History Main / InventoryManagementPuzzle

* As an attempt to impose difficulty and complexity on a player. It forces the player to manage inventory as a resource, just as they have to manage Hp, Mp, and so forth.

** [[SilentHillShatteredMemories Shattered Memories]] on the other hand completely removed the entire Inventory.

** [[SilentHillShatteredMemories ShatteredMemories]] on the other hand completely removed the entire Inventory.

** ''FalloutNewVegas'', sharing the [=GameBryo=] engine with ''Morrowind'' and ''Fallout 3'', continues the trend and adds ItemCrafting, which uses borderline VendorTrash to create ammo and consumables ("How many duct tapes did I need to make the weapon repair kit?") The optional "Hardcore" mode adds, among other things, weight to your ammunition, with values from 0.01 ([=BBs=]) to 5 (mini nukes). Fortunately, you can still use your party members as pack mules.

*** If the number of items in a game-world location became too great, the game ported all of them into a special container bag dropped somewhere in that location. The limit is much lower in the xbox version.
** In ''{{Oblivion}}'' the limit is ridiculously low, and any high-level fighter equipment will take most of it, leaving hardly any space for loot. I would advise everybody to use a mod to at least double it, at which point it would still be annoying, but at least the game would be playable.

**** Actually, a caveat there. Due to Oblivion's AI, if you spend any amount of time near items that you've dropped (thus allowing the AI to do low-level processing) theres a chance that they'll steal your stuff should they need it for any reason. Its far better of an idea to put your stuff in a container that doesn't 'respawn' (Where 'respawning' here means that the items within it go back to default after a set number of days). The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wiki makes part of its purpose identifying such non-respawning containers. Many of them are at inns, or at end-of-quest-line earned home bases. All of the DLC-provided homes include at least one such chest.

** The Warlock problem is the fact that for some their spells, Warlocks have to use their Drain Soul spell on mobs to create Soul Shards. They don't stack at all. Thus warlocks have to either carry a few and drain as they need them or carry a large supply in special bags that hold only Shards but take up one of the aforementioned bag slots. Cataclysm however hopes to rectify this somewhat.

** If you play the Pitt's quests, you lose your gear just outside. You then have the opportunity to collect about 200 pounds' worth of new gear, including four unique weapons and five unique suits of armour, on top of getting back all of your initial gear after winning your freedom. If you didn't know beforehand and stashed almost all of your gear in a safe place, you will be ditching a lot of it, fast traveling between the Pitt and your stash to collect it all.

* While not technically a videogame, a lot of thought appears to have gone into making the inventory mechanics for ''{{Homestuck}}'' as complicated as possible. In some cases, the main character has had to [[strike:pick up]] 'captchalogue' useless items just to get the item he actually wants to use out of his [[strike:inventory stack]] 'sylladex' so he can [[strike:pick it up]] captchalogue it AGAIN and then use it.
** Rules for which item a character can use vary depending on how many items they've picked up before or after the one they want to use, where the item falls in alphabetical order in relation to the other ones, or whether a value calculated by the number of consonants and vowels in the word matches the same value for the verb you want to use with the item, depending on the 'fetch modus' used. Items forced out of the inventory system due to lack of space tend to shoot out with enough force to break or maim whatever is in their path, which has been used to great effect in Strife.

** Also averted by the Wayward Vagabond, who has no idea how to 'captchalogue' something, or what a 'sylladex' is, and simply picks stuff up.

* {{Borderlands}} has this, though this is definately an encouragement to travel light more than anything. Any item takes one slot, you can get up to 42 in one playthrough via upgrades, and as you don't need many weapons or health kits for efficient combat, the surplus is always loot. And since so much of the guns you pick up are cheap VendorTrash...

** It can also bring FridgeBrilliance. Said limit means that you want to depart lightly to maximize loot. Basically, armour, rifle with 300 rounds, set of favourite artifacts, sidearm, antirad, 3 medkits and bandages is more than enough (further weapons and consummables can easly be looted or bought). Which is just little more than NPC-s have on them. FridgeBrilliance as for me.

* ''DragonAge: Origins'' has a completely arbitrary limit on the number of items you can carry (or stacks of items, in the case of single-use things like salves and whatnot). You simply can't pick up any more items if your inventory is full. The limit can be raised to roughly twice the starting one by buying backpacks.

* SurvivalHorror is duly notorious for imposing inventory limits. Here, the goal is largely to increase tension by stopping the player from ever carrying around as much ammunition and health kits as he'd like. This editor thinks that they could probably come up with a better way to increase tension if they really tried, and that if you're going to do something like that, you really shouldn't also dominate the genre with huge game-spanning {{Fetch Quest}}s.

* The roleplaying game ''{{Paranoia}}'' sometimes plays with this by giving the PCs an impractically large amount of assigned equipment, which they ''have'' to take with them (or suffer hefty punishment for abandoning it).
** In the sample mission in the 2nd edition rulebook, the warehouse staff (having heard a treasonous rumor that the PCs are being sent on a doozy of a deathtrap mission) gleefully unload all the crap taking up valuable warehouse space, including thousands of ball bearings, a 1000-kilogram Teela-O-MLY statue, a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firkin firkin]] of neutronium...

