Been playing with my little XNA-based MMO test-of-concept project over the past few days, and have another question for the wide wide world… which inventory interface paradigms have really stood out for you in past MMOs as useful or superior?
I’m trying to create multiple interface objects that can just be plugged in at will, you see, and I want to be sure to have at least the major basic styles covered. As I see it, you’ve got…
Old Style UO:
Probably not the most user-friendly of the lot, but basically adequate, and with a significant “nostalgia factor” for some. Allows a fair amount of personalization in terms of organizing the inventory.
Diablo Style:
Has the advantage of being able to express a rudimentary “bulkiness” factor in addition to the more common weight/encumbrance value. Can really eat up the screen space with even a moderate sized inventory, however…
Prototypical MMO “slot-based”:
EQ and WoW style slots. Conservative in terms of screen space and user-friendly, but fairly poor at expressing/handling all but the most rudimentary concept of bulk or weight (i.e. 4 halberds in a belt pouch? Why not?)
Obsidian-style:
Verbose, lots of screen real-estate, but has the advantage of being able to compare similar objects/weapons/tools at a glance (as long as there aren’t dozens of them).
What am I forgetting? Anyone have a new idea that I should try to accommodate while I’m at it?
Voyages in Eternity 
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September 3, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Aaron
I like item comparison UI features. You hold your cursor over the sword you just picked up and a couple of pop-up windows show you that sword’s stats vs your equipped sword’s stats. But I prefer that it doesn’t compare the items automatically. It’s a bit annoying when unwanted windows keep popping up as your moving your cursor around in your inventory.
For information that’s not tied into your immediate surroundings (inventory, character info, etc), I like depthful UI that can be toggled easily. I don’t care if it takes up the whole screen, because it’s not interrupting anything…I’m not interacting with the surrounding world anyway. It’s just the info you need on-the-fly, like health and selected skills, that need to be as unobtrusive as possible.
As for skills, I prefer being able to activate any of them just with one keystroke (the keys possibly re-mapped to the player’s preference) over having to assign a skill to my mouse button before using it (2 keystrokes, instead of one). Faster access encourages more varied tactics, in my experience.
September 3, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Lars
I tend to prefer more utilitarian interfaces that let me find, sort, and compare quickly. The EQ/WoW style model is ok until you have tons of very large bags. Nowadays, in EQ2, it tooks forever for me to find anything I have in my bag. If I could open ONE window that showed me all items in my inventory, and let me sort by name or by type (weapon, armor, spell scroll, collectible, etc.), Oblivion style, I’d be a much happier person. For me, the game is the strategy (what do I keep/sell, which armor do I wear for this encounter, etc.), not shuffling icons around.
The Diablo style interface is even more obnoxious because the items can be different sizes in the interface. Which, for me, seems to make it harder to find things, because I have to remember not just what the icon looks like but what size it is, and so on.
It does allow the game designer to model bulk more “realistically” and add a degree of strategy to inventory management (Deus Ex used this type of interface so you couldn’t walk around with every weapon in the game, forcing you to make difficult decisions as to what you would use). But its extremely annoying. A game that assigns meaningful weights/encumbrance to the items you obtain would function almost as well. (As opposed to EQ2, where after a few levels you can literally walk around with huge bank strong boxes filled to the brim with dozens of pieces of armor to maximize your defense against each and every resistance.)
September 3, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Mythokia
One thing I am really looking for inventory is a search/filter feature. I’m a bit of a pack mule in EQ2 and having 192 total slots because I use 6 * 32 slot strong boxes really gets in the way of locating anything in a short amount of time.
If recipes can be filtered and searched, why not do the same for the inventory too?
September 3, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Aaron
If you have a 360, rent Two Worlds. It’s not a fun game, but they did some things right… and one of those was inventory. It has a size-savvy inventory system, like Diablo, but it also has a sort button at the bottom. It sorts everything according to type first, then size. I thought it worked pretty well, allaying most of the frustration Lars mentions.
I agree that the contents of multiple containers should be shown together.
I do like the Oblivion inventory interface, but Diablo’s interface might have been better suited toward the tradeoffs, choosing between items, that was so pivotal to its gameplay. Encumberance by weight is harder on weak characters and easier on characters with bumped-up strength. In general, it might work as well to encourage tradeoffs, but it affects each player different based on playstyle. The Diablo system affects all players equally.
September 4, 2007 at 11:08 am
Lars
Well, encumbrance disadvantages weaker players mostly because traditionally RPGs have combined the concepts of weight and encumbrance into one value. It could be handled as a separate set of numers. These are orthogonal concepts anyway; the only rationale for combining the two was probably because it was simpler. Just separating the concepts into separate numbers would offer most of the strategic trade-offs we get from the Diablo system (except for tradeoffs introduced by having items vary by shape, such as 3 slot items that can come horizontal, vertical, OR in an L shape.)
I think players might be able to tolerate the extra complexity this would introduce, especially if features to sort/filter by weight or encumbrance, etc. were introduced to make it manageable. Unlike the pen and paper days, the computer is there to do the calculations.
Basically, instead of showing me a grid (like in Diablo) and forcing me to shuffle stuff around so I can find a spot to put my 3×3 axe, just tell me its encumbrance value is “9” and it weighs 1 pound (as opposed to my adamantine bars which have encumbrance values of “1” but weigh 5 pounds each.) If I carry too much weight OR if I’m encumbered, I move slower (or not at all.) A stronger character might be able to carry more weight (as they can today) but all characters would have the same tolerance for “encumbrance”.
September 4, 2007 at 1:05 pm
damianov
Or bulk/encumbrance could be a function of size as opposed to strength (a weak minotaur can handle more bulk than a strong gnome, as long as the weight doesn’t exceed either strength limit, that kind of thing). Anyone who has helped move a king-size mattress or a “puffy” recliner chair probably knows what I’m talking about here…
Ended up being a good selection of elements/topics to keep in mind as I move forward. Thank you very much… if you run across additional possibilities, let me know. I’d really like to have as many options covered as possible when/if I let people have whatever I manage to get done.