Today I almost hit the limit of 500 items on my character in Stars Reach and it got me to think about this topic again, happens from time to time, mostly in MMOs and liveservice games.
I’m a loot hoarder, it’s the same story for me in pretty much every game – exploration and grinding serving the main purpose of throwing more loot in the pile that I hoard. Quite often a lot of that ends up being never used all the way till the very end of the game, but that’s when the game has an end, that’s why Singleplayer games are a bit different.
Hoarding is still massive for me in SP, but I deal with inventory limitations a bit better, because I know that game will be finished, that I most likely gonna have everything I need and more. Gear and currency most likely will be abundant, so I don’t need to go crazy stealing every single fork in the city to sell, well nowadays, I had that problem in the past, I think streaming helped a bit. I still do hoard a lot and hit some weight or capacity limits all the time, but I try to be a bit less zealous about looting stuff. Most RPGs provide some sort of storage, plenty of traders or just never limit your hoarding (like Gothic Remake for example). Survival games allow you to build all the storage you want to fill with loot usually, so you just need to drop it off at the base from time to time. Mostly your problem is getting too much loot while on the go somewhere – dealing with a bunch of bandits in KCD for example and trying to carry that to the trader. You need to leave a bunch of loot sometimes, but you still grab a lot and sell it or store it no problems, even though some traders might not have a lot of cash to buy everything.
MMOs and liveservice games have worse issues sometimes. You are not only limited with your own inventory, you are often limited with your storage/warehouse capacity and trading might also be limited/tricky. Worst example is Fallout 76 – I love the game and play it on and off since the beta test, despite all the bad rep that game got on release I still streamed it a lot. Early on there were really bad problems with loot, but it was explained by tech limitations, so storage chest was pretty small. In the same time currency that player can have is capped, currency that NPCs have to buy your stuff has daily cap too, so you can’t even sell everything. Converting legendary gear into special currency also had cap and limits, but at least now that system is not really needed and you can scrap your legendaries all you want with almost no limit, except the output still has weight. Trading between players allows you to use the currency substitute to store your monies, so you can sell a bunch, but then you need to deal with player trade discords. In-game player vending uses storage space again and you use currency that is hitting caps too, so not the best solutions and big trades all happen through discord and other ways. Now time had passed, tech issues already less of a problem, but limitations still stay, even though now we have a bit more storage space if you play for a while it fills super fast. Now after creating a problem they sell you a solution – subscribe and you get unlimited storage for scrap, ammo, and medical items recently, you don’t even get all the storage unlimited for paying 15$/mo! Maybe tech issues are still there, so they don’t go full unlimited, but it’s so annoying playing looter shooter and constantly dealing with your inventory management even when you are paying money monthly.
Some MMOs and liveservice games create that problem on purpose to sell you the solution later and that sucks, but at least in some cases it’s not too bad – Path of Exile you just buy tabs once and they stay. SpiritVale seemingly also selling warehouse extension already, Ragnarok Online used to sell both storage extension and your character inventory expansion. I think that’s generally acceptable, but you need to be reasonable with prices and business model, Fallout 76 is not reasonable in my opinion and yet I still like returning to it and tolerate this. Not everyone is a hoarder though and some people playing F76 have no problems dealing with full f2p inventory, so I wonder sometimes – are there many loot hoarders like me, who have such problems, or I’m a rare specimen?
On behalf of Loot Hoarders – please don’t go too restrictive in your games, let us at least drop the loot off somewhere, for someone collective lots of stuff is part of the fun. Let me have my dragon hoard, flex, and display the rare stuff even. If you are limiting it, then provide the way to increase that limit with reasonable prices, I swear if I could just grind and hoard like crazy I would be returning to Fallout 76 way more. But also don’t know if I would sub then without extra motivation? Well give me the sub with all the stash being unlimited then!
Returning to Stars Reach loot problem – it’s not too bad, because supposedly you can build storage containers, but apparently they were broken for a while (fixed now?) and you need your plot to place them and I currently can’t since I’m attached to wrong planet. Still needs a lot of work with inventory management though, since you get A LOT of different items during gameplay and quite a lot of items are the same, just from different planets and that makes them take different slots. At least there’s no weight limit, only amount of unique stacks, because I casually carry tons of sand with me, hoping to be able to process it one day. Stars Reach will get a dedicated post soon too and more about the inventory problem unless it gets improved until then.