It’s a debate as old as role-playing games themselves: should players have to deal with encumbrance?
The recent release of Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Bethesda’s Starfield have thrust the encumbrance debate back into the headlines, with both games employing a system that restricts how much stuff you can carry.
While each game employs systems and mechanics that let you carry more and more, it is inevitable that as a player, you’re going to have to spend a decent chunk of your time fussing with managing your character or characters’ carry weight limit.
In Starfield’s case, encumbrance is a big enough issue for some that they are willing to lose access to gaining achievements in order to increase the carry limit via console commands on PC. This in turn has made a mod designed to prevent the achievements from being disabled one of the most popular on NexusMods.
No one called it gameplay. It’s simply immersion.
It’s literally 100% on the gamer if they insist on carrying every item they find. There isn’t even .00000000000000001% responsibility for the developer. Carry capacities are a mandatory part of good design.