Overly punishing inventory management

Wicked Feedback
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Hi everyone, this post is meant to talk about my gripes with the inventory management portion of the game.

I want to preface by saying I’ve got all of my Ichor invested in resources inventory, and I’ll use that one as the basis for any discussion here.

Simply put, if you look at the loot that’s available in a single area, it’s easy to get your resource inventory maxed out.

The hunter’s wood is a perfect example of this.
You have Pine, Spruce, Birch, Silver, Rare embers (as rewards for parkouring), wolves, humanoids. There is the occasional boar part, crafted leather(s) and ingots.
There is simply not enough inventory slots to go through this single area without being maxed out.

What this means is the game forces you to go back to back or to ignore the loot you found.
This is a massive flow break, you could be enjoying the combat with a nice XP buff and you have to go back to base to store/sell/sort everything.

I would suggest the solution to be to limiting the number of loot variants in a single area, while also increasing the number of inventory slots (by a row or two) but there are multiple ways to tackle this, so I’ll leave it for the devs to figure out what works best with their vision.

The only thing I know for sure is that at 15 hours in, the game started to feel like a chore because of this. It feels punishing to explore a hidden area and not have slots to actually get rewarded.

Edit: I just want to ask this to people that are saying there are work arounds, there are indeed some, but why?
What does having to ignore loot, or having to go back to a whisper, or having to go back to your house to unload resources, adds to the player experience?

Edit 2: In the interest of being fair, I’ve tried the suggestions people have given here.
I still think some tuning, as I don’t think forcing people to play a particular way like this is good, but these helped a lot:

  • Investing in larger storage spaces meant I could unload every single item before a new area, this didn’t feel necessary as I was holding only later area items, but the RNG causes lower level items to show up eventually. I think Hunter’s Wood is the main offender as I kept an eye out on other areas.
  • I wasn’t aware you can sacrifice items other than equipment. This actually helps a lot, if you find a wood type you don’t need, you can just scrap it. It doesn’t feel as wasted as it did.
  • Ignoring loot feels weird so I tried something different: Ignoring item types. Doing a particular section without getting any plants, then without getting any wood, this help quite a bit.
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The Crafting Materials are an Unintuitive Mess
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  • You don’t HAVE to pickup or keep everything you find. Getting to a point where you can ignore some loot is pretty standard in an ARPG.
  • There is a fair bit of whispers, and the return rune lets you tele back to your house quickly.
  • You can use some of the items you find as donations/contributions for the plague bonfires etc.

I think there is a bit of room for improvement, but don’t think it’s as bad as you’re suggesting.

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All 3 are fair points but let’s break them down a bit

  • You don’t HAVE to pickup or keep everything you find. Getting to a point where you can ignore some loot is pretty standard in an ARPG.
    The random nature of some of the drops, means it gets automatically picked up as you kill enemies. Spruce and pine look quite similar depending on the lighting, so you cut them down, pick it up to then have to discard.

  • There is a fair bit of whispers, and the return rune lets you tele back to your house quickly.
    Yes, but once again, every ~30 minutes this means you need to stop playing the game, to do inventory management. It gets compounded by the lack of a sort all, deposit all button.

  • You can use some of the items you find as donations/contributions for the plague bonfires etc.
    This is the best use, but realistically when we compare the area I just talked about.
    The only real item I’m willing to discard would be pine wood or saps. All the other materials have uses, leather is used to upgrade lower level gear, and so are the mob drops. And once again you’re forced to stop engaging in the scenery, in combat, in actually looting due to an arbitrary restriction.

All of your suggestions still break the flow of the game, and I fail to see what is the actual benefit of the system, what is this bringing to the player experience?

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I agree, there is loot that you can start ignoring as you come closer towards the end of the current story to save on space when doing loot runs. The Return rune is an amazing tool to utilize when you do get full instead of trying to back track or push too far forward in an area you are looting.

I feel that having a lock feature in the gear section could help when you break from a loot run to clear your inventory. There have been a few times when I accidentally sold something I wanted to keep because I was in a hurry to sell and get back to looting.

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I use also some loot that I dont need to activate some whispers permanentely.

Later in endgame you don’t need to cut every tree. I focused more on getting loot to craft my prefered food or items

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Buy/build chests in your house.
Put your supplies in your chest.
Get a homestead teleporter.

When your inventory is full in your character, teleport home and empty your inventory. Items in your home inventory can be used for upgrades, crafting, etc.

With teleporter spots being fairly frequent in the world, inventory management isn’t a cumbersome, outside of keeping your character inventory to a minimum before you start anything.

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I get all of that… but why, what is this loop adding to your particular gaming experience?

Do you find it enjoyable to have to backtrack into town to stash?

I would rather keep killing mobs and progressing the story…

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I was using the return rune, but the problem remains: it’s breaking the flow of the combat/story.

This is not an issue when you’re just collecting stuff, but when you’re trying to unlock a new area, being forced to stop to do UI management is so disrupting…

Do you feel this flow you mentioned improves the gameplay?

