I feel like the saying "You can polish a turd, but it's still a turd" is applicable here. You can gloss-up and make the best UI element ever for a poor game mechanic. It could convey meaning and...
I feel like the saying "You can polish a turd, but it's still a turd" is applicable here.
You can gloss-up and make the best UI element ever for a poor game mechanic. It could convey meaning and intent perfectly. It could be a genius solution, never before done. It could receive the highest praise.
But at the end of the day, you still have a bad game element. People are still going to hate it. It will still negatively affect people's experience of the game. The UI doesn't fix that.
That one game mechanic was enough for me to give up playing BotW.
It's a very subjective gameplay design decision. I personally enjoyed it because it set the master sword apart from everything else in the game, and it encouraged me to keep changing things up and...
It's a very subjective gameplay design decision. I personally enjoyed it because it set the master sword apart from everything else in the game, and it encouraged me to keep changing things up and freely chuck low-durability weapons at enemies' faces.
It gives BotW a unique feel compared to other Zelda games. I kinda hate shield durability though. It made sledding on my ancient shields a painful decision until I used a glitch to get unlimited crafting parts from a guardian.
Even the master sword has durability though! It just “recharges”. Shield durability also irked me, but only really because of the shield sledding you mentioned.
Even the master sword has durability though! It just “recharges”.
Shield durability also irked me, but only really because of the shield sledding you mentioned.
Master Sword has about as much durability as a random iron claymore, and it does less damage than some of the end game weapons. They kinda fixed it with the DLC which gives it much more damage but...
Master Sword has about as much durability as a random iron claymore, and it does less damage than some of the end game weapons. They kinda fixed it with the DLC which gives it much more damage but that came out a long time later and still makes it feel like the master sword is useful for mundane tasks like hitting trees and mowing grass because you don't want to waste your other weapons on it.
Yeah that was one of the areas that I felt was super odd and clashed with the whole system. You can't have the master sword suck, but you also can't have it break, but you also can't have it be...
Yeah that was one of the areas that I felt was super odd and clashed with the whole system. You can't have the master sword suck, but you also can't have it break, but you also can't have it be great because then why use anything else, and you can't have him get it at the end.
Major issue there clashing gameplay elements with expectations.
I would not compare weapon disability to a turd, nor do I think it is a bad game mechanic. It's one of the most basic forms of resource management, and it's in a lot of my favorite games: Fallout,...
I would not compare weapon disability to a turd, nor do I think it is a bad game mechanic. It's one of the most basic forms of resource management, and it's in a lot of my favorite games: Fallout, Fire Emblem, Don't Starve, Rimworld, just to name a few.
I'm fine with people disliking it, but I'll go to my grave defending it as a game design choice.
As with any element, it depends on how it's done. I somewhat understand the problem with Botw and the like. The kinds of players who like these games are the kinds that did not want to do any sort...
As with any element, it depends on how it's done.
I somewhat understand the problem with Botw and the like. The kinds of players who like these games are the kinds that did not want to do any sort of resource management, and that's fine.
Putting in resource management, even if it was honestly pretty well done, is going to ruffle feathers.
At least BotW's and ToTK's implementation feels purposeful and the gameplay is built around it. There are so many horrible implementations of durability out there. Bethesda games are a notorious...
At least BotW's and ToTK's implementation feels purposeful and the gameplay is built around it. There are so many horrible implementations of durability out there. Bethesda games are a notorious example where weapons degrade far too quickly for how much you have to use them. Far Cry 2 is probably the single worst example, with the durability set so comically low that you can watch a gun deteriorate in your hands from just firing it. The Diablo implementation always felt tacked-on, like something they experimented with and decided against but forgot to remove from the final product. I know it's not but I never really understood why it was even in those games.
The implementation in these recent two Zelda games is quite a curveball but it's not much more of a hurdle than getting used to the idea of dying frequently in a Souls game, or getting over the hump of learning how to use the weapons and mechanics in Doom Eternal in a systematic way. All these games feel designed around these frictional mechanics to the point that they're not the barrier they initially seem. Although ToTK definitely is much, much better than BotW about it since they changed quite a bit to refine the whole experience by doing things like improving the quantity of quality weapons, and having a better variety of more special ones.
