I dunno, my mind changed a bit on this once I played BotW. As long as weapons are significantly different enough and there’s always ways to be effective with each, and you get a non-stop slew of them to rotate through, it’s fun.
If you lose any of the above conditions though and you’re just constantly trying to repair your weapon set, needing to pack stupid numbers of repair kits or stop at the corner store in town or whatever to repair your only set, that’s a no from me dawg.
But it can be fun. When I first played BotW I was really frustrated about durability until I complained about it to my friend and he was like “dude who cares, just pick up one of the 20 weapons laying on the ground and keep moving” I realized that I no longer need to hoard all the best weapons and I could just send it, and the game got way more fun.
That being said, most games do it poorly and 90% of the time I agree with you. Looking at YOU dead Island 2
I was thinking specifically of Breath of the Wild.
For me, Zelda has always been about scratching my completionist itch.
Making all the weapons temporary means I never get to feel the power of a completed inventory. Instead I’m just trading off weapons that I don’t like for more weapons that I don’t like. And if I do like one, it breaks anyway.
I didn’t even bother with Tears of the Kingdom for that reason. It’s a feel-bad mechanic, and I’d rather not do it.
Weapons in BotW are almost like ammunition. A given sword or club or whatever does so much damage per swing, and will last a certain number of swings, so it represents an amount of damage you can do to an enemy. This system is at its best when you break a sword over an enemy’s head, pick up his weapon, and then keep beating him with that. Problem is, there’s only so cool weapons can get. Players that want to work hard to get a really cool weapon don’t really have a way to both play with it and keep it around. Hell, the Master Sword breaks and grows back.
BotW does it right with shields. Shields have a use case, and an abuse case. If you do a perfect parry, your shield takes no damage. Same thing happened in Skyward Sword, if you abused your shield too much, it broke. But if you used it correctly, it wouldn’t break. If you built use cases and abuse cases for weapons, for example, bashing a sword against an enemy’s shield would wear it out, but striking soft flesh wouldn’t, that would reward players for learning the combat system by giving them a way to keep their coolest swords around.
TotK…Youtuber Skittybitty did a 3-hour takedown of that game and I could add at least two hours of my own criticism.
I can understand why it was polarizing. The game for sure broke a lot of norms in the franchise, and I too wasn’t happy about that at first, because it didn’t meet my initial expectations. But I think the weapon system is designed to encourage the player to explore the game mechanics, which if you just stick with one type of weapon you miss so much of, so I think it’s important to the game that they had it the way they did.
But yeah, I remember hating it at first so I definitely get it. My perspective changed but I totally understand if it never worked for you.
Far Cry 2 as well. Low durability didn’t break your weapon, it just increased the chance of a misfire or jam and made combat more chaotic. And if it really bothered you, you could always buy a simple AK (which was practically indestructible when upgraded).
For me: weapon durability.
I dunno, my mind changed a bit on this once I played BotW. As long as weapons are significantly different enough and there’s always ways to be effective with each, and you get a non-stop slew of them to rotate through, it’s fun.
If you lose any of the above conditions though and you’re just constantly trying to repair your weapon set, needing to pack stupid numbers of repair kits or stop at the corner store in town or whatever to repair your only set, that’s a no from me dawg.
But it can be fun. When I first played BotW I was really frustrated about durability until I complained about it to my friend and he was like “dude who cares, just pick up one of the 20 weapons laying on the ground and keep moving” I realized that I no longer need to hoard all the best weapons and I could just send it, and the game got way more fun.
That being said, most games do it poorly and 90% of the time I agree with you. Looking at YOU dead Island 2
I was thinking specifically of Breath of the Wild.
For me, Zelda has always been about scratching my completionist itch.
Making all the weapons temporary means I never get to feel the power of a completed inventory. Instead I’m just trading off weapons that I don’t like for more weapons that I don’t like. And if I do like one, it breaks anyway.
I didn’t even bother with Tears of the Kingdom for that reason. It’s a feel-bad mechanic, and I’d rather not do it.
Breath of the Wild does it both wrong and right.
Weapons in BotW are almost like ammunition. A given sword or club or whatever does so much damage per swing, and will last a certain number of swings, so it represents an amount of damage you can do to an enemy. This system is at its best when you break a sword over an enemy’s head, pick up his weapon, and then keep beating him with that. Problem is, there’s only so cool weapons can get. Players that want to work hard to get a really cool weapon don’t really have a way to both play with it and keep it around. Hell, the Master Sword breaks and grows back.
BotW does it right with shields. Shields have a use case, and an abuse case. If you do a perfect parry, your shield takes no damage. Same thing happened in Skyward Sword, if you abused your shield too much, it broke. But if you used it correctly, it wouldn’t break. If you built use cases and abuse cases for weapons, for example, bashing a sword against an enemy’s shield would wear it out, but striking soft flesh wouldn’t, that would reward players for learning the combat system by giving them a way to keep their coolest swords around.
TotK…Youtuber Skittybitty did a 3-hour takedown of that game and I could add at least two hours of my own criticism.
I can understand why it was polarizing. The game for sure broke a lot of norms in the franchise, and I too wasn’t happy about that at first, because it didn’t meet my initial expectations. But I think the weapon system is designed to encourage the player to explore the game mechanics, which if you just stick with one type of weapon you miss so much of, so I think it’s important to the game that they had it the way they did.
But yeah, I remember hating it at first so I definitely get it. My perspective changed but I totally understand if it never worked for you.
I generally hate it, too, but thought it felt pretty fitting and okay in RDR2.
Far Cry 2 as well. Low durability didn’t break your weapon, it just increased the chance of a misfire or jam and made combat more chaotic. And if it really bothered you, you could always buy a simple AK (which was practically indestructible when upgraded).