The fourth entry had a particularly strong iteration of this mechanic with its attaché case: a 6×10 grid (later upgraded to double its original size) that held as much equipment as you were feasibly able to cram into it. The point is, inventory management always felt it was deliberately baked into Resident Evil from the very beginning, serving to heighten the tension, as opposed to breaking it. As such, you were forced to make excruciating compromises whenever you headed out into the fray, not knowing if you were right to pack that shotgun, or if it would have been wiser to take extra healing supplies instead. Rather than an obtrusive declutter session that totally interrupts the flow of gameplay.įor example, in the original PSOne installments, it behooved you to plan ahead when leaving a safe room, so that you could get the utmost utility out of a finite number of item slots. To be fair, the legendary horror series tends to handle this aspect better than most franchises, because the developers understand how to make it feel like a tactical consideration. That is with the exception of Resident Evil 4, which takes the obligatory chore of organizing your crap and turns it into a fulfilling minigame in its own right. Whether I’m robotically deconstructing weapon mods in Control, restocking my troops’ gadgets in XCOM, or trying to navigate the Kafkaesque menus of Cyberpunk 2077, I’m seldom enjoying myself here. And even in titles that don’t rely on these encumberment systems, inventory management is rarely something that I anticipate with bated breath. Granted, imposing some kind of limitation on how much we can carry is a rational move (otherwise things wouldn’t be very challenging), but getting us to laboriously whittle down our haul like this, just to shed a few ounces of junk, utterly kills the momentum for me. You know, something that you have to go along with to get to the part that you’re actually looking forward to. At its worst, it’s the equivalent of painstakingly checking your airline luggage, to make certain that it doesn’t exceed the maximum flight allowance. When this happens, the action inevitably grinds to a halt whilst you determine what you can afford to offload and what to do with all your duplicated loot.Īt its best, this is a quick detour. Indeed, Mass Effect, Skyrim, and Fallout are all very immersive experiences, right up until you acquire one-too-many screws and then discover that your character is unaccountably rooted to the floor. Which is a bit annoying, when you consider how much of our time in virtual worlds is taken up by this administrative drudgery. Rather, the mechanic is just something that we all have to put up with. It’s not really intended to be fun in and of itself, unless you happen to derive great pleasure from sifting through long menus or calculating weight thresholds. As a general rule of thumb, inventory management is a necessary evil for video games, there only to prevent you from accumulating too much power at once.
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