This just made me remember tabletop D&D about a year ago. There was one room in the dungeon with nothing in it. We spent ages searching for a secret
Oh no! Okay, that is probably a little much, even for me, hahaha
Fortunately, with, say, BG3 and Thief 1/2, a useless room can be cleared relatively quickly. And in Thief, that "useless" room can actually come in handy as a room to hide from guards sometimes.
I've never played a Thief game apart from the Thief 3 demo, but I played Deus Ex many times, which I understand shares a lot of stylistic similarities. It's a good point that older games couldn't support the amount of junk that can be simulated in a modern game. Deus Ex was also IIRC one of the first games to introduce readable books and the like. although I used to think the printout of the DX script was impressive (~1ft tall) until I saw the game that's coming out soon that's supposed to take the "longest script" crown from BG3: I think that was about as tall as a person.
Wow! I had to look that up to see what you mean. A stack of papers a foot tall = DX's script? And BG3's as tall as a person?? Impressive! I hope that means dialogue, too, and not just readables. If only for readables, it definitely goes against my desire to 'not' read in video games, lol!! I get tired of Cyan Worlds' games like Riven, Firmament, Obduction and such. I cringe every time I find a book in those
I buy the games for the immersion and setting and such, but I've never liked the books. All those books. 30 page books sometimes.
If you enjoyed T3 at least a little, I think you might like to try T1 and/or T2. The graphics aren't as good, but the gameplay, controls, audioscape, and immersion are better, imo. Some fairly recent patches (within past 5 or so years), I think called "New Dark" (on ttlg dot com) if it doesn't come preloaded on Steam or GOG, have helped T1/T2 work on modern machines better and fix some past issues. You can enjoy more modern video resolutions, too. There are even some HD texture packs, but I've found them to bog my computer down and make the game not as smooth so I don't use them. For some reason I think captions might be turned on by default with the patch which I think is not desirable, but you can easily disable them in a .CFG file.
To me, T3 is "Thief lite" and didn't carry the T1/T2 torch nearly as well as it could have. I think Ion Storm who made Deus Ex and Thief 3 had some of their roots come from Looking Glass Studios, T1/T2's dev, if I'm not mistaken. Still, I can't guarantee you'll like T1/T2. For some reason, I just couldn't get into Deus Ex despite multiple tries, yet I love T1/T2. So, the reverse might hold true for you.
PS: Here's a Wayback Machine link to photos of the DX script you talk about... from Deus Ex's Lead Writer's old website -> https://web.archive.org/web/20051212071009/http://sheldonpacotti.com/script/
(His website seems to still exist, but I couldn't find the script images in their present day site.)
Inventory management can be a bit dull in a lot of modern RPGs, because they do sometimes encourage "pick up everything" until suddenly you can't move, which just isn't fun.
I'm not a fan of encumbrance in most any game. In RPGs, I'm more okay with it since it is trying to mimic reality to an extent. But as a hoarder, you're right, it's a problem and not fun. I would never personally seriously advocate an RPG or BG3 do inventory management like Thief (in terms of infinite pockets, no haggling, and such), because I know many people would rebel against such a thing for RPGs... so Thief's methods can stay there. But maybe Thief and other games/methods that have done inventory well for 'their' games or genres can inspire conversations about RPG inventory management, in general, and how to help avoid hoarding that is caused by many games teaching us over the years that "we just might need that one object at this one time 10 hours from now," or "maybe I won't have money 15 hours from now and will need to sell this spoon for 1 gold." I think in the short-term, not being able to add cheap junk to your inventory would be nice for games like BG3, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Kingdom Come Deliverance and so on. (I might be wrong about KCD, but I seem to recall maybe some junk there.)
I think BG3 might be the straw that broke the camel's back in my case. I'm really going to not care so much about taking so many items, and also stop comparing useful items against my current inventory so much. Also won't be looking in every single container and on every shelf in RPG games moving forward. Similar to you, I'm just going to play the game!
In my first playthroughs I always carried a rope, assuming that it MUST be needed.
Samwise Gamgee and Betrayal at Krondor had tought me this
Lol, nice!! As for BG3 ropes, spoiler alert.............spoiler ahead....... I just read you can actually toss them on vents. I never knew that! But, apparently, you can do the same with several different objects. Which I also never knew!
