“Still got one HP left!”

Yea going after a real “classics” here, Hitpoints.

The big problem isn't that Hitpoints system themselves are useless or outdated, by far not, there are many games that still do great with the classic HP systems. The problem comes in when games themselves get more complex but still use a “HP only” system.

Of course this primarily comes up in terms of combat. You can easily empty half a magazine of ammo into an opponent but somehow they won't drop or even twitch at it. Stab and slash someone several times with a sword and they won't even blink.

One issue I often run into in games like STALKER and FarCry is that hand grenades are nearly useless. You either capture someone in the “instant kill” area OR they just take some damage but are otherwise unimpeded to still act as if nothing happened.

And on the opposite end of the spectrum, while sometimes hilarious, you get absolutely stupid kills. Got an opponent down to 1 HP, he's still in full fighting condition and kill him by hitting his knee with an empty Styrofoam cup.

Now a solution could be damage effects that simply tie into how many Hps are left. It's done partly in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, enemies will walk slower or limp if they are seriously wounded. You could easily set points at which enemies show damage effects, 50% damage for unable to run, 75% damage for limping and so on.

But that leads into another big problem, enemies that have a ridicules amount of HP. My often mentioned example of an overpowered Mountain Lion in Oblivion is one of the worst case scenarios. Here it would have literally taken 200 arrows, all hits, to knock it down to anywhere near a kill, so even if it did show injure effects it wouldn't have brought me much.

And also one thing it all comes down to. Enemies being able to take a ridiculously powerful attack without any harm. RPG to the chest, nothing. Several machinegun rounds to the head, barely flinching. Of course in some cases it might be explained, but if said enemies did not wear any protection and it still happens you know you've got a problem.

So this leads back to an old favorite, Locational Damage and Damage Effects.

While quite common, at least in part, in most shooters it's still something many people seem to dislike, especially in the role playing dominated side (despite there being RPGs with locational damage systems).

Having a very simple LD/DE system would already help in many cases. The grenade example, enemies hit in the “injure” zone have multiple injures all over their body from shrapnel and the shockwave impeding their abilities to act. Hell even “ruptured ear drums” could be simulated by their aim being severely off or them having problems keeping track of you. The mountain lion example, an arrow stuck in it's legs and it would only limp.

Now I did say that LD is in many cases “partly” done in modern shooters. A problem there being that it is often nothing more than a damage modifier and an “instant kill” zone (head shots). You still don't have enemies reacting to injures or pain. Instead of breaking down on the ground or limping severely from a hit in the thigh they instead keep running, the only difference being that repeatedly hitting the leg takes 20 rounds instead of 10 in the chest.

Think of it like this, you have an enemy standing behind and obstacle and only the legs are in view. In most games you waste a magazine of ammo blowing away at the legs until he's dead. But think of the same scenario, you shoot the legs with a short burst, enemy drops down and you can shoot him in the chest now that he's exposed. Much more “efficient” and also “tactical”.

However it must be said again that this is by far not something for every game. Zelda would not require a LD system (though it does have enemies only vulnerable in certain locations), but first person RPGs, especially non linear ones, could profit from it as they are essentially action and player dependent.

Otherwise I would still encourage at least having health tied damage effects. For a linear style game those can already add more feeling for combat instead of grinding your opponents down with them still being able to fight even close to death.

To finish on a little side note on grenades again, how many games are there where explosions can actually knock enemies off their feet? No, not dead, just thrown to the ground.

I personally can't really think of any, so this may also be a point why in many games they are rendered useless. Though you may correct me on that as I lack the overview a bit.

"I'm hungry for action... and food"

Yea, this is a slightly more in depth look at something that was included in a previous topic, the realism one to be precise.
Here I wanted to take a slightly deeper look at how food and hunger is often handled in games which, since this is at critical flaw, is oftentimes done poorly.