And going back to what this video is actually about, Zelda's UI communicates durability far better than any of these other examples. Most of them have no indication beyond a number in a stat sheet. Far Cry 2 is the only other one that could perhaps match it but the balance of it is so wrong that its weapon quality indication comes off more like a cruel joke than anything else.
One could argue that HP itself is resource management, nevermind the fact that BotW also has stamina (another resource) that you can replenish with items or food/potions (another resource) that...
One could argue that HP itself is resource management, nevermind the fact that BotW also has stamina (another resource) that you can replenish with items or food/potions (another resource) that you can craft with ingredients (another resource).
I don't disagree with you at all. The only thing I disagree with is the idea that weapon durability is bad game design. People can dislike that it exists or not enjoy it, but that doesn't make it inherently bad.
Oh yeah no I think we're on the same page. There's plenty of games that do resource management fantastically (survival horror is one of the genres for it), and I think botw was fine. Just kinda...
Oh yeah no I think we're on the same page. There's plenty of games that do resource management fantastically (survival horror is one of the genres for it), and I think botw was fine. Just kinda talking about how yeah, there's always some people who will hate it.
I could be misremembering due to something in my modlist, but unlike other games Rimworld's weapon durability doesn't decrease with weapon use does it? It just tracks the conditions the weapon is...
I could be misremembering due to something in my modlist, but unlike other games Rimworld's weapon durability doesn't decrease with weapon use does it? It just tracks the conditions the weapon is stored in when not being carried by a pawn?
I’m not in a place to watch videos right now, but I really don’t think that breakable weapons are bad game design. They complicate the way you play the game, and that is not something that is...
I’m not in a place to watch videos right now, but I really don’t think that breakable weapons are bad game design. They complicate the way you play the game, and that is not something that is definitively good or bad; it’s something that depends on the context of the rest of the game’s design.
It might be something that some people hate, true, but so what? Not everything needs to appeal to everyone, and frankly I dislike games that attempt to do so because they tend to feel incredibly bland. I prefer to play interesting kusoge over games that I will forget every detail over the course of the next month. And when I think back to my favorite games of all time there’s not a single one that I can think of where frustration was not part of the experience. Frictionless gameplay is something to avoid.
I don't like them in general, but what really ruined BotW for me was that it you lose a fight, you respawn with the weapon durability still used up (and/or the gear still destroyed). It means you...
I don't like them in general, but what really ruined BotW for me was that it you lose a fight, you respawn with the weapon durability still used up (and/or the gear still destroyed). It means you can't really retry very difficult fights unless you have the means to go replace your gear between attempts.
So you're disincentivised from repeatedly throwing yourself at fights you're not winning? I can see that being irritating from a "dark souls" perspective, but I can also see why the designers...
So you're disincentivised from repeatedly throwing yourself at fights you're not winning? I can see that being irritating from a "dark souls" perspective, but I can also see why the designers might want to encourage players to move on to other objectives if they're losing fights repeatedly.
It disincentivized me from fighting in general. I did t want to participate in the economy from the beginning. Getting better weapons made me want to spend that durability even less. I hate using...
It disincentivized me from fighting in general. I did t want to participate in the economy from the beginning. Getting better weapons made me want to spend that durability even less. I hate using consumable items!
I think this is one of the core issues. Most players just naturally will not use consumable items. You have to do A LOT to force them to do so, including some very serious training in the...
I think this is one of the core issues. Most players just naturally will not use consumable items. You have to do A LOT to force them to do so, including some very serious training in the beginning of the game.
If you play the game and don't give a damn about your current weapons/consumables, and just use what you have, it's a hell of a lot more fun. My wife hoarded everything for the first one, literally killing entire mobs with bombs, and it wasn't nearly as good for her as the second one, where she chilled out on it a bit (especially after seeing her nephew play who was using more stuff and having fun with it).
The problem is that the new zelda's don't do enough to encourage getting over the item hoarding. Being able to "template" a few unique items so you can go back to a village with enough resources and "rebuild" them probably would've helped.
Exactly, you're telling me that even the freaking legendary Master Sword, the most powerful sword in all of Hyrule, can only be used in combat for like 10 minutes before it is rendered useless...
