Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 Revive Age-Old RPG Debate About Encumbrance

It’s a debate as old as role-playing games themselves: should players have to deal with encumbrance?

The recent release of Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Bethesda’s Starfield have thrust the encumbrance debate back into the headlines, with both games employing a system that restricts how much stuff you can carry.

While each game employs systems and mechanics that let you carry more and more, it is inevitable that as a player, you’re going to have to spend a decent chunk of your time fussing with managing your character or characters’ carry weight limit.

In Starfield’s case, encumbrance is a big enough issue for some that they are willing to lose access to gaining achievements in order to increase the carry limit via console commands on PC. This in turn has made a mod designed to prevent the achievements from being disabled one of the most popular on NexusMods.

It’s a different situation on Xbox Series X and S, of course. Starfield on console does not grant access to console command cheats, leaving players faced with the dreaded encumbrance mechanic.

Fans of role-playing games are well used to encumbrance, of course, however much they might hate it. Bethesda’s own The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games all have it. But why does it exist in the first place? There’s an argument to be made that encumbrance adds a sense of place to a virtual world, that it makes characters and objects more believable. There’s a game in resource management, too. If you can’t bring everything to a fight, what do you bring? Perhaps there are interesting choices to make with encumbrance.

Beyond that, there are logistical reasons video games use encumbrance. Again, if you can carry everything, how do you visualise everything in an inventory screen? How do you help the player find what they want? Starfield’s inventory user interface is awful. Imagine if all the items in the game world were suddenly weighing it down?

However we feel about it, encumbrance looks like it’s here to stay. People complained about it when Fallout 4 came out eight years ago, and Bethesda will be intimately familiar with the debate surrounding it. With all that, Bethesda made the decision to stick with it for Starfield. Larian, too, seems keen on it. Until such time developers ditch encumbrance, it’s a case of carry on with all that carry on!

There’s a lot going on in the world of Starfield. Its full launch saw over 1 million concurrent players. Players are using Starfield’s ship creator to recreate famous vessels from the likes of Star Wars, Serenity, and Star Trek, and many hidden references to other games like Skyrim have already been discovered. Savvy speedrunners have even figured out how to complete it in under three hours.

However, if you’re still just getting started, here are all the things to do first in Starfield.

IGN’s review explains the pull to seek out Starfield’s “immense amount of quality roleplaying quests and interesting NPCs” is strong, despite a rough start and some core aggravations.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].