On the early platforms, memory was at a premium for both in-play and save data. Why ever use a healing spell if you can carry 99 of each of three types of healing potions and two types of party-healing ones?

To make sure the player cannot rely on items for things that can be done by other means.

To encourage players to actually use items, rather than hoarding them forever for whenever they might come in handy.

Even if a person in the situation would find a place for that green herb if it meant the difference between life and death.

To achieve greater realism, even if it damages the gameplay and/or annoys players.To punish players by making them backtrack through a substantial portion of the game if the player made a poor choice to leave a Plot Coupon behind to carry more guns and ammo.It forces the player to manage inventory as a resource, just as they have to manage HP, MP, and so forth. As an attempt to impose difficulty and complexity on a player.The classic Inventory Management Puzzle is the brain-teaser in which you must transport a fox, a hen, and some grain across a bridge that will only bear the weight of one item at a time. There are many reasons the game designer may have for imposing this inventory limit, such as: To make matters worse, if a notion of item size exists at all, it's sometimes very coarsely defined: either you can carry eight items, whether the items are paper clips or pianos, or you can carry eight 'units' of equipment, but one unit is 'anything smaller than a breadbox,' and two units is 'A BFG.'

A common abstraction is to define inventory in terms of weight, with (nearly) arbitrary weights assigned to each item. So, you can carry around only a handful of items. At the simplest level, this is managed by simply limiting the number of items. Limit what the player can carry, so that he isn't hauling around objects that will make the designer's life hard in the future.Īnd then, there are the games which limit your inventory because the game designers want to make inventory management a part of the game, to force players to manage another resource.

Also, there's the matter of the Combinatorial Explosion. For one thing, like everything else, there's only a finite amount of memory to track inventory, and only a finite amount of screen space to show it, in accordance with the game's particular idiom. There are lots and lots of practical reasons that a game might want to place some bounds on your carrying capacity. How many things can you carry on your person? If your life depended on it, do you think you could manage just one more?

Darkest dungeon inventory sort mod