What I don't get...

[Buffalobiian]

They should just add a "burden" or weight feature so you can carry as many weapons as you can, but suffer a penalty for it. They could either add a movement/speed penalty, make you tire faster, or add inventory slots that you can fill up. I like the system in Fallout 3 (I think it's from here) where you could expand your inventory as you leveled up and got stronger.

"Getting stronger" is more of an RPG thing, though there are perks and such that FPS games can let you unlock.

In the end, I think it comes down to game design though. If I made a game where you could carry 10 weapons, but also coded enemies to be stronger, smarter, more numerous and just downright invincible to the point where your ability to succeed is essentially tied to your ability to score headshots (because anything less would lead to your prompt death), you'd have other more stupid things to complain about.

I don't like that the game designers restrict what you can use to "make it more challenging". They should just make the enemies smarter or greater in number, not limit what the player can do to kill them.

See my previous comment about designers taking into account user capacity when designing the experience. Making the player into a God would make the game ridiculously easy, or make the enemies ridiculously hard to kill in order to compensate.

Instead of "I've chosen a sniper so I'll have to make sure the enemy can't get close", it's "I have to make sure I put 4 headshots into him, or 25 body shots.. or else he'll kill me". It becomes monotonous and quite boring.

Again, it's more about the experience and less about the challenge.

[Animeniax]

"Getting stronger" is more of an RPG thing, though there are perks and such that FPS games can let you unlock.

In the end, I think it comes down to game design though. If I made a game where you could carry 10 weapons, but also coded enemies to be stronger, smarter, more numerous and just downright invincible to the point where your ability to succeed is essentially tied to your ability to score headshots (because anything less would lead to your prompt death), you'd have other more stupid things to complain about.

See my previous comment about designers taking into account user capacity when designing the experience. Making the player into a God would make the game ridiculously easy, or make the enemies ridiculously hard to kill in order to compensate.

Instead of "I've chosen a sniper so I'll have to make sure the enemy can't get close", it's "I have to make sure I put 4 headshots into him, or 25 body shots.. or else he'll kill me". It becomes monotonous and quite boring.

Again, it's more about the experience and less about the challenge.

It is a poor game design to limit players' ability to carry what eq they want, same as invisible walls and other cheap ways to increase game difficulty. Only allowing limited inventory slots is still the best way to force a player to balance what weapons he carries. The inventory also holds other items and potions, so the player has to choose between carrying several weapons or just one or two because they also have to carry other eq.

[Splash!]

In the end, I think it comes down to game design though. If I made a game where you could carry 10 weapons, but also coded enemies to be stronger, smarter, more numerous and just downright invincible to the point where your ability to succeed is essentially tied to your ability to score headshots (because anything less would lead to your prompt death), you'd have other more stupid things to complain about.

See my previous comment about designers taking into account user capacity when designing the experience. Making the player into a God would make the game ridiculously easy, or make the enemies ridiculously hard to kill in order to compensate.

I don't really get this point and can sympathize with the views of DBZ and Animeniax(within the context of single player campaigns). Giving the players more room to carry doesn't make them a god and doesn't automatically require enemies that are impossible to kill.

Limiting the carrying capacity is one of the easiest ways to modulate difficulty and that is what makes it so desirable (also a bit of a cop out). It makes it easier to design levels by focusing on the 'recommended' weapons that the player is likely to have. In contrast, what Animeniax is suggesting is harder to do well. In any given portion of a map, you have to account for a player having a large variety of weapons and design accordingly. You would want to place more enemies, but be careful about their placement so as to not put the player in impossible situations. You may also need to offer a larger variety of enemies and consider weapon-to-enemy/weapon-to-situation rules (thinking of Starcraft and how certain units counter others). Finally, making enemies 'smarter' is easier said then done and more often developers often resort to cheap mechanisms to make things more difficult.

The point I am making is that limiting weapon choices doesn't necessarily make for better game experiences, it just makes it easier to design them. Frankly, I would enjoy it alot more if I was given a larger selection of weapons that I could play with at any given time, so long as there were sufficient challenges on the map. Of course, it is alot harder to design a game that does this well, but that doesn't necessarily mean game designers should discard the approach altogether because of that.