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HOW MANY ITEMS DO YOU LIKE TO BE ABLE TO CARRY IN AN RPG?
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noajang
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noajang
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CloseFinishing up the items / inventory screen for my CMS at the moment, and it got me thinking about how many items the player should be able to carry with them. Feel like I'm kind of on the fence, and was looking for people's opinions on what they tend to prefer in games.
I've personally never been a huge fan of inventory micromanagement outside of survival horror, and found it kind of frustrating in games like Phantasy Star and Lunar to have to keep juggling items, especially with obligatory key items eating up the same inventory space. So I was leaning towards stacks of the same item up to a certain value. But I do kind of like the way that a smaller inventory allows you to make items more powerful and important without affecting game balance as much, and after implementing stacks of up to 99 of the same item like FF7, it just looked like way too much, especially for an RPG Maker game that is likely to be a lot shorter than the average commercially-released JRPG.
Right now I'm thinking about implementing some arbitrary lower cap (10? 20?) on item stacks like the Tales games, or potentially going with the limited inventory option, but making it a bit larger than usual and keeping key items separate. But was just curious what people tend to prefer when it comes to inventory space in RPGs.
I've personally never been a huge fan of inventory micromanagement outside of survival horror, and found it kind of frustrating in games like Phantasy Star and Lunar to have to keep juggling items, especially with obligatory key items eating up the same inventory space. So I was leaning towards stacks of the same item up to a certain value. But I do kind of like the way that a smaller inventory allows you to make items more powerful and important without affecting game balance as much, and after implementing stacks of up to 99 of the same item like FF7, it just looked like way too much, especially for an RPG Maker game that is likely to be a lot shorter than the average commercially-released JRPG.
Right now I'm thinking about implementing some arbitrary lower cap (10? 20?) on item stacks like the Tales games, or potentially going with the limited inventory option, but making it a bit larger than usual and keeping key items separate. But was just curious what people tend to prefer when it comes to inventory space in RPGs.
99 of each is my favorite.
But I do know that a restricted inventory is often better for gameplay and do occasionally limit inventory systems to 9 of each item.
But I do know that a restricted inventory is often better for gameplay and do occasionally limit inventory systems to 9 of each item.
noajang
0
Yeah, my first instinct was towards 99 in a stack as well, though I think it's probably just my Final Fantasy bias showing, and I find myself questioning the sense of it more and more. Feel like if you want to avoid breaking the game, you're kind of forced to either make items weak enough that they're not useful, or rare enough that the huge stacks aren't really merited.
I guess one thing it does have going for it is that it's rarely going to make the experience actively worse in the way that a badly handled restricted inventory can. I mean I can't recall ever getting mad at a game for having too much inventory space. But yeah, feel like it might be good to settle on some kind of happy medium.
I guess one thing it does have going for it is that it's rarely going to make the experience actively worse in the way that a badly handled restricted inventory can. I mean I can't recall ever getting mad at a game for having too much inventory space. But yeah, feel like it might be good to settle on some kind of happy medium.
For what I know/observed from using saved states generated by ZSNES, it's that the SNES FFs took up one byte of data for item quantities. So, their values could be as high as 255. However, my guess is that they just didn't like how three digits were displayed, and capped it at 99. This cap has become something of a series tradition, even if the hardware that came after the SNES could more easily handle larger data structures. Interestingly enough, the item/spell cap for FF8 was 100 (the only exception to the tradition that I'm aware of), and the data continued to be contained in one byte for even FF10.
However, the raw version of the "Have All Items" code for FF12...
...largely suggests that item quantities took up two bytes in that game (so, values up to 65536), despite only actually using one (ie: the cap was still 99).
*Edit: The mention of "item Tetris" makes me think of M&M6, 7, and 8. There were probably other games that did that, but, those were the ones I played back in the day.
