Do you remember when you could carry more than two weapons in a shooter? It used to be highly entertaining switching between a huge arsenal of weapons, giving you a variety of ways to dispatch enemies and opposing players. It also meant you didn’t really have to worry if you ran out of ammo for one of your guns, you normally had seven or eight others you could switch to.
There was the minor issue in this system that’s it wasn’t really all that realistic. You could maybe imagine a huge battle hardened soldier carrying a huge array of weaponry as he battles the alien hordes, but having Lara Croft somehow pack the contents of a small armoury into her tiny backpack never really made all that much sense. I was never even sure how she managed to fit a shotgun in there, let alone all the other weapons and inventory items she used to carry.
This has gone the way of the Dodo in a lot of games, shooters in particular just give you a primary and secondary weapon. It can be a little disappointing, but not only does it make sense from a storage point of view it makes the control far easier. If all you have to do is hit a single button to toggle weapons it’s far easier than scrolling through a huge list trying to find something that has ammo.
Of course bagspace (that’s right, infinite storage in bags has an actual name) still exists in a lot of games, RPGs in particular. Whilst you don’t have completely infinite space, you do seem to have way more than is practical to carry. Some of the costumes in Final Fantasy are fairly skimpy, where are they even putting it? At least Lara Croft had a backpack.
Which way would you prefer games to go? Do you prefer having pretty much unlimited storage, or is it easier to just toggle between a limited selection of items? Is it harder to manage a big inventory or to decide which two weapons you should be carrying?
3shirts
If you have Guybrush Threepwood’s pants, you can carry whatever you want, FACT!
Rabid-Coot
Despite fewer weapons enhancing realisim somethings havn’t changed much, before you’d get a sniper rifle as the game requires you to have one and be given more ammo next time the developer decided this is a part that requires sniping incase you waste it between the two places. Now when we hit a part where sniping is required theres always a convieniently placed sniper rifle with just enough ammo to kill the enemy snipers in the area witth a few spare shots incase you miss that’ll be used to pick off a few regular enemies before you pick up your previous gun and move on.
H3O
Realism needs to die. If I want realism in my shooter I’ll go to Afghanistan.
Some games still have their priorities straight, going for fun rather than realism.
3shirts
The whole point of realistic games is to do things you can’t do in real life. I can’t drive an F1 car or take a Veyron round Nurburgring and I can’t go exploring ancient Mayan ruins. I would also prefer NOT to slaughter actual human beings thanks, but that’s just me.
randomuser
When you already have unrealistic features such as auto regenerating health or instant heal health packs in your average fps game, limiting your ability to only being able to carry a couple of weapons for just for realisms sake seems rather silly to me.
MrSpeedyGonzales
I think from what I’ve noticed in games recently is that there hasn’t really been enough variety in the weapons that you can get. In the old games you could get a grenade launcher, rocket launcher, assult rifle, machine gun, mini gun, pistol, sniper, rifle, shotgun, and made up weapons as well. you don’t have that choice anymore!
I miss have a huge choice in weapons in game that weren’t suppose to be realistic like Red Faction 1/2, I don’t know why games like Halo could implement it. Why don’t they have it as an option that you can toggle on and off, depending on how difficult you want the game to be!?
Porcupine_I
i don’t like the Inventory in Deathspank, i constantly keep grinding old stuff to make room for new one.
i have no problem with limiting the amount of certain items that i can carry like grenades.
But limiting the inventory slots doesn’t add anything to the game, especially when there are some fun weapons or armor i might want to try at a later time, but i can’t keep them, because i don’t have any room.
Danza Di Fuoco E Ghiaccio
I’ve wondered how the heck Ratchet kept all his weapon’s of mass universial destrution. Is it like capsules or pokeballs its strange but realism doesn’t help a shooter to be fun.
shields_t
I seem to remember that Dead Space’s weapon simply transforms into it’s different iterations – that works for me.
Qurx
it really depends on the game for me…
in shooters i like it the most when you are able to carry 2 weapons and it doesn’t matter which… although then the sidearm like weapon wont be used that much… an in addition have one trowing weapon…
in rpgs it depends… if weapons just give an higher attack then many space isn’t really needed… :/ bc the sword with the highest attack will be chosen… but then they have special effects and you have a bigger number of characters to equip you might want to have a bigger storage…
shields_t
Oh and Resident Evil 5’s inventory is a royal bum-pain, way to much dicking about while zombies are busy taking bites out of you.