Food as items has been in many games before, usually it functions as healing items like in the Castlevania series or Minecraft before the 1.8 update.
But quite a few have gone off of using it as an instant health item mainly because it seemed “unrealistic” to them, so in its place healing items like med kits of potions are used. However what to do with all the food items now. Quite a few developers thought “Hey, lets just have eating be a requirement” and with that sadly screwed it up as they didn't think it through.

For one their required eating system doesn't add anything, it actually just takes something away. You don't eat and after a set time suddenly get a “you're hungry” and get instantly punished for not eating anything (which reminds me, instant punishments will likely be a future topic). Mostly this is done in health draining, your running speed going down or you can't run at all, your stats being drained etc.
While those methods are OK in themselves they are often too severe and too instant. In real life you don't suddenly lose your skills just because you haven't had dinner yet. Also the hard set times between the intervals of needing food are not well done as well, it's actually not required to eat food 3 times every day, hell in the past you could have been lucky to get food ONCE a day.

So in short, many times the added hunger system is simply a punishment but doesn't offer anything back.


Now however there are a few cases where the food and hunger system was done much, MUCH better.

As I mentioned before, the food system in Minecraft 1.8+ is probably one of the best I have ever seen implemented in a game yet.

• Firstly, eating food is the main way to regenerate health. It completely regenerates over time if you are well fed, and other ways of healing become available later in the game

• Second, the most recently eaten food item satiates you a bit, preventing the food meter from decreasing for a short while, practically doubling it's own food value.

• Third, the times between requiring food are not hard set, it depends on the actions you took between them, you can check This Page Of The Minecraft Wiki for details how the depletion varies due to which actions.

• Fourth, you can get a good supply of food from almost every animal, mushrooms, wheat and even an emergency item (rotten flesh) to keep you nourished.

• Lastly, while there are punishments for not being nourished enough they only manifest at the very end of food meter depletion (with the exception of health regeneration which happens at the 80% mark). You can only not sprint anymore when you're down to 30% and health loss only happens at full depletion (which is only directly lethal in the hardest difficulty).

Now one criticism of this new system was that it completely replaced the “getting health instantly” one there was before and if you're in a tight spot at times that can be annoying, but now the implementation of the potion system allowed an instant health item again. While the necessary ingredients are harder to obtain it does allow to have both systems the same time now.


Aside game developers themselves the mindset of having bad hunger systems sadly also is spread among game modders. How many times have there been “requirement to eat” (eat or drop dead) mods that do exactly what described, only punish you for not eating at hard set intervals with too severe punishments? That's sadly the reason why I almost never use such mods.

However I have been picking up S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl again a few days ago after reading of the “Complete 2009” mod and I can only say it's awesome. Not only does it include graphics updates, quest fixes, many error fixes, better weapons handling among a few things, it also changes the food requirement the game previously had slightly to include a very slow but still handy health regeneration when you're not hungry and only tones it down slowly as your hunger worsens.
A small fix I would personally include would be to make the need for food slow down while using the sleeping bag (another addition of the mod) so when you went to sleep well fed you're only slightly hungry when waking up again instead of going into severe hunger. But even with that it still does a far better job than many other games and game mods presented.


In conclusion, Food and Hunger system like any realism aspect of games need to be very thought through before implementation, simple addition to the game without working out the exact workings of bonus and punishment only add to a frustration factor instead of a gameplay improvement. Also things like supply should be very thought through, if you'd need to eat in hard set intervals but food drops are only at very limited locations it will only turn into a race against a never stopping clock.
Once again it is not necessary for all games, only the ones that could actually profit from this system, largely the open world sandbox variants I'd say.


Also I want to give my endorsement to the “Stalker complete 2009” mod since it gives that game a great deal of replay value. You can find the developers blog with further information, download link and versions for “Call of Pripyat” and “Clear Sky” here:
Stalker Complete 2009 Blog

“Set difficulty to unfair”

Games can be hard... very hard at times.And that's actually quite fine, in fact there are tons of people who love difficult games and there are many difficult games that are fun.

