Games With The Biggest Inventory Space
January 29, 2023Inventories are a staple of modern games. These endless invisible backpacks allow Aloy to carry a tribe’s worth of arrows, or Call of Duty: Warzone players to store half a nation’s store of munitions just off-screen. While we all hate encumbrance limits, they are a necessary evil.
Without them, we’d spend hours paging through menus of trinkets and swords we’ll never equip. But even in games that do cap how much you can carry, it can sometimes feel ridiculous just how big your pockets must be. These are the video game characters that must have the biggest secret pouches somewhere for all their stuff.
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11 Dovahkiin – Skyrim
There are few games where you run up against the encumbrance limit more than you do in Skyrim. Maybe it’s because your base stamina is pretty low. Maybe It’s because you keep picking up everything because the looting sound is so satisfying. Or maybe you just really, really need 1,400 cheese wheels and 1,200 sweet buns.
Whatever the reason, the Dovakiin stuffing their pockets to bursting was such a problem that later versions of Skyrim on both console and PC came installed with a community-created backpack mod. It’s good to know the Dragonborn has somewhere more practical to keep their loot after all these years because Daedric armour certainly doesn’t have pockets.
10 Pokemon Trainer – Pokemon
Like any good JPRG, by the time you finish a Pokemon game, your inventory should be overflowing with healing items, energy recovery items, a few ancient artefacts, and at least 1,008 unique living beings!
While Pokemon trainers carry an unreasonable amount of gear around — especially considering most of them are kids — we can kind of justify it in a universe where a fire-breathing dragon can fit inside a golf ball. Maybe whatever technology keeps Charizard in a tiny ball can also be used to store all these meals we have cooked.
9 Gabriel Knight – Gabriel Knight 3: Blood Of The Sacred, Blood Of The Damned
It’s not necessarily the amount of stuff that we worry about adventure game characters putting in their pockets; it’s the nature of the goods. For years Guybrush, Manny, Clem, and all the other point-and-click protagonists have been stuffing questionable quest items into who-knows-where.
Nowhere is this as problematic as in the Gabriel Knight series. It was one thing, in the first game, when he carried around endangered snakeskin and classified crime scene photos, but by the time the third entry came around he was keeping cat hair, a water spritzer, and candy (that he plans to give to his only friend), all in the same pocket. Gross dude.
8 The Villager – Animal Crossing
People say that Animal Crossing is relaxing, but I think it’s the exact opposite. You arrive in a new town and quickly become the mayor only to be saddled with incredible debt by an evil raccoon. That sounds like a stressful nightmare. As if that wasn’t enough, where am I supposed to keep all these eggs?
Yes, the games have gotten better about letting you magically stack items in your already rather large backpack. But it’s still not enough, there is never going to be a time when I am not overwhelmed by sugarcane, spiders in jars, dinosaur fossils, and this darn foggy chair!
7 Link – The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild
For a small fellow Link has always been able to carry a lot on his big adventures. Swords, shields, hookshots, and creepy masks clearly find a home somewhere in his little green tunic. However, by the time Breath of the Wild came along, things were starting to get a bit ridiculous.
Are you telling me that a guy the size of a tree stump could carry 14 bows, 10 shields, 30 half-broken swords, spears, and clubs, and enough meals to feed an entire Korok Village? The part that really breaks it though is that he can do all this wearing nothing but boxer briefs. Link… do we want to know where you are storing all that gear?
6 Leon – Resident Evil 4
We’ll give Resident Evil 4 this: at least Capcom tries to justify Leon being able to carry around a small armoury and large herb dispensary with him. What makes less sense is that all this stuff fits his suitcase.
Spend your time Tetris-ing eggs and ammo in there all you like, but I still refuse to believe you could fit multiple rocket launchers in any cache case. However, maybe Leon is just that good, in which case I doubt he ever needs an extra check-in bag while flying.
5 Lara Croft – Tomb Raider
Tomb Raider is clearly a piece of fiction, and not because of the living dinosaurs or world-ending conspiracies. Instead, we all know it’s all made up because no woman’s pants come with two back pockets big enough to fit dual pistols into, not to mention the troves of treasure she carries around also.
4 The Parent – Fallout 4
For some reason, the playable characters in Fallout 4 being able to lug literal tonnes of gear around with them is much more unbelievable than it was in Skyrim. That’s probably because in this game you aren’t a chosen one of legend, your just some guy or gal from suburbia whose body has been frozen for decades.
And yet, not only can you carry guns, clothes, and multiple small mech suits, but you can also defy all known laws of physics and mass and carry an infinite number of bobby pins. Oh, and who could forget, you also have enough space to bring around crafting materials to build a small town.
3 Doomslayer/BJ Blazkowicz – Doom/Wolfenstein
Doom and Wolfenstein are maybe two of the first games where the suspension of disbelief needed to buy into video game inventories became almost impossible to accept. I could picture the adventurer from Rogue having a backpack that could fit all their goods, but by the time Doom and Wolfenstein came around protagonists were carrying enough weapons to single handily wage war on the Third Reich and the Forces of hell.
As the Doom games have gotten more ridiculous and brazen, it’s become somewhat easier to accept that the man that flies around in a space cathedral has magic never-ending pockets. However, the recent Wolfenstein games try to paint realistic portraits of a soldier out of time for the most part… Actually, come to think of it, BJ has survived a head transplant, he can probably carry 18 shotguns with him if he wants.
2 Every Far Cry Protagonist – Far Cry
Okay, think about how outlandish it is that the Doomslayer can sprint around with 16 guns hanging off him. Except instead of a demon-slaying demigod, it’s some scrawny dude from LA called Jason.
1 Steve – Minecraft
The Minecraft community loves nothing more than some very rough napkin maths. Thanks to that, we know that the heaviest object in the game, a netherite block, would weigh roughly 162,961kg. We also know that Steve has 37 inventory slots, all of which can stack 64 items in one slot.
That means in total Minecraft Steve could carry 2368 netherite blocks all at once. That works out to about 385,916,881 kilograms, or 385,916 tonnes of dirt. What we’re saying is Minecraft Steve has very, very, very big pockets.
