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code DESIGNDOC at the link below. Welcome to the final test. The evil king of... evil has been waiting
for you. Prepare yourself. Oh wait, you did already. You’ve got dozens of full restores clanking
around in your backpack, and they’ve been there for the last 6 chapters. You’re an unstoppable healing machine. The king is dead, you win. Maybe you could’ve used some of those earlier. Save some stress. Thanks, item hoarding! Item hoarding shows up in tons of games. It doesn’t affect all players in the same
way, but for a large chunk of the audience, item hoarding can lead to anxiety, more difficult
games, and throw off the balance of the experience. But it’s not completely their fault. Whether it’s a trove of healing items in
an RPG, a 7 figure bank account in an open-world sandbox game, or a storage chest with 5 of
every crafting item in the world, hoarding is a player behavior driven by design decisions. Some of the decisions are accidental, some
are negligent, and some are even unfortunate side effects of other, good decisions. But we can fix this. The first step to solving a problem is to
recognize it, so let’s look at item hoarding behavior in games, and the techniques you
can use to reduce or eliminate the problem. But first, start your own hoard of international
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to get 85% off plus 3 extra months for free. Thanks, Surfshark! So what is hoarding anyway? In games, hoarding is the tendency to avoid
using a limited resource. Usually a player hoards because they’re
scared of running out of something and not having enough for some point in the future. Don’t use that full potion now, what if
you need it later? Sometime. The classic hoarding behaviors usually show
up in games with rare, consumable items, but that’s not the only type of game that has
to design around hoarding. It happens with any limited resource: MP bars,
currency, crafting items, it’s all hoardable. Not every player will become a hoarder, but
it’s a very common issue. A large chunk of your player base will be
prone to doing it, and it’s worth designing around. In a vacuum, there’s a logic in hoarding. Saving your best stuff for a rainy day makes
sense. But for games, hoarding can fall into a vicious
cycle. There’s never a clear line where NOW is
the right time to use it - to know that today is the rainy day. There’s always a chance you’ll need that
item EVEN MORE in the future, right? So you keep hoarding. Forever. The end result is the punchline of a joke. But luckily, there are tricks to reduce player
hoarding. Some are simple things that help almost any
game, and some are major overhauls - powerful tools that can cause knock-on effects, and
maybe even bigger problems. Let’s start with the base case: Final Fantasy’s inventories show what can
happen if you don’t deal with pro-hoarding design choices. We’ll focus on Final Fantasy IX as an example,
but the same issues crop up in almost every game in the series. First, the game’s inventory limits are very
high. You can store 99 copies of each unique consumable
item. That can promote hoarding, because without
a limit, or with a limit as high as this, there’s no pressure to use-it-or-lose-it. Second, the best items in Final Fantasy are
really strong. There are plenty of items like Elixirs that
bring you back to 100% for just the cost of one turn. It’s an incredibly efficient way to get
a party out of trouble. Well, not out of Trouble, but that’s another
video. *whispering* click the video. after this one. youtube told me to tell you. This promotes hoarding because the stronger
an item is, the more valuable it seems, and the worse it will feel to the player to have
to use it up, or to waste it. Third, the rarest items are pretty rare. You might go several hours between finding
elixirs. The harder it is to refill spent stock, the
more a player will want to cling to what they have. Fourth, game difficulty. Final Fantasy isn’t the most difficult game
series around. It’s not a cakewalk, but it’s usually
not that tough to get through any challenge with a little strategy, or just through grinding
levels. This can lead to hoarding because the easier
a game is, the less pressure players will have to use up their best assets. They’ll think they can probably tough it
out without using anything, and usually they’ll be right. Fifth, it’s not super clear in Final Fantasy
that players are getting close to the end of the game if it’s their first time playing. Sure, a player will probably get a SENSE that
they’re nearing the end, but it’s not clear how many more fights they’ll have
to get through. The more ambiguous a game is about how long
a player will need to keep their stock, the more players will just want to keep everything
they have for as long as they can. None of the decisions on their own are a big
deal, but they each nudge the game a little bit to encourage more hoarding. Combined they make almost a perfect storm
of... hoarding a lot of ethers and megalixirs and stuff. Luckily, for each of these problems there’s
a workaround. Hoarding is fundamentally about perceived
scarcity. So, to fix hoarding behavior, we need to find
ways of easing player anxiety over that scarcity. One approach can be to place a lower hard
cap on inventory space for single items. Shin Megami Tensei IV does a fancy version
of this. It puts a hard cap on individual items, but
the cap number changes based on how powerful an item is. You might be able to hold 30 small healing
items but only 5 Full Heals. If the player hits that cap pretty quickly,
