Equipment durability is necessary for immersion

[rusty_shackleford]

Some mods for Anomaly take it to the next level and overall it handled gear durability pretty well. There's an assortment of different repair items for different levels of durability. The lower the durability goes on any given piece of gear, the harder it is to fix. If you can stop to apply stitches or duct tape to armor, or some gun oil to your weapon, then you can stave off disaster. Thing is that all those repair items take up more weight and space and it costs a load of money to pay to get a wrecked piece of gear fixed.

However, you can also disassemble similar guns and pieces of armor into individual parts and repair those parts with entirely different kinds of repair equipment, I.E. take the receiver from one rifle that isn't completely ruined and fix it up to put into another gun. It can get a bit complicated and sometimes it's the only way to get the kind of rifle you really want. I had to take a broken down ak-101 or whatever it was and scavenge parts for it over time because I couldn't find the model I wanted on any of the merchants.

Post apoc(or similar, so, STALKER) settings is definitely where having a full, fleshed out repair(and crafting) system shines.
Setting-dependent game mechanics is an under-discussed thing

[rusty_shackleford]

Nah, that one's just because of voice acting. Paying voice actors to read every name in the baby book in every possible intonation just for the player to name their character something you didn't record anyway is a huge waste of money. I expect we'll see NPCs addressing you by your name again once on-the-fly AI voice acting gets good enough to be indistinguishable from real humans.

They used to let you name your character all the time in voice acted games, by the way. They just didn't use it in the voiced lines, it would show up in the text.
Even arguably some of the most pop-a-mole movie game RPGs used to let you do it:

Fallout 4(it's 20 years old now, a retro game) recorded hundreds of the most common names for Codsworth just so he had a high chance of being able to speak your character's name to improve immersion.

[WrenchWring]

"Why does armor need repaired?"
Because it gets hit during combat. I think it's a pretty good idea that it probably should break eventually.
"Does it serve a mechanical purpose?"
It could! But it's cool that the game acknowledges your armor isn't indestructible.
You can just add things to games that you think are cool. Not everything is a "mechanic" that needs to be "learned"

But they are mechanics and they do need to be learned. You can't just dismiss that reality. Armor damage has to be implemented in code, it doesn't just happen. There is an underlying mechanical implementation of armor durability that has hard and fast rules. The player has to notice that their armor is breaking down, and then they have to figure out how to get it repaired, and then they start thinking about what's the best how and when to get their armor repaired. If the answer to that question is boring, then it shouldn't be in the game.

A mechanic having a reason to exist and it being an "interesting choice" are not one and the same. Equipment durability may seem like meaningless busywork to you, but it's something that makes the game world feel more real to someone else, which justifies its existence.

It's not always meaningless busywork, there's many ways to make it have a point. It's basically adding drag to the player that they have to compensate for somehow, which is good if that drag means you have to plan around bringing repair supplies along or making sure that you have a route back to a repair spot. And if repairing your gear is just giving money to the blacksmith to set your Gear Durability Number to 100%, well, that's not very realistic or simulationist itself. The blacksmith should need to take time to repair your gear, right? You character should have to wait for your gear to be repaired, and either pay for an inn or use up camping supplies. That leads to meaningful choices about getting money or camping supplies.

Fallout 4(it's 20 years old now, a retro game) recorded hundreds of the most common names for Codsworth just so he had a high chance of being able to speak your character's name to improve immersion.

Yeah and even at the time that was obviously a pointless Bethesda marketing stunt and so expensive they could only have a single character do it. Everyone else just calls you "blue".

[rusty_shackleford]

But they are mechanics and they do need to be learned. You can't just dismiss that reality. Armor damage has to be implemented in code, it doesn't just happen. There is an underlying mechanical implementation of armor durability that has hard and fast rules. The player has to notice that their armor is breaking down, and then they have to figure out how to get it repaired, and then they start thinking about what's the best how and when to get their armor repaired. If the answer to that question is boring, then it shouldn't be in the game.

It breaks because it gets hit, what part of this are you having trouble understanding?
Code? Mechanics?

It got hit by the mace and is dented!

[rusty_shackleford]

If you only think of games as a bundle of mechanics tied together by code, I guess you don't see much reason for any of this to exist. At the same time, I believe you were created in a lab test tube specifically to undermine game design because what you want has been tried for 15 years now and has repeatedly and ceaselessly made every game it touches worse.

