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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Unpopular opinion (on the internet): BotW and TotK's weapon durability feature is one of these games greatest mechanics

I wouldn’t say it’s unpopular opinion. Just a really loud minority who love to hear themselves complain in the most overdramatic fashion possible about the dominant game of current time. The exact same people were also whining about Animal Crossing: New Horizons when it was the dominant game. I don’t want to say people are outright lying about their opinion to get attention, but certainly overreacting to get attention.

It fits the design of one of the very greatest games in the history of video games. It’s superior to the sorts of games that just stuff you with hundreds to thousands of items that you’re not sure if they should be sold or not because you’re not sure what’s expendable. With Breath of the Wild and it’s sequel, it’s all expendable (except the master sword) because you’re always on the path of getting new and better stuff.

It’s not like it’s some alien new system either. It’s a species of an ammo system. You find ammo, use it, and find more and use that. The difference from the standard being that you don’t need to find a weapon separately to use the ammo and you’ve got an inventory limitation (expandable). Although, shortages are rare, there are weapons all over the place and they’re always getting stronger and stronger based on progress measured by improvement of Link.

That’s just my two cents… and you’ll have to forgive me if I’m repeating things that have been said 18 times already, the thread’s too big and I don’t have time :D



I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.

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Jumpin said:

I wouldn’t say it’s unpopular opinion. Just a really loud minority who love to hear themselves complain in the most overdramatic fashion possible about the dominant game of current time. The exact same people were also whining about Animal Crossing: New Horizons when it was the dominant game. I don’t want to say people are outright lying about their opinion to get attention, but certainly overreacting to get attention.

It fits the design of one of the very greatest games in the history of video games. It’s superior to the sorts of games that just stuff you with hundreds to thousands of items that you’re not sure if they should be sold or not because you’re not sure what’s expendable. With Breath of the Wild and it’s sequel, it’s all expendable (except the master sword) because you’re always on the path of getting new and better stuff.

It’s not like it’s some alien new system either. It’s a species of an ammo system. You find ammo, use it, and find more and use that. The difference from the standard being that you don’t need to find a weapon separately to use the ammo and you’ve got an inventory limitation (expandable). Although, shortages are rare, there are weapons all over the place and they’re always getting stronger and stronger based on progress measured by improvement of Link.

That’s just my two cents… and you’ll have to forgive me if I’m repeating things that have been said 18 times already, the thread’s too big and I don’t have time :D

Hey I made the bullet anology in the OP allready :P



tolu619 said:

To those people who can't stand this mechanic, who say it's a deal breaker for them, I think you didn't give it a good try with an open mind, so you never got to see that it's not nearly as bad as you thought. Before I explain why I said that, let me point out that I would have preferred if the weapons were more durable. Maybe up to twice as durable as they are in the games. I don't hate the mechanics, I just think they went a bit too far with them. That being said, here's why I think you probably didn't give it a chance:
1. It's so easy to find weapons in the game, it's almost impossible to be completely weaponless once you've gotten past the first 20 minutes of the game.
2. If you need a weapon, it probably means you're fighting an enemy, and almost all the enemies in the game drop their weapons when they are knocked to the ground, so you can easily pick them up mid-combat.
3. If you have a favorite weapon, you have the liberty to fill your inventory with multiple copies of that weapon because like I said earlier, it's very easy to find weapons.
4. There's no point hoarding your best weapons and avoiding fights to avoid weapon durability because the abundance of powerful weapons scales with the time spent in the game (I think it's tied to the number of blood moons you've encountered). The longer you've been playing, the more frequently you'll run into powerful enemies and thus, powerful weapons.
5. Weak enemies hold weak weapons and stong enemies hold strong weapons. This means that if you break some of your own weapons while fighting an enemy camp, you can pick their weapons from them and the weapons will always be strong enough to handle the particular enemies you're currently facing. There's no risk of grabbing a very weak weapon from a strong enemy such that the weapon will hardly do any damage to him.
6. In BOTW, you had the option of building a house for yourself and stocking it with some of your favorite weapons so that when an occasion arises in which you would like more copies of your favs, you could go home and pick them from your armory.
7. Finally, at almost every point in the game, you have an inventory so full of weapons that you would have to drop one if you found a new one to pick up. If the weapons really were breaking too quickly, you wouldn't almost always have a full inventory. This just shows that the rate of weapon drops/new weapon discovery is considerably higher than the rate of weapon breaks.

What for those who didn't think it was a deal-breaker (since I played 170 hours) but find it an annoying mechanic that limits the fun in the game.

As I already explained earlier, it prevented taking all kinds of different weapons along to have them available for experimentation. Also needing 2 sets when the leveling got out of balance mixing easy camps which drop low level weapons, with attacks from high level enemies needing high level weapons to defeat.

Yes it was very annoying to always have the inventory full and have to choose what to drop every time you find something. It would be much nicer to have longer durability and finding the same weapon again restes the durability of what you are holding, with a small bonus on top when you already have a weapon of that kind with full durability. Not having duplicates in the inventory is an much better way to encourage experimentation, as well as having a bigger inventory to allow more different kinds of weapons to be carried along.

That would increase the flow of the game (not opening inventory every time to pick up a weapon, only when you encounter one that's different from all you are already carrying) give you more toys to play with and prevent simply keeping using the same type of weapon by filling your inventory with all the same high level weapons.

TotK is better with durability and so far it's just a minor nuisance to have utility 'weapons' like the axe and rock hammer break. But that's on the same level as Minecraft basically. The one thing that's still there is the find a new weapon, go look in the inventory again what to replace or leave it. But with the fuse system you can't simply say, you already have that base weapon, top up durability when finding it again. I guess you could restore durability of the fused one, which would make you experiment more with different base types of weapons. (And not end up carrying only heavy sticks or traveling spears along for example) One other nuisance is that you have to go into the inventory to select the weapon and destroy the fused part before being able to replace the end part. Dunno why it simply doesn't add a confirmation pop up when trying to fuse a different thing on a weapon. A simple want to replace press A or B would be so much easier.