However a big problem is how this difficulty is achieved as in most cases it simply changes how unfair the game is towards you.

How is the difficulty in most games achieved?

Oftentimes it changes how much damage you do and how much damage enemies can take and dish out. In many it will change enemy spawns simply flooding you with opponents.

While those things make it more difficult I'd say it's often a “fake difficulty” as it mostly just makes the game unfair.

However there are examples of games that change difficulty in an interesting way.

Crysis for example, while also changing how much damage you can take (which still isn't a huge change as you can't take a lot to begin with) mostly changes the enemies AI. On lower difficulties they are not the smartest oftentimes just rushing you and easily tricked by your stealth mode.

On higher difficulty they behave much more tactical flanking your position and, when they observe you going invisible, will cover the area in machine gun fire and chuck grenades at your last seen direction.

Additionally your control in vehicles changes slight, on easy you can control a vehicle and its turret the same time but on higher you have to switch between them.

It pretty much demands you to act much more tactical as your opponents do so too. While you do take more damage on higher ones it still matters what and where you were hit and your opponents can't suddenly survive a head shot but won't go down easily from unaimed shots.

Also one I should mention is a Minecraft challenge map called “Super Hostile – Legendary” which was given the justified label of “Rom hack hard”. But still I'd say it's pretty much never “unfair” towards you despite being loaded with traps, enemy spawners and simple hair pulling hard areas (not to mention that it's recommended to play it on hardest difficulty for extra spice).

And why? Because it's Minecraft, you are the BOSS and in control. Pretty much any time you fail it was not because the game was unfair to you, it was because you didn't utilize the game right.

That is a part most of the difficult games miss, giving you actual CONTROL over the situation you're in.

Now on the issue of enemies dealing more damage many would likely say “it is more realistic as you can easily die in real life too due to injures”. However if an enemy can kill you with two hits to the knee while you can give them several shots in the head and chest and they don't even flinch the realism aspect is pretty void.

A point counting into this also is enemies that have infinite projectiles. An archer blocking your path can shoot hundreds of arrows your way despite only having a single quiver, the solutions often used are either nerfing the arrows so you can soak up a few hits or “you just have to be tough”. But again neither of those offers a real challenge, it simply balances the game unfair against you or makes the threat only exist when there's several archers in unreachable locations.

How much simpler could it be if that archer simply had a limited amount of arrows, he has 20 shots, you can evade him till he runs out and then has to confront you up close. Not only can the arrows in this case deal more realistic damage as there isn't an infinite arrow factory pumping them out, it also allows you the before mentioned control over the situation.

Improbable aiming skills of opponents should get a small side mention here too... don't make them all ace snipers, that simple.

And actually for a strange reason many people actually seem to want unfair/fake difficulty over actual challenge.

Especially in RPGs this seems to be the case. This is mainly tied into the whole leveling aspect, you start off extremely weak and die easily from a few hits while opponents take tons of hits to kill and with rising level this slowly shifts to your benefit, while you go from plankton to godlike.

To me this more seems like it starts out unfair and slowly you get to “cheat” your way around the unfairness rather than offering actual challenge. However I myself think that this is connected into the “fear” of realism which I covered before.

Personally I'd like to see more realism aspects brought into RPGs as well though simply as they can offer REAL challenge. For example locational damage, leveling and improvement can still help you along. A vicious guard dog will still offer the same challenge to you whether being on level 5 or 50, if it tears your throat out you're dead. However on level 50 you most likely have more skills of evading its attacks, defending yourself and better gear to protect yourself.

Like this enemies simply would not need artificial buffs and powerups simply to keep you challenged, the “low level” ones can still do that but you are simply better equipped to deal with it.

