Equipment Slots

Slots used to indicate which game items players wish to use.

Games that let players find armor, weapons, or other types of equipment often let them find many different kinds of each to let players have the choice of selecting wish they prefer. Having Equipment Slots lets players show this choice simply by placing the selected items in slots. Depending on if they are combined with a general inventory or not, these slots can represent everything one can carry.

Examples

Equipment Slots are common in Computer-based Roleplaying Games. Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and the first games in the Fallout series make use of them, as does Torchlight, World of Warcraft, the Ultima series, the Baldur's Gate series, and the Dragon Age series. In these games, players have general inventories and can from these select the specific items they wish to use at any particular moment. Minecraft uses the same design structures as the above roleplaying games but in a sandbox game and lets game time progress while players are accessing the inventory and Equipment Slots.

Some First-Person Shooters also make use of Equipment Slots but then without having inventories. This is used, e.g. in Far Cry and the Left 4 Dead series, to force players to commit to using a particular set of weapons and changes can only be done when new weapons are found or by backtracking to where old weapons were left.

Borderlands is an example of an FPS that retains the combination of Equipment Slots and inventories that roleplaying games use.

Using the pattern

Characters Player Characters Companions

There are two main uses for Limited Inventory Slots and these

Interface Aspects

HUD Interfaces

Secondary Interface Screens

Relations

Can Instantiate

Functional Roles, Tradeoffs

Can Modulate

Armor, Characters, Equipment, Inventories, Tools, Weapons

Can Be Instantiated By

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Can Be Modulated By

HUD Interfaces, Secondary Interface Screens

Possible Closure Effects

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Potentially Conflicting With

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History

New pattern created in this wiki.

References

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Acknowledgements

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