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How do you like the current encumbrance system?


ARRANOX

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So what i want to discuss is the "gameplay value" of the current encumbrance system.

personally i don`t like it, to me its just anoying. but i do love a challenging game, and its important to av punishing game mechanics like encumburance in a survival game.

Before anyone gives me suggestions on how to overcome this issue let me say that i have no problem dealing with it.

I just find that in my case it does not really add any value to my game, and is only anoying at times.

And the fact that when im getting packmule up or getting enough pocket mods it does not really feel like im achiving something.

becouse 1 to 3 more or less encumbrance is so little change in speed.

 

IF however you found a pocket mod that allowed you to carry 3 more items it would be a YEASS! :D moment.

So more or less how TFP intended to have pocket mods work in the first place would have been more enjoyable. (in my opinion)

 

So to add encumbrance on top of that i would have added it as a side affect to other Negative status effects like hunger, infection e.t.c

 

Im not saying its a big issue, im just curious if anyone likes how the encumbrance system works?

 

Edited by ARRANOX
It was pointed out that the title may have been misleading. (see edit history)
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I don't particularly enjoy it, no, but it's part of the game, and unlike the blood moon or gps Zombies, I can deal with it, with little to no issues.  Like many things in the game it forces us to make choices, keep that brass trophy, candelabra, and radiator or scrap then to 1 pile of brass and lose 25% of the whole?  I try to avoid putting points in pack mule, just because they are not needed as long as you are making choices.

A drop box here, a drop box there, and once I get vehicles or heavens bless me and a I find a pocket mod, or the way to make them, I'm keeping my enc low.

I agree it's not the best system, but imo, it's better then Conan or Valheim.

 

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15 minutes ago, Darthjake said:

I agree it's not the best system, but imo, it's better then Conan or Valheim.

Haven't played either of those games (yet).  Is it similar to Fallout or The Infected where items have weight and you have a weight limit?  The Infected goes a bit further and has a size restriction also tied to your backpack.

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28 minutes ago, Darthjake said:

I don't particularly enjoy it, no, but it's part of the game, and unlike the blood moon or gps Zombies, I can deal with it, with little to no issues.  Like many things in the game it forces us to make choices, keep that brass trophy, candelabra, and radiator or scrap then to 1 pile of brass and lose 25% of the whole?  I try to avoid putting points in pack mule, just because they are not needed as long as you are making choices.

A drop box here, a drop box there, and once I get vehicles or heavens bless me and a I find a pocket mod, or the way to make them, I'm keeping my enc low.

I agree it's not the best system, but imo, it's better then Conan or Valheim.

 

i get your meaning. for me when i get a vehicle im done thinking about encumbrance, the biggest issue with encumbrance is solved. you still want the pocket mods but its never the thing you are looking for/hoping for when you get to the main loot rom. however if it was so that the pocket mods gave you additional slots it would be the best armor mod in the entire game for me, haha

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1 hour ago, ARRANOX said:

So more or less how TFP intended to have pocket mods work in the first place would have been more enjoyable. (in my opinion)

Um, no? You don't need high-end pocket mods, you can also skill pack mule.

It's a decision you have to take.

 

1 hour ago, ARRANOX said:

So to add encumbrance on top of that i would have added it as a side affect to other Negative status effects like hunger, infection e.t.c

So what would be the difference then?

 

Encumberance is a logistic penalty. If you are looting a POI (until you have not "unlocked" all your inventory slots) you have to decide what (loot) you carry with you and what you leave behind or if you want to keep as many as possible anyway deal with becoming very slow. And it's not just an issue with being slow and therefore zombies become more dangerous, it's also a issue of time. Carrying many stuff home from a looted POI takes much much longer and probably is a waste of time.

 

Imho there should be (many) more inventory slots. Even more as you can "unlock" even with pack mule 5 and perfect pocket mods fitted.

Imho the issue why it seems "boring" is because you can fit mods and/or skill packmule until you can use all slots without getting encumbered and once you reached that encumberance is gone totally. (And the "you can't be encumbered at night"-skill book becomes absolutely worthless.)

