Making frustration the point
Of course, there is no one-size fits all approach to how to handle encumbrance, and there are always exceptions or outliers to consider.
Sometimes the limitations placed on the player can actually be the point of the experience, which is something Cain readily admits when talking about
Death Stranding – Kojima Productions’ game about a delivery person connecting a strangely Icelandic-looking vision of post-apocalyptic North America.
In
Death Stranding, you play as the porter Sam Bridges and must make deliveries over all kinds of treacherous terrain, with the cargo you're carrying impacting both your walking speed and balance. It’s all part of an experience that’s specifically designed around communicating the physical challenges of lugging heavy equipment long distances. As a result, you spend most of your time figuring out the most efficient way forward in order to fulfill your requests and earn better grades.
“If you’re going to have an encumbrance mechanic – especially if you’re making a game about a package delivery person -- yeah, build it right into the game’s controls, the game’s terrain, your movement system,” Cain says. “In some sense, it’s brilliant because that’s a game about being encumbered and trying to get around.”
Spencer Yan, the developer of the upcoming survival game
My Work is Not Yet Done, agrees. But he’s also quick to point out the shortcomings.
“I think
Death Stranding's approach is really interesting and unique, but also highly situational and specific to its own designs,” states Yan. “Most people are not Sam Porter Bridges and will not find themselves in situations where they have to haul excessive loads that occupy not just considerable weight, but also space (and especially vertical space...), so the raw transferability of that mechanic is in my opinion fairly limited given the game's unique approach to Sam's profession.”
With that being said, there are some minor similarities between his own project and
Death Stranding, in that they both aim to depict the physical and mental toil of hiking long distances with a full inventory fastened to your back. However, in
My Work is Not Yet Done, this is not represented through a precarious balancing act, as seen in
Death Stranding, but through a number of hidden stats representing your both physical and psychic condition.
Set within a fictionalized version of a state park in what would be modern-day Georgia,
My Work is Not Yet Done follows a character called Avery, the last remaining survivor of a doomed expedition, as she tracks down the source of an inscrutable signal. The game doesn’t just have one inventory, but several sub-inventories which are separated into kits. Each of these kits has its own specific weight and volume. Depending on what you put inside them, the weight will change and contribute more to your overall encumbrance, but the volume of items you can carry in each will always remain fixed.
Unlike in other games that rely on a strength stat, here it’s Avery’s body weight and fitness that dictate how much you can comfortably carry (this value never changes throughout the game). You can also still move when you’re overencumbered, but deciding to do so will lead to a sharp decline in both your mood and energy.
“The practical effect is that the player is essentially always fighting a losing battle of sorts against physics, in that any kind of action is going to fatigue them,” explains Yan. “The priority is shifted then onto fatigue recovery instead, which sidesteps
Fallout's camel encumbrance by allowing you to temporarily perform massive hauls at normal speed, but with considerable long-term consequences.”
Carry Weight Vs. Equip Load
Besides
Death Stranding, designers also commonly point to the 'Soulsborne' games when discussing novel ways of approaching encumbrance. This is because these games typically deviate from the norm by only counting the items you have equipped rather than the contents of your entire inventory. This way the games prioritize the choices that are the most compelling to make, such as what weapon or armor you want to equip, rather than whether you have room to carry whatever will be dropped next.
Dene Carter is the co-creator of
Fable and is currently working on a retro, tile-based RPG called
Moonring, that borrows this approach. For him,
Bloodborne and
Dark Souls are some of the few games that get encumbrance right.
“It's all about what your intent is--like all design,” says Carter. “If your intent is to entertain, you want to ensure your product is entertaining. You want your 'frustration' points to be very carefully considered and part of the important core mechanics and nowhere else.
“These games are all about understanding. The deeper you understand the world and its rules and its lore, the more you get from the game. ‘Don't go over 24 percent encumbrance or you'll fat-roll’ is critical information. There's [obviously] no fat-roll in
Moonring, but…your ability to dodge an arrow is literally linked to how long your 'move' translates to in game-ticks. Go over 2x encumbrance and you'll find you just can't move very fast. And those arrows are going to hit.”
In a lot of ways, this is similar to the approach taken elsewhere in
Pillars of Eternity. In that game, there is no traditional carry weight, meaning you can pick up whatever, but your recovery speed between turns will take a hit depending on the types of clothing or armor you have equipped. Like the above, here the focus remains exclusively on the more interesting decisions that result from inventory management without getting too bogged down in the nitty gritty of what you can or cannot carry.
“The way Josh Sawyer designed the encumbrance [in
Pillars of Eternity] was your own personal inventory encumbers you, but then you push items into a stash,” says Cain. “It was effectively infinite in size, but it was only accessible when you went back to town [on harder difficulty modes]. If you picked something up and threw it in your stash, you couldn’t touch it for the rest of that dungeon or that adventure. I like that, because it means you can pick up everything you found, but at some point, you had to decide what to do with it.”
As you can see, there isn’t just one way of thinking about encumbrance, but several depending on the type of game being made. Given the highly-specific nature of the mechanic, it needs to resonate with the decisions the developers have taken elsewhere to avoid creating unnecessary frustration or problems in the design. And even then, it’s a fine line between creating something that works and something that adds to the problems the player encounters.
“I think like a lot of system mechanics, everything kind of skirts the edge between being challenging and being frustrating,” says Cain. “And I think if you ask 10 different game developers what they’re going to do, you’re going to get 10 different answers. There really is no one right answer.”
