T w e n t y S i d e d
There’s no way around it; I am lost. Deeply, passionately, irreparably lost. I’m not sure where this space is relative to anywhere else and I’m not sure it even matters, as space and time themselves seem capricious, aloof, even spiteful. I gave up getting out of here fully intact some time ago. Now I’d settle for retaining just a shred of sanity, just an ounce of vitality–some souvenir of the man I was before I entered this hateful parallel dimension beyond mortal understanding.
I’m talking, of course, about my inventory screen.
Let’s take a modest gander. And by “modest gander,” I mean let’s settle once and for all how overbearingly asinine this system is so I can move on to grousing about bigger and better things. Behold:
Observe that there are currently ten item squares visible. “Visible” is an understatement; they’re massive, all the better to give us a good look at the chunky blurry inscrutable item images. Then we can look right down to the very bottom to see in tiny yellow text what a given item actually is.
Now, for a dungeon crawler developed for the PC, ten squares of visible inventory at a time is a terribly miserly quantity. If you asked me to pick my top ten favorite pieces of equipment in a given Bethesda game, I’d need spreadsheets and the aid of a counselor to narrow it down past fifteen. But here’s where the rub really comes in: column B on the right there isn’t for your inventory at all. It represents the dirty floor, DVD bargain bin, or pocket you’re rummaging. So trusting our fates in fickle arithmetic, that means there’s only–five slots visible at a time?
How would you like to try four?
See, that big square on top–taking up exactly as much real estate as the others–is just to indicate whether or not you’re currently looking inside a bag. How does it indicate that? By displaying an icon of a bag–the same icon that any of the squares below, when they happen to hold bags, will display. This is somewhat confusing in the beginning and annoying merely forever. And really, they needn’t have gone through the trouble, because I can solve this little mystery for you right now: yes, you are looking inside a bag. Most likely a bag inside another bag inside another bag. Because it turns out everything is bags now; your life is bags. Your high school sweetheart is a bag. Every night you close your bags and dream of the bags on bags your bags bags bags.
Battlespire is the only game I know of where you can take inventory and lose.
It quickly becomes clear that my inventory is 85% the following two items: floating mystical energy signatures fashioned by daedric magics, and burlap sacks. The sacks often contain two or more sacks within, as well as a few large weapons; the sacks in those sacks yield more sacks. Careful analysis turns up a few items of interest buried within these nesting containers, so I post up in an out-of-the-way alley to start conducting a painstakingly, painsmakingly thorough search. By the time I’m done there’s a stack of empty sacks reaching to the dungeon ceiling and a small pile of as-yet-undiscovered windfalls, which include:
- A “Cape of Sanguine Golden Wisdom.” Again, I have no idea what this does and I’m not even sure I can check, but I do feel reasonably certain that I hope that I eventually find a cape not designed by burlesque taxidermists.
- A variety of potions. I’m vague on what these do and have no intention of chugging them experimentally. If they’re useful, I don’t want to waste them. If they suck, I don’t want to start sucking. It’s a classic dilemma I intend to address by savescumming in lieu of intelligent resource management.
- A couple of scrolls of Summon Plot Exposition.
- A Cog of Flux Capacitation. That might sound like a lame joke, and it is, but for once it isn’t one of mine. That’s actually what it’s called.
- Pants.
- Fuck you, pants? HOW LONG HAVE I HAD THESE?
I don’t pretend to be an expert on this unknowable daedric invasion dimension, but I can only assume a pair of trousers and sanguine golden wisdom capes will prove to be valuable assets. Certainly more so than the dozen hemp sacks I pulled out of a scamp’s bushy legparts. Now, in the interests of being well and fully prepared, let’s try to read those damn story exposition scrolls.
Okay, so the bright side is that I now have some context for who the hell Vatasha Trenelle is and why I’d want to talk to her. The bad news is, approximately eighty-five percent of that message was landscaping-grade fantasy gravel and assorted enigma. I understand little of it and like little of what I understand. There’s only a couple things I’m sure of: for one, I’m going to have to find some keys or something. For another, I’m going to have to keep track of them in my inventory. Thirdly, we are all doomed.
