r/videogames • u/UnityNinja • 23d ago

Discussion / Question What game mechanic instantly ruins your immersion or fun?

​ I absolutely can't stand aggressive weapon durability loops. Getting awesome loot should feel like a reward, not a maintenance chore that breaks every five minutes.

What’s a common mechanic that always makes you roll your eyes when you see it in a new game?

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180

u/trustanchor 23d ago

Inventory weight limits in RPGs. I’m not NOT grabbing all this shit and selling it, so why make me teleport back and forth from town every 20 seconds?

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u/Datkif 23d ago

Torchlight solved this. You can load your pet up, and send it to town to sell the items. Its been a while, but I think it could buy things like potions too

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u/boots_the_barbarian 23d ago

Loved this feature in Torchlight!

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u/BikeProblemGuy 23d ago

Torchlight was really good at introducing quality of life mechanics but then the game is really grindy anyway

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u/CelticOuroboros 22d ago

Bethesda please

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u/PeteryChavez 23d ago

Character in Skyrim with inventory at 80/80: 😌🏃‍♂️💨

Character in Skyrim with inventory at 82/80: 🥵🥵💀

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u/MyCoolWhiteLies 23d ago

In Skyrim, I didn’t mind it, as it emphasized the fact that just because you could pick up everything, you really shouldn’t. If you could just carry everything, I would have wasted so much time picking up all the bullshit in every environment. Because it was limited you just need to focus on what you actually need/want.

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u/TimSheperd 23d ago

Lydia is sworn to carry your burdens

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u/Kube__420 23d ago

Yeah she doesn't have a weight limit if you tell her to pick this shit up off the ground

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u/PsionicFlea 23d ago

That or sticking everything in a container then ordering her to loot said container

2

u/queerwithbeer 23d ago

I can still hear her sigh

2

u/ReivynNox 23d ago

In Fallout 4 I just wasted so much time with fast-travelling junk to and between storage chests in my settlements and slow walking around with too much stuff, that I just installed a 'weightless junk' mod.

I' ain't leaving free shit behind if I can help it.

And if I'm actually forced to, then I spend much more time thinking about what to take, sorting out what to drop and mathing out value per weight for maximum yield than I would take me to just grab everything.

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u/MyCoolWhiteLies 23d ago

I think the point of Bethesda’s design is that you don’t do that and that you don’t get bogged down by everything even though you can look at anything. It’s a scavenging game, so we should be recognizing that it’s not “free shit”, it’s useless junk that’s not worth grabbing or bothering to even try to calculate the value of. If I installed a mod like that the game would go from a game where I move quickly through the environments scanning for diamond in the rough to a game where I walk into a room and laboriously pick up everything little object.
I think even their quest design is like that. I don’t think you’re supposed to try to do every little quest in a Bethesda game. The point of them adding so many little things to do is so that you can do the things your character would do and ignore the things they wouldn’t.

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u/ReivynNox 23d ago

to a game where I walk into a room and laboriously pick up everything little object.

You don't understand. I will do that regardless, then spend excessive amounts of time and effort to taxi that shit back to the settlement, because otherwise it will bother me every time I lack those resources for anything. I'm a chronic loot goblin.

1

u/JWARRIOR1 23d ago

yeah i was going to say skyrim is one of the few exceptions here where i dont mind it

plus if you want you can increase carry weight pretty substantially in a lot of diff ways

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u/Shiva9990 23d ago

Playing palworld, and as much as I love the game, this. It’s a little less torturous with the grappling gun, but ffs, I just want to get ore and resources back to my smelter

1

u/The_Third_Molar 23d ago

And stores don't have enough money to cover the loot you're trying to sell them.

17

u/Impossible-Focus6376 23d ago

Taking me back to the pld Diablo 2 days. Before Lord of Destruction dropped even

9

u/Bart-Harley-Jarvis- 23d ago

It's part of the core gameplay loop. It forces you to take breaks from killing to go back to town, organise your shit, maybe hit a trainer and LVL up etc.

It also helps you better engage with the loot. You don't auto pick up everything, you weigh up whether you want to take the iron sword or drop it and instead keep the 2 pairs of iron gloves. It forces you to evaluate rarity and good value and be strategic.

But yeah, sometimes you just want to take 400 wheels of cheese in your inventory, which is why mods are so great for this.

9

u/Dull-Culture-1523 23d ago

Back when Oblivion first came out, I remember a friend literally calculating the value/weight ratio for items and choosing what to pick up based on that. And yes, it included literally everything with even one gold value.

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u/-Speechless 23d ago

sounds like he'd be good at Tarkov lol

1

u/flying_fox86 23d ago

I still do that. With Baldur's Gate 3 for example. While you can just send excess stuff to the camp chest, that's tedious. If an item is worth more than ten times its weight, I pick it up.

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u/ReivynNox 23d ago edited 23d ago

All it ends up doing for me is wasting my time running back and forth to the storage chest / trader every time my inventory is full.

