Right now I have a whopping 86 inventory spaces. Eighty-six! That's enough for anyone right? Check this out.
https://content.screencast.com/users...03-26_1145.png
Let's break it down.
- 8 spaces for a single primary gear set
- 7 spaces for weapons (admittedly being wasteful with all those instruments)
- 9 spaces for consumables (food, snack, amethysts, first aid kit, armor patch kit, campfires, speed potions, etc)
- 7 spaces for tools (autopsy kit, shovel, skinning knife, inkstone, etc)
- 8 spaces for active quest items and incomplete quest objectives
- 8 spaces for arrows
- 4 spaces for dungeon key items
I think of all these items as my "adventuring kit". Probably 9\10 times when I open my inventory, I don't really even want to see any of this stuff. I don't want it to show on vendors. I don't want it to get confused with loot. I don't want NPC's ripping items out of it to complete quests either.
I think there's some really concrete an obvious UI\UX improvements to suggest here.
- Add user configurable "tabs" to categorize the inventory.
- The user can assign the tab a name.
- The user can choose how many slots (from a shared pool) are on each tab.
- A tab can be marked as "hidden" so items in those tabs never show at vendors.
Okay, so now that that is out of the way... let's talk about something more controversial. Here are a few things that I have just completely given up on because the inventory is too cramped.
- I gave up on calligraphy. Too much inventory required, too little actual value from the skill.
- I gave up on alternate skill\gear sets. There just isn't enough inventory available.
- I gave up carrying health\armor\power potions. They always seemed to be the first tihng I dropped when full. So I started selling them.
Think about this as a designer, because you are designing all these cool and fun skills, but then they don't integrate well with the inventory system which is frustrating and kinda undermines that effort.
I think this is a problem.
The solution I would propose is to split the global inventory pool into smaller, more focused pools. This would allow a lot more flexibility when balancing them such that you can be more generous with some pools while still being stingy with others. Put differently, some inventory slots could have a much higher game balance "weight" than others.
- Space in the "general" pool would remain limited, perhaps even more limited than it is now. You should have to make some choices when deep in a dungeon about what gets hauled back. This is good.
- Space in the "consumable", "tools" and "trade" pools would also have sane maximums. You shouldn't be able to carry infinite food or every single tool. However, you also shouldn't feel like you can't do calligraphy because it takes up 3-5 inventory spaces and they would be better spent on other things. You could give more space here when players level up trade skills or industry so it sizes accordingly.
- Space in the "keyring" and "quiver" could be a lot less restricted. It's just quality of life.
- Finally, the "equipment" pool would be tied to how many gear sets the character has earned. So each time you gain a new gear set, you get exactly 10 spaces here. To prevent abuse, you might have to mark items placed here as permenately untradable\unsellable.
To me this would feel a lot more logical and restricted in the right ways. It would be less frustrating for the player while simultaneously increasing the flexibility for the developer to balance each pool independently and add more skills without them being unintentionally gimped by the inventory system.
What does everyone think?