 

1 hour ago, ARRANOX said:

Im not saying its a big issue, im just curious if anyone likes how the encumbrance system works?

I like it, because it makes logistics valuable. However it becomes obsolete once you have all slots unlocked, so imho it could be improved anyway.

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I like it and wish it went further-- as in smaller backpacks with less slots to larger backpacks with more slots than we currently have. The whole point of it is to feel that sense of accomplishment once you have a vehicle and/or all slots cleared. I have played with mods that increase backpack size and/or clear all slots by spending one skill point in pack mule and those mods make the game feel much closer to creative mode to me.  Same with the early game struggle to manage stamina. It might be annoying and we might wish to be able to do everything we want wearing whatever we want for as long as we want-- but the early game restriction that slowly eases up as your character progresses gives that sense of growth and when you can finally swing that sledgehammer without pooping out after only three swings, it feels good. IMO, better than just being able to always use a sledgehammer all day long uninterrupted from Day 1. 

Edited by Roland (see edit history)
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36 minutes ago, Liesel Weppen said:

Um, no? You don't need high-end pocket mods, you can also skill pack mule.

It's a decision you have to take.

What i meant here is that the first experimental the encumbrance slots was locked, but due to feedback they changed it so you would be able to use the slots and added the debuff instead.  i think we only had 18 backpack slots and the rest had to be unlocked before we could use them.

40 minutes ago, Liesel Weppen said:

So what would be the difference then?

to that i will say that the difference would be that you can carry as much as your backpack would allow at anytime, but if in your loot run you get damaged like a sprained leg or a infection you will get sluggish and slower and you will get an encumbrance debuff, so if you want to get home alive maybe dump some of you junk to get home faster?

 

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5 minutes ago, ARRANOX said:

 i think we only had 18 backpack slots and the rest had to be unlocked before we could use them.

So further dumbing down the game, to prevent people that are unable to manage their inventory from being living dangerous?

No thanks.

 

Quote

to that i will say that the difference would be that you can carry as much as your backpack would allow at anytime, but if in your loot run you get damaged like a sprained leg or a infection you will get sluggish and slower and you will get an encumbrance debuff, so if you want to get home alive maybe dump some of you junk to get home faster?

That's how it currently works...

If you are encumbered, drop stuff. If you got a leg sprained additional, even more... So what's the problem?

Basically you are actually literally getting an encumberance debuff if you use more inventory slots then you have "unlocked" to this point.

Edited by Liesel Weppen (see edit history)
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1 minute ago, Liesel Weppen said:

So further dumbing down the game, to prevent people that are unable to manage their inventory from being living dangerous?

No thanks.

I was not a fan of that version either, but i liked the idea of being able to uppgrade your inventory.

3 minutes ago, Liesel Weppen said:

That's how it currently works...

yeah, but you get the encumbrance debuff even when your healthy now, and if you unlock packmule or get full on pocketmods it does not matter if you have broken your leg or not so carry all you want.  

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1 minute ago, ARRANOX said:

I was not a fan of that version either, but i liked the idea of being able to uppgrade your inventory.

That's what i suggested: Make inventory bigger. Even bigger than you can unlock with perfect equipment and skillpoints.

 

1 minute ago, ARRANOX said:

yeah, but you get the encumbrance debuff even when your healthy now, and if you unlock packmule or get full on pocketmods it does not matter if you have broken your leg or not so carry all you want.  

If you are encumbered, your are slower, even if you are healthy. Sound absolutely reasonable to me.

A broken leg gives an ADDITIONAL movement debuff. If you are encumbered AND have a broken leg, you are even slower (afaik?).

If you have unlocked your whole inventory you can't be encumbered anymore, a broken leg however makes you still slower. Both have nothing to do with each other.

 

The only potential thing i see there is, that encumberance AND broken leg could even potentiate each other. But that would make it even worse in a matter of balancing.

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3 minutes ago, Liesel Weppen said:

That's what i suggested: Make inventory bigger. Even bigger than you can unlock with perfect equipment and skillpoints.