[rusty_shackleford]

When my shield gets struck square in the middle by an ogre's greataxe and keeps working at 100% efficiency:

When my character gets struck square in the middle by an ogre's greataxe and keeps fighting at 100% efficiency:

I touched on this in my Rogue Trader mini-review:

Teetering on the edge here, but the injury system until I got a trivial way to remove traumas halfway thru. Should have been a lot more types of trauma, traumas that require recuperation, etc., Like a lot of systems in the game it feels very surface level. BUT… playing on Unfair, I did frequently find myself thinking(in the early game): "Do I want to keep on pushing ahead, or should I go back to my ship to recover?" The main issue is, the punishment for recovering is just the player's real life time, nothing else. If you're fine with wasting your time, then the injury system effectively does not exist.

Handling injuries is difficult. Seen it done a lot of different ways in games(most tabletop ways do not translate well to video game.) Obviously much easier to do in tacticool roster games, but when you have a core selection of characters it becomes much harder to do well.

Having a timer attached to your gamer and losing time is probably not an interesting mechanic… probably. Maybe is? May have to do things while injured because otherwise you'll run out of time.
Don't really like the idea of an overarching time limit, but I think quests and such having a time limit is fine, along with random events etc., so you can't just wait forever.


Bur to answer your implicit question, yes, I'd like to see more fleshed out injury systems. List games you like that have good injury systems.

[Cloharp7]

Something that seems to have largely disappeared from newer RPGs is equipment durability. I suspect how these minor mechanics get removed is someone suggests it's minor, just a nuisance("go and repair the item at the blacksmith"), etc., without realizing the implication it has on grounding the game in the gameworld.
After finishing a dungeon or going on an exploration, my gear should be in tatters. This makes it a very good part of any well-designed attrition system(which tends to be lacking altogether now)

I guess as far as modern games go I'll give some credit to BG3 for at least making your characters visibly dirty, bloody, etc., Probably doesn't go far enough because they want characters to look 'cinematic' or whatever. No durability system tho! 5e apparently doesn't have any durability rules(optional?)

What I would love to see is a game actually having the balls to implement required material components in order to cast spells.

[DecadeRiptide]

Something that seems to have largely disappeared from newer RPGs is equipment durability. I suspect how these minor mechanics get removed is someone suggests it's minor, just a nuisance("go and repair the item at the blacksmith"), etc., without realizing the implication it has on grounding the game in the gameworld.
After finishing a dungeon or going on an exploration, my gear should be in tatters. This makes it a very good part of any well-designed attrition system(which tends to be lacking altogether now)

I guess as far as modern games go I'll give some credit to BG3 for at least making your characters visibly dirty, bloody, etc., Probably doesn't go far enough because they want characters to look 'cinematic' or whatever. No durability system tho! 5e apparently doesn't have any durability rules(optional?)

I want to see the armour peices break into shards and fly off my character when I get hit with weapons

[TKVNC]

As I pointed out earlier, not everything needs to be an "interesting choice" — most things aren't.

Game mechanics absolutely do have to justify their own existence because there is a mechanical burden on the player to learn them. If the player invests time and effort into learning a mechanic only to wind up realizing it is hollow and empty, that's a kind of betrayal. Players lose a bit of trust in the developer, in the DM, every time they invest part of themselves into caring about a mechanic only to find out that it's meaningless busywork. Pretty scenery doesn't have to present interesting choices because you don't have to put any effort into enjoying it.

Sort of like how naming your character has become unpopular and instead you get called by a title or similar. Just little things that keep getting stripped away which detach you from the game. Of course naming your character isn't a meaningful or interesting choice. But it reminds you that it's your character every time you see the name used.

Nah, that one's just because of voice acting. Paying voice actors to read every name in the baby book in every possible intonation just for the player to name their character something you didn't record anyway is a huge waste of money. I expect we'll see NPCs addressing you by your name again once on-the-fly AI voice acting gets good enough to be indistinguishable from real humans.

It's just laziness. They can't even be bothered to add 'he' or 'him' anymore. It just a neutral 'they' 'them', and it is so utterly immersion breaking. Sometimes they add 'you'. But it doesn't help much. BG3 is a big offender here.

If it's so impersonal that I don't even get a 'he', it becomes very difficult to suspend disbelief.