it’ll encourage them to use up items quicker. Other games might be designed around a limited
space for your entire inventory. Classic Survival Horror games, like Resident
Evil 4, live for this. It’s great theming, and a smart design choice. You have to cram everything you want to carry
in your Attache case. Space is quite limited, and the bigger and
better items tend to take up a lot of space, so you only want to take what you need, and
use or drop the rest. Though, there is another design choice that
this approach makes you do. If the game was stingy about giving items,
but still had a small inventory cap, the pressure to use up your items and the pressure to hoard
would clash pretty hard, and would make the game more difficult, if not just more unpleasant
to play. Resident Evil does a great job throughout
the series of pacing out your resources. It’s pretty rare to have a moment where
you’re completely starved for ammo or healing items, as long as you’re not too reckless
with them. The series also gives a little leeway with
item boxes in safe rooms that let you store some of your excess to create your own little
personal resupply store. But that’s not the only approach. Some games push players to use up their inventory. Ammunition in DOOM 2016 comes and goes pretty
quickly, and the game uses that to encourage you to swap out weapons and change up your
tactics. Out of shotgun rounds? Well, you just picked up some plasma rifle
ammo, try that next. Out of that now? Go for the Rocket Launcher. DOOM usually gives back about an equal amount
of resources the player has spent, so even though the resources can look scarce, they
don’t feel that scarce in the moment. Other items like the Chainsaw will make enemies
drop even more ammo for your favorite weapons, so there really isn’t as much of a drive
to hoard ammo. OK, what if you tried to solve the problem
from another angle? What if we took the ‘consumable’ part
out of consumable resources? Why not instead make some of your most useful
items regenerating or rechargeable in some way? The Estus flask in the Dark Souls trilogy
is a cool way of implementing a limit to your health potions in a temporary way. You have a limited number of times that you
can heal with an Estus flask, but you can refill those charges whenever you rest at
a bonfire. The short term limit puts a better defined
bounds around how long you have to keep the resources around for. The game can be designed with those limits
in mind, and managing your Estus flask can become a skill a player can improve at over
time. It’s a natural path for useful in-game upgrades
too, and there are even buffs that let you slowly regenerate charges without a bonfire. Careful, though. A rechargeable resource can cause unintended
consequences. Look at Dishonored. Dishonored has a unique mana regeneration
system, but it also has traditional consumables. When you use a power in Dishonored, your mana
drains. But, if you wait about 5 seconds before casting
another spell, the mana you’ve spent will regenerate. If you blow through your mana pool by casting
a bunch of spells too quickly, you’ll lose the mana, and the only way to restore it is
with stock mana potions and random food pickups. The system is there to balance out your powers,
but in practice it discourages experimentation. Dishonored is great when you’re skillfully
swapping between your abilities and quickly chaining them together to pull off some insane
stunts, both in combat and especially while you’re sneaking around. But the mana regen system puts a damper on
trying to chain a bunch of spells together. It makes it valuable to slow the pace of your
magic use, since it conserves your mana, but that makes the game play at an awkward pace. Teleport, wait, teleport, wait, teleport,
wait…What could have been a cool, flashy sequence can easily turn into a highway with
a speed bump every 20 feet. There are a good number of options to restore
mana, but it’s still a finite resource and using it carelessly can still put you in tough
situations, especially while you’re learning the game, which is also when you’re just
figuring out the rhythm of both the stealth and the combat. It can push a player prone to hoarding into
playing much more slowly and conservatively, instead of at the speed where the game shines,
all because of resource hoarding. Dishonored shows that there are a bunch of
other forms hoarding can take besides that Final Fantasy style consumable item hoarding. For another, let’s look at crafting systems. They’re prone to hoarding, too, and it can
happen on a wider scale. Crafting games make a hoarder ask a slightly
different question. Instead of thinking ‘What if I need this
item later?’ on a few rare and powerful items, crafting games can make you wonder
that about practically every item in the game. What if there are some great crafting recipes
that require early-game materials? Or what if you need stuff from an area you
can’t get to anymore? How can you know whether ANY item is safe
to use, or safe to sell? You have to proactively design around the
problem. First, the more info you provide in-game,
the better. Knowing whether or not a component is rare
can help. Giving players the location and drop rate
also make it easier to know what’s important to keep. Instead of forcing players to look up the
info on an independent website, just put it in the game. Monster Hunter World is a step in the right
direction. Character progression is entirely tied to
your craftable equipment and items, so crafting those items is a big deal, and hoarding items
would be a bigger problem if the game was more opaque about how to do it. The Monster Field Guide is a solid in-game
