Best RPG Inventory system

[DarkSign]

OK ok so the word "best" is subjective, but what do you guys like when it comes to an inventory system?

Do you like a UO system where you can "hide" things...
Quest items automatically separated out via tabs etc.

I'm working on a system that uses realistic locations with each location only taking certain types of containers (e.g. chest only holding a bandoleer)
...with quest items having no weight and separated by a tab

What rpg (sp and mmo) inventory systems should be emulated and avoided?

[Margalis]

For the most part I hate inventory Tetris, though it worked well in RE4. That's probably because the stuff you picked up (grenades, ammo, etc) was small and the big stuff (guns, stocks) was pretty permanent. It would have been awful if the game involved picking up lots of large objects. Diablo has that problem, you get a lot of largish items and each time you grab something it becomes a goofy optimization problem.

I'm actually kind of proud of myself for coming up with that explanation for why it worked fine in RE4, I'd never really thought about it before but it makes a lot of sense.

My concern with realistic locations is what happens if I have a sword and I pick up another one? (Or shield, or helmet, or whatever) There isn't really a realistic location for a second sword, helmet and shield anywhere, other than in a big bag.

[schild]

It worked in RE4 because you could rotate.

The Atelier Iris series from Gust has the best inventory/crafting system though.

Tabbed lists. And auto-grabbing specific items from your inventory for crafting.

[nurtsi]

Agree on the the Diablo / Mythos shit. Also stuff like having only few slots in the beginning and then you need to spend time on improving your inventory to the get more space is retarded. Inventory should stay in the background as much as possible. It's not the reason you play a game so make sure it doesn't get in the way.

Other thing that always bugs me is the fact that all containers are bags of holding. Try carrying a spare breastplate for example. See how easy that is. Of course there's the realism != fun argument, but still. It kills the suspension of disbelief (like swimming in plate armor). Yes, this is in conflict with the thing I just said in the previous paragraph 

For the good stuff, a certain upcoming MMO has quest items, resources for crafting and normal items all separated into different tabs. Filters are also good. If you're filling a slot that takes only item type A, then don't bother showing anything but type A items to the user as an option. But lot of this stuff depends on how your UI is done.

LOTRO has a good paper-doll system where you separate appearance from the actual items and you can hide stuff like gloves, shoes, cape, hat, etc. That's something everybody should do. Pimping the looks of your toon is very important to a lot of players. LOTRO has pretty decent system all in all. All slots available at start. All items take one slot regardless if it's armour or an apple. Most of the time you don't need to think about it.

[DarkSign]

Interesting feedback. I'll have to look into LOTRO's system more.

My system will have the following locations:

Back
Chest
Waist
Shoulders
Pockets - waist, arm, leg
Hidden

and will have certain categories of container:

1. Packs - small, medium, large: only worn in back location  (configurations of 2 small packs, 1 small and 1 medium, and 1 large only allowed)
2. Bandoliers - small, medium, large (corresponding to ammo type): worn over chest
3. slung weapons - worn on shoulders
4. holster - single, double: worn on waist
5. ammo belt - small, medium large (corresponding to ammo type): worn on waist

Quest items will have little to no weight. Weight will affect movement speed.

Think modern/post-apoc.  Am I missing anything?

[Margalis]

Where do I put shit like extra guns besides the ones I'm currently using? In my backpack?

[Comstar]

I hate LOTR's system for one reason- I can't eaisly tell what is what. Also the background colours of items seem random. I need to be able to see at a glance how much vendor trash I have, how much quest items etc.

Also if you're basing it on weight, please make it grapicaly obvious how heavy things are. In games that follow the weight of items I need to be able to see at a glance how heavy everything is, or allow it to sort by weight.

For that matter, allow me to sort by lots of different things - alphabetical, weight, class (trash, weapon, food, ammo, quest items etc).

[DarkSign]

Where do I put shit like extra guns besides the ones I'm currently using? In my backpack?

Guns you're not using are either slung weapons (held on shoulder straps) or in holsters or in a backpack. Are there other realistic options?

[nurtsi]

I hate LOTR's system for one reason- I can't easily tell what is what. Also the background colours of items seem random. I need to be able to see at a glance how much vendor trash I have, how much quest items etc.

The background of the items tells the type of the items. I can't remember them all by heart by I think it went something like:

Red:               thrash
Grey:              normal stuff (no stats)
Dark green:    quest items
Light green:   crafting items
Blue:              consumables
Yellow:           rare drops
Purple:           good stuff

Some items fall into many categories, like to craft armour X you need armour Y as ingredient (so Y could be grey or light green). I don't know how they pick the color in those cases. The icons are small though, I can't usually tell what is what before I hover my cursor over the item and look at the tooltip.

