OK, so we’ve all been there. You’re playing an RPG, be it Final Fantasy or Skyrim and you find a super strong item. “Gee, this could really help me out in a fight. But I don’t want to waste it on some pithy goblins. I’ll save it for later when I need to kill some demonic monstrosity.” Fast forward 70 hours of game time and now you’re on the last boss and you’ve got 100 elixirs, full heals, strength potions etc. So you finally use them and win the fight and think, “I should’ve used those earlier.” This is a problem that occurs in pretty much every RPG. Let’s take a look at why it happens, why it’s a problem and what can be done to fix it.
You could argue that it’s all the player’s fault they end up with a hoard of powerful items because they never used them when they had the chance, but I don’t think that’s fair. This is a game design issue and it harms the player experience. Players are given hundreds of useable items but for the most part they simply never need to use them. In most RPGs if a fight is too tough you can just go and grind levels to become more powerful.
Of course you’re going to do that instead of using those possibly rare items because it doesn’t cost anything except your time. You’re certain to get strong enough eventually through grinding but if you use that mega fire bomb in the next boss you don’t know how long it’ll be til you find another one. And what if the next boss after this is weak to fire and that would’ve really helped?! The fact is, using up items always feels like you’re losing something that could be useful later on. Grinding on the other hand is always a net gain. You won’t lose your level ups and you’ll end up with more money and probably even more items.
That example really highlights why this is such a problem. Grinding is almost never enjoyable. Nobody wants to spend hours mindlessly mashing A just to level up. You could be spending that time actually having fun with the game instead. Moreover, battles can often become repetitive, even without grinding. Once you’ve found a decent combination of spells and abilities it’s hard to stray away from them. If RPGs encouraged more item use, it would lead to more varied gameplay and less grinding.
So what can developers do to encourage players to actually use the tools they find along the way? For one thing, I think inventory space should be significantly lowered. We’ve all seen the memes about the Dragonborn pausing a battle to eat a 100 cheese wheels and drink 50 mana potions mid fight. Well, if they couldn’t fit so much random stuff in their pockets that might not happen. Same goes for Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. Your party always has so much room for items that it becomes second nature to hoard them.
If there were stricter inventory limits then players would be encouraged to use up what they already have. Imagine if the next time you opened a chest you couldn’t pick up Fire Bombs or whatever. To expand on that, I mean it would be best if you could only hold a certain amount of each item. Rather than only having 10 inventory slots you could have all the slots you need but could only hold a max of 10 Fire Bombs for example. That way you’d still have access to your entire arsenal but you’ll want to use them up because you might as well and you know you can get more. Similarly, it would be good if said items dropped from enemy encounters.
Most RPG enemies won’t drop items like elixirs or strength buff potions and they’re usually treasures found every so often in a chest or bought in shops. As such it never feels like they’re readily available, even though you can end up with hundreds of them. If they were given to the player more frequently, and the player had a limited inventory space, then they’d really be encouraged to use them because they know they can’t collect any more without using them but can still get more whenever they need.
Having enemies drop useable items more frequently would also eliminate one of the other causes of the Elixir problem. Game designers can never be sure every player will open every treasure chest on the way to the next boss fight so battles have to be designed with that in mind. In other words, any boss needs to be able to be defeated with only a minimal use of items or without any at all. However if they were given to the player more often as rewards in battle or players were encouraged to explore dungeons more, then designers could create more interesting and nuanced battles.
So to sum up, players are almost never encouraged to use their consumable items in any RPG until the very end when they know it’s the last time they can. If developers encouraged their use it would lead to more varied gameplay while also making tough fights easier. This in turn would eliminate the need for grinding, keeping the overall pace of the game up and removing one of gaming’s most tedious aspects.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. If you can think of any games that did a good job of negating this problem, let me know. I’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you want to hear more of my thoughts, check out my twitter @KevLooks or listen to the podcast I’m in, The Pause Menu.
COMMENTS
The elixir problem tends to be mildly discomforting or disappointing at worst. Players try to raise their chances of getting through a rough spot by clinging onto their resources. This may introduce more of a challenge into regular gameplay if the developers already have an intended use for these items nearby(as they might, to get the players to know its effects or to raise the stakes a little). If the game never gets hard enough to require the use of these items, or if what seems to be the best opportunity to use them doesn’t come up, you wind up with some superfluous items at the end of the game and/or the lingering feeling during the game that you could be using those items, and not knowing if you should.
While it’s common, it’s not terrible, but a fun challenge to solve.
Making items serve a more clear purpose is a good way to eliminate that. Not only creating a fire bomb for enemies weak to fire, but creating the circumstances where the use of those items is ideal, like fights that are clearly too hard to win without the proper resources. This not only raises engagement, but also adds more depth to the game as players now must seek those items(making trading and looting more meaningful) instead of being showered with items they have no use for. In that aspect I’d say Skyrim is a poor example(as it is for several other game design aspects as well), since it has a ton of items that serve no clear purpose, possibly a result of the many crafting systems and Bethesda’s quantity over quality focus. But they still feel special and profitable enough to keep. As a contrast to the elixir problem in Skyrim itself, arrows come in tiers, and once the highest becomes plentiful enough, it feels ok to use since there’s no pressure on the ‘supply’ side, but the lower tiers become useless. In general, the highest tier of whatever the player has may be handled as an elixir, but everything under becomes much more mundane, and thus more likely to be used, but they’re also a little harder to implement as they require more work on assets, placement and balancing.
Another solution is to have no elixirs. In Bioshock everything is reduced from their ‘item’ form into immediate effects acquired upon looting containers. In Dishonored everything is made into regular forms of specific effects, you have an amount health and mana potions, but nothing special. Lastly having items ‘by slot’ is also valid, as you can never run out of the necessary slots to store things you need, and by that I mean games like Legend of Zelda where every item you can own occupies a predetermined place, every kind of ammo and consumable too, the only variables being potions that while are indeed valuable can be refilled in more or less stable ways, creating a balance between perceived supply and worth.
Not a fan of limiting inventory for this reason. I’m not sure creating a bigger problem is a good way to solve a small one. Inventory management is meant to be a feature for immersion and works as a resource management puzzle, but very often turns out to be much more of a problem, as it gets increasingly frustrating (e.g. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.). As such, games that do use limited inventory, have a limited amount of ‘elixirs’ as well, like the original Diablo.
Finally, there can be more creative ways to fix that. For instance, making the items ‘expire’ is a much more effective way to make players use items at the first best opportunity that may present itself while the item is still good, and such time penalty mechanics are the core of making survival sandbox games put on pressure even without having goals. Take Stardew Valley and Don’t Starve for a comparison. Both have special items. Both have special situations these items may be kept for. Both have limited inventory, with the addition of chests. Stardew Valley has more ‘elixirs’. But that’s also fine because these games have very different tones.
Overall, it seems you’re contrasting item hoarding vs grinding, but grinding is an entirely different problem altogether, related to extending playtime. I do agree that developers need to encourage players to use their items, but in more traditional RPGs items are just abstracted properties, just a different set of numbers and names, what tends to impact not only item dynamics, but combat mechanics as well, as enemies get the same treatment. To reiterate, in essence the elixir problem boils down to items with a low enough supply with a high enough perceived worth and no clear purpose or pressure to use. All of these factors can be tweaked with proper design, and it might not be so hard to have a game with no hoarding, or many elixirs if you wish.
Hey thanks for taking the time to write such an insightful comment. I guess you’re right at the end of the day, it all comes down to how the games are designed.
I suppose for most people it isn’t really that much of a problem or else designers would’ve done more to circumvent it.