The acorns one was particularly silly, you had to be incredibly dumb to not realize those are quest items but it was suppose to help players not accidentally sell a quest item. If the game is long maybe you forget about it and sell them? But again, the art was unique enough to make you remember not to sell them. Overall it was not a bad inventory, it limited both inventory space (although not enough in my opinion) and had a weight limit.
For me, the worse inventory is the one from BG3 and DOS2 - basically the same thing, to much to filter thru and most of it was junk that it was boring to even sell.
My ideal inventory would be divided on categories but also have an inventory space limit in addition to a weight limit. A tab for gems and rings, one for alchemy, one for quest items and one for general inventory. Add a key ring as well. They can even translate in specific bags on your character model, pouches, scroll case, big backpack. The game should allow you to carry 100 rings but not 3 suits of armor and no one should just pick everything up.
Somewhat related, I dislike having color codes for items, it feels immersion breaking at one point. You have grey, green, blue, purple and golden - basically what wow did . It is a small nitpick but if the actual itemization made sense instead of double digit and even triple digit stats you don't need to have color coding. BG2 did that great you had the +x and a flavor test that made it unique and part of the world.
Another nitpick, is random drops. I prefer it when the armor, weapons and spells are meaningful, like in Witcher 2 or Gothic 2. It helps reduce clutter when you don't have randomly generated generic items, it also make the world more immersive. Compared to Oblivion or Skyrim where you had random thugs with parts of Daedric armor.
As far as I'm concerned it has a place solely in games where inventory management is heavily emphasized like say, System Shock. Or survival games to some extent.
Otherwise it's just lazy. Just make picking it up toggle the next step in the quest and be done.
The idea of "quest items" as a separate category is a compromise to minimize the chances of the player entering a fail or lockout state.
More generally the things players find "annoying" are the ones that most create immersion. Because those are the ones that most closely tie the gameplay to an analogue of real world activity. Organizing, traveling, looking for hard to find objects, etc.
The trick is to optimize the frustration so that the player notices but isn't overcome by it. If the player doesn't complain then the experience isn't memorable. If he quits then it was too much. But if the players complain and still keep playing, that is where immersion happens.
A great example of a game that uses a completely modern UI is Horizon Zero Dawn where there are no inconveniences or nods to older style gameplay (except a minor use of random drops) but the game is utterly forgettable.
Most quest items aren't even kept in your bag, they just exist on their own limbo. Ones that need to be used are but can be used directly from the quest list itself and then its removed from your bag when the quest is done anyway, meaning its position in your bag is meaningless.
Heck even in Vanilla they made a separate keyring bag just to keep keys in because those were intended to be quest items you needed indefinitely.
Also, OoT is a bad example of the problem unless you are making that exact type of adventure game instead of an RPG. Because all the "quest items" are just plot coupons with no actual "use" in game. You could replace the screen with just a white checklist and accomplish the same function. Especially as once the main quest items are acquired, they will cease to matter whatsoever anyway, outside of narratively. They only serve as a check that you've finished a temple, as every single one is tied to a boss kill sans the freebie Light one. I'd say its redundant in fact to have them at all.
In fact, the original N64 version's most famous flaw was directly designed to a failure of its inventory system. Which was the constant need to pause and equip the Iron Boots, which the long lag each time making it feel like forever. This was fixed in the 3DS version, but the whole reason the flaw existed was the design choice to separate "items" from "equipment" originally leaving your equipment unable to be assigned to the C buttons.
Those are nitpicky complains about the game of course (except the Iron Boot one), but its a nitpicky topic. And I play an OoT randomizer like once a month so I know an autistic amount about the game.
Speaking of OoT rando, it does have one "undroppable" quest item: Ruto's letter, taking up a bottle. It's not actually relevant in vanilla, being so close to where you turn it in, but it might be in rando, since you can theoretically find it without access to King Zora.
Even then, probably not all that relevant. I don't remember if you can get blue bottle off of it, but if you can, then that's 90% of the use of a bottle right there.
It does in fact sit unusable until you can access King Zora with either Zelda's Lullaby or the Scale.