All in all I'd say the classic shifting damage system is not necessarily wrong but it does leave you somewhat “cheated”. There are a few better ways to deal with difficulty such as changes in AI and how some game mechanics function.

I think it could best be said as difficulty making opponents and environment behave more realistic but not into unreasonable or implausible levels. Like from missing very often to being reasonable shots that barely miss at close quarters but not to being able to snipe-kill you while running from an odd angle. Or from being killed by a single hit anywhere to requiring chest or head shots for reliable kills but not take a full magazine of machine gun fire to the chest and still stand.

Or to give a non shooter heavy example, an enemy in a jump n run game that is easy to hit on easy and can actually dodge you on higher difficulties but not to a degree that it can almost teleport out of any corner you push it in.

“Realism... not really”

NOTE:

This topic concerns GAMEPLAY realism, not GRAPHICAL realism.

Before reading further I'd like to play a game of some sort, or rather a little experiment. From just reading the topic title and not any further please make a note of what your opinion is on gameplay realism and maybe write it down in a text file. Now when you're done with that save it and read on, you'll maybe see why I wanted to try that.

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So onto the topic, gameplay realism, or rather, the common misconceptions, mistakes, errors and bad implementation of it which gave the concept a really bad name in the past and possible solutions to it.

Realism in gaming in itself is not a bad thing, actually it's a good thing in many genres or specific titles. However due to mostly bad choices and implementation it's now often associated with games that are not fun and frustrating.

So to maybe help clear up a few issues here are a few of my thoughts on the topic where improvements can be made or simply to clear up misconceptions.

Some of them I want to mention here are:

• Realism in context 
• Realism where it's usefully applicable
• Realism as gameplay mechanics 
• Realism done well

-Realism in context:

There often is the misconception of realism meaning “removing everything that is not like in real life”. While this may apply to the closest definition of the word it is not what realism in video games means.

The true concept that should apply here is “Realism in context”, something that I personally refer to as “Believability”.

This means if something is a well established fact in a games setting, even if it's not possible in real life, is realistic in this setting and therefor “realistic in context”.

As an example, take a game setting that is very much like the real world but some people possess telekinetic powers. Within this setting telekinesis is realistic so seeing it used would be realistic and believable as well.

However suddenly having werewolfs appear when it's otherwise based on the real world would not be realistic in both senses, it is not something that is in real life and it would be something that is not realistic within it's own context unless it was explained in some way.

This concept gets a bit more blurred in game worlds that feature magic but it can still apply.

Even in a game setting with magic that can raise gigantic demons there are things that are not believable.

An average human being decapitated and surviving it for example, unless there was a very good explanation for how this was possible it would neither be realistic nor believable.

Something that should be remembered though is that usually where a gap is left open it's not too far off to fill it with what you know from reality which can leave a feeling of wrongness if it doesn't match with real life experiences.

This is the important part about establishing what you want in your games setting.

-Realism where usefully applicable:

A common complaint about realism is how some games simply are not realistic and that is the fun about them.

Here the concept of “realism where usefully applicable” comes into play.

When asking for more realism it usually doesn't apply to every game and to every system in a game.

Nobody would argue that in “Super Mario Bros.” you only have a realistic jumping height, that “Tetris” should have blocks that are just a little to wide to fit a gap because realistically not all blocks could fit so perfectly or that you should have to go to the toilet every few hours in an action based FPS.

There simply are factors where realism should not apply which mainly depends on the game itself.

FPS games would often do well with a locational damage/effects system, jump n' runs don't. But the same time having your character go deaf from constant gunfire would not be a system you'd want in a FPS (at least not in the wide majority of titles).

Simply said, it depends on the game where, if and how realism should be applied.

And even in games that are usually low on the realism scale you can have semi-realistic systems, take “Super Mario 64” implementing fall damage that was not present in older titles.

-Realism as gameplay mechanics:

Another common misconception is simply putting it in to have it.

But it's rarely thought through how it could actually be tied into gameplay in a way that can actually add something to the experience and be useful.