[Comstar]

I think it's because a lot of the vendor trash is mislabelled the wrong colour.

That and SELLING items has no way I can see to sort either.

[Yegolev]

Where do I put shit like extra guns besides the ones I'm currently using? In my backpack?

Guns you're not using are either slung weapons (held on shoulder straps) or in holsters or in a backpack. Are there other realistic options?

Trunk of your car?

Sometimes I like the grid systems when inventory management is part of the game.  Ideally, though, I'm very happy with sortable and filterable lists.  Tabs get the job done if they are well-designed but there are inherent limtations to predefined categories.  Oblivion comes to mind, where I could see a weapon tab and an armor tab, but I would have loved another tab or filter so I could see just bows or shoes.  Also that miscellaneous tab was a nightmare, mostly because the things I wanted most often were at the bottom.  A dropdown of the sort used in the better MMO UI would be what I wanted, plus a search box.

[Koyasha]

I'm gonna say that the Baggins mod for WoW is an example of very well done inventory organization.  It comes preset to sort your items by type into various categories, and you can customize the categories, creating new ones, new windows, new subsections, and adding items to them by group or individually.  It's quite functional as-installed, but customizable to exactly the level you want.

As for limitations on what you can carry...well, that's a sticky issue.  If the game sacrifices aspects of internal consistency or 'realism' in any number of fields, I'm going to say that inventory management should be right near the top of the list on things to sacrifice for ease of gameplay and fun.  You can either go absolutely realistic, taking size, weight, difficulty of carrying a large, unwieldy object into account, or go the other way, let the person carry as much as they feel like.  But I don't like the in-between systems where we try to only partially remain consistent, tracking say, weight and inventory slots, while ignoring the fact that you cannot carry eight backpacks, each brimming with six platemail breastplates even if you do have enough strength to hold them all, because they are simply too large.  It's simple to me - if you're going for real, make it very real, if you're going for ease of gameplay, don't slap limitations on it.

[DarkSign]

Well said.  There wont be any eight backpacks in this system. 2 small ones or 1 small and 1 medium or 1 big only.

In the interim, I've been looking at Jagged Alliance 2 (a mod of it actually) and may re-install Hidden & Dangerous 2. Both have interesting takes iirc.

The issue about the GUI being user-friendly is an interesting one. How to make it easy to get to things. The colored backgrounds is worth thinking about, an auto-sort area, and tabs for different items.

Hmmm...a lot to chew on.

[Amarr HM]

Just completed "the witcher" had a pretty nice realistic inventory. Didn't find my self sorting it out overly much like I have had to do in other RPGs great game aswell though bugged to bits on vista.

[schild]

The Witcher Inventory is a big fucking mess.

Huge mess.

One of the only things I really agree with Zero Puncuation on.

Also, I'm telling you fuckers, NIS/Gust games.

Atelier Iris/Mana Khemia or Disgaea. That's it. That's how you do it.

Call it a fucking inventory, let it be endless or have an obscene, untold limit. And have tabs. Anything else is just gay.

[Yegolev]

A search box isn't gay, not if you have a keyboard that is, and it would have helped Oblivion a good bit if I could do a partial text search on names... especially on spells and potions that I made myself!

The details of the inventory system will depend on how item-dependent the game would be and what sort of items, I think.  Mana Khemia has lots of items and they all have some sort of use and any sort of limit on it would be retarded, while in other games there is quite a bit of garbage and generally fewer useful items.  Having a weight restriction in a traditional western RPG makes more sense.

Mana Khemia is awesome, by the way.

[Jerrith]

One thing that never really worked out in Vanguard, but I thought could have been neat was with mounts and their saddlebags.  At one point, the idea was to setup your carrying capacity so that you'd be wearing a full set of armor, and want to keep the rest of your inventory mostly clear for loot...  So when you went into a dungeon, you'd store everything else in your mount's saddlebags (which didn't count against your personal weight), which you'd be unable to access while you were in the dungeon.  Get a bunch of loot, and you might want to fight out to the entrance, so you could access your mount and store equipment on it, before going back in for more.

[DarkSign]

Why would you be unable to access the saddlebags while in the dungeon, he's in there with you, right?

[Yegolev]

Bringing a wagon with you and setting up a base camp outside the dungeon is a good idea.  I liked doing that in Daggerfall.

[Koyasha]

Having a weight restriction in a traditional western RPG makes more sense.

See, this is what I disagree with.  Slapping a weight restriction on without taking into account all the other issues with carrying items seems silly to me.  If the game isn't going to be designed around a completely realistic inventory system where weight, size, bulkiness, and exactly where you can carry an item are all taken into account, then I think it should just issue a pouch of infinite containment and be done with it.