 

If you are encumbered, your are slower, even if you are healthy. Sound absolutely reasonable to me.

A broken leg gives an ADDITIONAL movement debuff. If you are encumbered AND have a broken leg, you are even slower (afaik?).

If you have unlocked your whole inventory you can't be encumbered anymore, a broken leg however makes you still slower. Both have nothing to do with each other.

 

The only potential thing i see there is, that encumberance AND broken leg could even potentiate each other. But that would make it even worse in a matter of balancing.

I just think the encumbrance like it is now does not really add that much challenge and its too easy to overcome. and it brings down the value of a skill like packmule or the pocketmods. i get what you are saying i just feel that inventory managment has more potential than the game offers atm and its a very important part of this game.

My ideas and suggestions are not by any means perfect but thats why i would like to discuss this.

From what i can understand for your perspective is that you like how it works now, but you would also like to see it go further in the future.

so even if we don`t see "eye to eye" on some parts i can respect your opinion. 

1 hour ago, Roland said:

I like it and wish it went further-- as in smaller backpacks with less slots to larger backpacks with more slots than we currently have. The whole point of it is to feel that sense of accomplishment once you have a vehicle and/or all slots cleared. I have played with mods that increase backpack size and/or clear all slots by spending one skill point in pack mule and those mods make the game feel much closer to creative mode to me.  Same with the early game struggle to manage stamina. It might be annoying and we might wish to be able to do everything we want wearing whatever we want for as long as we want-- but the early game restriction that slowly eases up as your character progresses gives that sense of growth and when you can finally swing that sledgehammer without pooping out after only three swings, it feels good. IMO, better than just being able to always use a sledgehammer all day long uninterrupted from Day 1. 

 

I like your thinking, i have looked at the mods, but im not after just bigger inventory, just the feeling of progressing my character.

if i hated the encumbrance i would have just modded it away, but i think my problem is that it bothers me that it does not bother me that much to be encumbered.. if that made sense? :)

 

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I mean, it is kind of silly to complain about the system for going over the limit when you can have every slot filled with 6000 small rocks up to the point you become encumbered.

 

There are a lot of different elements to the game that this might be the best solution for it.

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Honestly, people complaining about this are exaggerating quite a lot. The encumbrance system is one of the most permissive i have ever seen. And you can feel real constraints when you're about 8-10 items in excess. You're not really having it hard at only 3.

 

I've played game with much more restrictive encumbrance than that. The one in STALKER : Shadow of Chernobyl was still too easy for me.

 

If that would be only me, i would have made it way more taxing on stamina and movement. Stacks of items would have a more significant impact. You would not be able to pick up any vehicles apart from the Bicycle and this one alone would already put encumbrance on you, even with an almost empty backpack.

 

A more severe encumbrance feature coulde open the door to backpack crafting of various quality and available slots. Id love to see that.

Edited by Kyonshi (see edit history)
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I think asking if people enjoy being encumbered is misleading.  People don't enjoy being hungry, bleeding out, running out of stamina, etc.  It's not the right question to judge a mechanic.  The first principle here is, the player's inventory is limited.  Given that, what's the best way to limit it?

 

I see encumbrance as a way to impose a soft limit instead of a hard limit on the inventory.  Remember, the inventory is considerably larger than it was before.  Back then it was a hard limit: carry up to x and then you hit a wall; you can't carry any more.  I like this soft limit better, where you have a period where you're of running out of space and paying more for it with every item, instead of boom, I have to deal with my inventory now.

 

I'm 100% in favor of Roland's idea of having multiple containers, backpacks or otherwise, of different sizes which you can find and/or craft.  Finding useful stuff like that is what makes looting worthwhile.  Another idea you might like, since you're after a greater sense of progression... just spitballing here... is if all backpack slots caused encumbrance, and instead of a Pack Mule perk, the encumbered slots and/or the amount of penalty per slot decreased slightly every time you level up.  This would parallel the change where your max health and stamina increase by one every time you level up.

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There are many different systems out there. Also for different reasons.

