic to balance different character builds. For example, you might spend a few points in charisma to get more party members (read pack mules) that you might otherwise neglect in favor of more direct killing statistics. Or a ranged weapon user might buy points of strength to lug around more ammo. I especially liked the Fallout New Vegas version of the pack rat perk which gave you additional carrying capacity for a high barter skill.

The whole inventory issue is basically about role play. The modern audience doesn't care about atmosphere, they just want to kill kill kill. Hell even the classes in modern games are the same. Warriors practically have spells in GW2 and WoW. Actually screw practically. Its all about constant button mashing.

Did you see those people up thread? "But, But, But, I want to be able to carry the optimal gear for every possible circumstance and switch into it for no penalty."

Jesus Christ. Why even have the gear for fuck's sake...

Digging through a backpack for That Thing That Will Save Everybody can make for an intense moment, but not a very heroic one; whereas weight and space constraints do hand the player some tough (and fun) choices on what to carry and how to be prepared for different things, making the system technically difficult from a control-angle (i.e. having them manually jigsaw their gear tightly enough to fit more stuff, not pausing the action when they go in there after what they need) could frustrate the player. That's my concern with manual packing...but I had forgotten it, haha. :) It's a big part of Diablo and games like it; Deus Ex too, and the most recent one auto-packed your inventory for you to get the most space (and did pause the action when you went in there, iirc).

@Altar, I admit I'm not so pessimistic with my thoughts on "the modern audience." The kind of people that buy and enjoy games where heavy-handed inventory management is a 'feature' are not the kind of people that are only in a game for frag count. They're the people that really enjoyed everything that the Interplay gang put out. When designing a game for the lowest common denominator, maybe eschewing inventory management is a good idea. The core of that's a discussion for another time though. <3

@Altar, I admit I'm not so pessimistic with my thoughts on "the modern audience." The kind of people that buy and enjoy games where heavy-handed inventory management is a 'feature' are not the kind of people that are only in a game for frag count. They're the people that really enjoyed everything that the Interplay gang put out. When designing a game for the lowest common denominator, maybe eschewing inventory management is a good idea. The core of that's a discussion for another time though. <3

I was only responding to what people said specifically in this thread about inventory management.

JRPG inventory systems are mostly a holdover from when limited cartridge space made a more complex serialization system impractical.

For inventory complexity it entirely depends on if its purpose is for tactical load outs or a scavenger / door to door salesman sim.

I guess that "modern audience" aka "lazy people" of any ARPG/RPG/MMORPG would probably just take the most generic weapon available with the most overpowered skill as to not having to switch around and only looting the shiniest rares as picking something up seems like useless work to them (and later whining about being poor and needing free things if its an online game), which I would find sad.
Opposite to these are more oldschool people taking the effort to optimize everything, switching weapons, armors, skills constantly, picking up everything for crafting, selling, using.
When restricting inventory you actually encourage the lazy playstyle. Imagine going into a dungeon, fighting your way through and 1/10 the way in your inventory gets filled and you start puzzling around everything to make a bit extra room. Then you start killing 1 monster, looting, calculating gold per inventory square for all items you carry, dropping the least worthy, finding next monster,... and you spend 90% of your time with accounting and 10% with RPG playing. Or you could be getting into a mob, something good drops and you can only choose between getting killed while sorting out or having that item disappear from time limit for looting, which could get incredibly frustrating. I would prefer games with at least enough space to just loot everything I find in one dungeon visit or one walk from one merchant to the next.
The halfway good thing with restricted inventory is that people cannot carry around unlimited amount of potions, though I would prefer a weight limit for this over systems where you can only carry 10 potions of this one type of potion even when you dont carry any other type which you could. Also theres the issue that this seems more like a bandaid for having given too much gold to the player or making potions not expensive enough or dropping too often.
People not being able to make use of equip they have earned by playing when there is no space for it, I would not see as a good thing.
Making the inventory small to conserve on database capacity for your MMO seems reasonable at first, but could get frustrating when there are thousands of different things people need to collect for quests and you allow them only a few hundred while still needing space for equip. Also hdd have more space nowadays...
The worst thing would be a F2P game with extra tiny inventory as to make it extra frustrating so people have to buy more space with real money.

For a FPS I can see how later levels could be made more interesting when the player can for example only carry a pistol, a rifle and one other weapon and you plan for this in your leveldesign so there are enough(but not too many) replacements available at certain points when needed.

And for a trading sim, TBS or RTS it would be almost natural to want a fixed capacity on a ship/whatever for that added realism and more complex planning needs.