Inventory

Inventory in Diablo 3.

The Inventory of a player's character is the menu page they are likely to look at the most for equipment allocation and organizing the backpack. This is where you apply armor or weapons for usage.

Bag Slots

The slots in Diablo III bags work very differently from the inventory slots in Diablo II, as it no longer applies the "tetris-style" inventory of differently sized items, requiring time to organize the layout of your loot. As of March 30 with the airing of BlizzCast Episode 8, this changed and the inventory is now divided into three Tabs:

Large Item Tab/Backpack - Used for large items such as weapons and armor. One large item goes into one large slot.
Small Item Tab/Pouch - Used for storing smaller things like Runes, Gems, Scrolls and Potions.
Quest Tab/Quest chest - Used for storing quest items.

Each Tab will have a bag assigned to it, each bag will have a predetermined number of slots. Players will start with standard bags in each tab, between presumably 6-8 slots in Large Item Tab and 12-16 in Small Item Tab. As players progress, they will find better bags, with a speculated progression rate of 2 slots. (Players start with 6 Large item slots, they will later find a bag with 8 Large item slots, and so on.)

(Note that slots differentiate between tabs, If for Example, you have 6 slots in the Large Item Tab, then you will have 12 slots in the Small Item Tab, This is because the slots in the tabs are of different size, so 2 small item slots stacked vertically = 1 large item slot.)

Stash

A Stash facility has been promised, but specifics of that have yet to be revealed.

Development

During WWI 2008 and BlizzCon 2008, the inventory was similar to that of World of WarCraft, with one slot for each item, and a possibility to expand the inventory space by adding up to four bags to your character. Smaller items also stacked up to five in a stack in order to save space. It started with 12 slots, but could progressively be upgraded to 30 slots.

A Detailed shot by Vikkz of the Previous Inventory Layout: [1] Please note that the area labelled "left hand" is actually right hand slot on the screen and vice-versa. It's the left hand of the character.

Fan Requests

When the 1-item-slot bags were revealed, there were some fans who would rather have an inventory with the multiple square items in the actual bag, and the newer version from April 30 is a little step in that direction. Some still want the original D1 and D2 bags though, but it's highly unlikely to change. Here is a quote from a discussion between a Battle.net member and Bashiok: [2]

Phat_smoke: All items shuld = 1 inv square space

thats my thot

Bashiok:

i totilly agre

References