There’s a lot to love about The Outer Words 2. It’s got phenomenally funny writing, beautiful environments, a compelling story, and companions with actual personalities. But I’ve barely heard anyone mention one of its best features: the lack of an encumbrance mechanic.
Anyone who knows me knows I am a pack rat. In any RPG, I pour all my points into skills like stealth, lockpicking, and pickpocketing. If it’s worth a fair amount of money and isn’t bolted to the ground, it’s coming with me. This generally leads to problems.
In Oblivion, for example, my stealth archer has an ungodly amount of Strength points, because the Strength stat is tied to the player-character’s carrying capacity, and I was sick of my weak-armed sneak-thief clearing out a cave full of enemies only to have to make multiple trips back and forth to sell off all the loot within. Starfield was another offender, with limited carry weight and vendors with limited funds. A post-launch update now allows players to increase both carry capacity and vendors’ on-hand cash… but it comes at the cost of player XP, as if not wanting to fast-travel multiple times and wait for vendors to refresh their funds is some sort of moral failing deserving of punishment.
But I have no such problems in The Outer Worlds 2, because Obsidian seems to share my opinion that dealing with encumbrance is A. annoying as hell, and B. incredibly immersion-breaking. Given my tendency to loot every container, unlock every safe, and pickpocket every NPC in the entire colony of Arcadia, one might understandably think that my inventory is a bloated mess filled with duplicate items and useless junk. But surprisingly, it isn’t. Because like every good little thief, I sell most of what I steal. This is probably the case for a lot of pack-rat RPG players. It seems Obsidian understands this too, especially given the fact that 2019’s The Outer Worlds actually did feature a carry weight/encumbrance mechanic that prevents sprinting and fast travel.
Because the sequel has done away with encumbrance, I can truly enjoy exploring every inch of the game’s large, detailed maps, which have loot lurking in every corner. Instead of constantly stopping to check how much room I have left in my inventory, or having to repeatedly fast-travel to sell off everything I’ve gathered, I can actually stay focused on the game, no longer forced to pause in the middle of a major quest to offload the metric crapload of loot I’ve picked up.
While I understand limiting inventory space for survival games in which resources should be scarce (or for technical reasons, if a bloated inventory could negatively affect the game’s ability to run), I think more RPGs should take a page out of The Outer Worlds 2‘s book and do away with encumbrance altogether. Most of us are selling off our excess loot, but if someone wants to fill their pockets with 100 boxes of Purpleberry Crunch, what’s the harm in letting them?