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Wait, so if I’ve got this right…
Each bag has four slots. Bags can contain other bags in any number of their own slots. Bags can be nested within bags infinitely. So you can essentially carry 4+(3n) non-bag items, where n is the number of bags you’ve got.
Your inventory makes a mockery of physics. ‘Space’ no longer has any meaning, as any number of bags you carry contain bags bigger than themselves for eternity. The true eldritch horror of the game is not the final boss, it’s the inventory system.
No, it looks like you can scroll the inventory – you can only see 4 slots but more exist.
Which raises the question of why you use bags at all. I guess you apparently find items in bags in bags and it’d be a nightmare to take them all out.
But you have to take them out to use them and do most of that work to even know what they are…
Giving the devs some benefit of the doubt I would suspect that they thought it was a feature. Considering how limited the inventory screen is the readily available bags are probably meant to help with sorting items. Of course this would be more useful if you could name, dye or otherwise mark them… and it in no way beats having an actual better inventory screen.
Truly, we have entered the Bagception. There is no escape from the Bagception.
The inventory system was probably made the day after the programmer assigned to the task had learnt of recursion for the first time, and was absolutely thrilled to put it to use somewhere, anywhere.
Or is this lazy programming? Each inventory and bag has a fixed size in memory, so you don’t need to implement a fancy data structure?
If you can only use pieces of memory of tightly limited size and need to piece those together into a larger data container, you don’t need to make it like this, i.e. nested and recursive. You can also just make a linked list of the pieces and iterate over them. And the code for the latter is the less risky and complicated one. To the user the result would look like a single large linear inventory, like in Skyrim.
Of course I was jesting in my original comment. There is also the possibility some designer had a sudden idea “what if you could also put bags into these inventory slots, wouldn’t that be cool” and a programmer said “I can totally make that work”, and thus it was decided the game would have a recursive inventory of madness.
However, the real madness is the UI. Anarchy Online had basically the same inventory system, you had a main inventory and you could put bags and boxes into it which act as another inventory, which can also hold bags and boxes, ad infinitum. But in AO you had decent screen size, you customize the size and position of the windows on the screen, you had different types of boxes with different icons and iirc you could even name them, move items by drag&drop etc.
AO is from 2001, Battlespire for 97.
There’s plenty of games of similar age with much better UI, but AO is an unfair example :p
Frustratingly, the size of the base backpack in WoW is fixed at 16, and has been since the game’s launch. Meanwhile, the size of the four additional bags you can carry has ballooned to double that size (or even more for specialty type bags). Whenever the issue is raised with the developers though, the response is that any attempt to increase the size of that default backpack causes catastrophic issues around corrupting every player’s entire inventory and items being lost into the ether.
Really?? I’d never heard that. That just makes me wonder what the hell they did, since any sane way of implementing it should have allowed the size to be upgraded relatively effortlessly, with the difference simply appearing as empty slots. Shrinking the backpack, sure, that’s just asking for trouble, but growing it? That should be easy. So what hath they wrought??
Hopefully just lazy programming and not Lazy Programming, otherwise there could literally be an infinite number of bags in the game.
Oh! We did this in a MUD called Tibia: You could only carry so much weight but you could push infinite weight along the ground. So when you were out hunting monsters you’d only put the stuff with the best gold/weight ratio (usually gold pieces, sometimes gems or very rare items) into your backpack. And eventually, you’d even run out of capacity for carrying gold (gold was reasonably heavy).
So what you’d do is form a “loot bag”: You’d have a bag that you’d either push along or hide somewhere (risky) in which you’d put all of the items dropped by monsters. Once that bag was full you’d find another bag (monsters dropped plenty) and put your loot bag into that one for another 7 inventory slots. After you finished hunting you’d then push that monstrosity of bags with items inside bags with items inside bags with items to the vendor and sell it all. At that point the loot bag would often weight many many tons.
