Why does item durability trigger people so much?
It should be a pretty well known fact by now that video games need mechanics that challenge you in some way, otherwise there is no weight or consequence to anything you do. People accept things like death, item mangagement or puzzles; but when item durability comes up people collectively seem to lose their shit, no matter how well its implemented.
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It's just annoying.
Especially in Fallout where just to repair something, it costs half an arm and leg.
Because it usually amounts to nothing but busywork.
The cost of repairing or replacing your equipment is usually negligible and people don't like having to stop what they were previously doing to go back to the item repair point to fix it.
Because durability is a shit mechanic in everyway.
It's not interesting, it's not challenging, it's not unique, it doesn't improve the game in any way. It's just annoying and serves no purpose other than to waste your time.
I don't mind in most games. Dark Souls 2 was pretty bad though, especially when most of the gimmicky weapons break in 5 hits.
If you're speaking of breath of the wild, everything in that game breaks in a handful of hits. It's annoying to have to keep replacing your weapon so often.
I have to agree with this though.
I think item durability is fine, it's just done really poorly in most games. For example:
-Blades lose general damage instead of armor penetration power
-Ancient legendary artifacts get damaged from battle against rats
-Rookie blacksmith can repair said artifacts
-Firearms can't be cleaned to prevent them from breaking down
-Firearms lose general damage instead of reliability and accuracy
-Broken weapons don't affect NPCs combat effectiveness
Weapon durability is OK depending on how it is implemented.
If you have things that you really want to keep and have the ability to repair them, and all durability is doing is adding a pointless "repair" mechanic to the game, then that is stupid.
Something like Breath of the Wild sounds okay, because you can just constantly keep throwing away and getting new weapons and the majority of them aren't unique so you don't appear to be losing anything.
Anyone who says weapon durability is universally bad needs to play more games. In the Souls games, durability is mostly useless since touching a bonfire or whatever will fix your weapons, but there was opportunities to make durability an interesting mechanic. Pic related.
Especially """""""""power""""""""" armor in 4
Tons of super rare aluminum to repair and then it breaks after a skirmish with some fucking raiders with pipe guns
>
It's not interesting, it's not challenging, it's not unique, it doesn't improve the game in any way. It's just annoying and serves no purpose other than to waste your time.
It can give another degree of value to items. Instead of just using the best weapon you got at all times, you might want to save it for later.
It's good IF you can repair the stuff yourself (and level smithing)
Because it's annoying and pointless busywork if you can repair them and anti-progression if you can't.
Everything else you mentioned is forward progression, having your weapon break is backwards progression.
I mean then you just run into the problem of "super OP potion/item only 2 in the whole game so use in emergencies only!" type items where the vast majority of players save these things until a situation arises they feel the need to use them, but then they never use them at all.
Did Mega Man need durability to have a challenge? Did Mario? Sonic? Gordon Freeman?
If you think a game needs durability to have consequences you are truly, utterly a fucking retard.
Because in most games it's unnecessary, and only exists for the sake of throwing a wrench in the works. It's a shitty nuisance that you can easily overcome, but becomes very tedious.
Unless it's used for balance reasons, like something having 3 charges before it breaks. Or a very limited amount of uses to keep it from being OP.
>Tfw had to remove scraping spear
>the spell in ds3 is useless
Durability is just ammo for melee weapons.
This.
As everyone else said, it's just annoying.
More often than not, you're just pressing a button that's like 'fix all for 42 gold'.
Adds nothing to the game, just another useless thing to do.
That's so fucking stupid.
yeah, it is.
I think durability's only good when the weapon in question has a decent amount of use and you have another weapon that doesn't break to fall back on afterwards, as well as unbreakable variants hidden somewhere in the world, Brandish and Beyond Oasis come to mind
The worst part about durability is how completely fucking retarded the balancing always is.
>you just slapped a piece of ham 3 times with a solid steel pipe.
>weapon at risk.
>video games need mechanics that challenge you in some way
I don't see the challenge in replacing my weapon every other battle. Or travelling to a specific point and pressing "pay negligible amount of [money] to fix."
I'm pretty sure we have a word for this. I think it's "tedium."
Weapon durability system = menu simulator. It doesn't make the game more challenging. It doesn't add urgency to combat. It just makes it so you need to carry multiple waffle bats so when yours breaks after a battle or two you have to go into the menu and equip a new one.
Far Cry 2 was a good example of how to do weapon durability.
You could pick up enemy weapons, but they were worn and shitty, they would jam and break so going and buying your own guns was encouraged. Though occasionally you would have a situation where you would want to pick up and use an enemy's gun. It was a cool trade off idea.
