Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 both weigh the player down with encumbrance. Love it or hate it, it seems like it’s here to stay.
Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 both weigh the player down with encumbrance. Love it or hate it, it seems like it’s here to stay.
What about gear durability? I hate that shit even more than I hate encumbrance.
Same. Like what kind of sword breaks after 3 uses.
That it kind of the thing tho, if you just violently smash your sword around, it’s gonna break. Like katanas are pretty flimsy and a german greatsword for example could just snap it off. Let’s take elden ring for example and you use your sword to find an invisible wall, that’s terrible for a sword and it would go to shit really quick. So i guess in a way it’s realistic. But i really don’t like it when games do that. All it does for me is that i’m never going to use the nice things in the game, because they break, then you need a new one or repair it or whatever.
I’m fine with encumbrance… especially in these Bethesda games. All they do is litter the world with garbage for the player to pick up and carry around for no reason other than make the game longer.
Well, a sword is probably not gonna break after striking someone’s armor 7 times, but it is gonna get uselessly dull quicker than you’d imagine. Professional chefs sharpen their knives once a month or two, and that’s modern steel mostly being used against softer stuff without a lot of force. Afaik, historically soldiers did re-sharpen their blades after every battle because one battle was all it took to dull a blade made of medieval era materials.
Do professional chefs really sharpen their knives that infrequently? When I worked at a pizza shop we sharpened that cheap chef’s knife like every day. Maybe high end restaurants have much better steel? That seems pretty infrequent for the amount of use it gets though.
There are two kinds of “sharpening” you do: real sharpening with a whetstone, and honing with a honing rod. The latter is something you should do very often, the earlier shouldn’t be necessary daily or even weekly.
I love durability systems when they’re done well such as in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. In these rare games, the designers have clearly kept the durability system as part of a carefully designed gear economy. Part of the intended difficulty of these games is learning to improvise and not relying on a singular weapon or tactic. The action doesn’t stop when your sword breaks. It often becomes more frantic and desperate unless the player has planned accordingly, and then they can feel rewarded for proper preparation. In other words, proper implementation tends to look much more like Resident Evil resource management than the classic Diablo money sink.
Unfortunately, most games do not justify these systems. In Dark Souls, Skyrim, old Diablo, and countless others, the durability system is more of a grindy chore that forces the action to stop whenever the player has to “return to town” to repair their stuff. The player dreads their gear breaking not because it’ll happen in the heat of action, but because they have to basically babysit their gear and put all action on hold while they regularly check their gear’s “health” and occasionally focus on getting it repaired.
Skyrim doesn’t have gear durability. Oblivion was the last, single-player Elder Scrolls game to include that
You’re absolutely right! Been a long time since I played either and conflated the two. I should probably play them again, now that I think about it.
Oblivion is still neat as a history piece.
Yeah, encumbrance can be overcame but the durability thing is annoying. Especially when you can’t repair the gear.
BOTW/TOTK Zelda games are the only ones that get it right. It’s a core game mechanic and they give you enough weapons to have fun with it.
Eh. Can’t say I had fun watching my higher end weapon break on the stronger, bullet sponge enemies later on, and replacing it with a crappy short swords that do barely any damage. ToTK though was certainly better thanks to fusion.
It was ok early game, but later it got super annoying for me. I played it on PC so I used a program that edited the durability for the items and made them and impossible value.