[Yegolev]

I do agree with you somewhat, but it is more like a sliding scale I think and will hinge on how much impact inventory has on gameplay.  Nothing wrong with a very realistic system, I just didn't type all that out.  Carrying more than one set of armor, for example, seems ridiculous due to bulk.  It's like a washing machine in that I could pick one up just fine if it wasn't so fucking bulky.

[DarkSign]

The genre and tech-level has to be taken into account as well. We're talking post-apoc / near future. Not magic. Not sci-fi.
If part of the gameplay is survival, making it realistic would fit the niche.

[Yegolev]

Yea, you did say that at the beginning, didn't you?  I'll repeat the trunk-of-the-car bit and agree with Koyasha for the rest.

[Venkman]

In games about gearing up, you need absurd amounts of space to carry the extra crap that'll eventually be mudflated out, but still have some resale value to NPCs (every DIKU ever)

If you've got a self-consistent system where everything can be broken down into resources for crafting, then you need absurd amounts of space to carry the extra crap that'll eventually be broken down into absurd amounts of resources and sold to people mass produce stuff (SWG, Eve)

If you've got a game where your gear is less important than your skills, and your primary method of success and advancement is through your actions, then you need little to no inventory beyond what goes into your weapons and items (PS in many ways, COD4 "inventory" in the form of ammo and slots for grenades, etc)

If you're going even more of the sim route with item weights and true WYSIWYG loot where you can strip corpses clean of everything for your own use, then your entire system from game design to controls to UI to models to inventory is connected anyway. I've never played a game with that level of sim, but I still believe it could be fun if done right.

Micromanaging your inventory is never a fun game unto itself. It just becomes one's own cross to bear, another level of decisioning making in games where there's no reason for it beyond the punitive (ala D2, imho).

[ajax34i]

Managing inventory space isn't fun in my book.  Getting loot is, as is digging through it to see what's good and what isn't.

I wouldn't see anything wrong with a system that gives me limited on-my-person space (for realism) but lets me select an arbitrary number of items I've just looted and then lets me "send these items to my horse/wagon parked outside the dungeon" with a click of the mouse.  In character, I'd take a run outside, stow them in, and come back in, but from a gameplay perspective I don't have to suffer through that and neither do my groupmates (it's instant).

[cosapi]

I personally liked being able to see what the item looks like, and move it around in my inventory.  That said, I hate slotted inventories, so even though you can see and move items around in those, they just don't "do it" for me.  I still think the inventory system used in ultima 7 and UO was the most entertaining.  Especially when digging through a chest and finding something nice hidden under junk.

[DarkSign]

I personally liked being able to see what the item looks like, and move it around in my inventory.  That said, I hate slotted inventories, so even though you can see and move items around in those, they just don't "do it" for me.  I still think the inventory system used in ultima 7 and UO was the most entertaining.  Especially when digging through a chest and finding something nice hidden under junk.

Well said. One of the things we want to do with stores and vendors is to allow inspection of an item...not just buying off a list. Say you've got two guns of the same type - with the right levels of perception (attribute) and skill (either gun or crafting) you'd be able to tell which one has a loose trigger and which one has a greater chance of misfiring.

[Lantyssa]

I'll agree with the sentiment that it needs to be either incredibly realistic or unlimited -- in between sucks.  There is also the importance of the inventory.  Is one of the player's main ways of making money by selling loot?  Are there nifty items that may not do much but are cool to have/use on occasion?  The more either of those is required, the more annoying it is to not have the inventory space to lug them around.

[Jerrith]

I'll agree with the sentiment that it needs to be either incredibly realistic or unlimited -- in between sucks.  There is also the importance of the inventory.  Is one of the player's main ways of making money by selling loot?  Are there nifty items that may not do much but are cool to have/use on occasion?  The more either of those is required, the more annoying it is to not have the inventory space to lug them around.

I think there's a middle ground that's worthwhile.  Something that's not far from unlimited, but has some basic checks on it.  You simply don't want people to have 1000+ items (on their character, in their bank, anywhere), it's a significant amount of data, even when you're just tracking the instance specific elements.  I guess what I'd aim for is something with unlimited slots, but a weight associated with each item, and penalities (usually movement speed debuffs, but perhaps offensive and/or defensive combat debuffs would make sense too?) that scale up as you start to carry more than is ideal. 

Sorting is another issue.  I'm not convinced yet, but I think a single large container that allows you to filter intelligently will end up being better than using multiple containers for sorting.  That however, depends on the filter being good enough to let you get at what you're interested in quickly and efficiently, as well as some helpful features like being able to flag an item as "No Sell" or something similar.

