Incline What can be done about excessive loot?

[kangaxx]

It's a while since I played Underrail but from memory that had a system that at least made me think (i.e. remember which vendors wanted which items, and how close they were). So I didn't just pick everything up and lug it around like a moron. Crafting also has a point.

Compare it to DOS2 where you end up carrying everything around, including paintings the size of a wall, and spending 2 hours selling it in the town square with a Scottish dyke asking Bree if she's keeping it together on repeat. Problem is that the scaling loot system is so bad in that game that you're incentivised to play loot gypsy. Crafting is pointless etc.

 

[Inhabitants of Khorinis]

First Witcher did this pretty well. You get new weapon and armor rougly each chapter, and most money is spend on knowledge (books, recipes etc). General loot you find from killing enemies are mainly ingredients. I don't think I ever found myself with a full invetory, trying to decide what loot should I leave behind.

It's also great because it supports the setting. Sure, gear is important, but witcher's main weapon are potions, his knowledge of monsters, and a fighting style designed to combat said mosters, not a new shiny sword or heavier armor. Sword is a sword and armor is armor (more or less).

 

[Trithne]

I didn't play their Pathfinder games, so I dunno if this is the case there, but in Rogue Trader the loot is farcical. Every encounter has at least a dozen enemies, and you get the weapons and armour from all of them, and it's almost all useless, but if you leave any, when you exit the area it asks you "are you sure you want to leave all this awesome loot?", like it matters.

There is a "loot it all and dump it in your ship's cargo hold" button, but now it just clutters up my ship and I have no idea what to do with it, and if I want to find something in it, that's a multi minute ordeal.

 

[kangaxx]

I didn't play their Pathfinder games, so I dunno if this is the case there, but in Rogue Trader the loot is farcical. Every encounter has at least a dozen enemies, and you get the weapons and armour from all of them, and it's almost all useless, but if you any, when you exit the area it asks you "are you sure you want to leave all this awesome loot?", like it matters.

There is a "loot it all and dump it in your ship's cargo hold" button, but now it just clutters up my ship and I have no idea what to do with it, and if I want to find something in it, that's a multi minute ordeal.

I can confirm that the amount of loot in KM and WOTR is retarded. Even if you cut out non-magic weapons and items you get an avalanche of loot, much of it high level.

That said, I've heard it's a Pathfinder thing in general so it may not just be Owlcat.

 

[Peachcurl]

"More than you can carry" is nearly every RPG out there. That's hardly what anyone means by excessive loot, unless you're being fussy with semantics.

I am sorry Peachcurl, maybe i am misrepresenting your point. I am probably biased from the codex discussion of inventory restriction where i found out that many codex peasants what a vacuum cleaner attached to a bag of holding instead of any inventory restriction.

I kinda do want that. But only IFF loot is excessive to the extreme in the first place, as is the case in, say, modern Diablo-inspired games or some Bethesda games. The vacuum-cleaner-bag-of-holding is a tolerable band aid for a broken system.

I'd rather go for a loot model that has little, but relevant loot. Hand placed/designed if possible (but I'm fine with a well thought out randomized system).

Not necessarily without heavy inventory restrictions either. Making decisions is fine. For instance, in Sword of the Stars: The Pit you have to make choices what to take. Often. I'm fine with that. Every item counts in terms of survival, having actual value, beyond just throwing it at a vendor. Survival is the core theme of the gameplay, so that works for me.

 

[Norfleet]

I can confirm that the amount of loot in KM and WOTR is retarded. Even if you cut out non-magic weapons and items you get an avalanche of loot, much of it high level.

It's the natural consequence of fighting tool-using enemies. Humans use weapons like yours. Therefore, when you kill them, you should, naturally, get their weapons. Games where you kill a dude that has a fancy gun and for some strange reason there's nothing on him, annoy everyone.

I'd rather go for a loot model that has little, but relevant loot. Hand placed/designed if possible (but I'm fine with a well thought out randomized system).