[Red7]

These did not lead to "meaningful decisions", the part some people did not like was removed and the game was simplified. Yet it clearly made the game worse if you care about playing it as anything beyond Numbers Go Up

Ok, I suppose you're making the simulationist argument: "Equipment should break down because it breaks down in real life." Fair enough. I think whether to include durability mostly comes down to aesthetic preference in the context of cRPGs, which is why I came at it from the gamist perspective, but I understand the appeal.

What about magic equipment, though? It would be weird if you had to go repair your +5 sword after a few battles.

war/life is all about resources and logistics unless u are space ngers and dont use technology

removing logistics part from gaYming is in line of "you will own nothing and be ****** by ****"

[Red7]

Something that seems to have largely disappeared from newer RPGs is equipment durability. I suspect how these minor mechanics get removed is someone suggests it's minor, just a nuisance("go and repair the item at the blacksmith"), etc., without realizing the implication it has on grounding the game in the gameworld.
After finishing a dungeon or going on an exploration, my gear should be in tatters. This makes it a very good part of any well-designed attrition system(which tends to be lacking altogether now)

I guess as far as modern games go I'll give some credit to BG3 for at least making your characters visibly dirty, bloody, etc., Probably doesn't go far enough because they want characters to look 'cinematic' or whatever. No durability system tho! 5e apparently doesn't have any durability rules(optional?)

I want to see the armour peices break into shards and fly off my character when I get hit with weapons

if they put vaginas in game, 1 they should be hot 2 their armor should break it would make bashing em more fun

very few games do this tho. actually only one weeb "card system" game where beat up vaginas then rape them comes to mind/"skunk".

[DecadeRiptide]

Something that seems to have largely disappeared from newer RPGs is equipment durability. I suspect how these minor mechanics get removed is someone suggests it's minor, just a nuisance("go and repair the item at the blacksmith"), etc., without realizing the implication it has on grounding the game in the gameworld.
After finishing a dungeon or going on an exploration, my gear should be in tatters. This makes it a very good part of any well-designed attrition system(which tends to be lacking altogether now)

I guess as far as modern games go I'll give some credit to BG3 for at least making your characters visibly dirty, bloody, etc., Probably doesn't go far enough because they want characters to look 'cinematic' or whatever. No durability system tho! 5e apparently doesn't have any durability rules(optional?)

I want to see the armour peices break into shards and fly off my character when I get hit with weapons

if they put vaginas in game, 1 they should be hot 2 their armor should break it would make bashing em more fun

very few games do this tho. actually only one weeb "card system" game where beat up vaginas then rape them comes to mind/"skunk".

The Killing Antidote is an indie game where your clothes rip apart when you're attacked by zombies lol

[Stack of Turtles]

I want to see the armour peices break into shards and fly off my character when I get hit with weapons

if they put vaginas in game, 1 they should be hot 2 their armor should break it would make bashing em more fun

very few games do this tho. actually only one weeb "card system" game where beat up vaginas then rape them comes to mind/"skunk".

The Killing Antidote is an indie game where your clothes rip apart when you're attacked by zombies lol

"your"

[WhiteShark]

These did not lead to "meaningful decisions", the part some people did not like was removed and the game was simplified. Yet it clearly made the game worse if you care about playing it as anything beyond Numbers Go Up

Ok, I suppose you're making the simulationist argument: "Equipment should break down because it breaks down in real life." Fair enough. I think whether to include durability mostly comes down to aesthetic preference in the context of cRPGs, which is why I came at it from the gamist perspective, but I understand the appeal.

What about magic equipment, though? It would be weird if you had to go repair your +5 sword after a few battles.

war/life is all about resources and logistics unless u are space ngers and dont use technology

removing logistics part from gaYming is in line of "you will own nothing and be ****** by ****"

Yes, and logistics is meaningless without time. "Logistics" without time is just aesthetics.

[DecadeRiptide]

Something that seems to have largely disappeared from newer RPGs is equipment durability. I suspect how these minor mechanics get removed is someone suggests it's minor, just a nuisance("go and repair the item at the blacksmith"), etc., without realizing the implication it has on grounding the game in the gameworld.
After finishing a dungeon or going on an exploration, my gear should be in tatters. This makes it a very good part of any well-designed attrition system(which tends to be lacking altogether now)

I guess as far as modern games go I'll give some credit to BG3 for at least making your characters visibly dirty, bloody, etc., Probably doesn't go far enough because they want characters to look 'cinematic' or whatever. No durability system tho! 5e apparently doesn't have any durability rules(optional?)

