In the first Dark Souls, you could infuse your designated weapon with crystal, meaning that it would get totally OP but its durability would severly be decreased with no way to repair it. As such this was the kind of weapon you would have to use wisely (like in boss fights only) as it's doomed to break forever.

I've been playing this game lately, and I can actually comment on how durability works in the game.

First, it turns out that the durability of weapons (and I assume armor, though I haven't yet explicitly tested this) is based on how much you pay for them. This means that, if you negotiate a cheaper price for a weapon, it will be less durable. It also means that a dagger of lightning, for example, will be more durable than a plain dagger.

I also noticed that having high Strength will make your weapons break faster. (I note that this is also true in Morrowind, and is more noticeable there because Morrowind provides the means to raise Strength well over 100, while in Arena 100 is the hard cap.)

There are actually two ways to escape the system (aside from using fists, which I am surprised that they didn't crash the game, given what I've read):

1. Use magic. Magic uses spell points which (for non-Sorcerers) recover when you rest. Later on, when fighting spell casters, you can use Spell Absorption effects; in addition to making you immune to the enemy's spells, these allow you to recover your spell points easily, allowing you to continuously use spells. This strategy works better later on, when your level is higher and enemy casters are more common.

2. Play as a Knight. Every day, at midnight, your weapons and armor (but not accessories) will be repaired slightly. With this setup, unless you start abusing artifacts or cheap spellcasting weapons, you won't have your equipment break, and you won't have to keep returning to town either.

Still, I have found that the mechanic doesn't really add much strategically, given how easy it is to repair items. If stronger items had less durability, then it might be an interesting mechanic, but as is, it only limits the use of weaker items that you don't want to be using later on anyway.

Daggerfall also lets you do this with the item maker.

The only problem, from a game balance perspective, is that if the weapon is already made of a good material, its durability is so high that that isn't really a problem, so it fails to work as a limiting factor.

On the other hand, in Battlespire, I like using my fists, as items can't be easily repaired in that game (you need to find and consume a Coffer of Restoration to do this), and fists provide an escape from the durability system in addition to getting stronger the more you use them.

There are pros and cons to a weapon durability system. On the pro-side it can force you to switch out weapons more often and thereby try new weapons or combos that you wouldn't have tried otherwise. It can force you out of your comfort zone in ways that can be good. But on the con-side if weapons break too fast it can feel artificial and "gamey". Dead Island was a game where weapons would break very quickly but you would also gain new weapons so it would kinda balance out. System Shock 2 weapons would break ridiculously fast and it became very annoying /thankfully you could disable that in the INI file. So it's on a case by case basis I guess.

Ah, this is one of those things that sounds cool on paper, but once you start forcing players to deal with it you quickly see how much of a chore it makes your game feel to play.

Unless you're going for a hardcore experience, in which case I'll expect this sort of thing, please leave it out.

I love when things are durable so that they're less likely to break, not when they're fragile and break too easily. I have a couple of phones and laptops that could've done with greater durability, I should be able to replace the broken parts of the laptops but the phones are a more difficult and costly task.

My own durability? No, don't like it very much, far too fragile.

The durability which I like is seen in Misery mod for Stalker CoP. Weapon breaks more often as it degrades and the repair costs increase logarithmically as it gets more damaged. One can have it repaired by repair guy, or one can repair it him/herself with repair kits - slight damage suffices oil, but heavy damage needs very expensive repair and clean kit - just to push it upwards of 50%, where it must be further serviced.

It ranges from slightly annoyed (WoW), to a bit more annoyed (Oblivion) to "fuck that, I get a mod to remove item-degrading alltogether" (Fallout 3).

What does that mean? Why would it crash the game?

Even though I was a spellcaster (mage?), it just became too tiresome earlier in the game for me to constantly having to sleep, just in order to replenish my mana, especially in those dungeons where it was harder to find a place to rest. I felt that the attack spells consumed mana very rapidly, especially in places where enemies respawned quite often. So I saved offensive spells for special encounters, or if I had no other option.

Using fists instead of weapons or spells was made feasible also because of the glitchy way the enemies moved. It was usually quite easy to get an enemy to get stuck on a corner of a wall or such so that you could hit it (even with your fists) but it couldn't hit you, sometimes not even with ranged weapons or spells (they would hit the wall, instead of you).

IIRC, the most use I had for spells in combat was that I cast a Levitate spell on myself, and then floated on top of water or a hole in the ground while an enemy was standing on the edge of the ground, trying to reach me. Then I would just move forward, punch, move back, enemy tries to hit me but misses because I already went out of range... repeat until the enemy is dead, or your Levitate spell is exhausted (in which case cast it again).

Using fists instead of weapons usually merely meant that killing the enemy took some more time/hits, that's all. So if an enemy was stuck on a wall and it would take 10 hits with a staff or 25 hits with a fist to kill it... I'd just use fists so that I don't have to hurry back to town to repair the staff.

Wasn't it also so that if you brought your items for repair, you would have to wait for many hours/days until they were repaired? So you couldn't just drop by and get your stuff fixed instantly (for a sum of money). Maybe that is realistic, but still it made it even less lucrative to use your gear (and having to repair them often).

