On the Procurement, Amassment, Management, and Eventual Exchange of Tools Necessary for Continued Survival in a Hostile Environment

or On Limited Storage Space in Video Games.

Or, more specifically, that I hate it. I admit, I'm something of pack rat. I hate throwing things out. I like keeping old things, even if I use them infrequently, or in case of decorative items, not at all. But I do not understand at all the purpose of having a limited storage space at all in video games, particularly loot driven games, like Diablo, Torchlight, Borderlands or Dungeon Defenders.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the latter three games (my memories of Diablo are a bit fuzzy, but I'm fairly certain I enjoyed it as well.), it's just that the storage limit always annoyed the hell outta me. I hated throwing away the one piece of good armor or weapon that I used for 5 levels because I needed more space to store other, alternate pieces of equipment that were statistically better, or awesome items that you always manage to get for the other classes and want to pass on to another one of your characters or a friend. In fact, the first mod I installed for Torchlight was one that gave me more chests to use as storage. I did the same thing for STALKER because I got tired of lugging weapons back to the shop to sell. And don't tell me that I should've just "dealt with it, it's apart of the the game" because I did. I before I added those chests and increased the weight limit I sold that piece of gear, and for an hour I ran weapons back to the dealer. I did the same thing in Human Revolution, running guns back to the dealer instead of picking them up for 2-3 pieces of ammo.

So the question is why this is necessary in the first place? What prompted them to put limits on storage space to begin with? The technical difficulties in  the actual coding of inventory in general remains mostly speculation as I have no real programming experience and the problems inherent in item storage coding are a mystery to me. However, with various games storing items by weight (Oblivion, STALKER, etc) it seems as if it isn't technically infeasible to implement a basically infinite capacity in storage. For example, Demon's Souls storage seems basically unlimited (not to mention nicely sorted). It does limit what you can carry with you (by weight), but that isn't what important here. Perhaps it's because it isn't a loot driven game? The same annoyance pops up in various MMOs: You only have so much inventory space but seems especially egregious when your crafting items, various tickets you need to enter dungeons, and vendor trash all share the same low number of available slots. It's a rather annoying money grab in these "free" MMOs.

I can't think of a good reason for it, at all. A reason for a limited available inventory, perhaps, but nothing comes to mind when I try and find a rationale for limiting storage. It just seems to stem from habit and convention: Diablo did it this way, so we're going follow it. But even then, people made mule characters to store their items. What's the point in continuing this if it doesn't enhance the experience? Does anyone actually like chucking away their items, or being unable to pick up loot when they're full? Is it just for pacing? Did they find that people would usually pick up around X items in Y time frame and set the inventory limit on a rough sketch of that so people would go back to town to hock their stuff? Is (in multiplayer games) to stop people from automatically running around looting everything? These are still just reasons for a limited available inventory, and try as I might, nothing comes up for why you would ever implement limited storage at all (not counting technical problems in implementation.). Am I just missing something that's enjoyable about this process?

This post in particular is mostly from playing Dungeon Defenders and their 10 page shared Item Box space (No mules allowed!). If the supposed 24 Characters maximum is attained, each individual character will have a mere 5 Slots for alternative gear, and no room for extra pets. I suppose they're counting on people never reaching that many characters, like the ol' Conga Line of Doom for the Magic 2010 change. But it seems rather strange, because once you fully upgrade an item you get to name it and selling a loyal friend you've named just seems like a terrible thing to implement and promote.