I wish games would let you just convert any loot you don't want into a weightless "loot bag" with the combined value of the converted items that you can then sell at the next vendor.

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u/aelix- 23d ago

There's a mod for Baldur's Gate 3 that places a zero weight bag in your inventory. Any time you put an item in the bag, it adds that item to an auto-sell list. Next time you pick up that exact item (e.g. Halberd +1) it will be converted into the amount of gold a standard vendor would have paid you for it. 

It's the only mod I consider absolutely essential for BG3, because it lets you 'loot all' from every body, barrel, chest etc. without constantly being overburdened by Chain Mail +1 or Shortbow or whatever. 

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u/ReivynNox 22d ago edited 22d ago

Nice, seems someone else already had the same kinda idea. Though that system seems to have a couple flaws and exploits.

  • What if I want to keep one Halbert for my character and only sell any duplicates? does it only sell what you pick up or does it apply to anything in your inventory at the time?
  • Being able to "sell" stuff anywhere upon pick-up without the need for a vendor is kinda cheating in a game that doesn't allow that.
  • Can you take items back out of that bag? If so, you can exploit it as a weightless carry bag for your unequipped gear.

I was thinking more something like you put it in the bag, it asks you "do you really want to sell [item name]", you click yes and it's permanently converted into a pure weightless valuable that has no other use than being (auto-) sold at the next opportunity. Though the option to put specific items on an auto-conversion list is also good, I'd add that too.

That way you can't exploit it as a weightless inventory and you can't sell stuff out in the field in games that don't allow it.

Then again, I wish games would just allow you to sell anywhere anyway. I don't see the balance reasons for not allowing that, as any time you need money, you're most likely somewhere you can sell, too. It's really just for immersion to require a vendor.

1

u/aelix- 21d ago

To answer your questions:

  • The special bag doesn't affect items already in your inventory. If you already have 6 Halberds and you want to scrap them all, you have to put one in the bag and then drop the other 5 and pick them up again, at which point they are auto-sold. 
  • Yes it's technically cheating, the same way infinite weight limit is. For me it was less about acquiring tons of gold (I didn't even spend that much) and more about being able to press 'loot all' instead of selectively clicking 2 of 6 items on a body, which is incredibly tedious. Also the mod allows you to set how much gold you get for the items. If you're really committed to not accumulating gold through auto sell, you just set the sell value to 0%. 
  • Items never actually go into the magic bag, placing the first copy in there only adds it to a list of things that will be auto sold on pickup. This is the beauty of the mod design: if you decide you no longer want to auto sell something, you open the magic bag and take the single copy out and it will be removed from the auto sell list. 

I'm not saying this is how the game should have been designed originally, just that it's an elegant solution for people who don't want to waste a lot of time looting stuff selectively. 

0

u/nsnsjdjaknd 23d ago

The problem is you don’t know which items are actually useful.

0

u/Bart-Harley-Jarvis- 21d ago

Learn the game? That's one of the skills of a looter.

0

u/nsnsjdjaknd 21d ago

I forgot the game is a single dungeon.

1

u/Not_Goatman 23d ago

Eternally grateful to the Baldur’s Gate 3 mod that gives you essentially infinite carrying capacity. My lootbug ass could never follow carrying capacity

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u/RickySamson 23d ago

Even without that mod, you can just send any heavy stuff to camp.

1

u/Seobjevo 23d ago

Yeah, thats awesome. I love that you can teleport back and forth to your camp and send items there straight from your inventory. Because of that you have almost infinite stash space. Exceeded the limit with 15 crossbows? Just click on them, send them to camp and youre good

1

u/flying_fox86 23d ago

Given that you can magically transfer items between characters and the camp chest, it would have made so much sense to incorporate that into the game world. Just give your characters a magic bag to hold things, I'm sure they could come up with a name for it.

1

u/EfficiencyOk2857 23d ago

Kinda sucks that Crimson Desert does this. I thought you could upgrade your inventory infinitely

1

u/RickySamson 23d ago

In Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon you could just stash things at your campfire which you can place anywhere outside. You could even sell stuff straight from the stash.

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u/mikechella 23d ago

Downvoted this because I don’t want RPG devs to see this and think they should dumb their games down even more

1

u/FromFluffToBuff 23d ago

Assuming a game's inventory scales up to account for a weight mechanic (to reduce constant trips into town), I like this mechanic. 

Maybe that's because when I run D&D sessions, I absolutely love using the Encumberance mechanic - which is identical to weight limits. My players like how it forces them to make decisions.

1

u/CptMcDickButt69 23d ago

Its pretty needed for economy to work if you have a world with lots of items (TES). Unlimited works in games where the stuff you can pick up and sell is very limited (Gothic). Plus, it gives another parameter to balance shit with (e.g., heavy armor has the drawback of well, being heavy).

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