Encumbrance is always annoying in games. Nothing like the stupid reality of gravity to make a game unfun. We understand that it adds an element of strategy as the player must carefully consider what to carryon adventures, and that it feels a bit silly if you can carry twenty full suits of armor, a feast fit for a banquet hall, and more herbs than a medicinal marijuana facility, but at the same time, if you really want to use an encumbrance system, at least make it reasonable. We couldn’t count how many times we were deep in a dungeon, discovered some amazing piece of armor, picked it up, and suddenly couldn’t move. Then we had to shower pots, pans, and cheese wheels like a shoplifter at Costco.
Above: He may look all fancy-pants in that armor, until he realizes he can’t move
At the other end of the scale, Oblivion also lets you craft spells that make encumbrance meaningless. So what’s the point of even having it? Either don’t put it in there at all, or make the standard encumbrance more reasonable, and don’t let the player circumvent it. Hell, even Demon’s Souls, one of the hardest damn games ever made, had a more forgiving encumbrance system than Oblivion.
