>>> Only for people that have experienced both versions of inventory!!! <<<

(if you ignore this requirement and vote anyway, you will have bad luck for the rest of this year)

Now be honest and tell us why you find one or another inventory better!

The Fallout 1/2 inventory system (not the UI, which generally svcks for both Fallout 1/2 and 3/4) is better for a few reasons. First, items can actually have textual descriptions and associated images in the Fallout 1/2 system - they just have a tiny grayscale icon in the Fallout 3/New Vegas system. Those text descriptions can sometimes be mere fluff, but other times they can be really useful; I've really missed them in Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

The other primary reason the system's better in Fallout 1/2 is that ammunition can be separated into clips or power cells (which have charge or ammunition counts associated with them) rather than individual bullets. A single battery weighs the same amount if it's 100% full or 1% full. This is much more realistic than Fallout 3's 'the capacity of a battery depends upon the weapon that battery is put in and battery weight changes depending upon how full that battery is'. Also, you can have alternative ammo types, something Fallout 3 didn't and Fallout 4 doesn't seem to have.

The Fallout series very deliberately presented all UI as re-purposed objects from the game world. Even the box the game came in was a lunchbox from the Fallout world; the manual inside was the vault Dweller orientation guide.

The inventory menu was some sort of representation of an in-world device as it might appear there. (Though it was not a device the PC carried.)

Barter & trade UI was the same; it was depicted as a wooden table of a sort. As in a trading board; as in "Bring what you have to the table" ~to trade.

FO3 kept with the Pipboy UI, but failed to retain the UI principles of the series anywhere else.

I ultimately find 3/4 inventory to be better, not by some major margin but still, it feels smoother to use and with 4 we seam to get some nifty new details I like.

Just to remaind people: http://goo.gl/EZAAGf, https://goo.gl/bNE8B4. I wish you could actually post pictures in this forum.

I personaly realy miss item grahpics, allowed you do just see items instead of having to reading thru all the list every time you need to find it.

Good think 4 bringing them back then, I to missed item graphics, so Im quite happy.

Nope http://i.imgur.com/Mwd0Gbp.png, They just made better graphics for items, but they still one color, and you still need to find then in a list of text before you can see them.

Eh, I don't dislike item icons, but I don't prefer them either. It was a reasonable UI for it's time, but I think I prefer FO3/NV's just for being more efficient (can see & recognize more items at once, etc). Also, with the vastly higher number of lootable items in the Bethesda games, having to look through all those icons could be a pain.

All in all, it depends on the game and the rest of it's interface. I've played games with icons & liked them, I've played games with lists & liked them. (And vice-versa, run into some iffy inventory interfaces out there..... )

edit

As opposed to having to find them in a list of icons before you can see them....? Not sure what the issue is here.

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FO:NV had alternate ammo types..... that's not a limitation of the inventory system, that's a choice of the devs.

What can that possibly mean?

*What about 'its time' could possibly affect anything?

**I've seen better UI from before Fallout's time, and far worse UI from after it.

*** From a technology perspective... It's interesting to note that Fallout and Oblivion had the same default screen resolution.

Just that understanding / study / development of UIs changed & grew over the years. Lots of UI's in the 80's/90's were quite clunky. Fallout's wasn't that bad.

(I've seen any number of comments from people complaining about how awkward/difficult/made-by-programmers-for-other-geeks some of the "old school" UIs were.)

edit: this is from the standpoint of human factors / man-machine interface / usability. The science of user interfaces has advanced over the past decades.... game devs may not always do a good job of applying that knowledge, but we still understand more about UI than we did then.

I've seen them too. There is merit to it. Artists often make inefficient UI; and engineers can make some of the blandest crap ~beautifully efficient.

Imagine you got a garage with like 20 cars in it, they all diffirent, every car has a sign in front of it with its name, bmw, lamborghini, lexus usw. Do you realy think it would be faster for you to find the right car every morning by reading their names one by one till you find right one, or would it be faster to recognize this car by the way it look?

If I can only look at a row of pictures of the cars, six at a time, and have to scroll through them, I still have to scroll through the list to find a certain one. Regardless of if the list is pictures or words.

Neither inventory system is great, I'd rather have something like Sky UI where you can go down the menu diagonally instead of the up down that wastes so much time. Fallout 1/2 isn't terrible but that inventory system wouldn't work well with huge amounts of items.

I didn't think that was ever a problem... but it was changed in Van Buren; to the entire inventory at a glance.

*edit:

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/Fallout%20Related/VB_inventory_zpst9fby3qi.jpg

That's great, as long as you can remember what all the icons are. If not, then you need to spend time clicking on everything (or mousing over, since we have pop-up tips nowadays) to find things. Like, say,http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/255493Capture2.jpg......

All in all, I think that in a game where you're going to have a vast number of items (both in the game world, and in your inventory) a text list is probably the better option. (been trying Morrowind again recently, and sorting through all the stuff in my inventory after i've, oh, looted all the crates in a town.... fun, fun, fun. All those tiny icons for potions & ingredients. Wheeeeee!)

To be fair in 4 you actually see a detailed in game model for each gun, so the inventory model doesn't need to be more then a mono colour model, unlike 1/2 where the icons had to do the brunt of actually showing us how the guns looks like, since the in game models where generic.

Hmm, looking at that picture again, I wonder what that "Right Stick - Inspect" option does....

Probably shows what mods are on it, or more details on performance, that would be my gess.

That's not 'nowadays', that's simply developer preference.

3/nv was miles better

While the UI in Fallout 3 and New Vegas wasn't particulary informative, it was lightyears ahead in usability. It still needed improvement (which is why UI-mods are mandatory) but the very clunky UI in the first two Fallouts is their one of the very few weak points.

Probably the same as what it does in Skyrim - lets us take a zomed-in look at the model, in full color. Isn't it the same button, too?

I have a hard time seeing anything in Fallout 1/2's inventory menus (and arguably the entire UI) beyond the artwork itself that could be considered better than Fallout 3. I'll pick an alphabetically ordered text list over a list of icons ordered by last use (or whatever way the first two games' inventories organized themselves) every time. Having actual categories helps too, instead of lumping everything into one long list. The text blurbs are nice, but all of the pertinent information was hidden away in a submenu of "what does this do?" - or you had to equip it. Bethesda's Fallout, we just have to hover over the item to see the stats.

I can't think of any menu action in Fallout 1 or 2 that couldn't be done faster in 3 or New Vegas.

I will be surprised if someone will pick Fallout 1 and 2 inventory, you can not create anything worse even if you try.

Never had any issues with either inventory system. While Fallout and Fallout 2's inventory has some nice things about it like item description, I have to give it to Fallout 3 and New Vegas for the sake of being more organized. Items are actually categorized so you know where all of your weapons, armor, chems, and misc. items are. Not to mention, as some have already said, it's also in alphabetical order, so you will still know where the item you want is even when you have to scroll through a long list of items.

Like I said, I can still use the older games UI with no issue, it's something I've been used to for years, but the newer Fallout games inventory system was much better.