Yes, but then you still have the issue of "enemies". Even if there's absolutely nothing of worth found in random chests and barrels, the fact remains: If you kill an enemy, he had weapons he was using to menace you with. You rightly should get those weapons. Wargear's good loot in and of itself! The only way around that is for the bulk of enemies to not be humanoids, like in the aforementioned "Alien Shooter", where you kill aliens, but obviously, aliens don't have any gear so there's no reason to expect any loot on them.

 

[Norfleet]

und, including paintings the size of a wall, and spending 2 hours selling it in the town square with a Scottish dyke asking Bree if she's keeping it together on repeat. Problem is that the scaling loot system is so bad in that game that you're incentivised to play loot gypsy. Crafting is pointless etc.

Isn't DOS2 the game where you play as a moving black hole, accumulating everything that has mass to create a singularity of destruction by simply rolling over everything with said mass?

 

[mediocrepoet]

und, including paintings the size of a wall, and spending 2 hours selling it in the town square with a Scottish dyke asking Bree if she's keeping it together on repeat. Problem is that the scaling loot system is so bad in that game that you're incentivised to play loot gypsy. Crafting is pointless etc.

Isn't DOS2 the game where you play as a moving black hole, accumulating everything that has mass to create a singularity of destruction by simply rolling over everything with said mass?

DOS2 guy as Katamari Damacy?

 

[Norfleet]

DOS2 guy as Katamari Damacy?

Is that where it is folded 1000 times and can cut through through tanks like butter?

 

[gaussgunner]

I just finished reading The Recollections of Rifleman Harris today, a memoir by a British soldier in Portugal & Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. They (try to) loot very often as you might expect, are constantly surrounded by corpses, but still never have anything good in their inventory.
[.....]

Good post, food for thought even if not directly applicable to RPGs where you're more like professional soldier(s) of fortune paid big money to mass-slaughter ragtag enemies or monsters. It's not unrealistic for five white guys to rout a small army of Africans, it's been done many times. Even in underdog RPG scenarios you quickly rise to professional level so you shouldn't need to loot corpses for a living throughout the whole game.

Regarding more "solutions":
- Unlimited inventory leads to annoying gameplay
- Limited merchant cash is annoying; too realistic
- Weapon/armor degradation is annoying busywork
- Fixed inventory slots fail to account for small vs large items
- Not bad with keyrings and small item stacking
- Inventory tetris is annoying and computer can automate it; pointless system bloat
- Weight limits aren't bad
- Encumbrance is annoying
- Weapon/armor combat-only encumbrance is nice but doesn't prevent loot hoarding
- Spiderweb's unlimited "junk bag" (no item withdrawl in combat) isn't bad
- Payment per kill is an abstraction of that, but still rewards pointless killing, but so does XP
- Payment for quest completion (like Witcher notice board quests) is fine
- Quests only (no grinding opportunities) is annoying

My preference is fixed inventory slots or fixed weight limits, ability to loot all items you can potentially use yourself, small semirandom per-kill payments, larger quest payments, no loot selling, but full refunds for items you just bought.

 

[mediocrepoet]

DOS2 guy as Katamari Damacy?

Is that where it is folded 1000 times and can cut through through tanks like butter?

It's where you roll through a bunch of shit and glom together. You closet weeb.

 

[Victor1234]

I just finished reading The Recollections of Rifleman Harris today, a memoir by a British soldier in Portugal & Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. They (try to) loot very often as you might expect, are constantly surrounded by corpses, but still never have anything good in their inventory.
[.....]

Good post, food for thought even if not directly applicable to RPGs where you're more like professional soldier(s) of fortune paid big money to mass-slaughter ragtag enemies or monsters. It's not unrealistic for five white guys to rout a small army of Africans, it's been done many times. Even in underdog RPG scenarios you quickly rise to professional level so you shouldn't need to loot corpses for a living throughout the whole game.