Fortunately, the only hard requirements for a bottle are also behind King Zora. Being the fish for Jabu and the Blue Fire, and I think a single or double use in Ganon's Castle if you have to do the Water Trial (which by that point if you don't have a bottle you are really unlucky). The only other checks the bottle opens up is the bugs in bean patches for 9 additional Skultula checks, which is a setting most people don't play with anyway.
I did forget the single "usuable" quest item slot that is designated for the Chicken/Letter, but that only exists to show off the day/night cycle and both are one use anyway.
Neverwinter Online put some quest items in your inventory, and others not. You could never actually do anything with the ones in your inventory either, and some of them were actually discardable but you could just farm more easily enough.
I can't figure out why Cryptic did things this way; my guess is one intern wanted inventory quest items and another intern didn't, or they have a high designer turnover rate.
I don't recall if the acorns were originally undroppable, and I can definitely confirm they're droppable now. With only a handful of exceptions, all items in Baldur's Gate are droppable. Most important items (quest or crafting) are protected with a critical item flag, which prevents them from being despawned under normal circumstances. Items that lack the droppable flag are companion-specific equipment (Edwin's necklace or Boo) and effects implemented as items, like "unarmed" attacks and various enemy immunities.
This is really just a problem for Bethesda, whose UI designer should be flogged. In fact, as of Oblivion, their quest items are weightless. Any shown weight for undroppable items is just for show, it doesn't actually affect you (and in fact, is sometimes exploitable), at least until the quest is cleared. Aside from the UI, their problem is that quest stages often don't get set properly, so (still weightless) items can remain in your inventory as clutter. Occasionally you even have spawned but unimplemented quest items, like ink in Fallout 3.
Quest items should be sortable or highlightable, but they're not always entirely separate and unusable. A unique sword or a mundane ingredient can both be quest items, as can some random one-purpose gadget, usually in the same game. The problem is devs are just fucking lazy, so any series with a "misc" or "other" item category will inevitably turn it into the junk drawer.
They were such a pain in Bethesda games as they all had an encumbered system that in Fallout was worse as you moved like a snail but at least in Skyrim you had a horse to mitigate movement penalty.
Combine that with items you need but have weight and it becomes a chore of inventory management, you can tell they gave up in Fallout 4 by giving you a perk to move as normal even over encumbered by draining stamina and being able to fast travel regardless.
In Skyrim and FO3-4 quest items have zero weight unless you have a mod that changes that. That might have even been the case in Oblivion, but it's been nearly 2 decades since I played that.
If the objects are not represented anywhere, they might as well not exist. Why pickup a McGruffin that goes into mallet space? It might as well be a switch or a password at that point. Every time an object comes from nowhere the game becomes a little more abstracted, and a little less immersive.
This is not to say abstracted games can be fun. Look at Pong and Tetris. But if you are trying to build a world where things make sense like reality, and not playing things for comedy like the N64 rpgs, then abstracting items away is not a good solution. The better solution is to make the items unnecessary and provide a different justification for the path, or just accept that there will be McGruffins in the players inventory.
<Detective Gumshoe's ID Card crumpled up and thrown away.>
Gumshoe: "Hey! Why'd you do that? I still need it!".
Pheonix Wright had the right way of going about key items. Remove them from the inventory when no longer relevant: New set of items each case, and if a case goes long, erase them mid-case. Even if doing so from a realism perspective is dumb or mean, just lampshade it and move on.
I don't like quest items that are only usable for the quest, generally speaking. If I get the Achilles Sword in SF2, I can use it to recruit a character, kill a boss, or just... use it as a sword. Flash in Pokemon lights up the caves, but it's also a pretty good battle move. Don't make the items useless.
Because it means you as the player have to figure shit out and sometimes what you thought was just junk ends up being useful fi the game designer is clever enough to build the possibility for the player to organically figure things out. If you over-systematize everything it can pull the player out of the experience.
Also, I am...90% certain that the dryad acorns were droppable at any point because I know for certain that I've stuffed them into a bag of holding before. You're thinking of things like the portal key in spellhold, stuff that was absolutely critical to advancing through an area where backtracking was not an option. Locking familiars to a specific slot was pretty annoying though, I'll give you that.
I play the original version exclusively and have since launch. I'm pretty confident in my knowledge of that game. There's only a handful of items that are locked into an inventory slot. It's very much the exception.
