VGC Weapon Durability MEGA Thread

[Peh]

                               

Wright said:

· Grabbing an overpowered weapon early on; to begin with, it's not as easy as "going into" a dungeon and fetching said weapon. He oversimplifies this also with the fact that, apparently, new players already know where the overpowered weapon lies, when basically whenever you start an open-world game you have zero clue about things. Unless you're using guide from the start, but players with guide are already spoiling themselves, so their experience is already lessened. Did someone know where to find daedric weapons in Oblivion once you leave the prison at the start? Did players know the requisites to unlock higher damaging weaponry in Red Dead Redemption once you gain control of John? You know behind which sidequest the Legendary Guitar in Deadly Premonition lies? No, of course not, because you're experiencing these things for the very first time. There's no way a person would know how to overpower himself that quickly with weaponry.

Obviously, no you don't know where the good and best weapon are if you play for the first time. But, that's also not the point. The point is, that you give the players actually not restrictions. So, if a player stumples by accident over a really powerful weapon and he can keep it for the rest of the game, than you created an exploit and all the other weapons loose their purpose and the game also looses parts of its challenge itself. After the tutorial level, you can just go to Hyrule castle and get all the good stuff. It's just lying around or are in treasures. You just have to avoid enemy encounters when doing so. You can see this being done in speedruns.

Wright said:

There's also the fact that he might come across as a high-level dungeon from the start, but what are the chances he successfully completes the dungeon and grabs the overpowered reward at the end? Not to mention, games like Dark Souls, you can find a lot of early overpowered weaponry that, if you're in the correct class, you might be able to equip on the go. Doesn't mean much. The game won't stop being a breeze because ultimately it's an open-ended game that relies more on skill than just mere raw stats. The weapon in this case becomes a sweet relief, but not a salvation.

The dungeons are all the same level, because all the necessary equipment you need to solve them are there from the tutorial part of the game. I havn't tried it but I guess you can use your bombs to kill nearly every enemy in the game. The better weapons makes the enemies just a bit easier to kill, nothing more. So like mentioned in the video, weapons are just consumable, like ammunition for weapons. There are not a necessity, they just make your journey easier and in order for you not to exploit that, every weapon becomes breakable.

Wright said:

· He claims the fun in Breath of the Wild lies by collecting all that weapon that keeps breaking. Now I haven't experienced this for myself, so I can't develop much here, but this resonates with the point I claimed earlier: weapons in Breath of the Wild lack personality. You want them for a quantity reason, to have plenty of weapons to spare when fighting, not because you attach yourself to the weapon (and some people in this thread has stated as such, too). There's no charm or added value to them, just the raw number of how many you can carry so that you then have many weapons to use from. It's not fun, it becomes the mundane task of collecting anything you can grab in your hand. Not saying it's a boring mechanic, but I'm not saying it's charming, either. There's no reward in waiting for enemies to drop their weapon to use them; it's just a mechanic gameplay-wise to keep the flow of the combat. You don't think much of the weaponry outside these first instances where you find the nice weapons. I don't think any player looks forward to getting more arrows for their bow with enthusiastic loot interest, but rather, because they keep running out of them and need to restock. Same principle is added to the weapons.

But how would you design a game without restricting players in what the can wear or not? You don't have level restriction like Witcher 3 for parts in your game and equipment. Even if the Witcher 3 is an open world game, you still are restricted in what you can do and at what time you can do that. Zelda Botw doesn't have such restriction at all.  You can do whatever you want in the game. And in order to keep a certain balance, certain mechanics have to be made to make it work. If you are allowed to keep the best weapon in the game from the beginning, why go on and explore the game? Being to powerful in the beginning will have no challengers at all and thus the game becomes boring as hell.

Wright said:

· Horrible item management can happen in any game in regards to how cumbersome the player is, but it's not suddenly a big issue if the weapons are unbreakable. You can stock your inventory in Diablo on a chest if it becomes too big. You can leave items in Oblivion at your house. Just because you want to carry around a worn-out weapon until you fix it doesn't inmediately mean that the inventory management becomes tedious. Not to mention you can also have a game like Bloodborne, who doesn't feature that many weapons (12 in total, I think), so not only you want to carry them all with you because of their uniqueness, there's nothing cumbersome about managing them in your inventory. Honestly, making weapons so rare and unique is much more enticing, imo, than finding any weapon over and over when yours keep breaking like he says in the video.

I don't mean this as a full-blown critique. It's okay if people like this, but I can't find myself agreeing with the video.

I am not saying that every game should absorb this mechanic. It's about what you want to achieve in your game. Diablo is about getting the best gear available and throwing the old ones away. But it also got different difficulty settings to make it challenging. Those doesn't exist in Zelda. And Diablo is also not an open world game without restrictions. It's similar for Oblivion. You have a level system, so better gear is only available with a better level to avoid explotation. But Zelda doesn't have a level system. It never had with the exception of Zelda 2. They just wanted to get rid of the linearity in the game and go back to where it all started with Zelda for the NES.

Zelda is not about finding the best gear, it's about the expierence you have with the game. And with this one, you get all the freedom you want without someone telling you, "Nope. You can't do that unless you are level blablabla". That's why they also give you the possibility to go and beat the game right after the tutorial part.