I can’t decide if I love them or hate them
Featured screenshot of cyubeVR from Stonebrick Studios
(Gameplay of Survival Nation from Wenkly Studio)
Humans, ever since the beginning of time, have always had an instinctual, primal urge. Not to reproduce, or to survive. But the urge to store objects on our person using pouches, backpacks, straps, pockets and whatnot to carry our favorite things around. Every human on the planet understands the universal concept of carrying little trinkets to important places, like “Food” to eat, “Liquid” to drink, or (in some countries more than others) “Gun” to shoot and kill other people. Maybe to steal the little trinkets they once also carried around. Naturally, this concept of “carrying things” has made it’s way into storytelling and the entertainment we interact with.
(Gameplay of Red Dead Redemption 2 from Rockstar Games)
With video games and their unique ability to provide interactivity, many different types of inventory systems have came and went over the years. Some have stayed longer than others. Like the Call of Duty series‘ classic “two gun, maybe three with a perk, and some grenades” class-based system. Some games have you pack everything into squares, like Minecraft’s iconic inventory grid that lets you carry several tons of rare heavy minerals in your butt pocket. For Bethesda, the concept of weight is not lost on them, as both the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games have an over-encumberment system so you can’t cram a million bars of gold or wheels of cheese into your backpack. Grand Theft Auto V just lets you carry every weapon in existence around like you’re a battle-hardened war machine stuck in the middle-aged body of Michael De Santa. Same thing happens in the Half-Life series, only Gordon Freeman is a little younger, so it’s more believable he’d be able to haul around his massive arsenal. In more realistic games, like Red Dead Redemption 2 pictured above, Rockstar Games spent years and years developing the super advanced EBWTS (Equine Based Weapon Transportation System) allowing you to store excess weapons on the side of your horse. (In the clip, my horse is named Ptoughneigh, pronounced Tony.)
(Gameplay of COMPOUND from Bevan McKecknie at notdead)
However, things get a lot more tricky when the terrifying and mysterious Third Dimension gets thrown into the equation. With the advent of Virtual Reality and the addition of real, physical presence in video games, inventory systems have gotten a lot more complicated. Instead of pressing a measly button to pick something up or swap something around, you now have the option to use your disgusting, meaty Real Human Being Hands to grab and manipulate objects at your will. As fun as it is for the player to do, it creates a nightmare for VR game developers and systems designers. How do they make it fun to manage your inventory? In your regular boring-old flat screen game, this was never really a problem as inventory management was more of an annoying necessity than something that’s meant to be fun. But when you have to physically reach for something on your person, that requires physical energy. And if you’re spending physical energy to do something in a video game, most people would agree that it has to be something fun, something worth that energy. It has to be something easy enough to grasp, but not something so boring it becomes annoying. How do game developers solve this problem?
(Gameplay of Half-Life: Alyx from Valve Software)
I’d like to open with probably one of my least favorite ways to select items in a VR inventory. The dreaded “hold a button to open a grid/wheel and point your finger at something.” I fucking hate this method of VR inventory management. It’s absolutely miserable. It sucks. It doesn’t do anything to take advantage of the medium the game is lucky to be in. Sure, it’s fast. It’s reliable. You could probably do more with it than any other VR inventory system. But god, it’s so BOOORRRRINGGGG. I recognize that it’s incredibly speedy for games with fast-paced combat and a wide arsenal, like COMPOUND and the Source VR Mod Team’s incredible Half-Life 2: VR Mod, but personally, I love the frantic scramble to find the only loaded weapon left stored somewhere in a holster on your body. Inventory systems like this just throw away some of the potential that being in VR allows a game. I don’t hate this as much as the early days of automatic weapon reloads in older VR games, but it’s not that far behind.