I want to see the armour peices break into shards and fly off my character when I get hit with weapons

I'm not 100% sure but I think For Honour might have this. Don't know if that game has a repair system on it though

[aimlesshealer]

It's basically adding drag to the player that they have to compensate for somehow

That alone is enough to justify its existence. That little bit of overhead/inconvenince meaningfully changes the experience of the player. Not everything has to be part of a highfalutin gameplay loop. Eliminating every component of game design which doesn't result in !!MAXIMUM DOPAMINE GENERATION!! is foolishness. That's like cutting everything from a movie which isn't an action scene.

All interactive components of a game, no matter how minor, add something. The only question is whether it's a worthwhile addition to the whole. Midwit devs can't understand this, probably because they've trained themselves out of using intuition. I blame college.

[maidenhaver IV]

Gear wear only makes sense when it actually has relevance to the game's economy. Otherwise, yes, it's just irritating busywork. If I have to go the blacksmith and click the "repair all" button, or worse, individually hammer every single piece, this is just pointless busywork. The cost of doing so is nearly always irrelevant.

Where gear durability and damage would actually MATTER is in a game where things are PRODUCED. Part of what drives weird economics in games is that things are endlessly produced, but pretty much nothing is actually consumed, so the amount of gear piles up, resulting in the best items still being hella rare due to being produced through RNG drop mechanics and every other piece of **** item piles up, resulting in them being functionally worthless to the richest portion of the playerbase, so if it's not best in slot, it's worthless trash. But even then, if gear durability is just "click hammer and maybe pay worthless coins, make problem go away", nothing changes.

This. I've come to prefer gear randomly breaking or vanishing, over poorly thought mechanic mechanics. Change durability but leave (or add) fumbling, and most rpgs are better off. Repair is less ultimately important than getting inventory and items correct, in the first place. Arcanum has a good idea for a repair system, ie when you repair something, your something loses max durability. Did New Vegas do repair this way? Arcanum's guns never need cleaning or repair; the game was clearly an alpha test, not even a real game.

[Havitner]

I could write an article on the importance of things that aren't important. I should. I'd need to collect references…

When playing a rogue in WoW: gathering ingredients, brewing poisons, and applying them to your weapons. If I understand things correctly, the process has now been replaced by 'click a button to decide which poison-themed debuff effect your weapons cause until you change to a different one by pressing a different button'.

Requiring ammunition for ranged weapons, and featuring quivers that you could buy/craft that could store more ammo stacks than normal bags. Now all ranged weapons have infinite ammo.

Having to carry things like Flint and Tinder, and Thieves' Tools to use various abilities.

Having to journey back to a major city to visit your class trainer to learn new spells and abilities when you hit the required level. Now you just get them automatically on levelup.

See also this comment:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysided ... nt-1064636

[Havitner]

5e apparently doesn't have any durability rules(optional?)

Does any edition of D&D have durability rules? I'm not aware of any.

3.5, the best edition.

https://www.d20srd.org/srd/exploration. ... dHitPoints

Although weapons and armor don't generally take 'passive' damage in combat, so the system is mostly used for sundering attacks, as well as spells and special abilities that specifically target gear.

What I would love to see is a game actually having the balls to implement required material components in order to cast spells.

Ultima Online had this, although one of the first thing I'd usually try to do when playing a mage was find (randomly generated) gear with a total of 100% Lower Reagent Cost.

Not because it was OP or because I hated the reagent cost system, but because hitting 100% LRC felt more 'real' than getting another +10% damage or whatever. My spells used to sometimes cost reagents, but with my current gear, they never do.

[Tangerine]

I could write an article on the importance of things that aren't important. I should. I'd need to collect references…

When playing a rogue in WoW: gathering ingredients, brewing poisons, and applying them to your weapons. If I understand things correctly, the process has now been replaced by 'click a button to decide which poison-themed debuff effect your weapons cause until you change to a different one by pressing a different button'.

Requiring ammunition for ranged weapons, and featuring quivers that you could buy/craft that could store more ammo stacks than normal bags. Now all ranged weapons have infinite ammo.

Having to carry things like Flint and Tinder, and Thieves' Tools to use various abilities.

Having to journey back to a major city to visit your class trainer to learn new spells and abilities when you hit the required level. Now you just get them automatically on levelup.

