And hello fellow friend of Garrett! Though I came to Thief a little late and the somewhat divisive third one will always have a very special place in my heart.
Hello!! *waves*
The problem with RPGs items is that you don't know if you'll need it, so almost everything becomes, "I guess I want it", lol. With silver stuff in BG3, for example, I thought maybe I'd eventually need to melt down silver for some critical tool or weapon. Instead, I eventually learned that it is probably just expensive dinnerware/flatware that I can sell.
Thief and Dishonored... are problem solving games at their core, so what you can pick up are tools for problem solving.
Very true!
In another favourite game of mine, the survival game The Long Dark, everything is useful.
I love this game, too! But I'm finding it really hard. I took a year or two break because I got stuck or found it very tedious with the old lady in its 'Wintermute' story, and wolves, but finally just finished Episode One of "Wintermute" a month or two ago. I don't follow that game to know how much more game there is to play, but it almost seems like I've just barely scratched the surface, as I only just started Episode 2 and there are like 5 episodes to Wintermute??, and I think even other DLCs to eventually buy? I'm not sure. The main thing I don't really like in The Long Dark are the wolves. Too unrealistic with their AI behaviour, unrealistic aggression triggers, and their bee-line path to you. I think they spawn out of nowhere, too, iirc, rather than feeling as though they live in the world. Too gamey in that sense. Only put there to come after player.
In BG3, I thought, you could reasonably well distinguish between trash and treasure, with the caveat that you should always read the flavour text because some of the trash might turn out to be treasure in disguise.
I never figured the flavour text out. Maybe in my next playthrough I will understand better. For example, many of the generic looking rings and necklaces in BG3 had descriptions that were interesting and flavourful, yet extremely vague to me in how that translates to their powers, if they had any. I never really knew if they were just decorative jewelry, or had some hidden powers. I tried to assume that jewelry that didn't have a color perimeter around their inventory slot were powerless and could just be sold, but I was never sure, so kept all of them for the longest time. Eventually, I think I purged some of them, but still... hard to know, imo
