Is weapon durability an inherently unfun mechanic?

Is weapon durability an inherently unfun mechanic?

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Depends on what the purpose is
Like a lot of games have really bad economies or reasons to explore and arbitrarily draining player resources forces gameplay to happen.

Then you have stuff like elden ring where you dont need the mechanic and still have player do the gameplay thing

Yes, because it can never be balanced in an interesting way. It either is "meaningful" which means the player engages in constant tedium to maintain or switch weapons, or it is irrelevant and the player can just ignore it.

It's annoying but it at least breaks the monotony a bit. Naturally you're going to bore yourself to death if all you ever do is just run around and swing your sword at everything.

Not necessarily. I won't say I really "liked" BotW weapon degradation, but it was literally never an issue. I played like 200+ hours and always had a steady supply of weapons to use.

>durability
>cooking/crafting
>magic
>the trinity of "never done quite right"
Alright Yea Forums how would (You) make these work?

Yes.

Yes. It hindered my ability to enjoy BOTW, & made me hesitant to use any of the cool weapons & shields I found in my travels.

Should have had a system like in Oblivion & Fallout NV, where you can repair items, & only become temporarily unusable at low maintenance, not gone forever.

link is built for ugly bastard cock

I never got why this was an issue. By my 20th hour in the game I had already amassed a shiton of weapons. In fact I constantly dropped weapons so I could try others I didnt find

It's about as fun as threads asking the same stupid fucking questions every day for years on end.

Yes. The only time it can be used effectively is in a horror game to put stress on the player in order to heighten the tension. In all other cases it is garbage and should not exist.

If there's no way to repair, yes.

Melee weapon durability would be fine if the game worked like Halo. Player restricted to two or so weapons, switch between them with a button press, easily switch your weapon with an enemies dropped weapon with a button press. Never have to pull up a window to do it. Never have to navigate through dozens of stored weapons to find what you want.

The only time I liked it was in Fire Emblem where it's used as part of the games balance.

I wouldn't say "inherently unfun" but it needs to be more developed as a system than just "shit breaks in 10 hits, go find/buy another one"
In BOTW for example I would have liked if the Champions' weapons were "unbreakable" like the Master Sword, even better if that was accomplished through some quest to upgrade them yourself. There is a system to have them remade when they break but that's totally soulless and not worth the effort, I'm just gonna hang them on my wall until the end of the game.
Speaking of, a better storage/inventory system would definitely help people's issues with BOTW, only having five slots at the start is ridiculous and hunting Koroks gets old fast.

>durability
Just have weapons degrade very slowly over time. Make it so that it's never really something that bothers you, but still include it for the sake of immersion and consistency. Durability can be broken down into three stages: There is the perfect state where you get max damage output, the dull blade stage where you get a 15% reduction in damage output, and the broken stage where the weapons aren't usable at all. You can fix weapons by bringing them to a blacksmith or you can fix it yourself if you have the correct levels in smithing and the right amount of materials.
>cooking
In easy/normal mode, cooking is totally optional and just a little extra thing you can do if you want to do it, with small buffs for the people who seek it out. In hard mode, the buffs you get for keeping yourself well-fed should be bumped up a little bit, and if you don't eat for long periods of time you get a small, but meaningful debuff from hunger.
>magic
make magic MAGICAL. Do literally anything besides "shoot out balls of light that do x amount of damage". Let the player traverse the environment differently using magic, let the player deform and interact with the environment around him using magic, etc

yes
only contrarians love it, most people hate it and want it gone

>Durability
Weapons never break but do more damage if you keep them sharp/oiled/etc. Basically, Monster Hunter's version of durability.
>Cooking/crafting
Actually requires an element of skill and doesn't have an arbitrary grinding number. You practice on shit, get better tools to make it easier, but you can make endgame shit with a campfire and a stick if you have the right ingredients and are good.
>Magic
Depends on the game, I always liked dragon's dogma version of magic. Big dick damage, but you're standing still for a long time in a game with high speed enemies. And a lot of games don't focus on buffing/debuffing enemies, it's always damage or some buff that lasts 10 minutes. Give me a channeled buff that lasts 10 seconds but has an actual impact if I use it right. Likewise for things like damage mitigation.

there's a middle ground between hate/love, see

I still can't understand how people are getting filtered by durability system in Botw. My slots always were filled with gear.

