Skyrim - Hoarding Can’t Stop & Won’t Stop

Nathan Hughes of Onlysp has written a new article for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim where he talks about hoarding. and why he can't stop doing it while playing the game.

If there’s one thing that can be said about gamers everywhere, it’s that we love to hoard stuff. By having an inventory full of legendary enchanted equipment that’s just gathering dust, I admit that I, or my characters in games, have a serious case of hoarding. As a result, I decided to peel back the layers of games like Skyrim and uncover the real reason to just why I have a house full of cheese wheels and fur boots. I wish I was making this up.

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More information.

Apart from Skyrim did that article author ever play any RPG at all?
We're all hoarding in RPGs!
I can't remember any RPG where my inventory and different containers weren't full of useable/useless loot in the end.

But he just explained something. A difference between RPG and a shooter with RPG elements. Noone was hoarding in ME2/ME3.

Joxer's short definition of a real CRPG:

"A game in which you can hoard stuff"

That is the best picture of Joxer I've ever seen. I didn't realize you knew him in real life, Hidden

When Morrowind came out, there was a lady that had a bunch of pillows in her attic and she wanted you to kill a few rats up there. Once I did that, I covered the whole floor with pillows and then put all of my alchemical ingredients on them, one stack/pillow. It took hours, but was a hoot.

P.S. I had more time back then

That pic is hardly the best - I'm not anorexic, I have a long hair, a few days old beard and I never ever wear any kind of a tie.
But those "gadgets" are definetly mine!

Ups - I mixed up the pictures …

Joxer:


and his sistas:

Now those are more than exact!

I start out that way when I begin a new game. It lasts until I figure out what''s useful or worth selling and what's just clutter.
If I can't use it or it's not worth selling, then I don't bother with it. It's just a Crapfest otherwise.

I hoard clothes in Skyrim. It's bad. Really bad.

Of course, I always end up making some version of myself in RPG's...>.>

I dress all my gals in Skyrim too. Each housecarl and companion has their own wardrobe and they change often. I love Vilja because she is scripted to change depending on time of day and circumstances, ie swimming.

Every RPG I play I hoard stuff. Potions, scrolls, etc. I say to myself, "You never know when you'll need that +2 agility potion, or that Scroll of Paralysis", so I end up just hoarding everything forever .

Yep. Well, except in those games where you have limited space inventories. I've been collecting stuff in D:OS just in case I want to craft something later. It's looking like I never will now. (I'm not so sure if that bucket of milk I picked up 12 days ago is all that good now, anyway!)

Zloth said:

Yep. Well, except in those games where you have limited space inventories. I've been collecting stuff in D:OS just in case I want to craft something later. It's looking like I never will now. (I'm not so sure if that bucket of milk I picked up 12 days ago is all that good now, anyway!)

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Haha! That's magical milk, it stays good forever

I actually really enjoy inventory management in games that do it right.

While I do end up hoarding in most games, I'd rather that games didn't make them inevitable or easy. I usually like the feeling in the early parts of a game where my character can really use the stuff he has in his inventory rather than the mid to end game where he has too much of everything.

I really hate hoarding but feel compelled to do so mostly because I feel I'm going to miss out on content. That dead cat I picked up must be good for something right? its either a joke about carrying a dead cat or its the solution to a quest that I've not encountered yet.

My ideal system is some sort of odd mix of Baldur's Gate, Dungeon Seige, Skyrim, Divinity: OS and the Witcher. I'd prefer that my character has a very limited personal inventory so that I don't have 12 suits of mail and 15 types of swords in my backpack that I can put on in combat. I'd like a pack animal for storing items picked up locally and the ability to send equipment back to my home base easily. I'd like it to autosort items into type-specific containers like arrows in the quiver, scrolls in the scroll case, armor/weapons displayed in display stands, ingredients in the spice rack. Quest items should be zero weight and non-removable like in BG (and maybe config setting for this). I don't really want it to be Progress Quest/Dungeon Seige level of automation or a chore for that matter but also don't want an inventory of 542 things to sort through like I do in DOS currently. Mass Effect 2 is also the wrong end of the spectrum but it was easy to hoard with.

"Too awesome to use". Lowers my enjoyment of the game.

Tales of Maj'Eyal partially solves that by replacing consumables with "rechargables"

When I played the original Diablo I had the entire surface covered with stuff. I mean, you never know when you might need a Rusty Sword of Trivial Bile!

The author starts with a remark on the game design, that a powerful artefact is thought to be needed to find the final boss when it is revealed later it is not to switch to power tripping.


I dont hoard, I dont even update the equipment of the PC past a point in the game.

The remark on the gameplay could have brought decent reflexion but in the end, the power trip prevails so...

Yea, the notorious spell scroll / potion syndrome

"I must not use this healing potion/spell scroll now, because I will need it later during tougher battles/boss fights"

Which might happen if the game is designed this way. The article starts on a decent observation to fall into the power trip thing that cant be assigned to a failure in game design.