An example I often like to mention is “Locational damage and effects” and “Arrows”.

Being able to injure or cripple limbs could very well be used to end fights in a game without having to kill your opponents, if they are no longer able to fight it's over.

This could be a very useful function in heavily character interaction based games, when you have to fight someone but the same time want information you can attempt to incapacitate that person and then ask questions.

Arrows would fit into this as well.

A common problem with arrows in video games is that they either do next to nothing and you require tons of arrows to bring down enemies (A thing I often refer to as “Toothpick Tossing”) or you have arrows that could by the damage they do bring down a brick wall (A “Wooden Nuke”).

But if you combine this with the before mentioned locational damage and effects system arrows don't need to be overpowered to be effective. While an arrow to the knee won't kill anyone it would prevent them from running making them an easier target or even unable to fight at all.

Similarly other mechanics could be added that create some realism and still have them tied into gameplay instead of simply “being there”.

Eating for example, instead of simply being necessary to do it could very well offer benefits to keep your character well fed that you don't have if you stay in a starved state which itself could have certain effects as well. However I don't want to get into too much detail about this here, this is just to give a few examples on this but I'm willing to give more and in greater detail if required.

-Realism done well:

This here really is a big point as it concerns both gamers and game developers equally.

A very common complaint coming up when discussing realism in games is “You'd get hit/shot once and you're dead”.

However this is not realistic but somehow this concept has seated itself very solidly.

This is where you have to stop and ask yourself “How can a realistic system be done well”.

Mentioning locational damage from before, realistically the only way to be killed instantly is by receiving sufficient damage to the brain or heart. All other injures could be potentially lethal but not instantly, wounds would need to bleed out to kill you or for suffocation you'd have to fully run out of oxygen in your blood stream (being strangled or suffocated long enough).

All those could be well simulated in games and have been in spades. “Call of Cthuhlu: Dark corners of the Earth” is a game I like to mention in this, it features a for it's time fairly detailed locational damage system for the main character and even features psyche effects when the character is under heavy stress which adds greatly to the atmosphere.

However a step down was the strict limitations to your medkit which gave it an too arbitrary limitation.

Other misconceptions include “If you don't eat/sleep regularly you suddenly drop dead/lose health till you die”.

Again it's neither fun nor realistic and could be done much better by 1. giving you more wiggle room between the initiation and before effects manifest and 2. make the effects more gradual instead of instant.

On the other end of the misconceptions of how systems would be realistic is taking small exceptions from reality in a still more realism based system.

With injures for example, in realty they would require weeks to heal, in game they could very well heal in a short time. This would be an acceptable exception from full realism.

A more recent example is how Minecraft handles healing and food in its latest versions which is pretty much one of the better food systems I have seen so far. You heal automatically as long as your “food bar” is about 80% full, when it drops below 30% you cant sprint anymore and you only lose health when it's completely depleted, plus the times between going hungry are sufficiently long and actions like sprinting, jumping and fighting drain it slightly faster.

So that is all I have on that topic for now.

Now you might ask yourself why I asked you to note down your thoughts on the topic before. The answer is, compare your thoughts on it before, then filter them through the points I mentioned here. Do you still feel the same way about the topic or were there a few misconceptions in your ideas about it?

In general you could say realism is not something the must be done, it's something that should be done where it's appropriate, in a WAY that actually adds to the game and it must be implemented well with exceptions where necessary.

"No control over control"

To get to the point right away, control settings.

Especially when PC gaming you usually set up your controls before you start a game, after all you usually have your preferred setups... too bad some games simply don't let you.

Yea, you get to set this and that but then it suddenly arbitrarily disallows you to set certain keys.

Now this might seem like a “that's a problem of the past, not the modern age gaming” issue, but actually no, it's more the opposite.

