The Gear entry said weight is the number I care about most, and the Energy entry gave the pack a limit. The limit was a wall. At the limit you could not pick up one more thing, and the game told you so at the worst possible moment: standing in a gun store with a rifle on the floor and a bag full of cans. You’d stand in a menu deciding what to put down, while the street outside did whatever it was doing.
This week I took the wall down.
Past the limit
You can now pick up past your capacity. The moment you’re over it, you are overloaded, and three things happen at once. Every action costs double the energy it normally would. Every step takes twice as long. And you can only walk: run and sneak are greyed out, and if you were sneaking when the weight went over, you stand up.
There is still a wall, at double your capacity, and nothing gets you past that one. But the band between full and double-full is yours. You can walk out of the gun store with the rifle and the cans, slowly, at twice the cost, and decide on the way home what to drop and where. The decision moved from the menu to the street.
Two things are deliberately not taxed. Energy still comes back at its normal rate, and the slow drains you don’t control, hunger, swimming, stay at their normal rate too. The tax is on what you do. So an overloaded survivor can always stop, rest, and trudge it off. There is no spiral where being heavy makes you too tired to become light.
What it means for a chase
The number I tuned this around is the zombie. Overloaded, you walk at half your normal pace. A zombie shambles slightly slower than that. So a greedy survivor walking home with too much still outpaces the dead, barely, on a straight road, as long as nothing cuts them off and nothing makes them run. The moment a chase needs a sprint, the weight is the thing that kills you.
The other thing this fixed is a small one. A backpack raises your capacity. Taking it off used to be impossible if the pack was full, because the moment the capacity dropped you’d be over it, and over it wasn’t allowed. Now it is. You can take the bag off, drop it in a corner, and stand there overloaded with the haul until you sort it out. Same with the rounds from a gun you unload: they go in your pack even when it’s full, up to the wall at double, and only what doesn’t fit lands on the floor.
I expect this to get abused in a specific way, which is loading up to just under double and crawling between two buildings that are close together. I’m fine with that. Crawling is slow and visible, and every zombie on the street gets a long look.