[DarkSign]

I'm really thinking that quest items will have no weight . . . and of course encumbrance penalties for all other items.

It would be ridiculous for a car modding person to be able to carry an entire engine that he found in the wastes around with him...but then that begs the question of do you go SO far into realism that in order to get the new engine in the car you need 2 or 3 people to carry the damn thing to put it in the trunk of your car (assuming the car has space)?

[Jerrith]

I'm really thinking that quest items will have no weight . . .

That and an unlimited ability to carry them work well, as long as they get cleaned up when you're no longer on the quest.  For most quests in Vanguard, you didn't actually get the items you were sent to collect, you just got a flag or counted flag set on your character representing if you'd gotten (or how many you'd gotten) of the item needed for a stage of a quest.  You lose the inventory portion of the system, but...  Do you really care about being able to inspect quest items?  The point it does matter on is trading.  If you want them to be tradable, they probably need to be real items.

[Lantyssa]

I think there's a middle ground that's worthwhile.  Something that's not far from unlimited, but has some basic checks on it.  You simply don't want people to have 1000+ items (on their character, in their bank, anywhere), it's a significant amount of data, even when you're just tracking the instance specific elements.  I guess what I'd aim for is something with unlimited slots, but a weight associated with each item, and penalities (usually movement speed debuffs, but perhaps offensive and/or defensive combat debuffs would make sense too?) that scale up as you start to carry more than is ideal.

There is, but most games aren't very good at finding it.  If a player has to interrupt the fun they are having in the field to go deposit or sell items, it's probably not big enough.

[Koyasha]

I think there's a middle ground that's worthwhile.  Something that's not far from unlimited, but has some basic checks on it.  You simply don't want people to have 1000+ items (on their character, in their bank, anywhere), it's a significant amount of data, even when you're just tracking the instance specific elements.  I guess what I'd aim for is something with unlimited slots, but a weight associated with each item, and penalities (usually movement speed debuffs, but perhaps offensive and/or defensive combat debuffs would make sense too?) that scale up as you start to carry more than is ideal.

There is, but most games aren't very good at finding it.  If a player has to interrupt the fun they are having in the field to go deposit or sell items, it's probably not big enough.

Also, if the player can obtain a bazillion cool items and then doesn't have room to carry them around to use or wear or whatever when they want, it's not enough.  WoW is particularly offensive in this regard, because there are a LOT of quests and events that reward a cool item, be that a minipet or an awesome looking (but not particularly great) piece of gear, etc, which you simply can't carry around if you want to have room to loot stuff and carry everything you need for combat.

Whatever the personal inventory space is like, I think an infinite amount of bank space (whatever sort of bank one has) is vital.  It's fine if it costs more to access more space, as long as there's no absolute limit on the space, so a person simply has to decide if it is worthwhile to them to spend on more space or not.

For the record, as much as I love a lot of FFXI's systems, it's inventory is possibly the worst in any MMOG I've personally played.  Extremely limited space, both on your person and in your mog house (bank), a few very difficult to obtain options to expand it, and the need/desire to store astronomical quantities of gear in order to deal with the job system (which means you need a different outfit for each of your classes, on the same character) + level limited BCNM (Burning Circle Notorious Monster, aka semi-instanced boss) battles, which dropped you to a specific maximum level and required you to have level-appropriate gear to equip, or be stripped naked by the level drop.  Wonderful way to maintain challenge during these battles, horrible because of, basically, the need to keep every piece of armor and weapon you've ever worn so you can switch back to it when you want to do that level battle.  Oh yeah...and you could never possess more than one stack of many stackable items.

[Lantyssa]

If your game prides itself on appearances, make an option for an armoire to store different kinds of outfits.  I had several great ones in WoW and other games I wanted to wear for looks, but eventually had to dump for space.  In most cases I didn't even care about their stats at that point.  I just wanted to be able to walk around town or attend guild meetings in a variety of suits which appealed to me.

[DarkSign]

If your game prides itself on appearances, make an option for an armoire to store different kinds of outfits.  I had several great ones in WoW and other games I wanted to wear for looks, but eventually had to dump for space.  In most cases I didn't even care about their stats at that point.  I just wanted to be able to walk around town or attend guild meetings in a variety of suits which appealed to me.

Games don't pride themselves on appearances, players do. Sure there are some that have more clothing options than others, but the legacy of modern MMOs is customization - CoH, PoTBS, EQ2 yadda yadda.
There will always be a contingent of players of any game that get extreme pleasure out of "looking cool." I understand the fun, don't get me wrong. The question is "Is it worth changing the game mechanics for fashion's sake?"
Depends on the game, I suppose.