Probably the common video game activity I hate the second most (the one everyone hates the most, of course, is the escort mission) is inventory management. You can carry one hundreds things, but now you have a hundred and one things and you have to pause from killing aliens or zombies or whatever to do some accounting as you go through your bag and decide what to drop. I’ve been finally playing Fallout 4, and it’s just constantly bogged me down. It’s every few feet I have to make some economic decisions in the middle of a firefight on what to keep and what to ditch.

Now, presumably, limiting how much you can carry is supposed to add to the challenge of the game (and thus the fun), but in my experience, that only works if you have realistic limits. For instance, you can only carry two different guns. Or maybe your character can only carry like ten items. Then usually your decision on what to pick up and what to drop are pretty quick. But in a game where you can carry on unrealistic number of things — like hundreds of items — all the inventory limit does is add tedium. In Fallout 4, you can carry dozens of guns if you want, so it’s not adding challenge in making you limit what you can carry with you. It just means every so often you have to pause to drop things — looking through hundreds of times to figure out which — or backtrack to a vendor to sell things or go to a place you have to store things. No challenge is added, only tedium. I can think of a number of other games where this aspect just kept tearing away at the fun — the Elder Scrolls games and Dragon Age pop quickly to mind.

The only game where I remember inventory management fondly is Resident Evil 4 (which, incidentally, has escort missions in it that I won’t go as far to say I liked, I least don’t shudder when I remember them). There, you actually had to rotate and move things to fit in your bag — like a puzzle — and it was kind of fun. And it did put limits that affected challenge in that you only had room for a few different guns (one of the funs things in that game was replaying using different guns).

Anyway, my advice for video game developers: once you get past a realistic number of items you can carry — like 12 maybe — just make it unlimited. It’s like the supermarket — you have the ten items or less and the no limit lanes. Pick one. I don’t have a lot of video game time anymore, and I don’t want to spend it carefully sorting and organizing lists on a screen.