The odd thing about backpacks... The wrong people are wearing them.

[Vandala]

Something weird I've noticed about this game is that the characters you see in the game that you expect to have backpack do not have backpacks (people wandering around, soldiers patrolling, lone wanderers wandering about in the wilderness), and the people you do not expect to have backpacks do have backpacks (namely shopkeepers).

This really should be fixed at some point since it makes no real sense. Shopkeepers that have a building to store and sell their wares from do not need or want to be wearing a backpack all day long to sell items from. Whereas soldiers and other people on the road or wandering the wilderness often do have or need such an item, but in this game they never have them.

Another point about this is that those people you would expect to have backpacks should also have some basic items in them as well. Things like a little bit of food, a few cats of pocket change, maybe some tools for whatever profession they might have, a sleeping bag, a lantern of some sort, etc. This can even be used for lore building as such people could also be carrying a book with them or perhaps a journal.

If your worried about giving the player too much money (in the form of lots of backpacks) from loot drops, you could fix this by adding some shitty or none sell-able backpacks to the game, bandits for example could carry improvised sling packs made from some shitty cloth that can't be sold, soldiers can all wear special nation specific soldier backpacks that no sane shopkeeper (from the same nation) is going to buy from you because they know where they come from, they are basically part of the uniform.

Perhaps you could even just have it be possible to slot in the basic cloth item as a backpack (as in, its used as a sling pack) that way some characters like some of the shitty bandits would provide the player with basic cloth items as loot rather then having to make a new unsalable backpack just for them.