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
It’s not breaking, but Monster Hunter’s sharpness system works really well.
Every melee weapon (even the hammer and hunting horn) has a sharpness bar, broken up into smaller colored bars. It goes from the most sharp (purple), all the way down to red sharpness. Every attack that hits a monster will dull the weapon a bit. Higher sharpness will have a higher damage multiplier attached, while lower sharpness will penalize you. If an attack is too weak, or your weapon is too dull and is hitting a tougher part of a monster, then you’ll “bounce” off of it, interrupting your combo or attack flow and leaving you vulnerable to attacks. During a break on the right, you can use a whetstone for 4-ish seconds to sharpen your weapon again.
I like it because as you’re crafting and upgrading weapons, the sharpness is a factor to consider. Do you want a weapon with a ton of green sharpness, or one that has a sliver of blue and then a little green, but it quickly drops to yellow? It also affects your armor choices, because there are armor skills that allow for faster sharpening, or reduced dulling, or increased overall sharpness, or the ability to never bounce no matter how still your weapon gets. And in a fight, you have to pick and choose your targets a little more carefully, and know when to back off to sharpen and come back hitting harder.
This is the only acceptable answer IMHO. If you don’t like sharpening, take a blunt weapon. Make the weapon functional but lose effectiveness. There is some merit in consumables or time gated upgrades but I need to be useful with a broken weapon or the designers messed up and I’m uninstalling.
In the recent Another Crab’s Treasure, there’s a system where your shell, i.e. armor piece, breaks. These shells always come with a special ability (usually a secondary, powerful attack), so when you have to quickly switch to a new shell, your strategy has to change accordingly. This also serves as a great panic moment, because having no shell leaves you pretty vulnerable.
What makes that work well, in my opinion:
No way to repair shells. If they break, they’re gone.
No inventory to carry backup shells. Instead, you’ll regularly find random shells on the floor.
There’s no massive power differences between shells, nor an elaborate upgrade system.
I think, that’s what makes it so rare that a system like this works, because it requires not having relatively many other systems. And particularly AAA games need to be stuffed with all the systems possible, to differentiate them from indies.
I’ve been playing For the King II and I like the weapon system. Might not qualify as a “true” weapon degradation system, but it boils down to there being only some weapons that are breakable. They’re stronger than their non-breakable counterparts, but the breaking comes down to your stats (as well as a couple special abilities. Overall a great mechanic to use different types of weapons, and when they break, you can revert back to ol’ faithful.
I can’t think of any time I enjoyed weapon degradation systems. I’ve been able to tolerate some, but usually because the degradation happens so slowly that the system is basically moot.
My problem is how blatantly the hand of game designer feels in these systems. “No, you can’t just be powerful all the time!” the system says by forcing a resource sink into the game in a very annoying and disruptive way. These systems often encourage obsessive searching of common enemies if the weapons are repaired by combining them with enemy weapons.
There are easier resource sinks in the way of ammo or consumables. Even for melee weapons, in scifi they can still need power packs or in fantasy some whatever magical gem blah blah that acts as ammo. If a weapon is so common like a wooden club that it seems illogical to need some kind of magic ammo, then I posit that shouldn’t have degradation. What is the point of a club that breaks after five hits if those wooden clubs are laying around everywhere? It’s just annoying business to pick them up.
Minecraft is pretty good with tool and weapon durability. The game’s progression is built around getting tools that last longer, and the ones that break quickly are easy to replace. Repairing is fast, and pretty cheap for the first few repairs. By the time you have things that you want to never break, you’ve probably been able to find a Mending book or 2, so that they last forever
I still hated it, but RDR2 had a decent weapon maintenance/damage system. Most of it gets done in downtime between missions, but it’s also possible to just pick up others’ weapons as often as you need depending on how you play.
That’s probably why and when it works, when it encourages you to choose between 2 different styles of play: hunt down top tier weapons and then spend time/strategy keeping them maintained, or rip through missions aggressively and pick up everything you can.
I pretty much always have more fun when weapons don’t degrade, and I am so far from a grinder that I am 100% down for unlimited ammo and overpowered weapons, but I think weapons breaking can work if replacements are super easily found and increase in quality as the game progresses, or if repairs are pretty much optional depending on how you play.
I really like this mechanic on paper but in practice it makes games miserable. What I’ve found that I want is to earn my weapons and I want those weapons to stay exactly the same forever unless I upgrade them.
The Psycho Wand as a symbol for transient value is intriguing, but it does beg the question: “what is value?” Everything is transient, is it not? From this perspective, how can we say a digital Psycho Wand is more or less valuable than other material possession? Perhaps the answer is to abandon the desire to possess anything at all, but how do we do this when the Western world is built upon fostering this desire from the baby’s rattle to daddy’s new car?
There are so many things in our world where we need to take a step back and rationally analyze our behavior. Things like gambling or gaming, eating habits, social media, commercials… they can all create the wrong urges and gut feelings. Sadly, we can’t trust what “feels right” in the moment, because we’re driven by dopamine and endorphine that gets released even by pointless activies, regardless of what we neglect. It should be taught at schools^1^ how to recognize when bad influences create self-destructive habits, and how to recognize and overcome them.
^1^Seriously, schools teach so much information, when all the information is now at our fingertips, but we face so many challenges with how to approach life and society and so on that schools don’t help us with… (After all this, I just had to leave a footnote here as well)
agreed. i don’t have much to add as my sentiment on this subject drips from the words i’ve already written. i think addiction is a complicated thing driven by many factors: boredom, lack of purpose, depression, and some even think there is a genetic component. it’s definitely more complicated than just-turn-the-game-off. (love the footnote.)
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