Exactly, you're telling me that even the freaking legendary Master Sword, the most powerful sword in all of Hyrule, can only be used in combat for like 10 minutes before it is rendered useless (temporarily)? The whole game frustrated me mostly due to that one aspect. I ended up keeping massive amounts of disposable weapons in my inventory all the time and I rarely used anything strong in case I needed it. I reminds me of elixers in Final Fantasy games, I'd always save them in case I needed them and they may as well have no existed for 99% of the game. In BotW I focused way too much of my mental energy stressing about making sure I didn't run out of gear because they were apparently made out of play dough. The sequel apparently lets you take the squished play dough and form it into new play dough weapons to make said play dough weaponry less frustrating. Neat, but not interested.
I had meant to make that as a response to @Unsorted specifically, who also mentioned BotW. I don’t think that losing the durability on your equipment when you respawn is a failure in design. I...
I had meant to make that as a response to @Unsorted specifically, who also mentioned BotW.
I don’t think that losing the durability on your equipment when you respawn is a failure in design. I think it’s a specific decision. You can win the game with any weapon. You are meant specifically to improvise; it’s supposed to feel like a survival game in a way. Note there is no player stats outside of health, which is less of a stat as it is a buffer for the player to make mistakes in.
Yeah. I think I largely agree with you. I don't like durability mechanics on weapons. But I get why they exist. They're there for immersion, honesty, and mechanics' sake. In a similar vein, I...
Yeah. I think I largely agree with you.
I don't like durability mechanics on weapons. But I get why they exist. They're there for immersion, honesty, and mechanics' sake.
In a similar vein, I respect a limited inventory for weapons. In BOTW I found the root level of slots bullshit. And I found the expansion mechanism somewhat bullshit. But neither made me stop playing. I accepted both as fair and acceptable mechanics.
If I want a different mechanic, the world is free for me to design my game. I happily enjoyed their game and their story.
Call me whatever, but I actually liked breakable weapons in BotW. I was surprised to.learn this is how the game was made, but soon I got enough weapons waiting for their turn that I actually had...
Call me whatever, but I actually liked breakable weapons in BotW. I was surprised to.learn this is how the game was made, but soon I got enough weapons waiting for their turn that I actually had to throw away really good stuff to make room for even better stuff.
It makes you save the good weapons for later and also makes you actually use them (if you have to) and not hinge on them. It just makes you run through what you get and not get any favorite. I like that.
I'm still going to hate breakable weapons, no matter the UI. The only way I could stomach BOTW and TOTK is by playing them on an emulator with durability disabled.
I'm still going to hate breakable weapons, no matter the UI. The only way I could stomach BOTW and TOTK is by playing them on an emulator with durability disabled.
Breakable weapons suck. Get 'em in the deepest part of the ocean. The way the great majority of devs implement them, they make weapons feel ridiculously fragile. Sterling was right.
Breakable weapons suck. Get 'em in the deepest part of the ocean. The way the great majority of devs implement them, they make weapons feel ridiculously fragile. Sterling was right.
The more important thing which(at least me personally) would make me not hate these kind of mechanics would be if they implemented in a good way - from a perspective of reducing filler and...
The more important thing which(at least me personally) would make me not hate these kind of mechanics would be if they implemented in a good way - from a perspective of reducing filler and increasing complexity in a sane and player time respecting way.
This is incidentally the same for a lot of other filler design. Massively randomized level locked items, extra mazelike levels where it makes no sense, instantly respawning enemies, vendor trash everywhere, just regular trash everywhere...
I don't know about BoTW specifically but weapon durability is overwhelmingly(as far as I know) in one two states - nonexistent or breaking every five minutes(on the longer end) like clockwork.
I feel like the saying "You can polish a turd, but it's still a turd" is applicable here.
You can gloss-up and make the best UI element ever for a poor game mechanic. It could convey meaning and intent perfectly. It could be a genius solution, never before done. It could receive the highest praise.
But at the end of the day, you still have a bad game element. People are still going to hate it. It will still negatively affect people's experience of the game. The UI doesn't fix that.
That one game mechanic was enough for me to give up playing BotW.
