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I just don't believe it's actually difficult, there's nothing skill-related (which is directly related to difficulty) aside from potential pre-planning with having durability on weapons, which, unless we're playing chess, I have a hard time seeing that as real difficulty. Say you're fighting something that is strong vs bows and you've been fighting with swords, and the sword breaks and there's no direct replacement, sure, I guess, you could use bows and change your fighting style to compensate, or you can stop what you were doing to leave the area and go find some swords, which is an impediment to progress that you were doing. Except the problem is cyclical, as you tend to have to engage in combat in order to find more weapons (or buy them, which also tends to require engaging in combat, which leads to weapon degradation) Couple that with limited inventory space, the "difficulty" isn't the item degradation exclusively, but then the inventory management and time management of "how many weapons do I carry on me to not have to stop what I'm doing to find more weapons once these invariably break" Perhaps the argument could be made that weapons breaking provides the impetus to explore, but pretty much every elder scrolls/fallout/open world game would disagree with you, as the world itself simply being there is the impetus to explore, not the clash of mechanical systems within the game. It would be one thing, if like those mentioned games, there was a way to repair those items with an on hand resource, and/or if there were fewer things but more unique things, but that's just trading one issue for another with the question: "What purpose does item degradation on weapons actually have?" Is it exploring ways to use new items in novel ways? I suppose, but outside of initial forays into those, people find their own playstyles simply by playing the game, so I don't really see that being a major valid reason. Besides, people tend to fall into what they like, rather than experiment for the sake of it. Maybe speedrunners in terms of "how can I utterly break this game over my knee" whereas I'd argue most people would just want to complete the game. For me, personally, once I found the weapon, say in the case of Fallout, a laser rifle, and I like that, why would I ever pick something else? Fallout 4 tries to get around this by giving you random stats on weapons that might be better, or different weapons, but if I have picked what I want, I just want to use that and only get the item if it's a laser rifle + 1, or +3, etc I'm not going to whip out the rocket launcher unless the situation demands it. rarely, i'd use a shotgun or w/e to spice things up out of boredom but the reference I'd make it something akin to the weapon I want is a "trusty steed". I don't want to ride someone else's horse unless I don't have another choice. GreenBuckanneer fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jun 17, 2021 |
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Jun 17, 2021 17:20
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 05:58 |
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Violence solves nothing, the only thing broken about the weapon system is giving Link a weapon at all. Real heroes fight with magic.
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Jun 17, 2021 18:03
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Weapon durability in BotW isn't really about "difficulty" though, it's a pacing mechanism. It means there is a natural ebb and flow to the power of weapons you acquire based on where you've been. It allows the game to occasionally give you power way above your pay grade without short circuting its intended curve. And it means a clever player can feel good about bypassing the intended curve anyway if they know what they are doing. It's a means of putting a tiny shackle on a massive open world that would otherwise be universally the same level of damage/hp. You could argue skill gates instead of damage checks but I don't know that botw's combat system is capable of meaningful skill gates.
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Jun 17, 2021 18:26
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People say "If only there was a way to repair weapons" but there is, the Champion weapons can be repaired (well, remade really I guess) for a lower level weapon and some rocks. There's also the Master Sword for the "infinite use weapon" although that's implemented a bit poorly since it still "breaks" and you just have to wait for it to recharge. I feel like this is more or less fine for the standard game but I feel that instead of just making the Master Sword stronger, the weapon trials should have given it infinite durability. It still wouldn't have been a perfect solution (since that requires you to purchase DLC, also it's kinda late in the game) but I feel like earning an infinite durability weapon wouldn't somehow dramatically change the game. I'm also unsure how weapon durability is any different from ammo for guns in older FPS games, at least in how it affects gameplay. I know there's differences such as a particular gun has fixed stats that ammo doesn't change, which is a little different from "This sword had 20 attack power but this new one I found only has 15." I guess it's just because Link doesn't have a default attack to fall back on? Since I know most FPS games have some sort of melee option so even if you burn up all your ammo you still have something that can do damage, but one, I can't imagine a situation where someone in BotW has completely run out of any weapons to use since you can at least usually find a club somewhere, and two you have a lot of other ways of fighting that don't require weapons. The criticism I do have of the weapon durability system is one others have brought up. The game gives you so many weapons that ultimately it doesn't force the player to find new creative ways to deal with enemies, a weapon breaks and you just go into your menu and equip the next strongest one and keep beating the enemy up. It kind of just becomes inventory management and slightly tedious when you find a weapon and check to see "Is this stronger than the weakest weapon I have right now?" and if it isn't you just ignore it, as well as making sure to do things like "I just broke my sledgehammer so I have to keep this weapon slot open so I can pick up another one and not have to use my good stuff to break rocks." I really don't care if weapon durability comes back in the sequel or not, but I do think they should have a sort of compromise for people who don't like it: have infinite durability weapons, but they're significantly weaker than weapons you can find that have durability, and then in the late game you can maybe go on special quests to power them up and have infinite durability weapons on par with what you can find lying around. It gives people who don't want to deal with weapons breaking an option, still allows weapons you find to have value, and allows a player to earn the right to not have to deal with the system at all near the endgame.
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Jun 17, 2021 20:02
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I think weapon durability in BotW, while similar to ammo, is essentially doing a very similar thing to gear obsoletion in a game like WoW or Diablo. In those games, as you level up you're constantly discarding old gear to get more powerful gear, and especially in Diablo, it's essentially a static treadmill - you do more damage now so you crank up the difficulty to fight enemies with more health, so you get better gear, so you do more damage, so you crank up the difficulty. Number Go Up, but the gameplay remains the same. Breakable items create the same effect without the Number Go Up part. Over the course of a play session, a few of your weapons are replaced with new ones, and the gameplay remains fundamentally the same. But it lets you keep getting get that excitement of "Ooh, 5x Lynel bow! Royal broadsword! Shiny new object!" without having to implement a complex leveling and stat system like a Blizzard game, and without the "ugh gotta go back to town to repair my gear / dust it into mats" mechanic. For some folks that feels better, because it's simple and has those other minor benefits. For other folks it feels worse, because it just feels like losing something instead of gaining something (even though the only real gain in a Diablo upgrade is arbitrarily higher number).
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Jun 18, 2021 01:24
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Weapon durability was fine, regenerating health damage sponge enemies in master mode combined with weapon durability was not.
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Jun 18, 2021 01:37
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I don't think I ever fought an enemy, besides bosses, that cost more durability than it dropped, so every fight was a net gain that sometimes let me get some nicer stuff. My hot take is that if you have a problem with durability, your weapons are either breaking way more than mine did, or you just feel bad when stuff breaks even if you find more of the same/better right after the fight anyway.
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Jul 3, 2021 22:11
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 05:58 |
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Weapon durability is the best thing that has ever happened to link to the wild.
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Jul 4, 2021 04:05
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