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So play exactly how you want :wink:

Dont follow the flow

Follow your needs

:innocent:

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If I was playing Diablo 4 or PoE, maybe. But I am not. I am playing a game that has housing, and near unlimited storage, ability to have multiple teleporter or whisper points in your homes, etc etc.

The game I am currently playing, has that loop as part of it’s gameplay.; so I have no problems engaging with it.

If I want to do nothing else but mow down enemies non-stop/horde-style, there are OTHER games I can play for that; but I’m not.

And personally I have a couple of houses setup, and rarely find myself struggling with needing to go back to town that often. There is no reason to keep every single type of material on you at all times.

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I get what you are saying with base building, I’ve played other games that do this kind of flow, it’s the velocity at which inventory fills up that’s the issue.

Most of the games that have this system, you can easily ignore the loot, because the loot table is fixed. There is also very little in the way of exploring like this game does. This game has active hidden areas with RNG loot whereas a game like Valheim, or V Rising does not.
This means that you cannot fully control the loot that is found, and when you’ve just found a nice hidden area just to be prompted with “Resources full” it’s quite underwhelming.

I like how you compare this to other base building games, because it’s also a good argument here, this is the only one that has this frequency of trips back. Grounded, Valheim, Minecraft, V Rising, none of them have such a variety of loot in a single area, to avoid this exact issue.

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When I was trying to unlock parts of the map I would do just that, ignoring most items that could be picked up (chest, material nodes, random items orbs) and solely focus on killing and pathing my way through an area.

Only after I got to a point where I could return to a certain spot or felt confident in my navigation of the area did I switch from pathing to collecting.

Trying to collect everything and explore at the same time sounds nice but would make having an inventory useless and imo take from the game.

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There is nothing wrong with checking loot and determining what you want to take or leave, if anything it’s something you should be doing if you are looking for rare/needed items.

While it takes a little time, it is a way to avoid going back to town/home every 10-30mins.

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I’m just going to agree to disagree because quite honestly I just did a 20 minutes run to check if I was losing my mind, and I went into it with 0 resources, I left with 8 slots left before finishing the area.
Having 80% of your inventory filled in less than 30 minutes is crazy to me, but if it’s working for you guys, and ignoring loot is what you find enjoyable, I can’t argue with it.

I hope the devs take a look at balancing a bit further, there are multiple Steam reviews about this.

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I can’t imagine a single dev reading this and being excited that your solution is ignoring the loot they placed. This just shows how unbalanced this is…

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Loot can be retrieved when you return, not everything is needed to be picked up right as you see it :laughing:

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Absolutely fair :sweat_smile:
Thanks for taking the time to talk about it

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I completely agree with you SpyPuppet!
It’s an ARPG — it should have choices

  • do I want to pick everything up or be selective?
  • am I okay with a full inventory (and ignoring drops), or should I go back to town?

Because you’re not sure which materials will be needed, it’s best to pick up pretty much everything. Then the cycle continues: head back to town and sort everything out (wood here, gems there, bones over there…). The same applies to items and enchantments. There’s no loot filter, so until you reach BIS items, you’ll need to check every drop to make sure you don’t miss an important stat.

But exactly as you said: is this really what I want to be doing? Activating time-limited buffs, then shortly after running back to town, sorting items and materials into the right stashes, repairing my gear, and returning again five minutes later?

I like the Torchlight approach. You had a pet you could send to town with selected items to sell. It took time for the pet to travel, so you couldn’t spam it. At the same time, you weren’t forced to interrupt your current action, which worked really well from a UX perspective.

Edit: By the way, I’m not a fan of having multiple stashes. It makes sense to separate certain categories, like keeping weapons and armor in different stashes, but I’d prefer all materials to be in a single stash. Same with runes—right now I have them spread across four stashes, so when I extract something, I’m never sure whether I already have it or not.

One more unintended consequence: even though you can decorate your house in many ways, it usually ends up being just a storage space—because that’s what you actually need. A possible “solution” is to have a separate, nicer house, but then why would you ever use it? All you really need is a bed, and that can sit in the storage as well.

Remove storage restrictions
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It exists actually, but obviously it doesn’t solve the problem.

Here I talk about all the problems of this system: The Crafting Materials are an Unintuitive Mess .

There are too many redundant items, which do not improve the game experience enough to justify their existence.

If these items were to remain, it would be wise to increase the inventory capacity.

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Consider how storage works in other games. You have a stash, with a limited amount of inventory. That’s it. You beg and complain to the devs after 6-12 months that you need more storage. Eventually, they add another 5-10 slots.. Then in a month, you’re running out of space gain, and complain some more. And in another 6 months, they add another 5-10 extra slots.

Now consider how it works in NRftW. You can add an almost virtually limitless amount of storage as houses and floor space allows. You want to hoard nearly every type of item, for fashion, etc… yea you can do that.

The cost? A bit of self-management with regard to layout etc as you add additional chests and storage items. And yea, multiple points, so a bit of searching at times.

Which would you prefer? Scenario 1, where your storage limit is limited by what the devs drip feed you, or Scenaria 2 with almost no end to storage space? I’m a hoarder so I will take #2.