Weapon durability is not a mechanic.

Almost 100% of the time, yes. Could potentially be fun/interesting depending upon how it interacts with other mechanics, though. For example, say a dungeon-crawler focused on gathering equipment to sell for a profit might have durability affect the sale value of weapons, so the player would have an interesting risk-reward choice to make between using a weapon to more efficiently/safely explore and/or escape the dungeon, or conserve it for a better payoff later. A lot of games don't do anything interesting with it, though, or do something interesting but unfun (making weapon perform worse until it is repaired at some cost, or just having it break after awhille making weapons essentially consumables).

No. Most people are just hoarder faggots. There's no reason to scavenge for weapons once you find an unbreakable thunder sword.

Durability would degrade the weapon slowly. Bladed weapons become dull and chipped and don't quite hit as much, blunt weapons become chipped and don't lose damage, but will break the handle and make them near useless. But for fuck's sake don't make it snap in half in less than a few swings like BotW did. That shit was awful and in already terrible game.

Cooking is fucking pointless get rid of it.

Crafting is neat, but it's fine where it is.

Magic needs to basically be a form of crafting, where reagents are needed. Basically just make historical alchemy and make it really work the way it's written.

No, it is not. Ammo is resource management and a test of accuracy; it is inherently skill based. Weapon durability is literally just, "Go repair the weapon every once in a while," or "Pick up a new weapon because you can't prevent the current one from breaking." It does not meaningfully test skill or ability, because missing with the weapon does nothing to durability, and hitting with the weapon causes the same or very similar damage regardless.

Games shouldnt be designed to be hoarding when player collects items or loots bodies
Inventory management is worst thing in rpgs

>Is ammo an unfun mechanic in shooters?
If the game is poorly designed and doesn't reliably give you enough ammo to deal with the situations it puts you in, yes. Running out of ammo and having to retreat or start over is a very frustrating experience.
Now I don't exactly think that analogy describes BOTW, there are a lot of systems you can leverage to get the most out of your durability and trivialize taking out even the Gold fuckers on Master Mode who have way too much health, but I can see how people think it makes combat more trouble than it's worth since you can spend more resources taking out enemies than you're rewarded with for beating them.

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I think XIV did crafting very well. Gameplay-wise at least.
Magic was done very well in games like Arx Fatalis, where you have to cast spells actively, or Might & Magic 6/7/8 where it's about the scale and possibilities.

Durability mostly sucks because it rarely has any meaning.
In Kingdom Come Deliverance, I think durability is fairly decent. You have to "maintain" your gear, giving encounters more involved risk/reward aspects, "repair" broken stuff which makes gear switching less streamlined and more atmospheric.
Excelling at repairs doesn't just save you money - it'll allow you to improve your combat potential, so it's rewarding still.

>durability is ammo for melee weapons
>guns also have durability on top of ammo
>retarded analogy

Depends on the game. It can improve the game even when the degradation rate is extremely high, like in Shadow Tower, or it can just ruin the game like in BOTW

Only for plebs. There's nothing wrong with it and they're a very well done use of realism within the phantasy that videogames are without being intrusive towards the videogame concept at the same time. Plenty games had it from log time to nowadays

>Cadillacs & Dinosaurs
>Deadrising
>Fire Emblem games
>Zelda BOTW
>Fire Emblem after awakening
And so on.

this shit mechanic forces players to only use the powerful weapons with high durability
have you ever seen anyone attempt to beat the crap out of ganon with a tree branch or a torch? the entire game is ruined because of a shitty unfun mechanic
plus it's hilarious that a handful of weapons will literally never spawn again, meaning you are forced to NOT use those weapons (permanently missable weapons)

Weapon durability was actually fun in BOTW,because weapons were plentiful and it kept you trying new things out constantly.

