So I've got a bit of a selfish reason for making this post aside from starting an autistic debate about the back end of RPGs again. I'm just playing around right now with learning inventory mechanics and learning them.
Every time I look at grid inventories, yes they're sometimes quite nice visually laid out and everything and it lets you sort stuff well as the player when they're coded properly. At the same time though from the player's perspective I have never really cared much about grid vs list I played the hell out of Skyrim and Fallout 4 and I actually quite enjoy the list inventories because you can quickly scroll down clicky click your way through stuff and you're done whereas with grids you're dragging and dropping things constantly and having to split items in a fairly tedious way.
My main point with this ramble is though thinking about inventory design does anybody here actually care that much about what the inventory screen looks like if it's clean and usable? I bring this up because if I choose to code a list over a grid in my projects that have inventory systems it's a remarkable difference in the work load, lists are definitely easier to deal with and take less code compared to complicated grid systems if all you want to do is let people pick up and drop stuff or equip things and there's not much else going on.
For extreme examples, think Skyrim vs Diablo 2 in terms of how they have their inventories. Been fed up of bloated RPG after bloated RPG being released so I'm going to play around with these ideas for the lulz while I think about my other work now my RL garden stuff is calming down.
I've often considered emulating some of how Windows Explorer works for an inventory UI design. Especially with the use of copy/paste clipboard types of things, custom folders, etc.
Then i remember how cool yet clunky that was in Star Wars Galaxies.
I think one of the key things to a solidly done inventory system though, regardless of which approach you take, is to actually utilize fucking FILTERS.
Elder Scrolls Online UI mods highlight how useful and necessary this is (IE, advanced filters). Same goes for some STALKER mods when using a grid-based system.
And another example of a filter system would be 7 Days to Die. I can't remember if it applied to the inventory UI, but being able to just hit the craft button and type out a few letters from the name of what you intend to craft and then finally finalizing the crafting process made things so incredibly clean, fast, and easy.
One other thing I will mention is that grid systems can be nice when the variety of items and gear isn't too insane, and/or when the number of items you can carry on your person is somewhat limited.
One of those things that comes perfectly natural to PC players yet is never even considered by console players.
It's interesting you bring that up because a name based filter would work wonders for going through big inventories and wouldn't be difficult to code, list or otherwise because at the end of the day you're just filtering through a string. A few select survival games and RPG games I know have sort of implemented this but as you guys correctly point out this is a classic problem that's been caused by devs pandering to console players.
My biggest thing with inventory management has always been items they force you to carry for the sake of quests that have weight and it makes zero sense to me. Absolutely nothing wrong with having a boolean or whatever to indicate yes item been picked up. In fact when it comes to basic FPS' where you get keycards and stuff I'm 99% sure that's likely exactly what they did, that or integers if you're doing one of those get X number of items missions. Then you just have an animation playing of them picking up whatever it is.
I think the way older shooters and such handled keycards is a bit close to what you describe, just sort of occurred to me.
Granted, those games usually didn't even have full-bore inventory systems, but under the hood it probably worked pretty much the same way as you've been describing.
Hah, that's a good point. There are times where I totally forget how console players have to handle things because I've been so used to being a dedicated PC gamer for so long.
Though admittedly, I did briefly consider how differently inventory and items tend to be handled in VR, which is still pretty weird to me.