 

ARK: has a weight system, the player itself can carry almost nothing. The focus is that you require tamed dinosaurs for transportation. Also you can transfer items from one inventory to another directly. So you can move e.g. stone directly from the storage inventory to your dinosaurs inventory and also when crafting you can use items directly from a container. So the interface allows to compensate that. The player itself can also increase the weight he can carry, but even if you put all your skillpoints into that, it's still that low that the player still can't carry relevant amounts. Finally the players inventory is more or less only for equipment of the player.

 

Empyrion: Similar to ARK but it combines weight and volume. Volume because the space ships are built also by voxels, and if you want to carry high volume stuff, you require a ship with enough (storage) volume. While if you want to carry small but very heavy stuff, you can still use a small ship, but need enough thrust so your ship can still lift the weight (also depending on the gravitation of the planet *lol*). Also you can craft from containers and also move items directly between containers.

 

Now 7d2d is much simpler. It's just the amount of slots that is limited. First "soft" limit are the unencumbered slots and finally the "hard" limit ist the overall amount of slots in the inventory. Imho the hard limit can be removed, because encumbered slots already to the job. I usually don't skill pack mule anymore and i only use pocket mods until there are still 3-4 slots of encumberment left. Because "overloading" a few slots is not daramatic, but the mod slot used for the pocketmod would be gone for it.

Darkness Falls has a really huge inventory. I don't know if it is possible to make all slots non-encumbered, but i never used all slots there, because encumberment always made me unable to move, long before the inventory would have been full. So in practice, the inventory there has "unlimited" slots, but you can't use unlimited slots, because of encumberment.

 

But in the end, they all have the same goal: The player should think about how to do and organize logistics and also take decisions what to keep and what to drop.

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I suspect that 7DTD with a weight based system would be horrible.  If bicycles were a bit more accessible to start then it would make things a bit better (like not requiring a perk to make, just finding/building parts).  But I also like the idea of having an even smaller backpack to start and building bigger ones as you go.

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3 minutes ago, Maharin said:

But I also like the idea of having an even smaller backpack to start and building bigger ones as you go.

Nothing against this. Darkness Falls does this already. But it does not change inventory size. The bigger backpack just makes less slots encumbering. ;)

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17 minutes ago, Liesel Weppen said:

Nothing against this. Darkness Falls does this already. But it does not change inventory size. The bigger backpack just makes less slots encumbering. ;)

Which is exactly what the current perk in the game does.  Which would be fine if we had more inventory slots available (another row would be perfect, in my opinion).

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2 minutes ago, Maharin said:

Which would be fine if we had more inventory slots available (another row would be perfect, in my opinion).

What i'm talking about is, with encumbered slots, the inventory slots doesn't even need to be finite. Because encumberance will make you unable to move, once you have X items more in the inventory then you have unencumbered slots.

It's just an unnecessary hardcap and because of that hardcap i'm not even using the full potential of unencumberance, because it is pointless if you hit a hard wall only one slot later. :D

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16 minutes ago, Liesel Weppen said:

What i'm talking about is, with encumbered slots, the inventory slots doesn't even need to be finite. Because encumberance will make you unable to move, once you have X items more in the inventory then you have unencumbered slots.

It's just an unnecessary hardcap and because of that hardcap i'm not even using the full potential of unencumberance, because it is pointless if you hit a hard wall only one slot later. :D

Agreed, but programming an infinite inventory interface that is also efficient is harder than it sounds.  But even if the hard cap was 20 rows of inventory it would be more than enough to do what you are talking about.

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  • ARRANOX changed the title to How do you like the current encumbrance system?
6 minutes ago, Maharin said:

Agreed, but programming an infinite inventory interface that is also efficient is harder than it sounds.

I doubt and is already proven wrong, because mods like undead legacy have already added infinite inventory slots (and also added a weight system).

And i'm a software developer myself.

 

6 minutes ago, Maharin said:

  But even if the hard cap was 20 rows of inventory it would be more than enough to do what you are talking about.

Yep, that's enough in practice. Like Darkness Falls already does with the 96-slots (?) inventory.

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