*Edit2: RPG Maker is kinda weird about it's data structures. Like, a variable is generally defined as an instance of `Number` (whose children include `Integer` and `Float`), or `String` object, with no notation in the help file as to how much data they actually take up. Gold and experience values can generally be contained in three bytes (up to 16777215), but there's technically nothing stopping you from breaking four bytes (up to 4294967295) or greater if you remove the built-in cap for gold.
I'll note that experience in RPG Maker Games, both current EXP, and needed to level EXP up is printed as "------" (or something to this effect) at a character's max level. However, as far as I am aware, the actual value continues to increase, and is never capped.
However, the raw version of the "Have All Items" code for FF12...
Have all Items
4054E7A8 00400001
00630063 00000000
405539CC 00400001
00010000 00020002
205548B8 00000040
...largely suggests that item quantities took up two bytes in that game (so, values up to 65536), despite only actually using one (ie: the cap was still 99).
*Edit: The mention of "item Tetris" makes me think of M&M6, 7, and 8. There were probably other games that did that, but, those were the ones I played back in the day.
*Edit2: RPG Maker is kinda weird about it's data structures. Like, a variable is generally defined as an instance of `Number` (whose children include `Integer` and `Float`), or `String` object, with no notation in the help file as to how much data they actually take up. Gold and experience values can generally be contained in three bytes (up to 16777215), but there's technically nothing stopping you from breaking four bytes (up to 4294967295) or greater if you remove the built-in cap for gold.
I'll note that experience in RPG Maker Games, both current EXP, and needed to level EXP up is printed as "------" (or something to this effect) at a character's max level. However, as far as I am aware, the actual value continues to increase, and is never capped.
author=noajang
Finishing up the items / inventory screen for my CMS at the moment, and it got me thinking about how many items the player should be able to carry with them. Feel like I'm kind of on the fence, and was looking for people's opinions on what they tend to prefer in games.
I've personally never been a huge fan of inventory micromanagement outside of survival horror, and found it kind of frustrating in games like Phantasy Star and Lunar to have to keep juggling items, especially with obligatory key items eating up the same inventory space. So I was leaning towards stacks of the same item up to a certain value. But I do kind of like the way that a smaller inventory allows you to make items more powerful and important without affecting game balance as much, and after implementing stacks of up to 99 of the same item like FF7, it just looked like way too much, especially for an RPG Maker game that is likely to be a lot shorter than the average commercially-released JRPG.
Right now I'm thinking about implementing some arbitrary lower cap (10? 20?) on item stacks like the Tales games, or potentially going with the limited inventory option, but making it a bit larger than usual and keeping key items separate. But was just curious what people tend to prefer when it comes to inventory space in RPGs.
Like Piano said, restricted inventories can be fun but depends on the game.
I don't mind any size of inventory as long as it feels balanced. A restricted inventory can help discourage hoarding and can contribute to the difficulty. I'm partial to about 20 for healing items, and 5 for rare/powerful items.
The main reason for this is that I enjoy ripping off the Dark Cloud series which is one of the better item management systems I've played. The low max stacks mean I can collect every kind of item and strive to get a max stack for every item, but the low max limit ALSO means if I'm really in a pinch it doesn't feel bad to use the item, because I know it'll be easy enough to get back to maximum. Hoarding at max is silly because I start running into chests I can't collect from.
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
It depends on the game and what it wants to emphasize.
For me, personally, it's less about the amount of items you can carry and more about how useful those items are. You can have 99 item stack and can hold every item you can possible pick up, but if you don't use them, then they mostly just serve as fluff to provide players a comfortable backup instead of a crucial component of the gameplay. Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door and Legend of Dragoon are good examples of useful items with a limited inventory. You have limited inventories in both games, but attack items give you options that the party's skills just don't cover, like an AOE lightning attack or inflicting certain status ailments.
I did something like this in Prayer of the Faithless by limiting the item stack ceiling to 10 instead of 99. Despite the limited stack size, I encouraged players to use items more by:
1: Making them cost no Stamina to use (in PotF, every action costs Stamina, even basic attacks).
