I'm going to say 'no, I don't enjoy inventory management and loot systems.' Not in the 'typical RPG' sense, at least. They inevitably become pants salesman games, and I'm not terribly interested in collecting pants for spending cash.
Inventory systems, by and large, violate what I've come to believe an important lesson for effective game design: don't force the player to be the middleman in routine tasks and transactions. For the same reason I wouldn't want to have press a button in the middle of a reload animation in order to reload a gun, I don't see value in being the middleman in things that overwhelmingly happen a single way.
When you have a Whatever X weapon that's superior in every way to a Whatever IX model, I see no reason that the game should even let me lug around a Whatever IX if the only profitable action is to sell it. Just auto-sell it and save the trouble and tedium of being a gopher. Heck, why am I the one going around to search bodies like a grave robber? If there's only one profitable/natural choice, to loot and sell, why can't my companions do it on my behalf?
Here's two honest questions for you: how would you see weapons only slowly be introduced to the player, and what would you do with all copies of an old weapon after you picked it up for the first time? Neither of the answers seem particularly useful in supporting any 'realism' argument.
The first is relevant because tying weapon collection to enemy usage seems to me to be a sure-fire way of limiting enemy variety and capability in the early game. You'd never have early-game bossfights against those using the Revenant, for example. Everyone would start using the same dinky pistol and SMG, and for balance reasons the weapons would still come at comparable rates- which crowds our sense of realism of why 'pick up' is the natural solution.
The second, though, is the far more practical problem of what to do with extra copies and inferior models. If we accept that we can replicate a gun back at base (fabricate), then only the first gun of each model is really relevant to expanding our abilities. Even if we have to wait to return to base, that still means that we only need three of a model (or whatever the squad limit is)- and that after that, wall others are junk.
If they're going to be junk 99% of the time, to the point that we only exist as the middle man between enemy defeat and cashing them in the shop, why bother with that? Just give us the appropriate cash reward each time we kill the enemies, and be done with it.
Now, if you need/want a better reason we can't pick up weapons, just hand-wave something like 'biometrically locked' or 'weapon kill-switches that self-destruct on death'). In that case, loot could be relevant... though it'd be more in the sense of whatever good 'weapon shards' are for. And you still might as well just have them auto-collected on death rather than have us run between long distances to try and get them all.
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The only way not to hit the inventory limit regularly is to not engage in systemic looting- ie, to ignore the very system that you're insisting is important.
We also go back to the ship, where maintenance is done, between every mission.
Quality systems don't work well in a mission-based context like the ME series, and certainly not well with a loot table. They may make sense in an RPG context like fallout, but unless we pretend that military/protagonist ships don't offer repair/maintenance services between missions there's no plausible need for our cutting-edge maintained weapons to break apart every fifteen minutes or so.
If the goal is to force weapon swap-outs, a more credible design is the Halo series, where weapon management is key because ammo is limited. That's 'looting', but not with loot tables or anything, and it avoids the infinite pocket syndrome by limiting the number of weapons you can carry each time.
To start, I'm assuming that in this new game were not an already experienced soldier with a backing from the military since were going to a new galaxy. So going by that, I am also assuming that said character and his crew will have limited resources and not be able to always fix all weapons and armor and build all new weapons and armor all at the same time.
I won't argue for ME1's tiered weaponry and armory since it wasn't implemented very well. I think ME2 & ME3 did this well by having a larger variety of weapons that functioned differently from each other but the weapon variety can always be increased and tweaked to be less OP. This means most weapons won't really be junk since they will all work differently. Some enemies could also have upgrades and different gear equipped that the player might want to loot instead of buying.
Since this game is supposedly having a more "open" approach this can be fixed by having different types of enemies carrying different types of weapons and armor while not scaling the enemies, weapons and armor to the player's favor. ME3 already does this by giving different classes of enemies different types of weapons too.
Now for the extra copies "problem" I think this is solved by not picking the weapon up and just dropping it or leaving it there.
I only hit the the weapon and armor limit once because it was the first time I played the game, afterwards I usually sold the crap I got in ME1 or turned it to omni gel.
Plus I played New game plus a lot and you already know that you started with really great gear from the jump.
In a previous comment I provided examples of different things that could be looted too. Another thing, suppose that our character is a soldier or part of the military, it doesn't necessarily mean that he would be provided with things from different groups, rival factions, companies or organizations with better gear than him.
Maybe I didn't explain myself very well.
I do want to be able to level up, gain points to spend on powers and all that stuff. I do want the skill trees
What I do not want is inventory management, items that look all the same and have different stats (just like in ME1, and exactly like in DA:I).
I like how they did things in ME3: modular armor made a return again, each piece gave you a bonus (although I prefer armor to protect rather than change how much damage I do with my biotic powers and whatnot, but the idea was good).
Weapons were unique (they just need to balance them better), no copy and paste of the same model over and over again.
In my opinion this suits the game better.
Guess what, I don't want the negatives either. I think we can both agree that Bioware did a better job in ME2 & 3 with the greater weapon variety in designs and functions.
I'm still not understanding the real complain about inventory management except for games that had too much crap or a bad inventory menu (ex. Skyrim and ME1), but there are also other games that did this well and even some were made by Bioware. Is it really hard to open your inventory mid mission and pick a weapon or switch an armor? Is it really hard or irritating to pick a weapon that is better than yours that fell from a more powerful enemy? If my memory serves me well, both KOTOR 1 & 2 did this well by putting enough category in the inventory and it was easy to navigate and loot because it didn't have a limit to how much you can carry and you looted things at once.
Personally I liked some of the armor designs in ME1 and would like for them to return in their own full body armor category that is separate from modular armor. My main beef with ME2 & ME3 armors is that they only provide those bonuses and didn't give any real protection in battle compared to each other. The light, medium and heavy armor categories should make a return and maybe a new power armor category would be nice too.
Retour en haut
Then you get an end of mission report... Kind of like X-com: Enemy Unknown