So I can only assume the developers of Tibia took their obsession with bags inside bags from this game. It really isn’t a bad way to organize things (use different kinds and colors of bags for potions etc.) inside your inventory but I really wouldn’t want to do it with just 4 visible slots.
The “carrying a physics object which contains your loot” trick is also handy in the newer Bethesda games (…and New Vegas)
I tried that once, stored all my ill-gotten gains in the severed head of a raider and was halfway back to New Vegas before the game decided I was far enough away from the corpse that it could de-spawn. My first warning was when the head floating along in front of me winked out of existence, taking all my loot with it.
Corpses can de-spawn? Is that a console only thing or do you have to specifically set them to rather than specifically set them to not on PC? I have never seen that happen–I can return to the very first town in the game and there will still be dead powder gang/citizen corpses strewn about.
I think what happened here was the main body got far away enough to unload from the world, taking the giblets with it. There’s a corpse somewhere in that world, just packed full of loot.
Boo. Would’ve been much funnier if you’d suddenly been buried in a mountain of loot items instantly returned to full size.
The seemingly arbitrary assignment of some containers resetting and others being permanent makes it infuriatingly unreliable. In the end though, I was happiest playing these games once I dropped any pretense of realism and just used the console command to increase my carry weight by a couple orders of magnitude.
Going back further, it was always great to add a “boot” to your magic carpet in Ultima 7 ….by placing a barrel on it. I have fond memories of that game’s emergent inventory management, but I’d probably hate it these days.
So basically what you’re saying is that this was a precursor to Katamari Damacy?
Rutskarn*,you should definitely record a “inventory management” video for this game.
*If that really is you and not a doppelganger that has assumed your name.
Look at me. Look at you.
Look at me. Look at you.
Look at me. These tickets are now bags.
I’m in a bag.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayPAGPfAZUg
What’s in my pocketses, Bilbo Bag-ins?
-It’s a trick question! There are more pockets in your pocket!
And in the more pockets, is Bilbo Baggins.
The box contains our own universe.
It’s boxes all the way inside out.
And I thought the Ultima 5, 6, and 7 inventory management was insane. This actually beats that.
At least they had the courtesy to pause the game while you were looking at your inventory. Ultima 8 offered no such kindness, leaving the player to scramble around looking for that important spell or MacGuffin needed to progress while a horde of monsters bore down on them.
You could still move while doing all that, of course, but that was somewhat of an unreliable approach given there was a giant opaque backpack graphic in the middle of the screen blocking your view.
Fortunately, the Avatars secret power in U8 is the ability to outrun everything.
Josh would have a field day in this game.
With so much armor on your left leg and so little everywhere else I’m picturing you constantly high kicking like one of the Rockettes to block enemy attacks.
Return of The Bootlord?
*a fairground organ spins up its old, worn can-can cylinder*
Which makes the design of the cape even better.
This what happens when you trust your inventory management to the lowest bidder. Provided the lowest bidder is from St. Ives.
I’ve been playing Cataclysm DDA myself, and its got the exact opposite inventory problem that they’ve been working on. Items can be found in boxes and in bags, but one removed, can never be returned to the package. Inventory management in that game is “Have enough different floor tiles to dump shit onto in a sorted fashion.”
I still wouldn’t trade it for this hell.
and people think it’s the console/controller gamers’ fault that the skyrim UI sucks! I have a dream that one day Bethesda will have more than one or two programmers and they’ll actually get to finish polishing some of the game systems.
This seems relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVh15aUt8-c
“Battlespire is the only game I know of where you can take inventory and lose.”
Have you by any chance played Guild Wars 2 at level 80? Bags inside bags inside bags, bags with the same name that don’t stack, bags that are only dropped by a single event… I’ve never seen another game make getting loot as painful as it did.
I was aware of this madness already due to LGR on youtube having reviewed it already, however it does not make it any less stupid.
Just feels like “GUYS WE GOTTA SHOW OFF OUR AWESOME THREE-D GRAHFIX YEH” and nothing more with the spinning objects.