Weight makes sense from a story perspective. Even a top-spec fighter can’t carry four zweihanders and 500 food rations.
But even the 1-STR mage who might have a legitimate carry weight limit of 2kg, should not be told “you can only carry 3 different types of 10-gram herb.” Especially if he’s allowed to carry 200 units of any one of the types. Give me anything resembling a viable story-based reason for that.
But selling a solution to that is a very popular monetization paradigm for MMOs, so it stays.
If we leave realism aside for a moment, though, the difference is that:
a carry slot limit restricts how many distinct kinds of items you can have, whereas
a carry weight limit moreso forces you to leave behind duplicates of items or to e.g. make a choice between heavy armor vs. having auxiliary items.
It depends on the game what’s more fitting for the overall design, but yeah, ultimately you want to prevent the player from optimizing the fun out of the game.
Having very heavy armor or dozens of healing potions can be boring, since there’s no risk anymore.
But having one of each different kind of item can also kill the fun, because having the perfect solution for every situation is just as boring.
Carry slot limits annoy me more.
Weight makes sense from a story perspective. Even a top-spec fighter can’t carry four zweihanders and 500 food rations.
But even the 1-STR mage who might have a legitimate carry weight limit of 2kg, should not be told “you can only carry 3 different types of 10-gram herb.” Especially if he’s allowed to carry 200 units of any one of the types. Give me anything resembling a viable story-based reason for that.
But selling a solution to that is a very popular monetization paradigm for MMOs, so it stays.
If we leave realism aside for a moment, though, the difference is that:
It depends on the game what’s more fitting for the overall design, but yeah, ultimately you want to prevent the player from optimizing the fun out of the game.
Having very heavy armor or dozens of healing potions can be boring, since there’s no risk anymore. But having one of each different kind of item can also kill the fun, because having the perfect solution for every situation is just as boring.