Limited Inventory

There is an interesting discussion about inventory management on Voyages in Eternity. I was actually thinking about this game mechanic the other day while gearing up for a raid in Deathtoll. In EverQuest II, the amount you can carry is tied to your strength. But at high levels, you can literally walk around with a half dozen strong boxes (that are supposedly the type of things they use in highly secure banks to store goods). Which means I can carry a full set of armor for every type of resistance.

Wouldn't the game be better if we had more trade-offs regarding what we can carry? Why even have an "encumbrance" value otherwise? Some items in EQ2 might actually be MORE valuable if players had to make a strategic decision regarding what they could carry. Should they equip items like the Critter Wing Rings which give you a little bit of resistance against all resistances, for a well rounded defense? Or should they maximize against a few specific resistances. Groups or raids might need multiple tanks, each specialized against a different resistance, if no one was able to carry armor optimized for EVERY resistance anymore.

But that's not the case in EQ2 today. Since we can carry half the items in the game on your character at once, fewer items have utility. The Critter Wing Ring is useless unless I'm lazy, since I can simply drag along seven other rings that each have the maximum resistance against one of each resistance type. Winning and losing becomes more a matter of having the best gear somewhere in your 192 inventory slots to choose from and the macros to equip them.

I'd rather have a limited inventory system; the kind of difficult decisions you would be forced to make would add a much needed element of strategy to the game. And the loot? Well, loot has more value if you sometimes have to leave it behind.