Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 Revive Age-Old RPG Debate About Encumbrance
It’s a debate as old as role-playing games themselves: should players have to deal with encumbrance?
The recent release of Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Bethesda’s Starfield have thrust the encumbrance debate back into the headlines, with both games employing a system that restricts how much stuff you can carry.
While each game employs systems and mechanics that let you carry more and more, it is inevitable that as a player, you’re going to have to spend a decent chunk of your time fussing with managing your character or characters’ carry weight limit.
In Starfield’s case, encumbrance is a big enough issue for some that they are willing to lose access to gaining achievements in order to increase the carry limit via console commands on PC. This in turn has made a mod designed to prevent the achievements from being disabled one of the most popular on NexusMods.
It’s a different situation on Xbox Series X and S, of course. Starfield on console does not grant access to console command cheats, leaving players faced with the dreaded encumbrance mechanic.
Fans of role-playing games are well used to encumbrance, of course, however much they might hate it. Bethesda’s own The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games all have it. But why does it exist in the first place? There’s an argument to be made that encumbrance adds a sense of place to a virtual world, that it makes characters and objects more believable. There’s a game in resource management, too. If you can’t bring everything to a fight, what do you bring? Perhaps there are interesting choices to make with encumbrance.
Beyond that, there are logistical reasons video games use encumbrance. Again, if you can carry everything, how do you visualise everything in an inventory screen? How do
Read more on ign.com