Though naturally everyone hated it and they got rid of it in the sequel.
It would have been much better without the exploding weapons. I loved the jams and misfires but it's fucking stupid to think that an AK is going to explode because you fired more than 60 rounds. They should have just made jamming more and more frequent as dirt built up.
I'm okay with durability if it's something that ends up making interesting situations happen, like shooting someone with a flaregun in FC2 because your gun explod.
Other than that durability tends to be either
>barely a problem, maybe you have to do some menuing every once in a while because of it
>fucking annoying because shit's breaking on you constantly and finding replacements isn't fun or engaging.
Dead rising is a good example, since finding silly shit to hit zombies with was fun, and combination weapons generally having more durability encouraged you to experiment using those.
Mostly what everyone talked about it being done wrong.
For instance. I think that durability in FE is kind of retarded, but the game is (was?) balanced around it. It was still somewhat shitty, but I didn't mind it.
I also really liked how weapons jammed in FarCry 2. Which is what an user said about firearms losing reliability.
Most of the time is just lazily implemented or the game's mechanics won't go well with it (which means that is lazily implemented too).
I think that the way BotW implemented it wasn't that great. The critical thing that the weapons get is somewhat nice, so you won't feel like you're getting fucked all the time, because weapons break fast as fuck in there. But you're just packing so much shit that it feels retarded.
I wanted to see swords losing sharpness and becoming almost blunt weapons. Bending. Breaking but not becoming useless (somewhat like the goron knife but not that useless). Weapons breaking in different ways, because of different interactions it had with the environment and with the stuff that is in it.
Guns can explode though. Squibs and whatnot.
There's literally nothing challenging about having a durability to your item, it basically comes down to busywork and a slight currency drain in most situations. I'd rather it just deduct the currency when you die if that's the intent
>-Blades lose general damage instead of armor penetration power
sharpness doesn't do shit against armor, you don't slice it like a fucking vegetable. this is how blunt actual swords were: en.wikipedia.org
There's more types of armour than those made of metal plates.
Swords can also lose the point which would mean that they would be even more useless against metal armour.
Some games like Zelda do it well, others it's nothing more than an obstacle to fun, they don't normally incorporate it in a well designed way its usually just a gold & time sink.
This is what I was going to respond.
Swords are already fairly useless against armor.
There's a reason they were more sidearms than anything. Warhammers, maces, and general heavy blunt shit were for use against metal armor.
because it's a chore
people don't like maintenance in general
even in real life people postpone it as much as they can
surely, you vidya main character needs a new pair of underpants every once in a while, yet that has never been implemented in gameplay for a reason; because it's a chore
imagine a dialogue box popping up every time your character needs to take a shit
-6 agility cause your ass is clenched and you walk like a crab
>so realistic amirite?
>lol you don't like challenging games?
>l2 manage time and take shits in between battles
>not wanting your character to need to poop
>filthy casuals
I'm aware that a gun can explode. The circumstances to have that happen are slim to none though. And that's how EVERY weapon ends up after extended use in FC2. Which is fucking stupid. Especially with weapons like the AK which can be jammed full of mud and still cycle in real life.
Don't forget halberds which were meant to trip an enemy down so you could stab between the plates when they're incapacitated. Shame that this has literally never been done in games.
But losing the point would mean that you would have a hard time trying to pierce through the mail that was usually worn below the metal armour.
Isn't there a Skyrim mod for this?
the problem is badly made durability where you have to change your weapon every 2 minutes
but you already knew this and you're just a shitposting nintentoddler
In Zelda at least it's not about challenging you but encouraging you to play the game creatively. Your weapon breaks fairly easy? Get creative and use everything at your disposal to win fights. There's a reason there's something magnetic or explosive near most enemy camps.
Yet everyone assumes it's to make the game harder and just stockpiles weapons and doesn't do anything more than whack enemies with weak weapons while saving the good ones. The problem there is the player, not the game. They've been trained by terrible modern vidya to just expect to be able to hit something and get something. Faggotry.
Games don't like polearms for whatever reason.
It's just sword and axes. Even blunt shit has hard time finding some love, but much more than anything with a shaft.
It's probably because they're unwieldy for day to day stuff.
probably
"is there a skyrim mod for this" has basically become the new rule 34
That's basically what I said without going into detail.
Touching the bonfire to repair your weapons wasn't added until Dark Souls 2 (and I think is one of only a few things they managed to improve between the two games). But I agree that the way Dark Souls handles weapon durability is great, and people are willing to put up with that system because there is such a large variety of weapons available that each change how you approach combat.
