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.
The downside is with a realistic encumbrance system, you’d either:
A) Not be picking anything up, or:
B) Making so many milk runs your head will spin from the tedium of ferrying useless bullshit back and forth.
Being 70-80 hours into STARFIELD, there’s non-cheating ways to avoid the encumbrance penalty, such as the “Powered Assist” backpacks which lowers O2 / stamina consumption by 75% when overencumbered. You can also deposit your loot into your ship’s cargo bay and sell directly from it by pressing Q at any vendor.
In ITR/Into The Radius VR, a fully realistic military looter shooter survival horror like STALKER; I picked up and carried EVERYTHING, but through the use of an inane amount of utility items, such as a chest harness, backpack, lower back bags, leg bags, thigh bags, and so on. (My favorite thing to put in my belt bags was cake slices and energy drink cans, made for hilarious streaming content when you take a bite of cake in a dire situation)
I still spent like 20 real-life hours slogging knee deep through swamp to ferry back an entire inventory of artifacts worth 5K/ea.
So my takeaway is, people are gonna loot and hoard; if they do that, encourage it. If not, reward the player with more credits from missions and other things that don’t involve scraping and strip-mining every planet for every ounce of metal.