*** John's, Rose's, and Dave's Fetch Modi (Stack/Queue, Tree, Hash, and Array) are all based on computing data structures. Jade's are instead based on various popular board games.

** The ''{{Diablo}}'' series had a pretty small GridInventory with very few stackable items, and the sequel adding a small trunk and [[HyperspaceArsenal Hypercube]], which meant lots of trekking back and forth to sell ur lewtz (use somebody else's town portal and save scrolls!). One trick to get around this in a solo or less jerky server is to just drop things on the ground back at base (although you need to stuff everything away before logging out,) which also defangs the only real bite that the game's DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist had.
*** And in the original Diablo, money took space in your inventory. Sure, it stacked, but the richer you were, the less room you had left in your inventory. Even worse, due to a glitch it became impossible to buy the best armor in the game because carrying enough gold to pay for it meant there wasn't enough room for the item itself!
*** The ''Lord of Destruction'' ExpansionPack for ''Diablo II'' turned inventory management into a legitimate part of the game with charms. Charms are magical objects of varying size that bestow their (totally cumulative) enchantments on you simply by being carried. This means that a player can choose between having more free inventory space, or having more enchantments from charms.

* From the third game onward, the ''MegaManBattleNetwork'' games feature an optional ? but very helpful ? literal Inventory Management Puzzle in the Navi Customizer. You can use a number of programs to give MegaMan benefits with four rules: Textured programs may not touch the Command Line, non-textured programs must touch the Command Line, programs of the same color may not be touch, and all used programs must fit within the allotted space.

* ''[=~Baldur's Gate~=] I'' was especially bad, because the game wasn't paused in the item screen. So you had to do inventory management in safe areas, and good luck actually using one of the items they want you to use unless you have it in a quick use slot.
** ''MassEffect'' is pretty horrible about this as well. The upper limit of 150 items seems like a lot, until you consider that you're equipping 7 characters and that there are no less than 10 different categories of items. The fact that the game seems to love throwing you a dozen or more items in a single side quest doesn't help matters.
*** Since equipped items don't count toward the limit and there are no non-equippable items, you don't actually need to keep much of anything in your inventory. When you get a new item you either equip it on a character or sell it.
**** ''MassEffect'' also eased limitations with the ability to turn excess equipment into omnigel for other purposes. By the time a player has equipment up to max capacity, it's not really equipment anymore, it's loot, and by the time a player has that much loot, the exchange value doesn't matter so much anymore.
** What's worse is that when you hit the item limit you're forced to break down your most recently acquired items into omnigel, but you can't even choose which ones to break down and there is no way to get out of it, you have to ctrl-alt-del and kill the game process, then re-load the game, find a shop and sell your items or break down items you don't need before picking anything else up.
*** Or you could just man up and deal with losing an item or two, which is made pretty bearable by the fact that items are randomly generated and that every weapons locker, storage crate, and garbage can in the Mass Effect universe has two or three high-powered assault rifles or suits of combat armor in it.

To make matters worse (and make the designer seem like a real jerk if he claims he's aiming for "realism") one of the things that keeps our limited carrying capacity in real life from being too onerous a burden is the fact that we can set things down. Far too often, a game will impose an inventory limit, but not implement any sophisticated notion of chucking stuff on a shelf or table, sticking it in a cupboard, or otherwise leaving it wherever you happen to be at the moment. Far more popular is to limit the player to only abandoning inventory items at certain special locations, or only giving the player the option to discard items outright, removing them from play altogether. If the designer decided to allow the player to drop things wherever he likes, dropped items may yet be subject to EverythingFades.

* While not technically videogame, a lot of thought appears to have gone into making the inventory mechanics for ''{{Homestuck}}'' as complicated as possible. In some cases, the main character has had to [[strike:pick up]] 'captchalogue' useless items just to get the item he actually wants to use out of his [[strike:inventory stack]] 'sylladex' so he can [[strike:pick it up]] captchalogue it AGAIN and then use it.

* The roleplaying game ''{{Paranoia}}'' sometimes plays with this by giving the PCs an impractically large amount of assigned equipment, which they ''have'' to take with them (or suffer hefty punishment for abandoning it). In the sample mission in the 2nd edition rulebook, the warehouse staff (having heard a treasonous rumor that the PCs are being sent on a doozy of a deathtrap mission) gleefully unload all the crap taking up valuable warehouse space, including thousands of ball bearings, a 1000-kilogram Teela-O-MLY statue, a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firkin firkin]] of neutronium...

* ''Disgaea'' had a pretty large inventory limit, but as the game tended to give you many items for winning battles, as well as plenty of reasons to keep old items such as raiding them for specialists and keeping a lot of Gencys on hand, it could fill up fast. Thankfully, a clever person could make a good 100 dummy generics to use their three slots each to hold extra items.

** Thankfully, some Special Items don't count toward your 12-item limit (for example, a sheath that hides the [[InfinityPlusOneWeapon Sommerswerd]] from evil eyes), and while Meals count toward Backpack inventory, learning Hunting allows you to leave them behind entirely for most areas.

* ''{{Breath of Fire}}: Dragon Quarter'' featured an incredibly tight inventory limit. While you could carry practically any number of a particular ''type'' of item, the types were very limited, and had to include healing items, stat raising items, traps, etc.