So, some people seem to like replaying the game and gathering complete sets, legendary items, relics, etc. And yet the player’s stash is always many hundreds of times smaller than the full set of collectible items. So my question is: Why is this?
I’ve just set up GDStash, but it’s strange to me why this has to be a third-party tool when it seems to be such a fundamental part of the ARPG experience. Also, looking at ARPGs in general it seems that every successful game has at least one full-featured stash manager maintained by a third party.
So what is the concept behind the limited stash? Is there any reason why this continues to be a thing in these types of games?
The main point behind limited stash space, is because the Devs maintain (and i agree tbh) the idea that sorting your inventory should come secondary to actually playing the game.
That being said, GD offers more stash out of the box than any other ARPG, (that i am aware of) without having to pay irl money or even mod.
Anyways, with the expansion you will be getting increased stash space, so fear not.
For sure, I agree that GD is very generous with inventory space. Plus they support modding and they even plan to expand storage in the future, so my question isn’t about this game in particular.
The question is why the whole ARPG genre gives players all these super-rare items to collect and then prevents us from keeping them. GDStash is perfect for me, in that I can collect a legendary item I don’t necessarily need and then just fire it off into my collection so that it can be counted. There’s a huge positive feedback to having ALL THE THINGS, and it’s weird to me that this genre relies on third-party tools to achieve this.
My idea would be that you could discard (or sell) any “prefix-item-suffix” item into some “vault”. Then you could go to the “vault” later and pay coins to create a new item of that type. Nothing to do with inventory management. Everything to do with putting ALL THE THINGS in that vault. If a game had that mechanic then I would play it forever.
I understand that for sure, and i can agree with some of the suggestions you are making.
I think in recent years, with PoE (mtx’s) and D3 (with its auction house) are more or less about companies making $ rather than allowing players to have the space they need or even giving the players a choice to use a utility that gives them more space.
I guess in a sense, its all about in game economy with some ARPGs. Blizzard, GGG, they want people to sell/ trade items. Rather than hording items or storing them in a vault, it kind of forces players to sell/trade, which in my opinion “artificially” adds to the game play but, that could be better for those companies.
Its really a hard topic to discuss without input from the Devs of all the Arpg’s out there, unfortunately, but i do get what you are saying.
I remember that the developers of Hellgate: London had a plan to just straight-up sell stash space for money. The game tanked, and fortunately the practice never caught on, but stash space remains a kind of weird anachronism that the genre never seems quite able to either explain or do away with.
I guess I can put the question straight to the developers: Do you think that having a limited stash helps Grim Dawn or its core “loot loop” in some way? Does it undercut the flow of the game to have an unlimited stash?
Fun is subjective. What is fun for you might not be for others.
There are player who like the idea of limited space for storage items, so they are forced to decide what item to store and what item to drop. In this way the items become more valuable than have infinite stash.
So, if you like infinite stash you can use it with mods and have fun. If a player doesnt want infinite stash (s)he doesnt use mods and (s)he has fun.
But if you have in vanilla inifite stash, those players who dont like infite stash will not have fun.
Absolutely. You’re mentioning “fun”, and that’s exactly what I’m trying to nail down. For me personally, there’s no downside to that bottomless stash. But for other players there seems to be some benefit to the “keep vs. discard” decision-making process.
So my question is: How does that process make the game more fun? What gets lost when you have the option of keeping everything in an ARPG? I personally find the choice exhausting and I get anxious when I have to make those decisions.
BTW, I’m quite happy with my GDStash and I’m not advocating for any change. I just want to better understand how other people enjoy ARPGs.
Very simple, in my case I’m a horder and if I have vast amount of space then I’ll keep all sorts of bits that really aren’t going to be used, but I keep them “just in case”.
The it gets to the point where I’ve just got far too much and I spend more time stuck in my stash wondering why the hell I’m keeping xyz, or where is so and so, only to find that it’s not quite got the stats I remember, than I spend playing and it finally gets to the point where even the thought of having to go through all the “shite” I’ve accumulated actually puts me off even playing the game.
Simple put the stash stops being fun and starts being hard work. Hope this helps, but just my personal experience
Edit… Just thinking and I haven’t even used the stash for the last few months, all my chars are self found so there’s nothing really to keep that I cannot carry on me.
That’s interesting to me, because I just abandoned a new build for a similar reason. I had all the possible gear, but picking the best gear for my new character turned out to be so complicated that instead of figuring it out, I gave up and just started replaying my existing character on a higher difficulty.
So the “infinite stash” is rewarding but also overwhelming. What about the crafting mechanism in the game? If you could sell epic/legendary items to the blacksmith and then forge instances of those items later, how would it affect gameplay? Would anything be lost?
For me it would remove the randomness of each char, instead of having what drops and never quite knowing what it is, it’s replaced by at level x I craft xyz then at level w I then upgrade to item ZXYW. It’s all sort of known and lacks the pleasure of “Oh…what’s this that’s just dropped”
Edit… Or the hope that on one char I might get the same sort of item that a different char had. I guess it’s a case of I prefer the unknown of what drops to the supermarket approach of buy what you want.
