It’s a debate as old as role-playing games themselves: should players have to deal with encumbrance?
The recent release of Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Bethesda’s Starfield have thrust the encumbrance debate back into the headlines, with both games employing a system that restricts how much stuff you can carry.
While each game employs systems and mechanics that let you carry more and more, it is inevitable that as a player, you’re going to have to spend a decent chunk of your time fussing with managing your character or characters’ carry weight limit.
In Starfield’s case, encumbrance is a big enough issue for some that they are willing to lose access to gaining achievements in order to increase the carry limit via console commands on PC. This in turn has made a mod designed to prevent the achievements from being disabled one of the most popular on NexusMods.
Not really. Some have space-based inventory instead of encumbrance, some have no limit, and some don’t have many items to pick up.
Weight-based inventory is relatively rare in my experience, though it’s very common for Bethesda games.