Inventory management
Fact. This combination of words is usually not associated with anything good. It’s often synonym of constraints, wasted time, and frustration. Constraints, in themselves, are not necessarily a bad thing: they can be seen as the rule of a game. But frustration is.
So let’s take a look at two inventory management systems: that of Ultima VII, and that of Resident Evil. Both were mainstream, successful games, and as such, represent more the zeitgeist than the individual choices of their designers.
In both games, players cannot carry everything they see.
In Resident Evil and its cousin games, they are limited to a choice of 6 items, some items counting as 2.
In Ultima VII, each item has a weight. Players can only carry up to a certain weight, but they can hold as many items as they can possibly carry.
- Ultima VII, PC, 1992
- The inventory and stat screens of the hero. Notice the weight, below his feet.
In Resident Evil, only a few items are pickable. The rest of the game world is part of a static background.
In Ultima, everything you can possibly lift can be taken away, including very heavy but useful items such as cannons and boats, and very light but useless items like bunches of flower and forks.
In Resident Evil, the player can carry: puzzle items (ie items that must be used to solve a puzzle), weapons, consumables (ammo, used by weapons; plants, used to heal the player; ribbons, used to save the game).
- Resident Evil 3, Playstation, 1999
- Taking a look inside your inventory...
In Ultima VII, the player can carry everything, whether it has a use in the game or not.
In Resident Evil, the inventory is arranged neatly by slots and each item is easily accessible in a menu screen.
In Ultima, the inventory is complex: items could be on the player’s body (worn or held),
- Ultima VII, PC, 1992
- The paper-doll inventory screens of all characters
or in a container, such as a backpack, a chest or a bag. Some containers can be worn, and it is possible to store a smaller container inside a larger one. (for instance, it is possible to wear a backpack that has bags inside). Inside a container, items behave like icons in a window: they can be dragged and put wherever.
- Ultima VII, PC, 1992
- Inside a backpack...
In Resident Evil, items can be stored in a chest and can be found in any other chest.
- Resident Evil 3, Playstation, 1999
- Notice the chest on the right of the screen, where you can store items.
In Ultima, items can be stored in a chest and retrieved in that chest. Alternatively, items can be sold and bought.
In both games, similar items can be stacked (fused as one) to certain limits.
Why such constraints?
So, both games propose a set of rules and impose a set of constraints to players. What’s the rationale?
For Ultima, the game let players interact as much as possible with the entire universe, in an attempt to make that universe more consistent, more believable, more realistic.
For Resident Evil, the game’s ambition is to make the player feel that they are in constant need of something. They can never have enough ammo or health items to feel safe, but rather, they carry as much as they can afford.
More importantly, there is a best way to approach inventory - the player can devise a way to play the game in such an order that the burden of the system is minimal. Instead of trying to take items in the order they find them, and running to the nearest chest to store everything they have in excess and when they found out that they need to use an item that they don’t currently hold, the player can anticipate and minimize the trips to a chest.
By doing this, they play the game at another level: instead of wasting passive time, running errands, back and forth, the player spends active time thinking how they can be as efficient as possible. The interesting bit is that there is a reward associated with that change of perspective: the more active player will complete the game faster, which gives them a better grade at the end of the game. Ultimately, if the player decides to go for a "speed run" and finish the game as fast as it is physically possible to, they will need to find the optimal way to approach inventory.
Conversely, no matter the approach, the player of Ultima has no way to lessen the burden of the inventory management, and no reason to do so: there is no in-game or out-of-game reward for using the system better.
How would those two games be designed today?
It’s easy to pick on Ultima because it’s 15 years old. Resident Evil is not as venerable but it’s ageing too. But would there be a better way to design their inventory management system today?
Its biggest flaw in Ultima is that it allows players to interact with useless items, which has no interest in the game. The designers may have thought that this would make the world more interactive and more believable, but that’s not true - it’s like a web page with broken links. So - ban the useless items from the game universe. Just like, say, doors or walls, the player could be able to look at them, to hit them perhaps, but not to take them away.
Second: remove the weight barrier. Eventually, players will be able to carry everything and anything as their characters become stronger. There’s no reason why a character may be able to carry ten swords at the end of the game, but not at the beginning.
Third: change the way items are represented in the inventory. In the original game, as items could be dragged on top of each other, it was a mess. Acceptable conventions include: a slot-based system by which players put items on a limited grid of slots, as long as they fit (Diablo), or a tabbed list organized by category (i.e. Weapons, armors, story items...) that the player could sort by several criteria (console RPGs such as Final Fantasy).
Additionnally: the inventory was divided between each individidual character.
It could be made common,
There could be less object types, but more object per type (ex. instead of helmets, shirts, pants and boots, there could be a unique "suit" category with more content than the above, combined),
There would be a more abstract relationship between inventory and puzzles: i.e. a key used to unlock one door in the game could vanish once used, although it can, too, be used to lock the door again.
Resident Evil system could also be revamped: while the constraint does make sense, a more comfortable "easy mode" could be designed, with maybe more slots available in the inventory, or in which saving wouldn’t cost anything. Beginners would still feel the psychological pressure of not being able to carry everything they need to feel safe, but would be better equipped to survive the game. To reward players that choose the normal game, the FMV movie at the end of an easy game could be made shorter, or the documents that explain the background of the game and which can be found now and then in the adventure could be suppressed in an easy game.
Conclusion:
All limitations to the player’s freedom of action should be removed, unless they are fully justified, not by the game universe itself (i.e. for realistic reasons only) but by the inner game mechanisms.
Playing well despite such constraints should yield a reward to the player.