2: Preventing players from picking up items in the field if they have a full inventory so they can go back and get them if they need/want to later.
3: Making them relatively inexpensive to purchase from shops compared to other items.
4: Making attack item's damage scale based on the user's Attack stat so that items found in the beginning of the game are viable even at the end.
5: Having attack items bypass a crucial defense stat when used against an enemy.
For me, personally, it's less about the amount of items you can carry and more about how useful those items are. You can have 99 item stack and can hold every item you can possible pick up, but if you don't use them, then they mostly just serve as fluff to provide players a comfortable backup instead of a crucial component of the gameplay. Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door and Legend of Dragoon are good examples of useful items with a limited inventory. You have limited inventories in both games, but attack items give you options that the party's skills just don't cover, like an AOE lightning attack or inflicting certain status ailments.
I did something like this in Prayer of the Faithless by limiting the item stack ceiling to 10 instead of 99. Despite the limited stack size, I encouraged players to use items more by:
1: Making them cost no Stamina to use (in PotF, every action costs Stamina, even basic attacks).
2: Preventing players from picking up items in the field if they have a full inventory so they can go back and get them if they need/want to later.
3: Making them relatively inexpensive to purchase from shops compared to other items.
4: Making attack item's damage scale based on the user's Attack stat so that items found in the beginning of the game are viable even at the end.
5: Having attack items bypass a crucial defense stat when used against an enemy.
Darken
3952
Most players just hate opening a chest and not having room for it, so it offends a pack rat mentality since a lot of RPGs out of combat loops revolve around scanning the environment for goodies you don't actually need. Auto sending to storage and by proxy limiting what you can use in combat I think is the general solution.
Players not actually using the items is seperate problem even with unlimited inventory. Why are the items in the game if players just stockpile potions like its nothing? Feel like it's worth finding a use for them that skills just absolutely don't provide. If you have a healer that spends MP to heal and Inn's cost nothing, then depending on how its balanced most players tend to abuse it, an item is gone forever, MP is not. Drastic measures could call for getting rid of healing potions and make MP items more plentiful. The player's likely going to use them because it lets them spam skills when far away from heal spots. I do think players will heal status effects using items without hesitation, for some reason.
The RM Kinetic Cipher is known for flat out killing you if you don't stock up on status effect items. Which has an injoke in the community. But it does highlight another thing: Why have an item shop if nothing it provides is actually useful? Sure it sucks if you don't realize how important an item is after leaving the store but you can just have NPCs tell you that monsters roaming nearby tend to require these items. Status remedies are interesting because they act as soft keys, they're not essential to preventing outright death or running out of damage output, but they prevent annoyances, like bug spray or sunscreen on a hiking trip. Taking these ideas I'm throwing out there, you are emphasizing a particular game that might be different from say just chill RPG where you don't have to think much except in boss battles. If your games themes and vibes don't match a hiking trip, then you probably don't wanna emphasize that.
To really add another layer to it though, it's worth making the reliance on items equal to the risk. "Do I really want to use my item here? or should I use it later" which... 9 times out of 10 leads the pack rat player going "I'll use it later" The trick is really equalizing it so that it skews in favor of using it, but the player has some doubt to make items as a mechanic justfy its existance. There's some uncertainty that the answers available to you aren't obvious and changes every fight. This is way easier to accomplish in roguelikes and survival themed games where not using a precious item just means death. Chances are items are really just gonna exist as a way to reward the player outside of battles and actually using them won't take much thought. That's just part of the expectation of the genre though. It really depends on where you want to go: are you testing preperation? descision making? or just scavenger hunting?
Players not actually using the items is seperate problem even with unlimited inventory. Why are the items in the game if players just stockpile potions like its nothing? Feel like it's worth finding a use for them that skills just absolutely don't provide. If you have a healer that spends MP to heal and Inn's cost nothing, then depending on how its balanced most players tend to abuse it, an item is gone forever, MP is not. Drastic measures could call for getting rid of healing potions and make MP items more plentiful. The player's likely going to use them because it lets them spam skills when far away from heal spots. I do think players will heal status effects using items without hesitation, for some reason.