The game with the worst weapon durability system I can recall to this date is Dead Island. Things like heavy metal wrenches would somehow become completely broken after only 20 or so uses and had no better durability than the shit you could craft out of sticks. It made no sense and was very frustrating while playing.
I just remember some webm of a guy shoving a turd into the face of a Khajit.
>not equipping one of my other 100 shields automatically when one breaks
>same with bows and weapons
this is just dumb
It also had a hammer end that could be used to bludgeon a bitch.
Wrong.
I like it just like how I like ammo packs in games
Yeah. Most of the shit people throw at weapon durability has something to do with how fast things break. Which is somewhat understandable, because games work at a faster pace than real life. But even so, it does not excuse it of being a generally shitty and lazy mechanic.
the fuck are you even saying?
the gimmick is broken get over it faggot, we are worst than sonybros i swear.
literaly everyone used bombs and explosive canisters
>people don't like maintenance in general
Resident Evil is like 1/3 Item maintenance, and that is one of the greatest games ever made. Mechanics that limit you can invoke amazing experiences if done correctly.
I know, video games requiring button inputs is so fucking hard. Why not just let the game play itself?
It takes less than half a second to re-equip a weapon.
nexusmods.com
>Bathing in Skyrim adds bathing and cleanliness to Skyrim. Over time, your character will become visually more filthy and you will receive a penalty to your Speechcraft and disease resistance. If you become exceptionally filthy, you will also receive a penalty to Sneak as enemies smell you coming.
That's a well made mod and all if you just like to experiment with things, but imagine a game that forces this on you.
>That's a well made mod and all if you just like to experiment with things, but imagine a game that forces this on you.
Metal Gear Solid V?
- Its boring
- Its annoying
- It doesn't add anything fun/new/exciting to the gameplay.
- It can result in pointless grinding/looting for money/points/souls/currency so you can fix your weapon again.
- Nothing is earned by repairing a weapon. There is no progress. Nothing is achieved.
I'd rather be solving puzzles, fighting enemies or exploring new locations rather than having to worry about fixing shit. Its fucking mundane. I like challenging gameplay, as long as those challenges are FUN.
I like how Way of the Samurai 1 did durability
Swords were not blunt and halfswording can be done to very sharp blades
point taken
I suppose my point was mainly targeted at non-survival games
In a game where the main focus is to slash/shoot as much shit as you can as fast as possible, weapon durability just feels like a cheap trick to add extra "dimensions" to gameplay.
This. Now fuck off OP and stop defending everything Nintendo does you moron.
babbies first reveal on how swords actually work.
there's so much things that you don't know yet.
C H O R E
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I kinda liked the durability mechanic in DS2 (after they fixed it), since it's the only game in the series where you actually have to worry about it occasionally. For most weapons it wasn't an issue but if you wanted to use some super fragile meme weapon you either had to stock up on repair powder or have a backup. In DS1 you just occasionally had to throw a few souls at your weapon to make it feel better, and I'm pretty sure a sizeable amount of people who've played DS3 don't even know it has durability.
It's not well implemented most of the time
The only thing that I can think of that did it well was Stalker SoC and that was only really relevant to the hobo phase and unpatched DaS2 where you actually had to use repair powders and even then only when using something like Washing Pole or Estoc.
As said before Far Cry 2 did it right and I always used weapons I got from enemy corpses just for the fun of it.
The problem with people is they are like water, they just flow downhill in the easy path of least resistance rather then doing something fun.
Its the same kind of people who will read up on how to beat games rather then just playing them.
I like durability, but few games do it well, like Dark Souls 2.
Melee weapons need a downside, something to make you have a backup.
aluminum isn't super rare and you can but loads of it for 100 caps
The problem isn't the mechanic itself it's the way its implemented
In a game where it'd be implemented more thoughtfully gameplay would be created from that limitation, but if the game doesnt seem to give a fuck overall it should be here in the first place
example : dead rising
weapon durability worked in dead rising because the time limit forced you to be on the move constantly and losing your good weapons and finding something to replace it on the run was part of the tension of the gameplay
Limited ammo in resident evil games work because the gameplay forces you in many ways to rethread old grounds often so whenever you kill an ennemy and "wasting" ammo you're making a conscious choice of decreasing the tension of your next trips in exchange for a resource
in botw there is no mechanic to support weapon durability and contextualize it, it feels tacked on to extend the duration of the game
Sharpness is the only good form of durability if we're talking about bladed weapons. More games should just implement sharpness instead.
I know exactly what you mean and you are 100% correct. People who say things like "It's just pointless extra work" are quite clearly missing the point.