While I can sympathize with your frustrations regarding inventory management, I still say that disguising the distinction between critical quest items and generic vendor trash has a place within good game design, but only if you design around it. I'm thinking specifically of my own experience with Planescape Torment in this regard, in which I got an item that was plot related and then swiftly relegated to a bauble of no importance after the corresponding plot advancement. Given how little narrative attention was paid to it from that point on I could have simply dropped or sold it. Because I'm a hoarder though, I kept it for the rest of the game and there was some pay off for that. However it was an active choice I had to make, rather than it simply being another item in some array of quest related trinkets that the game managed for me. It created an organic experience of "ah ha! I was right to hang onto this for the last 60 hours of gameplay even though it stopped being relevant 10 hours into the game." I wouldn't have had that pay off if I wasn't given the freedom to be frustrated by inventory management and the opportunity to throw away a perfectly good quest item. It made the use of it so much later in the game feel so much more meaningful because it was rewarding player agency.
There's a lot of bad game design out there and bad game design will ruin any system, but don't mistake bad game design for bad system design. There's overlap, but they aren't actually synonymous in my opinion.
Pretty sure you ranted about this one already a number of months ago as well.
I generally agree though, some games do tend to handle it weirdly, where either the quest items take up arbitrary space in the main inventory menu and/or there's a risk of accidentally selling them.
Similarly, I'm not always a fan of things like crafting materials being dumped into a main inventory section either. Unless they can also be used as repair tools for equipment, they're not something you're usually going to need to interact with until you're actively crafting stuff. (Survival games may be an exception here however)
guild wars 2 is particularly bad with this. if you actually want to collect materials for improved gear, you will spend more time doing inventory management than you will playing the game.
Gear caps out pretty fucking quick in GW2, or it did back when I still played. I had full sets of ascended gear for my warrior and I barely ever set foot outside of World vs World.
The acorns one was particularly silly, you had to be incredibly dumb to not realize those are quest items but it was suppose to help players not accidentally sell a quest item. If the game is long maybe you forget about it and sell them? But again, the art was unique enough to make you remember not to sell them. Overall it was not a bad inventory, it limited both inventory space (although not enough in my opinion) and had a weight limit.
For me, the worse inventory is the one from BG3 and DOS2 - basically the same thing, to much to filter thru and most of it was junk that it was boring to even sell.
My ideal inventory would be divided on categories but also have an inventory space limit in addition to a weight limit. A tab for gems and rings, one for alchemy, one for quest items and one for general inventory. Add a key ring as well. They can even translate in specific bags on your character model, pouches, scroll case, big backpack. The game should allow you to carry 100 rings but not 3 suits of armor and no one should just pick everything up.
Somewhat related, I dislike having color codes for items, it feels immersion breaking at one point. You have grey, green, blue, purple and golden - basically what wow did . It is a small nitpick but if the actual itemization made sense instead of double digit and even triple digit stats you don't need to have color coding. BG2 did that great you had the +x and a flavor test that made it unique and part of the world.
Another nitpick, is random drops. I prefer it when the armor, weapons and spells are meaningful, like in Witcher 2 or Gothic 2. It helps reduce clutter when you don't have randomly generated generic items, it also make the world more immersive. Compared to Oblivion or Skyrim where you had random thugs with parts of Daedric armor.
DOS2 inventory sucking is a fact. I never could figure anything out from that screen.
As far as I'm concerned it has a place solely in games where inventory management is heavily emphasized like say, System Shock. Or survival games to some extent.
Otherwise it's just lazy. Just make picking it up toggle the next step in the quest and be done.
Play Zork.
The idea of "quest items" as a separate category is a compromise to minimize the chances of the player entering a fail or lockout state.
More generally the things players find "annoying" are the ones that most create immersion. Because those are the ones that most closely tie the gameplay to an analogue of real world activity. Organizing, traveling, looking for hard to find objects, etc.
The trick is to optimize the frustration so that the player notices but isn't overcome by it. If the player doesn't complain then the experience isn't memorable. If he quits then it was too much. But if the players complain and still keep playing, that is where immersion happens.
This strikes me as a case of "traditions are answers to problems we no longer remember.*
A great example of a game that uses a completely modern UI is Horizon Zero Dawn where there are no inconveniences or nods to older style gameplay (except a minor use of random drops) but the game is utterly forgettable.