The RM Kinetic Cipher is known for flat out killing you if you don't stock up on status effect items. Which has an injoke in the community. But it does highlight another thing: Why have an item shop if nothing it provides is actually useful? Sure it sucks if you don't realize how important an item is after leaving the store but you can just have NPCs tell you that monsters roaming nearby tend to require these items. Status remedies are interesting because they act as soft keys, they're not essential to preventing outright death or running out of damage output, but they prevent annoyances, like bug spray or sunscreen on a hiking trip. Taking these ideas I'm throwing out there, you are emphasizing a particular game that might be different from say just chill RPG where you don't have to think much except in boss battles. If your games themes and vibes don't match a hiking trip, then you probably don't wanna emphasize that.
To really add another layer to it though, it's worth making the reliance on items equal to the risk. "Do I really want to use my item here? or should I use it later" which... 9 times out of 10 leads the pack rat player going "I'll use it later" The trick is really equalizing it so that it skews in favor of using it, but the player has some doubt to make items as a mechanic justfy its existance. There's some uncertainty that the answers available to you aren't obvious and changes every fight. This is way easier to accomplish in roguelikes and survival themed games where not using a precious item just means death. Chances are items are really just gonna exist as a way to reward the player outside of battles and actually using them won't take much thought. That's just part of the expectation of the genre though. It really depends on where you want to go: are you testing preperation? descision making? or just scavenger hunting?
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
If your game is designed around dungeons being tests of endurance for the players to get through without running out of resources, then giving them nearly-unlimited resources ruins your game. Games like Secret of Mana, Kingdom Hearts, and Dragon Age 2/3 handle items like this and do a good job, letting players carry a small handful of healing items which are pretty carefully measured to match the length of the dungeons. A lot of these games also let players increase their inventory capacity slightly as the game goes on, matching the increased length and difficulty of the dungeons.
If your game isn't designed around testing the player's resource management as they go through an area, then why do you have a giant inventory of healing items at all instead of just automatically healing the player after each fight? Just give them a few emergency supplies, which they can use when they're on the verge of death in a boss fight.
Attack items that basically function as ammunition are different. If every time the player attacks, the attack expends an arrow or a grenade or a dose of poison or whatever, then the game should let players carry however many of those items causes the player to feel getting lost or grinding or using a bad strategy will cause them to run out of resources. Let them carry just barely enough to beat the dungeon if they ration their resources carefully.
MP recovery items can, annoyingly, fall into both categories if MP is used for both healing spells and attack spells. I usually feel like offensive spellcasters should have a secondary way to recover MP in these kinds of games, so that MP recovery items can be limited in a way that's calibrated to the healers.
If your game isn't designed around testing the player's resource management as they go through an area, then why do you have a giant inventory of healing items at all instead of just automatically healing the player after each fight? Just give them a few emergency supplies, which they can use when they're on the verge of death in a boss fight.
Attack items that basically function as ammunition are different. If every time the player attacks, the attack expends an arrow or a grenade or a dose of poison or whatever, then the game should let players carry however many of those items causes the player to feel getting lost or grinding or using a bad strategy will cause them to run out of resources. Let them carry just barely enough to beat the dungeon if they ration their resources carefully.
MP recovery items can, annoyingly, fall into both categories if MP is used for both healing spells and attack spells. I usually feel like offensive spellcasters should have a secondary way to recover MP in these kinds of games, so that MP recovery items can be limited in a way that's calibrated to the healers.
I find 20/30 as a cap for restoratives/battle items to be enough to require the player to think about when to use them without being so limited that a player never uses them. The Tales series was pretty good about it, and it meant early-game items like Apple Gels that only restore 30% HP were still good later on because not only did they operate on a percentage and therefore scaled with your Max HP, but you would keep collecting/buying them because it meant you wouldn't need to use your Lemon Gels for minor heals that were under the Lemon's 60% recovery rate.