For most games that wouldn't be too far off from the "steadily decreasing durability number that you need to pay to keep up" It works for MH because it starts at full every hunt and it's implemented well enough into the game where the difference in sharpness between two weapons can be the thing that makes you decide on one of them.
>The problem with people is they are like water, they just flow downhill in the easy path of least resistance rather then doing something fun.
Its kind of amazing how this ruined MGSV for tons of people.
People often critique the game for its poor variety, but this is not actually the case, MGSV just allows you to play fucking anyway you want; and for most people that meant using a OP suppressed tranq sniper and fulton for the most of the game.
Kojima was naive and thought people would naturally just mix up their playstyle when the game got boring, but unless they are forced to people generally won't.
Weapon durability in the first 3 wots games was kinda annoying imo. Anything under 5/5 forced you to play way too carefully until you manage to get to the blacksmith
Didn't mean to quote the second guy
Two simple examples of how durabilty can enhance game play are:
Causing the player to carry back up weapons and seek new weapons to replace old ones, rather than going through the whole game with the same weapon or a direct upgrade of said weapon.
Providing a new strategy for dealing with difficult opponents and a new hazard for players, essentially creating a new "health bar" to monitor, like your standard vitality or stamina bars. If you think its pointless to add more bars then why not simply remove every kind of "bar" and have failure occur the moment you press a button slower than an opponent in a rock, paper scissors type scenario or maybe a just roll a dice and highest number wins. Think about it.
Just goes to show how rushed DS3 was that they didn't fucking even test durability, you can't break any armor in the game without trying for hours or having a friend invade you and casting acid cloud on you.
Or maybe it's on purpose and they just wanted to remove it as a mechanic without ourtight doing so they just jacked the values to impossible levels.
Kinda like they did to weight and forced everyone to become a fast rolling Bloodboene character as long as he's not over 70%.
A friend of mine had complaints about the game like that. He was whining about the lack of variety and was only using suppressed tranq guns.
>well if that's boring why don't you do something like knock over a base or outpost with nothing but grenades and CQC?
>this shit I have will do that way better
It's like how people talk about how Dishonored is boring and easy and you just know they spent the whole game using almost nothing but blink and wallhax.
Because it's rarely ever implemented in a good way, and even when it is, it's still a huge pain in the ass.
Especially when weapons break when logically they shouldnt.
Like a fucking crowbar would not snap after two dozen hits against a zombie, for example. And a sword blade wouldnt snap from hitting unarmored humans, it might blunt, but it wont break entirely.
Guns don't fall apart after a couple of magazines worth of shooting, real military firearms can dump hundred, if not thousands of rounds before they even need to be cleaned, let alone repaired.
Because it's a hassle that isn't needed in a fantasy world.
>all games should have infinite ammo and health, it's fantasy after all
Most of the time it's pointless busywork. Only time i felt it was done right it was in prince of persia games with secondary weapons. Especially in WW where there were some very powerfull secondaries with very low durability. And there was no fixing, you used up the weapon and it broke.
> durability is ammo
Full retard
but they do that anyway, even if by end game you drown them in said items
in encourages scavenging and exploration, as well as not depending on the "one item that works" problem that a lot of games have
Durability is ammo, correct.
>as well as not depending on the "one item that works" problem that a lot of games have
Instead you've got no items that work because they fall apart too easy.
maybe you should git gud
Drability does not mean every weapon breaks in 3 hits dumb fuck.
Few games do that.
>Weapons breaks easily.
>Infinite Bombs.
Top Kek.
Its so fucking simple:
Its not an entertaining mechanic
Wrong, managing your resources is a fantastic mechanic.
This is why DS1 is hailed for having limited heals.
Wrong
I haven't played botw, but usually it adds fuckall complexity and only annoys the player
Same as limited inventory space, usually it just means that the player will have to spend 5 minutes TPing back to town every once in a while
What's the point
Wrong
I must ask, what if durability was linked to the quality rarity system? like a green item has less DP than a purple and once it falls below a certain amount of durability it changes item quality, but the reverse is it can be upgraded to purple it is a lower quality level? the requirement governed by the amount of DP it has
also make durability skill based, if the player does a shit job at dodging and blocking that has more effect on the item than just using it.
Only game that did durabilty right was STALKER.
Weapon starts jamming too often? press G to ditch it and pick up a random new one off the ground and continue.
Pros:
You get to use a new weapon every once in a while.
Requires minimal managment of ammunition and knowledge of enemy weapons.
Cons: None
If you can remove it and nothing substantial changes, why add it in the first place?
Wrong
you can say that for so many game mechanics