(Gameplay of Survival Nation from Wenkly Studio)
Other developers, developers with sense, opt for something more physical and realistic. A lot of games use some kind of backpack. Something you reach over your shoulder for and grab using the grip button, usually containing a grid system to place various items in. We’re jumping from my least favorite to my most favorite inventory system, because the backpack is just so simple and nice. You reach over behind your back, and BOOM, you have a grid of items right there for you to browse and pick from. It has the depth of the stupid pointy finger system but you still have to move your hands around and reach for something, like every true VR game has you do.
Many different kinds of backpacks are implemented across a wide variety of VR games. You have games like The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, where you are greeted with a grid of circles when you reach over your left shoulder to pull out your backpack. Including two slots on the sides for full sized weapon storage. I love this system, as it feels realistic enough to feel fun, but not annoying enough to hinder gameplay. Every realistic-style game has to strike a balance between realism and video game wackiness, otherwise the game just isn’t fun to play. Which makes Into the Radius 2, one of my favorite VR survival horror shooters, and one of the most realistic VR games I’ve ever played, an outlier when it comes to it’s backpack system. Your backpack is just kind of this… weird empty square with no grid. You just throw stuff in it and it freezes in place. They do the classic Bethesda method of “carry whatever you want but there’s a weight limit.” If you’re in the middle of a long raid, picking up any small artifact and object you find along your way, you’re less likely to run into issues with carry capacity and more likely to lose all of your important objects in the mess of your backpack. If that sounds annoying, I’ll tell you it actually isn’t as bad I describe. It feels like the classic and universal experience of digging through your backpack to find something. Just don’t put anything you need quick access to in there. Use one of your holsters for that.
(Gameplay of Into the Radius 2 from CM IMMERSIVE)
Speaking of holsters, a lot of simpler, less involved VR games only use a body holster system. I have very mixed feelings on games that use this. While it’s really easy to reach for your shoulder or your hip. you have very limited slots, and only so much body to plop a holster spot on. If you’ve ever tried to get all of the items in BONEWORKS, you’ll know how much of a pain in the ass it is to haul a dozen different items to the reclaimation bin. It’s 5-point holster system doesn’t make it easy. You get two over-the-shoulder holsters, two under your arms. and this weird hip/back/right buttcheek spot that I could never quite reach. Maybe it’s a product of it’s time, made for basestation tracked headsets like the Vive and Index, and inside-out headsets just struggle. Maybe I’m just stupid for playing the majority of the game seated and bumping my hand into my bed to try and get something in there. Either way, I always end up opening the menu to put something in there. In any case, it’s not as bad as Arizona Sunshine’s stupid and finnicky two-gun holster system. You dare to even think about holding an extra gun in your hand? Good luck putting it down. Letting go will just swap the weapon in your hand with another one in your holster. You have to keep an empty slot on your hip at all times. Dropping your weapon is hell too, but the game overall is too good to keep ragging on.
(Gameplay of BONEWORKS from Stress Level Zero)
Have VR developers truly mastered inventory systems? Laugh My Ass Off! No. As long as VR games keep getting developed, (and hopefully, they will) every developer will experiment with their own inventory system. Or just reuse someone else’s. Either way, I don’t give a fuck, it makes no difference to me. Even if I hate some of these inventory systems, they will always have their places and use cases for each and every game. Each and every game’s unique quirks just lure me into loving VR more and more. Every developer and designer will learn from their mistakes, and as a result we get better and more immersive games out of it. It all just reminds me how unique this medium is, and it’s potential to grow into something special, even more so than it already is. I hesitated to call this article “My Abusive Relationship With VR Inventories.” as it’s more like a mediocre marriage. Sure, I don’t love her as much as I used to, but I’m stuck with her no matter what, so I’ve slowly learned to love what I’ve got, and love what the future has in store. Except sometimes she vapes in the house and it smells like shit. I have to tolerate it because I live here but it still smells like shit. I wish she would stop fucking doing that. She hasn’t even tried to quit. I get irrationally violent when I come home from a long day at my blue collar job and the whole living room smells like her stinky fucking vape smoke. But I digress. As long as the game overall is fun, I won’t complain. Too much.
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