It's a very subjective gameplay design decision. I personally enjoyed it because it set the master sword apart from everything else in the game, and it encouraged me to keep changing things up and freely chuck low-durability weapons at enemies' faces.
It gives BotW a unique feel compared to other Zelda games. I kinda hate shield durability though. It made sledding on my ancient shields a painful decision until I used a glitch to get unlimited crafting parts from a guardian.
Even the master sword has durability though! It just “recharges”.
Shield durability also irked me, but only really because of the shield sledding you mentioned.
Master Sword has about as much durability as a random iron claymore, and it does less damage than some of the end game weapons. They kinda fixed it with the DLC which gives it much more damage but that came out a long time later and still makes it feel like the master sword is useful for mundane tasks like hitting trees and mowing grass because you don't want to waste your other weapons on it.
Yeah that was one of the areas that I felt was super odd and clashed with the whole system. You can't have the master sword suck, but you also can't have it break, but you also can't have it be great because then why use anything else, and you can't have him get it at the end.
Major issue there clashing gameplay elements with expectations.
I would not compare weapon disability to a turd, nor do I think it is a bad game mechanic. It's one of the most basic forms of resource management, and it's in a lot of my favorite games: Fallout, Fire Emblem, Don't Starve, Rimworld, just to name a few.
I'm fine with people disliking it, but I'll go to my grave defending it as a game design choice.
As with any element, it depends on how it's done.
I somewhat understand the problem with Botw and the like. The kinds of players who like these games are the kinds that did not want to do any sort of resource management, and that's fine.
Putting in resource management, even if it was honestly pretty well done, is going to ruffle feathers.
At least BotW's and ToTK's implementation feels purposeful and the gameplay is built around it. There are so many horrible implementations of durability out there. Bethesda games are a notorious example where weapons degrade far too quickly for how much you have to use them. Far Cry 2 is probably the single worst example, with the durability set so comically low that you can watch a gun deteriorate in your hands from just firing it. The Diablo implementation always felt tacked-on, like something they experimented with and decided against but forgot to remove from the final product. I know it's not but I never really understood why it was even in those games.
The implementation in these recent two Zelda games is quite a curveball but it's not much more of a hurdle than getting used to the idea of dying frequently in a Souls game, or getting over the hump of learning how to use the weapons and mechanics in Doom Eternal in a systematic way. All these games feel designed around these frictional mechanics to the point that they're not the barrier they initially seem. Although ToTK definitely is much, much better than BotW about it since they changed quite a bit to refine the whole experience by doing things like improving the quantity of quality weapons, and having a better variety of more special ones.
And going back to what this video is actually about, Zelda's UI communicates durability far better than any of these other examples. Most of them have no indication beyond a number in a stat sheet. Far Cry 2 is the only other one that could perhaps match it but the balance of it is so wrong that its weapon quality indication comes off more like a cruel joke than anything else.
One could argue that HP itself is resource management, nevermind the fact that BotW also has stamina (another resource) that you can replenish with items or food/potions (another resource) that you can craft with ingredients (another resource).
I don't disagree with you at all. The only thing I disagree with is the idea that weapon durability is bad game design. People can dislike that it exists or not enjoy it, but that doesn't make it inherently bad.
Oh yeah no I think we're on the same page. There's plenty of games that do resource management fantastically (survival horror is one of the genres for it), and I think botw was fine. Just kinda talking about how yeah, there's always some people who will hate it.
I could be misremembering due to something in my modlist, but unlike other games Rimworld's weapon durability doesn't decrease with weapon use does it? It just tracks the conditions the weapon is stored in when not being carried by a pawn?
You are correct that it doesn't wear down from use, but in addition to improper storage, it can also take damage and be destroyed.
That "feature" was also the biggest reason why I strongly disliked BotW and didn't buy the sequel.
I’m not in a place to watch videos right now, but I really don’t think that breakable weapons are bad game design. They complicate the way you play the game, and that is not something that is definitively good or bad; it’s something that depends on the context of the rest of the game’s design.
