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Gaming: Don't make us manage inventory. Its not fun, or clever.
Thu, 29 Dec 2005

If I don't post again (or even if I do) - Happy New Year!

Its been a few blissful days off for the holidays and I've managed to avoid using a computer much of the time - three entire days in a row without using one at all! - and spending much quality time with my wife. Really, these sorts of days will really be missed. I need another holiday already. Anyway, tomorrow is back to the grind for an entire day before the weekend rescues me. Woe.

Aside from straightening up around the house and visiting family and such, I've done a little gaming; as mentioned before theres been plenty of thievering in Thief II (and much looking about for Thief III at the store to no avail; no SOCOM-PSP either.), but I thought I'd pick up Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn again for the night. You see, this very fine game came out in 2002 if memory serves though I didn't play it then; in 2003 I gave it a whirl and battled through the first part of the game (Irenicus Dungeon for those in the know.) I got busy or lost interest and time passed and in 2004 I started over and again worked through the dungeon.. and got busy or lost interest again. Well, tonight I thought hell - a fine game - why not pick up where I left off and maybe see if I can remember anything at all about what was going on and start her up again?

Continues..

Turns out I'd left my little party in a precious bad spot battling a half dozen Umber Hulks in the basement of some castle; tough in that the mobs weren't worth a lot of experience, but they would 'confuse' (a spell) and kill the party quite quickly. Annoying and likely what drove me off a year ago...

Being a devious (or persistent) person I played the save/load/repeat game and invited one hulk into the room I was in and closed the door behind him, so that other mobs could wait outside while their pal gets sorted out. AI isn't really big in this game ;) I soon found an annoying bug in the interface -- if you open a door and a monster steps in, so that he is 'under' the door - graphically it being an isometric display - then you can't select the mob and he kills the character who opened the door while the other characters look at dasies (dungeon dasies of course.) While that led to many reloads, it eventually let me pick off these baddies one at a time and the party persisted. Well and good.

First thought of course, is to have the thief character stroll about this newly emptied lair and find whats lieing about; 3 chests in fact, full of sundry goodies. But alas, I now recall what drove me from the game in the first place.

Gentlemen (by which, I mean game developers) - never ever make a player worry about inventory; or more to point, if they must be made to worry about inventory, give them a bloody teleport-to-town-store-and-back spell so they can deal with it easily. You see, the thief (and all the other characters) were full up - of weapons, arrows, spell scrolls and silly things like acorns. Its been so long that I don't know if 'acorns' are useful as a quest item or not so best not throw them away; further, all the arrows and weapons I'm carrying are highlighted (thus implying they're magical though as yet unidentified) .. can't throw those away! Gems and other junk seems too useful.. maybe a quest item, or at least worth selling somewhere likely. Well and good. But now what?

Spell scrolls can't be too heavy but a real damned shame theres no where to put them, and yet we must collect hundreds of them. Apparently there are 'scroll boxes' (like quivers for arrows) for holding a dozen or so in, but I was only able to find one at a shop in the main town. So that leaves my party with a few dozen scrolls filling up all their slots until they get time/levels to learn them all, or cast them all. Likewise with all these items such as arrows, armour, weaponry of all sorts.. I can't very well ditch this stuff, yet casting Identify a couple of times per character sleep is really dull and annoying.. taking hours of real time. But really, in the end, I'd just like to sell off all this junk.

So, like the Annoying Maze in text adventures, I thought we as a developer society had learned that making players deal with inventory was unpleasant.. yet heres a modern game that sold millions and surely drove every one of its buyers mad. Make the shops carry loads of scroll cases, make gems and such smaller and able to be slipped into a - god forbid - bag, and make identification easier. It may be realistic to make your players spend 40 mins of real life walking their characters to a store and back to where they were, but its really not fun.

Maybe I'll quit this game, delete the saves, and send some flaming poop to the developers.

Oh, and one more thing .. add 'time management' -- let us accelerate the clock, or teleport around, or some other funk. Walking isn't cool.

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