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Original Source: https://georgerottkamp.com/comic/28-zelda-ocarina-of-time-vs-breath-of-the-wild/
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Original Artist: Geo the Hero AKA George Rottkamp
Weapon/tool durability is such an annoying mechanic in general.
Curse Minecraft for starting that.Edit: I get it, I get it. There were many games that did durability before Minecraft. Still don’t particularly like the mechanic
Minecraft absolutely was not the genesis of weapon durability, in fact Minecraft originally didn’t even have durability.
Yea it definitely wasn’t the first. But I feel like it exposed the concept to a much wider audience and found it to be mostly well accepted.
It’s great for getting people to use different weapons/bows/shields. Otherwise people would just find the one strongest one and never use anything else.
You could counteract that by making certain enemy classes weak or strong against specific weapon archetypes. Maybe skeletons are strong against spears because there’s nothing to stab at but weak against hammer type weapons because smashy smashy. The Souls games are kind of like this, I suppose, with their slash/thrust/blunt/etc damage types.
Yes. But I think there should be a balance. BotW’s weapons feel particularly fragile.
No it means I just have less fun with the things I like, and I have to work more to get the weapons back, when I want to do the fun thing with the fun weapons.
And?
I’m pretty sure Fire Emblem was doing it for over 20 years before Minecraft existed.
Personally, I’m bit torn here.
On one hand, the durability mechanic made me pick up and use weapons I would have normally ignored, and I found a couple of new favorites that way. Almost all weapons I find are, to a degree, useful even late into the game, because there is a constant demand for replacements. If there was no durability, I would have just grabbed a good enough blade and henceforth ignored everything else, rendering a good portion of the gameplay and items obsolete.
On the other hand, I’m somewhat of a fashionista when it comes to videogame characters, and this includes weapons. If I’m going to wear the Desert Voe set for example, then it HAS to be paired with Gerudo-type blades, otherwise it feels just weird. So of course I start farming for very specific equipment over and over again to have an ample amount of identical replacements at hand whenever I need them, and that’s basically just “no durability with extra steps” as I invest time and energy into guaranteeing that I always have that same blade.
IMHO it would have been a good middle ground to give the player the (late-game?) ability to turn a handful of weapons of their choice into unbreakable variants, maybe with a timer like the Master Sword so it doesn’t become too OP.
It’s poorly tuned. Having to pull new weapons out so frequently breaks the flow of combat for me. If they broke after 20 fights or so, it wouldn’t bother me, and still encourage experimentation
They could have done it like in Monster Hunter, where a blade becomes more dull with use and deals less damage until it is barely usable - it won’t break, but the damage output will be garbage until you repair / sharpen it. That way the player could still decide to just toss away a badly damaged weapon in favor of a better one, but it would also be easily possible to permanently keep the same weapon by just repairing it over and over again.
Slight sequel spoilers:
TotK does have a “repair” mechanic and I’m honestly grateful for it (otherwise my current challenge run would have been a nightmare) but you still have to be very careful to not actually break the weapon in question, and the repair mechanic itself is a bit …hm…how do I put it …“crude”. I would have preferred an actual blacksmith. One that doesn’t chew up your weapon and spits it into your face at Mach 3.
at least minecraft gives you 300 durability instead of 30
I think it was a creative solution that pretty much no other game of botw/totk caliber has pulled off effectively.
I know what debate I’m getting into here, you either like the mechanic or you don’t at the end of the day. Both opinions are valid.
But I found it extremely refreshing mid-late game to not just be picking up random weapons to sell and make no use of whatsoever. It really feels like an ongoing adventure, as opposed to something like Skyrim where you settle in with the best weapon you find and the rest are just merchant fodder.
Yeah, it makes the early game a challenge. But that’s a thing that is consistent across all zelda games. The early game is supposed to be a challenge. It’s hard to do that from a dev perspective in a game as freely open as these two.
I do think it would have been cool to have other legendary weapons get their own slot and timer like the master sword though.
I can appreciate the rather low durability helping to stem the flood of trash weapons you inevitably gather.
But I also think we can agree that it can be frustrating to fight some strong enemy and be rewarded with a strong weapon, only for it to break after what feels like five hits.But I admit that it’s a bit of a catch-22 the developer finds themselves in.
The sole example I can think of where a weapon isn’t otherwise available except from a strong enemy would be the lynel weapons, which let’s face it, are end game anyway. Plus with a little practice you can cheese the lynels and not even run down your weapon durability.
But more to the point, pretty much every other weapon in the game has set spawn points each blood moon. You just need to mark the most interesting ones when you need a powerful weapon. The botw one that comes to mind is the flame greatsword that spawns right inside the waterfall entrance to the castle.
In totk, pristine weapons spawn in abundance in the chasms.
So really it’s more about knowing where to gather them outside of fights.
I hate the new Zeldas because of the weird weapon breaking crap. I couldn’t even finish breath of the wild because of it. Call me a weirdo outsider but I’m one of the few who prefers older Zelda formats.
Weapon durability is the reason I didn’t buy tears of the kingdom. Annoying mechanic.
