A Foreboding of Inventory Boredom?

I’m still finishing my reading of the manual and have not actually started to play, but I’m having bad feelings. Specifically, is this going to be another RPG that requires trudging back and forth to salvage items, with the concomitant boredom of inventory management?

Fallout 2 had a neat feature that gave your character a huge storage space in the trunk of a car. Dungeon Siege was even better, allowing your party to buy as many pack animals as it needed. (You could sell your salvage directly from the pack animals, which you could not do with the car.)

What about TOEE? I’m afraid that Carrying Capacity, with its penalties for medium and heavy loads, is going to be one of the game’s sore spots.

I’m afraid the designers have focused too much on D&D tradition, too much on realism, and not enough on fun.

But fun and realism do not need to cancel out. With a little imagination, inventory management could be minimized and salvage operations could be fun…and you don’t need a car or pack animals. For example….

Say you assign the S key to Salvage. Once a battlefield has been cleared, you walk around and you hit S and click every item you want to salvage. This means you do not pick the item up; you hide it with the intention of returning to it later. You then proceed to the next battle and the next, until you have cleared the entire map and tagged all salvageable items. It’s time for a break.

You hit Ctrl + S. This means your characters return to the tagged items, pick them up, and tote them all back to town, with as many trips as necessary. But the player doesn’t see them walk back to the items and to town. That’s a long tedious process. He just uses his imagination. After hitting Ctrl + S, what the player sees is a screen where his party has returned to town. Next to the party is a big crate where your party has dumped all the salvaged items. All the player has to do is click on a shopkeeper. When the shop screen opens, there’s a button allowing the player to open the crate and sell the items. The crate button will appear on any shop screen in town.

After your party has finished selling the items, you click Alt + S, and your party is returned to its place on the far side of the map they’ve just cleared. :gotmyatte

 

Nope. They didn't do anything like that. Get used to making town runs.

Or not. Most items in the game won't sell for enough that you'll bother after the first couple of levels.

 

The house in Nulb. Ugh, who'd want that?

Especially since if you're Good, the ending of the game has the town sinking into the swamp. Not the best real-estate investment.

 

Okay. I think I can tolerate that without too many curses. I just hope I don't run into any filthy-tough creeps like that arch lich who pops out of a sarcophagus in BG II: Shadows of Amn. Remember that bastard? :blegh:

 

Yeah, I remeber him. The trap setting skill saved my butt with him and on many other occassions. No such skill in ToEE.

The inventory management isn't as bad as you might think. At lower levels, when you need to sell every little bit of loot you can lay your hands on, you pretty much need to make a town run after most battles to rest up anyway. At higher levels, anything that will get you less than 10 gold isn't even worth the trouble to pick up anyway. The worst part is having different shopkeepers who specialize in different items, so you have to visit four different places to get the best prices. Still, not too annoying.

 

I actually keep a rough idea of how much money I'd make trudging tons of armor back to town and just give it to myself with the console. Saves time and annoyance and really isn't "cheating" in any way that makes the game easier than it should.

 

Yip, or to solve my money problems I just give myself expensive items and sell them.

 

Yes, me too. I also used the Ring of Ram to push him onto the traps.

 

Now that is a great idea.

 

I usually just sell everything to the blacksmith...I thought about running around and asking different shopkeepers but is the difference in what u earn really that much? And which shopkeepers does anyone recommend?

 

It's about double the price when you sell to the right merchant. If you sell to one guy and he gives you twice the price of another, you know you've found the best price you're going to get (without adding to your appraise skill).

The leatherworked, blacksmith, tailor, jeweler, cabinet maker, and calmert all make a relatively convenient line straight up the center of town, and between them cover all the bases. Calmert will take magic items. The cabinet guy will take wooden things like spears and crossbows. The others are pretty obvious.

Most of the time I don't bother, but with magic items it's usually a good idea to make sure you're not getting only half what you could.

 

What he said. I've never tried the cabinet maker or Calmert though. I'll have to try them. I find Burne pays well for magic items. He pays more than the blacksmith for magic weapons and armor. In find he never disposes of any items I sell him as well, so they are always available to repurchase if the need arises. The same applies to the Leatherworker.

 

For myself, I always have the Bard, Rogue or Wizard (with Raven familliar) max out appraise. It makes a real difference early in the game when you need money the most, and again around level 3 or 6 when you have your first major craft-a-thon. I then sell almost everything either to Burne (if I'm trying to save time) or to Calmert, the Jewler, and finally the Smith.

With a high Appraise skill you can make a huge profit on scribed scrolls (0 XP to scribe cantrips, so assign a hot key and sell a stack of Read Magic scrolls to Burne at level 1 for extra cash) and crafted items, and there is unlimited XP in the game if you sleep in dangerous areas. Added to that, random encounters in the lower levels of the temple give you huge cash rewards. Money is only a problem if you try to do too much crafting too early.