It might be something that some people hate, true, but so what? Not everything needs to appeal to everyone, and frankly I dislike games that attempt to do so because they tend to feel incredibly bland. I prefer to play interesting kusoge over games that I will forget every detail over the course of the next month. And when I think back to my favorite games of all time there’s not a single one that I can think of where frustration was not part of the experience. Frictionless gameplay is something to avoid.
I don't like them in general, but what really ruined BotW for me was that it you lose a fight, you respawn with the weapon durability still used up (and/or the gear still destroyed). It means you can't really retry very difficult fights unless you have the means to go replace your gear between attempts.
So you're disincentivised from repeatedly throwing yourself at fights you're not winning? I can see that being irritating from a "dark souls" perspective, but I can also see why the designers might want to encourage players to move on to other objectives if they're losing fights repeatedly.
It disincentivized me from fighting in general. I did t want to participate in the economy from the beginning. Getting better weapons made me want to spend that durability even less. I hate using consumable items!
I think this is one of the core issues. Most players just naturally will not use consumable items. You have to do A LOT to force them to do so, including some very serious training in the beginning of the game.
If you play the game and don't give a damn about your current weapons/consumables, and just use what you have, it's a hell of a lot more fun. My wife hoarded everything for the first one, literally killing entire mobs with bombs, and it wasn't nearly as good for her as the second one, where she chilled out on it a bit (especially after seeing her nephew play who was using more stuff and having fun with it).
The problem is that the new zelda's don't do enough to encourage getting over the item hoarding. Being able to "template" a few unique items so you can go back to a village with enough resources and "rebuild" them probably would've helped.
Exactly, you're telling me that even the freaking legendary Master Sword, the most powerful sword in all of Hyrule, can only be used in combat for like 10 minutes before it is rendered useless (temporarily)? The whole game frustrated me mostly due to that one aspect. I ended up keeping massive amounts of disposable weapons in my inventory all the time and I rarely used anything strong in case I needed it. I reminds me of elixers in Final Fantasy games, I'd always save them in case I needed them and they may as well have no existed for 99% of the game. In BotW I focused way too much of my mental energy stressing about making sure I didn't run out of gear because they were apparently made out of play dough. The sequel apparently lets you take the squished play dough and form it into new play dough weapons to make said play dough weaponry less frustrating. Neat, but not interested.
I had meant to make that as a response to @Unsorted specifically, who also mentioned BotW.
I don’t think that losing the durability on your equipment when you respawn is a failure in design. I think it’s a specific decision. You can win the game with any weapon. You are meant specifically to improvise; it’s supposed to feel like a survival game in a way. Note there is no player stats outside of health, which is less of a stat as it is a buffer for the player to make mistakes in.
Yeah. I think I largely agree with you.
I don't like durability mechanics on weapons. But I get why they exist. They're there for immersion, honesty, and mechanics' sake.
In a similar vein, I respect a limited inventory for weapons. In BOTW I found the root level of slots bullshit. And I found the expansion mechanism somewhat bullshit. But neither made me stop playing. I accepted both as fair and acceptable mechanics.
If I want a different mechanic, the world is free for me to design my game. I happily enjoyed their game and their story.
Call me whatever, but I actually liked breakable weapons in BotW. I was surprised to.learn this is how the game was made, but soon I got enough weapons waiting for their turn that I actually had to throw away really good stuff to make room for even better stuff.
It makes you save the good weapons for later and also makes you actually use them (if you have to) and not hinge on them. It just makes you run through what you get and not get any favorite. I like that.
I'm still going to hate breakable weapons, no matter the UI. The only way I could stomach BOTW and TOTK is by playing them on an emulator with durability disabled.
Breakable weapons suck. Get 'em in the deepest part of the ocean. The way the great majority of devs implement them, they make weapons feel ridiculously fragile. Sterling was right.
The more important thing which(at least me personally) would make me not hate these kind of mechanics would be if they implemented in a good way - from a perspective of reducing filler and increasing complexity in a sane and player time respecting way.
This is incidentally the same for a lot of other filler design. Massively randomized level locked items, extra mazelike levels where it makes no sense, instantly respawning enemies, vendor trash everywhere, just regular trash everywhere...
I don't know about BoTW specifically but weapon durability is overwhelmingly(as far as I know) in one two states - nonexistent or breaking every five minutes(on the longer end) like clockwork.