Allowing too many of an item means still having dozens of potions when you find super potions, and still having dozens of those when you find hyper potions in Pokemon. The gap between finding super potions and finding hyper potions was so small that I believe that was part of why they nerfed them in more recent games.
Then there are games like Etrian Odyssey and other dungeon crawlers where you have a bag with 30/50/100 slots and every item, no matter what it does even if it's just a monster drop, takes up one slot.
For games with crafting, the limit on materials should be 99/999/9999.
Allowing too many of an item means still having dozens of potions when you find super potions, and still having dozens of those when you find hyper potions in Pokemon. The gap between finding super potions and finding hyper potions was so small that I believe that was part of why they nerfed them in more recent games.
Then there are games like Etrian Odyssey and other dungeon crawlers where you have a bag with 30/50/100 slots and every item, no matter what it does even if it's just a monster drop, takes up one slot.
For games with crafting, the limit on materials should be 99/999/9999.
When I first started playing Minecraft I hated that it was always stacks of 8 up to 64. Now I really like it. It's very identifiably Minecraft and it works out just fine for the game. They could have gone 99 each, but they went with something that was a bit more 'fun' and honestly, now I just calculate stacks and shit so easily. My 8 Times Tables are better than ever! :DDD
Personally, I usually prefer 99 though it always feels special when you get a game that breaks that cap. IDK, something about collecting a bunch of things and then realising "holy shit, 102?! how much more can we go?" is really fun.
That said, it really depends on the balance of the game. Something where you really only need a small amount of items used at a time can be good, but it does feel more rewarding to max out a bigger number than it does to do so to a smaller one.
9 vs 99? I'll pick 99 every time. XD
Personally, I usually prefer 99 though it always feels special when you get a game that breaks that cap. IDK, something about collecting a bunch of things and then realising "holy shit, 102?! how much more can we go?" is really fun.
That said, it really depends on the balance of the game. Something where you really only need a small amount of items used at a time can be good, but it does feel more rewarding to max out a bigger number than it does to do so to a smaller one.
9 vs 99? I'll pick 99 every time. XD
Crystalgate
694
I do not like to be able to carry 99 of each item. If I can, the items could usually have been replaced by a quality of life mechanic.
99 of a status cure item is only useful if it's annoying. For example, the game make the status effect persist after battles and you need to open the menu to pop one of your 50+ status sure items. This could have been handled by removing status effects after battles instead.
If I can carry 99 potions, I can heal whenever I want. Why not just restore all my hit-points after every battle? The same goes for mana and 99 ethers.
This does not apply to crafting materials though.
99 of a status cure item is only useful if it's annoying. For example, the game make the status effect persist after battles and you need to open the menu to pop one of your 50+ status sure items. This could have been handled by removing status effects after battles instead.
If I can carry 99 potions, I can heal whenever I want. Why not just restore all my hit-points after every battle? The same goes for mana and 99 ethers.
This does not apply to crafting materials though.
I strongly prefer infinite item space over having limited slots. It's a good reason why the earlier Pokemon games have aged so poorly. Limited inventory space sucks unless it's specificly built into the game design. This is mainly done well in survival games like Minecraft or Terraria where inventory management is an important aspect of gameplay. Fire Emblem does this well as well with each character having individual 5 slot inventories that can hold weapons and items alike and then a "convoy" for your greater inventory, which has been a thing since even the first Fire Emblem minus FE4 in which unique inventories and gold counts was a major part of the gameplay and story. As for how much items should stack, I personally think that most items should stack to 999 while weapons and armor should probably stack at just 99 if you don't use unique equipment. That way you never have to run out and restock. This is especially useful in item-heavy RPGs like Octopath where items are essential for optimal play during the endgame.
Either all of them with no limit, or extremely few of them, so that I need to really think what to take with me. Skyrim for example, doesn't do either great, but that's just me.
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