This is brilliant, and totally not a waste of my time.
I’ll kick things off, I suppose.
A role-playing game should be based on traditional tabletop role-playing games. To truly be considered a role-playing game, a game must have character creation, stats, chance on actions (dice rolls, for example), and turn-based action (true turn-based or some offshoot).
There was a mod for XCOM: Enemy Unknown called Long War that included an option for weapon breaking. After every battle there was a chance that equipment on your soldiers would break, dependent on how much damage they took. I think I adjusted the rate down from the default, but as an occasional risk I think it worked really well. Normally once you built enough stronger weapons to kit out a squad you didn’t care about building more. Now you had to consider the risk of your weapons breaking and not having access to them. You can repair broken weapons, but it takes time and you never know when the aliens are gonna attack. Investing more money into excess weapons greatly reduces the risk but means you spend more when you could be spending that money on other essential things.
that sounds interesting. weapon breaking may work better for strategy games, as an extra level of strategic consideration; but it seems to be less than well-received for action/adventure games.
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Into the Radius is a VR game that has weapons get dirty as you fire them. For lower amounts of wear you can find/buy a ramrod and some toilet paper and just clean the barrel pretty cheaply and it only takes a few seconds if you maintain them well. For more worn out weapons you’ll need to spray some cleaning fluid and scrub them with a brush to bring the durability back up to the levels where you can work on the barrel, and fluid can be expensive or hard to find. The more worn a weapon is the more it will start to misfire or jam, requiring you to clear rounds etc.
It feels pretty balanced if you keep on top of maintenance in your downtime, and feels like a good excuse for some VR interaction.
Dark Cloud 2 (Dark Chronicle in the EU) keeps the weapon upgrade system but only removes some weapon EXP if it breaks, and the EXP drop is negligible in my opinion. The biggest problem with letting weapons break here is that they’ll deal no damage until you repair them.
The only time it even really comes into play is if you use Crystal weapons or katanas. Or crystal katanas that will break after 2 hits.
Tears of the Kingdom.
Unlike BOTW where if you wanted good weapons, you would have to go find them and keep your inventory full of them just in case, TOTK has the Fusion power so you can take any piece of shit and make it viable with monster horns.
Fallout 3 and New Vegas come super close to what I would think is perfect. I hate using duplicate weapons to repair, but modding the game to use duct tape and weapon scrap for it makes it work way better. It’s been hella long and I think NV is like that in vanilla but I know FO3 isn’t and keeping those unique weapons working was such a PITA.
I actually hated tears of the kingdoms fused mechanic way more than botw. I disliked botws mechanic though, but tears of the kingdom was just so tedious. I stopped playing and 0 regrets. Tears of the kingdom just didn’t do it for me.
Fallout: New Vegas. The game pushes you across the map even though it is an open world game. You don’t have anywhere to start hoarding stuff and use it around much, since you have to move quite some while, at the early-mid game at least.
Both weapons and armor have a condition, which degrades with use and damage and can be simply repaired by combining 2 of them, or having some form of universal repair kits that are rarer iirc. The damage system makes the “on the road, always moving from place to place” feeling better imo.
I could get behind a sharpness system, where over time your blade dulls, but it just changes your damage from slashing to bludgeoning. You can sharpen it and it is more deadly, but smacking someone full force with a dull blade is still gonna work
Breaking for breaking sake is bad, like any game mechanic added for tradition reasons (i.e. we do it because that’s what you do). I often can this Anti-QoL, and that concept is killing me in these retro inspired games lately.
Consider why you break weapons and you can see when it can be done to a positive effect. BotW, I think, adds it for the sake of encouraging you to get more weapons or find steady supply of decent weapons, since they generally respawn. That seems fine, and honestly plays fine when you get to mid game and can utilize weapon spawns effectively (I think it’s lame just how easy they break, and that they break even if you are breaking rocks, but that’s a balancing issue, imo.)
Dark Cloud noticably does not do a good job justifying it’s breakage system. It’s more about fusing new ones, so you already have a way to recycle and encourage new weapon usage (plus, weapons are kind of rare). Not to mention, weapon customization is a big part there and iirc, you even lose the stones you put in the weapon if it breaks. So, at this point, the breakage is more a harsh punishment for an easy accidental crime- fighting too damn hard. Clearly not a well thought out feature included for inclusion sake.
A good system is going to use perma-breakage to encourage use of an abundance of weapon and armor drops, and temporary breakage to encourage resource management, be it repair items or stat bonuses, or in the case of Monster Hunter (mentioned in another comment), valuable seconds and potential vulnerability when sharpening the weapon. There are probably other good rationales, but punishing players is not one of them.
I tried Breath of the Wild because it got so much praise (I’m not really much of a gamer). The weapons breaking all the time bogged me down so much and gave me so much anxiety it ducked out all the fun. When I got killed by lightening I quit playing. I think weapons breaking should be something you can toggle like the difficulty level.
I went up to 10x durability after like 12 hours of playing, which was maybe overkill, i feel like 4 would be just about perfect if I replay it, but I was so over fucking shields breaking constantly. I also modded it to be able to use revalis gale infinitely once I got it, and those two small changes made the game SO MUCH MORE FUN. Exploring wasn’t a fucking chore anymore and I didn’t feel like I had to constantly switch or save my good weapons.
BotW durability rocks because it encourages experimentation and using cool weaps and combos. Any direction is viable for this reason. I also like New Vegas’s durability cos repairing is so satisfying. Mmm, love me some Jury Rigging
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