Guild Wars 3 officially revealed

You can still definitely have items without inventory management. Imagine a game like Minecraft, except instead of having an inventory full of blocks, it's just a big list of how many resources you have. 500 dirt, 372 stone, 12 iron ore. You'd still be able to interact with crafting interfaces, trade, etc all the same as before, but without directly interacting with these resources. The gameplay loops remain largely the same.

Not that it has to be all or nothing. It might make sense to have certain resources be stats-based, and others more "tactile", like weapons or equipment. That'd be up to the game designer. But I can agree with the idea that inventory management does get old, and many MMOs specifically use it as a disincentive to push you towards paying for premium storage.

I resonated with the "it feels like a second job" half of the comment, so was responding to that more. I would like to play GW2 a few times a year for a few hours, but I find thats not really possible. When I log in, I'm faced with an inventory full of esoterically named seasonal, zone-specific, or hyperniche items. And I don't know whether it's "safe" to discard them or not. So I'm forced to research all those items. And some of them are inevitably things that I "should" hang onto, so even after an hour of housecleaning, my inventory is still half-full, which makes normal gameplay annoying.

And I know these aren't new issues. I've seen plenty of reddit posts about it. There's a website that gives information about items. There's the /wiki command. But regardless, it's not fun to log in and have to perform that research/housecleaning step. So I don't log in much.

In terms of solutions, I think there are ways of introducing new mechanics and zones that don't revolve around new items. There can be new interactions around old items and/or managing new items. Or items that are meant for hyperspecific purposes can have their own inventories provided by the event/mechanic/NPC rather than cluttering up your general inventory. But as others have said, there is an incentive to encourage players to buy more inventory space. So the current situation is natural I suppose.

1. To me the main RPG elements are things like levels, grinding, and stats. "you can't do this because your number isn't big enough" is boring, and "make it bigger by just doing these same 40 tasks" even more so.

2. With that in mind, i think there's a slew of mechanics you can screw with. Stuff like Dark Souls or a less numbers focused Monster Hunter, Realm of the Mad god was interesting (you can max level a character in about an hour), Star Citizen is technically trying this, although obviously that's its own can of worms and you could just focus on the ship flying not the "rest" of it.

3. I think there's even more you could do modeling of games like EVE with the mostly player driven economy, but swapping out the "battle by numbers" rest of it. Obviously anything mmo isn't going to be perfect for precision, but games like V Rising I think were on an EXCELLENT track of figuring out a way to make the core game more about skill than levels/equipment. It also did a good job of abstracting the "fun" part of equipment with it still have builds and gear (more than i'd like, but less than most) without just drowning you in time wasters.

I think across those games there's lots of examples of what there is to do, and how to do it. You can still give players an environment to explore, goals to achieve, and the tools to setup their own content without tying it to "now pick 450 more flowers for ingredient X so you can sell it for Y to afford Z which is a part of set A...."