Amusingly, WoW figured it out a while ago.
Most quest items aren't even kept in your bag, they just exist on their own limbo. Ones that need to be used are but can be used directly from the quest list itself and then its removed from your bag when the quest is done anyway, meaning its position in your bag is meaningless.
Heck even in Vanilla they made a separate keyring bag just to keep keys in because those were intended to be quest items you needed indefinitely.
Also, OoT is a bad example of the problem unless you are making that exact type of adventure game instead of an RPG. Because all the "quest items" are just plot coupons with no actual "use" in game. You could replace the screen with just a white checklist and accomplish the same function. Especially as once the main quest items are acquired, they will cease to matter whatsoever anyway, outside of narratively. They only serve as a check that you've finished a temple, as every single one is tied to a boss kill sans the freebie Light one. I'd say its redundant in fact to have them at all.
In fact, the original N64 version's most famous flaw was directly designed to a failure of its inventory system. Which was the constant need to pause and equip the Iron Boots, which the long lag each time making it feel like forever. This was fixed in the 3DS version, but the whole reason the flaw existed was the design choice to separate "items" from "equipment" originally leaving your equipment unable to be assigned to the C buttons.
Those are nitpicky complains about the game of course (except the Iron Boot one), but its a nitpicky topic. And I play an OoT randomizer like once a month so I know an autistic amount about the game.
Speaking of OoT rando, it does have one "undroppable" quest item: Ruto's letter, taking up a bottle. It's not actually relevant in vanilla, being so close to where you turn it in, but it might be in rando, since you can theoretically find it without access to King Zora.
Even then, probably not all that relevant. I don't remember if you can get blue bottle off of it, but if you can, then that's 90% of the use of a bottle right there.
It does in fact sit unusable until you can access King Zora with either Zelda's Lullaby or the Scale.
Fortunately, the only hard requirements for a bottle are also behind King Zora. Being the fish for Jabu and the Blue Fire, and I think a single or double use in Ganon's Castle if you have to do the Water Trial (which by that point if you don't have a bottle you are really unlucky). The only other checks the bottle opens up is the bugs in bean patches for 9 additional Skultula checks, which is a setting most people don't play with anyway.
I did forget the single "usuable" quest item slot that is designated for the Chicken/Letter, but that only exists to show off the day/night cycle and both are one use anyway.
Neverwinter Online put some quest items in your inventory, and others not. You could never actually do anything with the ones in your inventory either, and some of them were actually discardable but you could just farm more easily enough.
I can't figure out why Cryptic did things this way; my guess is one intern wanted inventory quest items and another intern didn't, or they have a high designer turnover rate.
I don't recall if the acorns were originally undroppable, and I can definitely confirm they're droppable now. With only a handful of exceptions, all items in Baldur's Gate are droppable. Most important items (quest or crafting) are protected with a critical item flag, which prevents them from being despawned under normal circumstances. Items that lack the droppable flag are companion-specific equipment (Edwin's necklace or Boo) and effects implemented as items, like "unarmed" attacks and various enemy immunities.
This is really just a problem for Bethesda, whose UI designer should be flogged. In fact, as of Oblivion, their quest items are weightless. Any shown weight for undroppable items is just for show, it doesn't actually affect you (and in fact, is sometimes exploitable), at least until the quest is cleared. Aside from the UI, their problem is that quest stages often don't get set properly, so (still weightless) items can remain in your inventory as clutter. Occasionally you even have spawned but unimplemented quest items, like ink in Fallout 3.
Quest items should be sortable or highlightable, but they're not always entirely separate and unusable. A unique sword or a mundane ingredient can both be quest items, as can some random one-purpose gadget, usually in the same game. The problem is devs are just fucking lazy, so any series with a "misc" or "other" item category will inevitably turn it into the junk drawer.
They were such a pain in Bethesda games as they all had an encumbered system that in Fallout was worse as you moved like a snail but at least in Skyrim you had a horse to mitigate movement penalty.
Combine that with items you need but have weight and it becomes a chore of inventory management, you can tell they gave up in Fallout 4 by giving you a perk to move as normal even over encumbered by draining stamina and being able to fast travel regardless.