resource that pinpoints where item drops are and how frequently they’ll happen. The game spreads out the different ways you
can gain resources, beyond just grinding out materials in the field. The Botanist, Palico Safari, the Argosy, and
the Elder Melder all let you buy, create, or passively farm for specific types of crafting
materials, which streamlines the process of making items. There’s a crafting wish list that keeps
track of specific materials you’re aiming to find. There’s also a little note on each item
that lets you know whether or not the item is meant to be sold. These little tools make it much clearer how
you can go about making the things you want to make, and reduce the need to hoard everything
in sight. Ok. Crafting games and games with consumable items
can lead players to hoard if they aren’t proactive about addressing the problem. But there are other games that actively make
the problem worse with elaborate mechanics that encourage hoarding. Final Fantasy VIII’s controversial junction
system is so pro-hoarding it hurts. Instead of the usual magic and MP system,
spells are treated as consumables that you can stock up to 99 copies of. But where it really gets out of hand is how
you attach those spells directly to character stats, and the more copies of a spell you
have, the stronger the boost. It’s a fun twist on the standard RPG magic
system, but it’s a hoarder’s nightmare. Using a spell consumes it, and losing a copy
of a junctioned spell makes your character’s stats immediately weaker. Finding replacement copies of a spell in FFVIII
is practically identical to hunting for rare components in a crafting game, and has all
of the same hoard-inducing problems that we talked about earlier. It all adds up to a gigantic incentive to
never use any magic. Paper Mario Sticker Star has a system that
discourages using consumables too. But instead of just making your characters
weaker if you use them, it can stop the story progress in its tracks. In Sticker Star, every attack is a single
consumable item - these stickers. The rare ones are better attacks. But don’t use them. Boss fights and puzzles in Sticker Star usually
revolve around using one specific sticker, called a ‘Thing’ sticker, at the right
time in order to weaken the boss or make progress in the puzzle. You can only hold one of each unique ‘Thing’
sticker, but you can use them pretty much whenever you want. Once you use one, it’s gone. Even if it wasn’t the key one to use in
the boss fight or puzzle. Even if you use it up in a fight with a random
encounter and you needed that sticker to beat the boss. If you waste a sticker, you’re pretty much
forced to backtrack to get another copy of it. Without using the right sticker, it’s going
to be extremely difficult to win, to the point where it feels like an accident if you just
power through. In effect, it makes experimenting with using
a new sticker a terrible idea, even if it’s just to try it out to see what it does. You’re discouraged from seeing some of the
most fun visuals of the game, all because of pro-hoarding design. Other games have natural anti-hoarding systems
baked in. Roguelikes and roguelites fight off hoarding
through a pillar of their core design - run-based gameplay. It’s not a tool that every game can use,
of course, but if you can, it will fix the problem. In games like Enter the Gungeon, The Binding
of Isaac, or Spelunky, resources are scarce and unpredictable. Normally, that would promote a ton of hoarding,
but each run of the game isn’t meant to last very long. When things finally go south, you can’t
carry much, if anything, over to your next run, so you’d better use all your tools
while you can. Losing a run because you didn’t buy enough
at the last store you saw, or because you held back on using an awesome weapon for too
long will sting, and the sting quickly encourages players to not hoard. The quick turnover between runs also lowers
the pain of failure, since failure and restarting is meant to be part of the game. The situation that hoarders are trying to
avoid, the pain of ‘not having enough when you need it’, isn’t really a big deal
in Roguelikes, so the behavior goes away. Games with survival elements like Metal Gear
Solid 3 and Don’t Starve have naturally draining resources as a part of their mechanics,
and those discourage hoarding too. In both games, food expires on a built-in
timer, and once the timer hits 0, the item stops being useful. Stashing away a big pile of them is inherently
a waste of time. For Don’t Starve, the long term goal revolves
around working your way towards a system of regenerating resources, maintaining the system,
and expanding on it. Hoarding doesn’t help. The ultimate solution to the hoarding item
dilemma is to not have things to hoard in the first place. Xenoblade Chronicles gets part way there by
largely doing away with in-battle consumable items. There are no potions, ethers, or revival items. MP isn’t a factor. Healing in battle is tied to an ability with
a cooldown meter. Without items to hoard, hoarding isn’t a
problem. Yeah, it sounds really dumb when you say it
out loud, but it works! Can’t argue with that! Item hoarding pops up in lots of different
ways, for many different reasons. Check out the comments and let us know some
of your examples of item hoarding, and your favorite anti-hoarding techniques. You can’t stop every player who tends to
hoard, but there are ways to help ease the minds of a chunk of your player base. If you keep an eye out for systems that incentivize
hoarding and use the right techniques, you can really clean house. *chill vibes outro from Paper Mario: Sticker Star*