Having a lot of gear available doesn't make it a fun or engaging mechanic.

>degrade very slowly over time
That the worst idea i read yet. It's was annoying when your weapon brakes when you use it but now it brakes when you don't.

>have you ever seen anyone attempt to beat the crap out of ganon with a tree branch or a torch?
>not beating Ganondorf with the bottle

Not really no. It's not that different from running out of ammo in an FPS. Although modern game design might consider that "unfun" too since modern shooters seem to almost always just give you infinite ammo.

In many games, yes.
When the game is balanced around it, such as in BOTW however, no. BOTW would be a very boring game without it.

Magic needs more RNG. I've thought a lot about how magic should work, and magic needs a chance of failure with an interesting spell casted when a fail occurs.

If weapon degrade then let me repair it and let me craft weapons.
Also you can make system that when you forge weapon it's something like 20% worse than you find naturally but with each weapon of that type broken and forged you become better at that and will be able to make weapon that 20% better.

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Yeah, it's so exciting rummaging through my menu every 2 minutes because my weapon breaks after killing 3 enemies. BotW was one of the worst implementations of weapon durability ever.

>pic

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No. Yea Forums is full of shitter crybabies. And Elden Ring confirmed that a hundred times over.

Yea. The people who suggest being able to repair weapons are especially fucking retarded. I don't know why these types are so incapable of dealing with consumable items.

Why do you think it's a matter of inability and not simply being undesirable?

If repairing weapons was useful people would be using the champion's weapons, which they don't because it's pointless.
>I should be able to take my empty magazine to a town and fill it back up with bullets
Why the fuck don't you just grab a full one from the guy you just killed you idiot?

They're good in games where weapons are disposable, like in beat em ups where they're essentially a short-duration buff to your damage and range. Ideally picking up or swapping a weapon is fast and incorporates an attack into the pickup/swap animation though. Maybe even add bonus damage when you use up a weapon's durability, cause hitting a guy with a stick doesn't look like it hurts as much as hitting a guy with a stick so hard it breaks in two.

>durability
None

>cooking
I actually enjoyed the cooking in Botw.
If I were to make it even better, I'd make it so that you're able to make different types of meals depending on the what vessel you use.
Also, make the character actually eat exactly what you cooked with some really high quality animations like in Monster Hunter.

>magic
Make it grandiose and actually interesting like in Dragon's Dogma, but with more spells and more interactivity between them. I like how Spellbreakers did it as well with the many combos between elements.

>say a dungeon-crawler focused on gathering equipment to sell for a profit might have durability affect the sale value of weapons
This actually seems like a really interesting idea.

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You forgot stamina meters.

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It’s annoying considering, in most cases, the most basic maintenance would make it irrelevant but your character is too retarded to do it.
Like when it applies to guns, 2 minutes of wiping down the bolt and bore would make it a non-issue, but you still have to deal with guns malfunctioning and breaking because you can’t just do that.

It's contrived. You need a large inventory of weapons because of durability, and you have durability to force the player to use a lot of weapons. But none of that matters because you have infinite bombs. I went through the whole game with the default inventory with absolutely no problem.

no, but its rough to balance
>dark souls 2 on release
>classic fromsoft ties a lot of shit to the framerate
>including weapon durability
>on pc where framerate is consistently 60
>weapons broke at double speed
>have to bring a weapon for each slot
>journeys between bonfires become more tense
>tension in souls exploration = fun
but then you got the bad implementation where weapons vanish when they break, but it doesnt matter cause you get so many, then its just annoying and boils down to inventory management

make durability scale with stats maybe
using a rapier on an armored target would fuck the weapon up, but if your character has high dex or whatever it wouldn't
using it on an unarmored target wouldn't be an issue ever even at low stats
basically stat distribution affect your weapon proficiency in more than one way but still limits you somewhat depending on who you're facing thus promoting specialization

Yes because of the menu navigation. When you have to open your weapon menu multiple times during a fight and scroll to a new weapon to use just ruins the flow.