When I play older games I often find that you can freely bind your keys and mouse however you want. But more recent games seem to have the odd trend to have senseless restrictions, especially disallowing you to freely bind your mouse keys, which is annoying for me as I like to set jump to the middle mouse button.

I think the most infuriating example I encountered was “Tomb Raider Underworld”. Oh yea, there are other games that have even more restricted control settings. But this was especially bad because it disallowed you to set the mouse and some keyboard keys when the to previous games allowed you to do just that... the two previous games that ran on exactly the same engine, had almost exactly the same gameplay and same setups and controls... WHY!?!?

Seriously, why? That really makes no sense at all.

In fact the only possibility to change the controls freely was to hack the game... by importing a control registry file from Tomb Raider Legend that came out almost 3 years earlier. That only means that it would have been possible to have freely changeable controls just by changing a few lines of code. Which in turn means they must have locked the control setup deliberately... WHHYYY!?!?!?!?

OK, before I get too worked up about that one lets quickly tackle something else that fits into this.

Being able to set your controls, but then having secondary controls that are hard coded.

Example here, Fallout: New Vegas. I like the game but one thing that pissed me off personally is that you can't freely set the keys for “take all”, “abort”, “accept” and others for menus like the pipboy or conversations on your keyboard. They're all hard coded and can only be changed through INI hacking... if you're lucky, in all attempts I made it never worked. Which sucks since they are all left side bound for the WASD controls and I'm used to right side bound arrow keys controls.

Now this may seem minor but it is just annoying and something that wouldn't have to be if they simply added those few extra lines of code. I don't see how that would be an unreasonable task to ask for.

I really wonder why that is. Sometimes it just seems like they are malicious and say “either you play like WE intended or not at all”.

However a more serious one, and yes this might sound like I bash on consoles, is that they simply didn't care about individual setups because they designed the game with primarily a console release in mind. There they only have to program one control scheme and that's it. But for PC they actually have to write the extra code to let you bind keys freely. And despite many, many, MANY games in the past being able to do that it's apparently a too great task to assume it's doable.

Well that's all I have to say on that for now. I really don't get it, yea I don't program myself but is making freely bindable controls REALLY such a huge task? More so one to ask from professional game designers?

PS: I posted a request to have freely bindable controls on the EIDOS Forums after playing the TRU demo, the request was simply ignored.

"That's what I've said"

I bet many of you have been playing games that give you several different possibilities to answer to questions or generally make replies. If you're lucky they have the “good” and “bad” answer covered with the bad answer often mainly being there for shits and giggles.

Sometimes there are several answers ready for you to use which sometimes are more just for having more answers to chose from. But here's the point, are those choices actually worth something?

Usually you could throw away most of those answers as, no matter which you choose, the next line will be the same no matter what with one maybe netting you a “best possible” and one the “worst possible” result.

However while having such “evaluated” answers seems to go that way it has one big problem. You will never really reply in a way you would have actually answered but in the way that nets you the best “reward”.

My question pretty much is “How many games that give you multiple choice answers are there where, rather than the answer that seems to get you the best reward, you felt comfortable to answer in a way that most closely resembles what you would have actually said?”

I'm willing to bet that answer is either “none” or “very few”.

Now to not just point out a flaw but also offer some “solutions”.

A problem is that at max such games have a disposition system where people either like to dislike you which in itself is sadly far to shallow to really matter. However there already are games that offer a solution.

Dwarf Fortress for example has a system in which every NPC has his own personality which is simply is kept as a %value on several scales. In a game that uses a similar system if you'd reply to NPCs in a certain way it would affect each slightly different as it gets “filtered” through their personality values.

However how to then “express” that. As said the disposition system alone it too shallow.

My suggestion is to split up disposition into several values, my suggestions would be “Like”, “Trust”, “Fear” and “Respect”.

Each of those is measured individually and changes how NPCs will react and interact with you.