Regarding more "solutions":
- Unlimited inventory leads to annoying gameplay
- Limited merchant cash is annoying; too realistic
- Weapon/armor degradation is annoying busywork
- Fixed inventory slots fail to account for small vs large items
- Not bad with keyrings and small item stacking
- Inventory tetris is annoying and computer can automate it; pointless system bloat
- Weight limits aren't bad
- Encumbrance is annoying
- Weapon/armor combat-only encumbrance is nice but doesn't prevent loot hoarding
- Spiderweb's unlimited "junk bag" (no item withdrawl in combat) isn't bad
- Payment per kill is an abstraction of that, but still rewards pointless killing, but so does XP
- Payment for quest completion (like Witcher notice board quests) is fine
- Quests only (no grinding opportunities) is annoying

My preference is fixed inventory slots or fixed weight limits, ability to loot all items you can potentially use yourself, small semirandom per-kill payments, larger quest payments, no loot selling, but full refunds for items you just bought.

I've played a lot of games with inventory systems & loot but some of those concepts from the book have never come up. I think aside from Unreal World (and even there it's more about sacrificing some loot to the spirits than not taking it in the first place) nobody has ever made me worried about items being cursed or making me cursed if I take them before. Usually in popular culture that stuff boils down to an Indiana Jones style trap trigger than an actual curse anyways.

My favorite 'solution that recognizes the problem will always exist' comes from a Mount & Blade Warband mod. Set up a companion to be the wagonmaster and literally have an almost-unlimited inventory wagon follow your party around. You take whatever loot you want into your own inventory, leftovers go into the wagon automatically and then when you click a button, it automatically goes to the nearest town to convert everything to cash without your involvement.

That same mod (Brytenwalda, the dudes went on to make the Viking Conquest DLC) also had an interesting loot division mechanism. All loot auto-collected at the end of the battle but you get a choice about how to divide it. If you're greedy and keep too much for yourself, your minions hate you, if you give most to them, you obviously get only a little loot for yourself.

 

[Dadd]

DOS2 guy as Katamari Damacy?

Is that where it is folded 1000 times and can cut through through tanks like butter?

It's where you roll through a bunch of shit and glom together. You closet weeb.

The only true roll-playing game series

 

[Norfleet]

It's not unrealistic for five white guys to rout a small army of Africans, it's been done many times.

That's the thing, isn't it? They rout. They don't line up and file directly into the alien death cannons in an attempt to clog them with wreckage. You don't, realistically, get to chase them all down and mug them for their loot since they scatter in all directions and chasing them would likely lead you into an ambush (and most of them don't have any good loot anyway, and that's a big part of why they're losing).

Even in underdog RPG scenarios you quickly rise to professional level so you shouldn't need to loot corpses for a living throughout the whole game.

It's not about NEED. It's about being THOROUGH.

 

[almondblight]

Once again we come to the issue that RPGs attract people coming from fundamentally different camps. We have people who come from the tactical side - there should be fewer, more difficult fights, and they should be unique. Then we have people coming from the slot-machine side - variable time reward players who want to repetitively do the same thing for hours and see numbers go up. Go look at a playthrough of a blobber on Youtube, and listen to someone mindlessly tap tap tapping through trash mobs. Or see the complaints that the problem with PoE 1 wasn't that there were so many trash mobs, but they didn't reward you with (enough) experience.

The latter group (which is probably the majority of people here, if we're being honest) are responsible for a lot of garbage that makes games tedious for other players. But for them it's exciting, a little tiny reward after you mindlessly off every trash mob, and they get lots of "stuff," even though almost all of it is unnecessary garbage.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Players don't feel bad about leaving their illici- hard earned loot behind if they still profit in some way. Just let the player dismantle it for resources. Crafting materials if the game has crafting, consumables if not (ammo, repair kits, sharpening tools, etc)

 

[Old Hans]

If you kill an enemy, he had weapons he was using to menace you with. You rightly should get those weapons. Wargear's good loot in and of itself!

Just like in Fellowship of the Ring, when Gandalf and the gang spend an entire chapter collecting orc shields to sell to the vendor.

