The Elder Scrolls franchise has long been a testament to the vast possibilities (and admittedly, equally vast limitations) of open world games. Skyrim, its latest installment in 2011, has cemented itself as one having of the most involved overworlds with a myriad of options regarding how players can go about exploring and interacting with this world. Of course, too many options is bound to get overwhelming, and the game even threatens to become one of patience rather than strategy if your resources are too abundant. Players with a proclivity towards optimizing their combat would spend so much time assembling and equipping different armor and weapon sets based on the type of enemy before them that this would become more time-consuming than the fight itself, draining much of the satisfaction from the battles. Thus the developers integrated a well-balanced mechanic that sought to complicate and enrich the player’s experience through an aspect that many creators treat only as an afterthought of low importance: the inventory. Skyrim, like many Bethesda games, utilizes a weight-based inventory. The limit is not placed on how many items a player can have, but instead based on a weight threshold, where each item you acquire weighs a certain amount, with more powerful, durable, and/or valuable items typically programmed as heavier. Once that limit is exceeded, walking becomes agonizingly slow and fast travel is not permitted, so the player will have to strategically discard items or tolerate returning to town at a snail’s pace. While this mechanic is useful in encouraging players to explore certain options in the game, such as purchasing property in which to store your possessions, buying a horse to negate the slow travel pace when encumbered, or enlisting followers to carry items for you, it also leads to three different effects that impact the way you approach progressing in the game and the how you develop your character.
First and foremost, this weight limit prevents the player from giving into the inherent urge to collect everything that can be acquired and pawn it off for one or two gold apiece. Discouraging this strategy works to improve the player experience on a couple of levels. Firstly, they won’t spend a gross amount of time in every dungeon scouring the rooms and dead bodies of their foes until nothing remains. This immediate limitation on looting prevents the game from becoming tedious and methodical. It allows the player to worry more about combat, exploration, and interaction. Secondarily, it slows the player’s acquisition of funds, especially considering the fact that more valuable items are typically much heavier. Because of this, they will not be able to utilize the method of buying the most powerful items available right at the beginning and using them to negate the initial difficulty of the game. While, of course, it is still possible to execute this strategy, the amount of back and forth one would need to engage in to make it happen would be too tiresome to justify. This makes character growth considerably more satisfying and adds to the longevity of the game.
Another effect this weight-based inventory has is the encouragement of investment in magic. Skyrim offers an assortment of potions that have various healing and boosting properties to be used in battle. However, there are also classes of magic that a player can utilize, although their effects are relatively weak at first and need to be used frequently to be leveled up. If Skyrim had no limit on its inventory, there would be no reason not to just create, buy, and stockpile healing and armor boosting potions, rendering the fields of restoration and alteration obsolete. The weightless nature of spells and magic offer a viability to these aspects of the game without requiring their use to be successful, overall increasing versatility of play.
And lastly, the weight-based inventory system encourages investing in stamina. Upon leveling up, a player has the option to increase either their magic, hit points, or stamina gauge. Stamina is by far the least useful combat status, as increasing it only marginally improves your sprinting distance, which rarely helps you outrun enemies and only slightly improves travel time across the overworld. Strong attacks require stamina, but a player has to increase the gauge a considerable number of times before being able to tack another one onto a string of blows. Overall, it isn’t useless, but its appeal is only made immediately relevant in that it increases your carrying capacity with each upgrade. As you progress through the game, you will continually find that you have need for more items on hand or are hauling back more, heavier objects from dungeons. By integrating the stamina status into the inventory, the weight-based system is able to place fluid restrictions that are appropriate to the player’s level and priorities, which again helps make Skyrim a flexible open world experience.