I was running around somewhere in Golden Ridge, The Outer Worlds 2’s second major location, when I dared to look up a question that had been tickling the back of my brain for several hours: Does The Outer Worlds 2 have an inventory carry capacity limit?
I was afraid to learn the answer. The odds that it was what I wanted to hear were not in my favor. What I wanted is practically unheard of in Western-style action role-playing games. But there were encouraging signs from the first dozen or so hours of my initial playthrough that this time might be a rare exception. I’d made it through Paradise Island, the game’s first open area, without sparing a thought about how much loot I was carrying. I couldn’t find the genre-typical “infinite home base storage chest” anywhere on my ship. I scoured the game’s inventory menu for tiny numbers I might have missed with a more casual glance. Nothing.
Cautiously, I typed my question into a search engine. And there it was, the answer I hadn’t dared hope for: No, it doesn’t. I could steal as much superfluous crap from the various corpses, human and animal alike, I left in my wake as I wanted; I could stuff my pockets with all the wild plants, spare mechanical bits, and errant severed arms I came across and I’d never have to schlep it all the way back to a settlement or my ship to sell or store everything just to clear some space so I could pick up more junk and do it all over again. I could simply hoard it all, every tiny piece of trash and bulky piece of armor, and never have to worry about weight limits. It was exactly what I wanted. And by the time the credits finally rolled, I had come to hate it.
In early role-playing video games, inventory limits and encumbrance were necessary due to the limited memory and file sizes of cartridges and discs. Annoying but understandable. But many modern action RPGs still have inventory limits even when they aren’t a technical necessity.
Some game designers point to realism as an explanation; as The Witcher 3 director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz told PC Gamer, “Having a limit to how much equipment Geralt can carry plays a part in making the character and the world around him more believable.” It’s possible to take this too far, though, as Fallout 76 and Diablo 4 proved with their way-too-small carry capacities. No one wants to spend more time rummaging through inventory screens than gleefully chopping off monsters’ heads.
The realism argument makes sense, but I’ve never found it especially compelling. I grew up almost exclusively playing point-and-click adventure video games where reading and critical thinking were a major part of the gameplay, and when I finally made the jump to action RPGs, I was immediately taken by them because of how gloriously constant, quick, and varied the dopamine hits were. I didn’t have to wait for the payoff of sometimes tedious puzzles or long-winded interrogations. I could just run around, pick something up, and marvel at the new thing I had, whether it was useful to me or not.
I was enamored with these types of games because of how open they were, how few limits there were on what I could do or how I could solve a problem. That’s why I’ve always found inventory limits such a huge point of frustration. It’s not going to break immersion for me if my character has some sort of magical, unspecified access to all their equipment while moving around in the world. Thinking about how much equipment my character could realistically carry and where they would store all of it is not integral to my role-playing experience.
If anything, forcing me to stop and manage my inventory is more immersion-breaking for the type of gameplay I’m seeking. I’ll only craft something if I can’t find a strong enough stock weapon, and I’ll only visit a vendor if I need to sell something. Games with encumbrance systems always force me to do at least one of those two things. They add busy work without interesting trade-offs. The Outer Worlds 2 let me skip that entirely.
Tim Cain, co-director of the original Outer Worlds, which was released in 2019, looks at carrying capacity limits from a more practical perspective. As he told Game Developer, “[Without encumbrance,] You end up with enormous inventory sizes and there’s the issue of well, how do you manage that? And there’s different ways. You can say ‘Well, we’ll limit how much they can pick up,’ but you’ve now done encumbrance. You’ve just given it a hard limit. Or you can say, ‘We’ll break things down into categories or we’ll let things stack,’ but then you’ve just introduced all these extra issues of now you have pages of inventory or categories, or stacks of items.”
Notably, The Outer Worlds does limit how much stuff a player can carry around with them, but offers unlimited storage on their ship, which is a pretty common compromise for inventory systems in RPGs, but which is still, to my mind, an absolute pain in the ass. I wasn’t the only one relieved to see the sequel ditch it. “Honestly it’s kinda a breath of fresh air not having to worry,” wrote one player praising the decision on The Outer Worlds subreddit.
Somewhere around three-quarters of the way through The Outer Worlds 2, a block of text popped up on my screen. My employer, the Earth Directorate, had found a flaw in me. I had used a single heavy machine gun for so long without switching weapons that the game was calling me out via one of its most unique and compelling mechanics: the flaw system, which triggers when you meet certain gameplay conditions and offers you a significant boost in exchange for a permanent debuff.
This time, it offered me a bonus to armor penetration in exchange for losing my second weapon slot, which is, I think, a pretty good deal, but I was annoyed that the game had correctly identified a deep-seated insecurity that I have, which is that, left to my own devices, I am a bad and lazy gamer, so I quickly turned it down and tried unsuccessfully to put it out of my mind.
After that, out of spite, I started sneaking around and bopping unsuspecting enemies over the head with a frightfully high-damage telescoping baton that had the added bonus of being topped with the head of the Auntie’s Choice Moon Man mascot to add a bit of whimsy to the proceedings. As much as I hated to admit it, it was pretty fun. And then I started investigating what else I was missing out on.
Yeah, my beloved heavy machine gun was pretty good when it came to damage, but its ammo capacity was relatively small. Maybe I could craft a mod that could change that? Once I started interacting with those systems, I finally realized how much I had been floating through the game without really engaging with it and how detrimental that experience had been compared to playing RPGs that imposed limits. I was just running around, picking up stuff I’d never use, and telling myself I’d sort it out later, which I never did.
By the time I finished The Outer Worlds 2, I was carrying 142 weapons, 110 pieces of armor, and 98 helmets. Many of those were duplicates: I had an egregious seven identical copies of a single uniform that I hadn’t worn once. I’d put on a wonderfully daffy-looking helmet and robes I found in a hidden cache on Golden Ridge somewhere around the midpoint of the game and wore them straight through to the end because they were good enough and looking at them made me giggle.
I collected the 25 unique tossball cards I needed to get access to a vendor’s exclusive inventory and then didn’t buy any of it because I didn’t want to bother learning what each item could do. Consequently, I never got to experience the admittedly gimmicky but still very cool effect of putting on one of that vendor’s helmets and having the game’s graphics turn into pixel art. Many of the game’s most unique, bizarre, and delightful weapons sat untouched in my inventory because I’d chosen the path of least resistance. It didn’t feel good.
I keep thinking about what my experience playing The Outer Worlds 2 would have been like if carrying a lot of stuff was a flaw. Maybe the game would tell me I’m a pack-rat, decrease the price vendors are willing to pay me for anything I sell them, and increase the chance of finding weapons and armor with a mod already installed. I’d probably turn it down—and then head off to the nearest shop to sell all my duplicates and finally start thinking about the way I interact with the game again.