I didn't know that knights get free item repairs while sleeping, but then I didn't play a knight...


IIRC, Daggerfall toned down the weapon breakage a lot? At least I don't recall having similar reservations in Daggerfall for using weapons, it is those damn dungeons that I hate in Daggerfall.

I hate it in most games because it's just a tedious mechanism that forces you to grind. And I laugh every time I hear something like: "But that would be unrealistic if your gear were indestructible". Yeah, and healing your wounds by eating an apple is totally realistic. Or drinking such a huge doses of healing potions that would cause hyperhydration.

I do accept and like this mechanism in games which are all about collecting resources and crafting things like Minecraft

Sure, that's one way, but I was thinking more along the lines of a weapon/creature triangle/chart. Like there's already elemental attacks and such, why not extend that all the way? X material or better to beat monster, X weapon type is extra damaging, X weapon material is better suited for range... and so on.
How about this fun idea: Weapons are like litter, except you can't sell them and they'll crumble into dust from a few encounters meaning there's no point in getting attached. Does that sound good?
At least you can repair it. It's so much more vexing when a weapon turns to dust just because you happened to use it.
What about games where you can gather materials, but you aren't given any clear clue on what goes with what, nor does the game actually keep track of what you have made so far?
I can't tell what Breath of the Wild is going for. Even having seen footage. It wants to kick your ass, but you can set fire and ride updrafts, but you weapons break in 3 hits, but you have all these silly powers, and also there's a tablet that can take pictures despite this being set in a Medieval Stasis that suddenly pulled schizo tech out the ass!
Yes, but should one be really expected to go though weapons like a deck of cards?

How about an example? ;)

I can think of SotS: The Pit. I didn't like its crafting/repairing mechanism mostly because each bench/kitchen or whatever working place you find can be used very limited amount of times so you can't really play and test various crafting recipes.

I generally dislike durability in games.

As has already been mentioned, it doesn't make a lot of sense. A well made sword used properly would probably never 'break' in it's life time.

Sure if you parried a hammer blow with it or stabbed a house that might be different, but in general they should be quite tough.

Breaking after hitting forty orcs with it is stupid. I'd rather instead you had sharpness that deteriorated and you could sharpen your weapons (so no amount of use would ever destroy a weapon, instead it would just be a little less effective till you sharpened it again).

I particularly hate durability where it serves no real purpose. For example in D:OS you get a repair hammer thing (with unlimited use) and all it takes is right clicking and repairing an item. There is no hunger, very little need to rush and no cost to performing this action so it's basically pointless and more a matter of whether you remembered to repair items in between battles then a resource management thing.

At least in Diablo (as far as I recall) you had to pay to repair items, so it was a use for money and a means of ensuring you never had too much money.

In a roguelike you might be able to repair an item yourself, but doing so might take time, which makes you hungry so you have to consider when and where to do it rather than just repairing at will whenever there isn't an immediate danger.

I don't know about the other Diablos, but repairing in Diablo 2 normal difficulty is so cheap that the money should practically never be an issue. At worst, you might've just spent all your coins on gambling and then you have to go grind for a few minutes to be able to afford repairs.

So it really is just a distraction & pointless chore.

[url=http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Glitches]http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Glitches[/url] There are two ways to restore your spell points without resting:

1. Use Potions of Restore Power. Each one restores 25 spell points when used, and there is no realistic upper limit on the number you can carry. You can buy up to 99 at a time, and there's no downside to negotiating a better price on them. (If you get a huge amount, like over 30,000, of them, you could fall victim to integer overflow, but I don't think that's something you really need to worry about.)

2. Absorb the spells, either with a Sorcerer's innate spell absorption or a spell with the Spell Absorption effect. This, combined with strong attack magic, makes powerful spellcasting enemies much easier to defeat; just absorb the spells they throw at you and use the spell points to launch powerful attacks back at them. If you have 100% (or more) spell absorption from a custom spell (or by using the Staff of Magnus or Necromancer's Amulet), enemies can't hurt you with their spells. Now, instead of dreading encounters with spellcasting creatures, you learn to welcome them; instead of a swift game over, you come out of the fight in better shape than when the fight started.

The nice thing about these two options is that they are available to Sorcerers, who do not recover spell points when resting. Needless to say, playing a spellcaster gets a lot easier when resting isn't the only way to restore your magic.

Actually, the way it works is that the auto-repair happens at midnight of every day, regardless of what you're doing. Finding a safe place to rest and resting for 999 hours is certainly a way to repair your equipment, but it also happens if you are fast travelling long distances.

You can't auto-repair accessories, but you can still get plenty of use out of spellcasting weapons. Lifesteal weapons are handy because the spell will heal you 40 points when it hits an enemy, regardless of the damage the target took.

Incidentally, in Arena, spells ignore height; if you are in water or in a hole in the ground, you can use magic to hit enemies that are on the edge of the ground just fine.

Actually, I would argue that durability discourages grinding; if you spend too much time without progressing, your weapons will break before you get a better weapon to replace them.