In Skyrim and FO3-4 quest items have zero weight unless you have a mod that changes that. That might have even been the case in Oblivion, but it's been nearly 2 decades since I played that.
I couldn't remember as I have a horrible time with inventory in those games
It got even WORSE in F4 as suddenly EVERYTHING was useful for crafting and building so you became a horder!
Like needing plates for ceramic for a fucking nuclear reactor or something!
Abstraction vs. Simulation
Game Play vs Verisimilitude.
If the objects are not represented anywhere, they might as well not exist. Why pickup a McGruffin that goes into mallet space? It might as well be a switch or a password at that point. Every time an object comes from nowhere the game becomes a little more abstracted, and a little less immersive.
This is not to say abstracted games can be fun. Look at Pong and Tetris. But if you are trying to build a world where things make sense like reality, and not playing things for comedy like the N64 rpgs, then abstracting items away is not a good solution. The better solution is to make the items unnecessary and provide a different justification for the path, or just accept that there will be McGruffins in the players inventory.
<Detective Gumshoe's ID Card crumpled up and thrown away.>
Gumshoe: "Hey! Why'd you do that? I still need it!".
Pheonix Wright had the right way of going about key items. Remove them from the inventory when no longer relevant: New set of items each case, and if a case goes long, erase them mid-case. Even if doing so from a realism perspective is dumb or mean, just lampshade it and move on.
I don't like quest items that are only usable for the quest, generally speaking. If I get the Achilles Sword in SF2, I can use it to recruit a character, kill a boss, or just... use it as a sword. Flash in Pokemon lights up the caves, but it's also a pretty good battle move. Don't make the items useless.
Because it means you as the player have to figure shit out and sometimes what you thought was just junk ends up being useful fi the game designer is clever enough to build the possibility for the player to organically figure things out. If you over-systematize everything it can pull the player out of the experience.
Also, I am...90% certain that the dryad acorns were droppable at any point because I know for certain that I've stuffed them into a bag of holding before. You're thinking of things like the portal key in spellhold, stuff that was absolutely critical to advancing through an area where backtracking was not an option. Locking familiars to a specific slot was pretty annoying though, I'll give you that.
I play the original version exclusively and have since launch. I'm pretty confident in my knowledge of that game. There's only a handful of items that are locked into an inventory slot. It's very much the exception.
While I can sympathize with your frustrations regarding inventory management, I still say that disguising the distinction between critical quest items and generic vendor trash has a place within good game design, but only if you design around it. I'm thinking specifically of my own experience with Planescape Torment in this regard, in which I got an item that was plot related and then swiftly relegated to a bauble of no importance after the corresponding plot advancement. Given how little narrative attention was paid to it from that point on I could have simply dropped or sold it. Because I'm a hoarder though, I kept it for the rest of the game and there was some pay off for that. However it was an active choice I had to make, rather than it simply being another item in some array of quest related trinkets that the game managed for me. It created an organic experience of "ah ha! I was right to hang onto this for the last 60 hours of gameplay even though it stopped being relevant 10 hours into the game." I wouldn't have had that pay off if I wasn't given the freedom to be frustrated by inventory management and the opportunity to throw away a perfectly good quest item. It made the use of it so much later in the game feel so much more meaningful because it was rewarding player agency.
There's a lot of bad game design out there and bad game design will ruin any system, but don't mistake bad game design for bad system design. There's overlap, but they aren't actually synonymous in my opinion.
This reminds me of adventure game inventory.
Pretty sure you ranted about this one already a number of months ago as well.
I generally agree though, some games do tend to handle it weirdly, where either the quest items take up arbitrary space in the main inventory menu and/or there's a risk of accidentally selling them.
Similarly, I'm not always a fan of things like crafting materials being dumped into a main inventory section either. Unless they can also be used as repair tools for equipment, they're not something you're usually going to need to interact with until you're actively crafting stuff. (Survival games may be an exception here however)
guild wars 2 is particularly bad with this. if you actually want to collect materials for improved gear, you will spend more time doing inventory management than you will playing the game.
Gear caps out pretty fucking quick in GW2, or it did back when I still played. I had full sets of ascended gear for my warrior and I barely ever set foot outside of World vs World.