The Packrat Mentality
I just finished Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2(KotOR2) last weekend and 2 weeks before that, KotOR1. The first one was an incredibly enjoyable experience and well deserving of the awards and praise I’ve heard about it. The sequel was pretty much identical to first save for the plot, which for me was changed enough to consider it worth recommending if you liked how the first game was presented. What I’m upset about is, strangely enough, something I only realized towards the very end of the second game. I found myself continually checking the bodies of my fallen enemies for credits, equipment and datapads.
Credits (money) in the game are utterly pointless due to the fact that equipment, the only thing to spend your credits on, is widely available from your fallen enemies. Equipment (weapons and armor) becomes only marginally important in the mid and later stages of the game when the focus shifts to the skills and powers that you acquire by advancing your character in the typical fashion of experience points gained through plot advancement and defeating your foes. Datapads (PDAs) are infrequent drops which are used to advance the main and various sub plots.
Despite my realization that the end of the game was very near, I continued to habitually check the remains of the vast numbers that fell to my avatar. Seems like a rather morbid activity in retrospect. The process was sterilized by the game into a two click process, once on the body to reveal all the items and credits on the corpse and once to ‘get all’ and add them to my ever expanding inventory.
I blame the game for developing my habit of body searching and item collecting. The game is designed to require the searching of dead bodies for the datapads needed to advance the plot. It eases the collection of the important datapads by making it a simple 2 click process. It also makes adding junk items an easy and quick process as well.
As I approached the final confrontation I asked myself, why did they put 65 credits on one of the dark jedi that was guarding the door to the final confrontation? I went ahead and picked it up and laughed at the possibility of bribing the end boss into surrendering. Needless to say that option never appeared in the conversation tree.
I’m sure the drop was one of the many possibilities that are randomly generated on the remains of dead enemies. That drop was the last of what I’m sure were hundreds throughout the very long game. This lead to a vast collection of several hundred items over the course of the game; the vast majority of which were total useless to me. This is not the only game type in which I’ve experienced this. While primarily RPGs, both massive and tiny, seem to be the biggest offenders, many first person shooters allow you to carry an obscenely large payload. What I’m thinking is how did this become an acceptable practice?
I know that ability to posses a variety of items adds to the realism of the game world and connectedness of the player to the avatar via customization. Does a vast inventory, potentially weighing hundreds and hundreds of pounds, not detract from that realism? Some games have tried to implement a strength based limit to your inventory. Those systems still seem broken to me. Can you really carry 315 lbs of spears and axes AND fight you enemies AND consider this logical?
I’m proposing a much more realistic setup where there is the option, for games that require constant upgrades to your weapons, to auto-pickup and and auto-equip better equipment but still limit the equipment to what you can realistically carry in your backpack, utility belt and hands. KotOR can learn something from FPSs like Halo that have already implemented something similar to this. If you’re into micromanagement, there should definitely be the options turn off the system and fuss over the details to your heart’s content.
I believe an automated system, with player set parameters of course, would dramatically increase the narrative flow, realism and overall enjoyability of a game by getting rid of interruptions coming from item management, collection and hording. I’d welcome any thoughts you have on this or other systems of inventory management that I’ve not seen yet or perhaps have just forgotten about.
-Derek
Pickpocketing dead bodies for spare credits? Wouldn’t Jedi Knights frown upon that sort of thing?
I’m glad that you brought up Halo. Switching to a system where you can only carry two weapons, as would seem logical, is one of my favorite things about the game. A huge part of the strategy of Halo multiplayer comes from this one design choice. Which weapon combination you carry and use is typically the difference between a beginner and an intermediate player. The reason I think that this is important is that in such a wildly popular game, it showed that removing features and abilities is actually a great way to create richer, deeper gameplay.
I completely agree, the idea that “Less is More” can be very important to game design. I think you can see lots of games where they stop just trying to create the biggest and baddest things out there, rather trying to develop something interesting, that removes many of the things that made earlier versions easier.
And on the subject of picking up random things, the newest Castlevania allows you to pick up some of the most random things, including a “Paper Airplane”. But then again, you dont have to press any buttons to pick it up, just walk over it. Way simpilar.
MPO also recently did something like this for the Metal Gear games– just as players can send up to four soldiers into any given mission, each soldier can only carry up to four different items or weapons. Besides complicating the gameplay by adding another layer of srategy, I believe this idea of a limited inventory brings a much needed level of realism to action-adventure games that have steadily become somewhat laughable at the amount of items and weapons a character has on their person at any given moment. Never mind that going into a warzone with an entire army’s arsenal in your backpack can seriously undercut the challenge of almost any game, it just plain doesn’t make any sense.
there’s a problem with a lot of shoot’em up games where there’s too much of an emphasis on weapon choice and not enough on simply strategic elements of survival… am i the only one who wants a game where ONE bullet can kill you, instead of 30 or 40? fuck health meters, you’re either bleeding to death or your not.
There is a version in Halo multiplayer that’s one-shot-one-kill, but it’s really annoying because so much of the strategy of that game has to do with the timing of respawns. Goldeneye had ‘Golden Gun’ mode, which I remember as being much more fun, mostly because that game was more about finding people than actual shoot-outs. I agree though, that it would be interesting to see an FPS designed around this idea.
It’s interesting, though, how in games where such injuries don’t prove automatically lethal, the graphical representation of a headshot doesn’t necessarily represent a literal one in the gameplay. Instead, it becomes more metaphorical. Granted, it does provide a bit too much distance at times between the player and the avatar, though in these life-and-death scenarios, it’s a bit difficult to bridge the two completely together as nobody’s ever completely able to suspend all their disbelief.