Someone who dislikes you but has high respect might not want to talk to you for too long but listens to what you have to say. Or a shopkeeper who likes you might give you a discount but not necessarily trust you enough to let you wander around their store unsupervised.

Now to tie this in with the main point, conversations where you chose answers that most closely reflect what you would have actually said.

Lets take the system I suggested and say someone lost a loved one and they either don't have believes in an afterlife or their believes aren't exactly pleasant. Telling them “they are in a better place now” might seem like a jolly happy answer but to them might sound more insulting causing them to to possibly lose “like” and “respect” but not necessarily change their trust and fear values.

Also the impact of your answer can depend on your previous disposition values, if they trusted you a lot you might even get away with telling them a lie while with very little trust it would take a lot to convince them of your point, maybe more than they are willing to listen to you.

This would demand a greater level of complexity but not necessarily even to the point many people think of. There would not necessarily have to be reply strings to every possible answer, they could still net you the same or similar replies, but the disposition alterations can be calculated automatically and alter NPC behaviors accordingly.

As for the answer choices you get, it could give you a selection of “primary” answers and a possibility to “vary” your mood and “intensity” of the reply. It would take more insight into that but I'm always welcome for discussions.

“Pause please”

A while ago I played the freeware game “Façade”, it's pretty much about you being the friend of a married couple and invited over but they're having problems in their relationship.

You can either stand back and watch as the situation between them develops but also jack in yourself and actually write things to say.

As far as I have seen the text parser of the game is actually pretty good and can recognize a lot of things you type, though I was kinda limited in my abilities due to, well, making a load of typos all the time :-p.

The basic idea of being able to actually type in what you want to say in real time on the spot and having the game recognize what you mean in context is great.

However from reading over that sentence you might have recognized the problem there. Typing – on the spot – real time, those things don't go together well and that is the “critical flaw” there, you can't pause and type in your sentence.

Now I see where the developers went, you can't pause a situation in reality to think about what to say. However there is a disconnect between reality and gaming, your way of input.

In reality you can instantly say whats going through your head, in game you are at best still limited to a keyboard (unless it has actual speech recognition but this is not present in this example) which is much slower and you have to watch out for typos that could make your sentence unrecognizable.

So a way around this would have been to allow the player to pause the game to input text which, while allowing for some exploiting, would also allow for the game to take a more dynamic flow of the situation as you simply don't need larger stretches between sentences anymore.

However this is not “point out the flaw of one game”, I want to tie this a bit into gaming in general.

You see one of my favorite topics is “realism in gaming” which, sadly, has a VERY bad reputation to it, mainly, in my opinion at least, due to “critical flaws”.

Just a few days ago I was talking to a friend about how inventory management in open world sandbox RPGs could be handled and he mentioned “it should be all in real time”. However, even with generally being more on the realism side, I had to reject that for a few reasons.

Now while it might sound more logical that time passes as you rummage through your backpack it would be rather annoying to do so, so my thought on it was that time is frozen as you rummage but then taking to use an item from the inventory takes time depending on how much stuff you have to dig through (I.e. how full your inventory is). Again the idea is simply the disconnect between real input and game input, if you have to scroll through a long list of items just to find yours it puts you into a disadvantage you wouldn't have in reality so a break from it in game is acceptable.

Personally I see the inventory screen more as your characters “thought process” of what to take rather than him actually digging around in it.

However I do realize there would be other ways to handle this.

For example the way it's done in later ultima games (I didn't play them myself but seen “The Spoony Ones” reviews) where inventory management is done in real time and all inventories have graphical representation of actually being crates and bags you carry with you.

This sure is one way it could be handled but again has limitations such as very small items being hard to click on with even a mouse, let alone a controller and that your inventory essentially turns 2D that way ignoring the hight of a container.

In some instances you might be tempted to do something in real time, but be aware of the disconnect between real world input and gaming input, putting a player by limited dexterity or possibility of in disadvantage may result in your attempt ending negatively.