 

[agris]

Once again we come to the issue that RPGs attract people coming from fundamentally different camps. We have people who come from the tactical side - there should be fewer, more difficult fights, and they should be unique. Then we have people coming from the slot-machine side - variable time reward players who want to repetitively do the same thing for hours and see numbers go up. Go look at a playthrough of a blobber on Youtube, and listen to someone mindlessly tap tap tapping through trash mobs. Or see the complaints that the problem with PoE 1 wasn't that there were so many trash mobs, but they didn't reward you with (enough) experience.

The latter group (which is probably the majority of people here, if we're being honest) are responsible for a lot of garbage that makes games tedious for other players. But for them it's exciting, a little tiny reward after you mindlessly off every trash mob, and they get lots of "stuff," even though almost all of it is unnecessary garbage.

get outta my head

 

[CHEMS]

LOOT IS LOVE
LOOT IS LIVE

I enjoy collecting every kind of object that can be found in the game and autistically storing them in player homes by category

If i can't loot in a game i won't even play it

 

[Dadd]

If you kill an enemy, he had weapons he was using to menace you with. You rightly should get those weapons. Wargear's good loot in and of itself!

Just like in Fellowship of the Ring, when Gandalf and the gang spend an entire chapter collecting orc shields to sell to the vendor.

We need time limits in RPGs. Not only that, but the enemies advance their goals concurrently with you. I've always found it dumb that the evil lord twiddles his thumb while the hero has infinite time to gear up and kill him.

 

[Old Hans]

If you kill an enemy, he had weapons he was using to menace you with. You rightly should get those weapons. Wargear's good loot in and of itself!

Just like in Fellowship of the Ring, when Gandalf and the gang spend an entire chapter collecting orc shields to sell to the vendor.

We need time limits in RPGs. Not only that, but the enemies advance their goals concurrently with you. I've always found it dumb that the evil lord twiddles his thumb while the hero has infinite time to gear up and kill him.

you could set a time limit of 10,000 years and players would still complain. They'd be all

"I've had multiple anxiety attacks playing this game, because of the time limit. All I wanna do is relax and spend 10k years collecting and selling orc shields to the vendor, but the developers are rushing me with this nazi time limit"

then the story would get picked up by Polygon with a headline that reads "this new RPG game has a time limit and its driving players insane. Its being compared to Nazi Germany"

 

[Butter]

you could set a time limit of 10,000 years and players would still complain. They'd be all

"I've had multiple anxiety attacks playing this game, because of the time limit. All I wanna do is relax and spend 10k years collecting and selling orc shields to the vendor, but the developers are rushing me with this nazi time limit"

then the story would get picked up by Polygon with a headline that reads "this new RPG game has a time limit and its driving players insane. Its being compared to Nazi Germany"

Being mildly controversial gets you free publicity courtesy of 90IQ Kotaku writers.

 

[Pyrite Pachyderm]

I crashed my PS3 when FONV came out and I stuffed too much junk into a container in the hotel. You can pry trash loot from my cold dead hands (to hoard it yourself).

 

[Norfleet]

We need time limits in RPGs. Not only that, but the enemies advance their goals concurrently with you. I've always found it dumb that the evil lord twiddles his thumb while the hero has infinite time to gear up and kill him.

Time limits would help with the issue, but likely be unpopular in their own right. Enemy progression, on the other hand, might accomplish this same result while being cool, especially if the effects of this are directly visible and can be combatted by the player. Games like JA2 and Space Rangers had the world progress if the player simply did nothing, with potentially negative results for the player.

 

[mondblut]

This remind me of robbery in Jagged Alliance 2. You can hit a target 3 unarmed strike and he fall down to ground. Use Ctrl Click on the body to rob their weapons, which should cost 20AP (in 25 AP system). After successfully rob him, kill him will yield only armors and or miscelanous, no weapon.

1.13 with "drop everything" was truly a blessing from the Lord.