See also this comment:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysided ... nt-1064636

“BTW it was the moment before WoW started to streamline and remove systems within the game that subscription numbers peaked. WoW has been shedding subscribers ever since streamlining has been a thing.”

Don’t play WoW, never have, never will, but I did have to point out that correlation does not imply causation here.

There's always one.

[Havitner]

QoL maximalists ruin games.

[Oyster Sauce]

Completely pointless and a waste of time in The Witcher 3. You're given 10000x as many repair tools as you could possibly use, and they're applied instantly from the pause menu, even during combat.

[Xenich]

The problem with durability is that it's often implemented poorly. E.g., (a) without any way to fix items that broke (b) durability degrades too fast.

Meaning that it reduces the incentives to explore and find "super powerful" unique gear. (Player uses it three times, it breaks, player must throw it away or get it fixed every 10 minutes. Not fun.)

I prefer "chance to break" for all "non-magical" items that is somewhat reasonable but relative to how and what it is used on with magical weapons having no break chance on normal things, but... a chance to break if used on creatures or things that would be counter to the materials/design of the weapon in some way.

Edit: oh an on action based games, I think extreme spam use should increase chance of breaking as well. Seems like a nice balance to the play. If someone is whacking like crazy, there should be issues, or if it is firearm and they are constantly pushing the firearm, it should begin heating up and too many heating up episodes should start to cause eventual breaks. Higher quality items should be more resilient to this, but still have their limits. though to be fair, I would also want to design in tactical play within an action game that provides better damage and survival for players who learn to approach a fight intelligently rather than spamming everything and making the fights last longer in this could prove a useful design to the game play.

I really hate weapon breaking being a cyclical concept of game play (Dying Light for instance) as it cheapens the idea as you say of seeking out weapons of unique nature.

I think a lot of more modern games rely far too much on cyclical systems to keep the player running around chasing their tail with breaking, fixing, and finding replacements.

I understand in "some" game designs, it might make sense, but there are few I have seen where it was implemented well without making the experience seem "gimmicky".

[BosanskiSeljak]

muh immersion

******

99.9% of the time mechanics like this is just a waste of time with 0 upside

[Xenich]

muh immersion

******

99.9% of the time mechanics like this is just a waste of time with 0 upside

Depends on implementation. It isn't about "immersion" in my view, it is about creating more game play mechanics. Granted, if it is used as a "gimmick" such as most games do, yeah... that is garbage.

[NotAI]

Exactly, was also thinking of Dying Light, in regard to durability being poorly implemented.

The issue with durability systems is that this requires being able to repair equipment. Furthermore, to repair equipment at a cost that is less than rewards for exploration and the typical side quest. But this is almost never the case, for some reason.

Many games had included durability but eliminated any straightforward way to repair equipment, or made it through going to a "repair role" type NPC who then charges 100,000,000 million gold to repair a hunting knife, because the devs figured they need more cash sinks in the game economy.

Yet the main source of fun in a game is finding unique cool looking equipment and being able to use it in a trial and error fashion.

All this did is disincentivize (a) exploration, (b) combat, (c) side quests, (d) finding unique loot, as done on a whim, which is the source of half the fun of a game, because (a)-(d) now "costs" equipment that cannot be repaired, including the player's favorite "cool looking" equipment, and any unique equipment found will break permanently or, if it can be repaired, costs more to repair than any side quest reward or exploration reward.

If it's going to be done badly, equipment durability is best omitted. Alas, it tends to be implemented badly.

There are many mechanics like that today. Hence they are all best omitted.

[BosanskiSeljak]

muh immersion

******

99.9% of the time mechanics like this is just a waste of time with 0 upside

Depends on implementation. It isn't about "immersion" in my view, it is about creating more game play mechanics. Granted, if it is used as a "gimmick" such as most games do, yeah... that is garbage.

Feature bloat is an epidemic. I don't want a bunch of **** tacked onto the game unless you really knock it out of the park with the other stuff. But a slightly above average game tacking on half assed crafting/durability/survival/etc. mechanics can go die for all I care. 99.9% of the time it adds nothing. Hell, I'll add inventory limits/encumbrance to that as well. There aren't many games that truly pull it off. Most of the time you just can't loot 100 of the ****** generic swords that sell for **** all money lol

It's already a struggle to get a few parts of an RPG to be truly great. Every mechanic they try to add on just makes it more ****.

For example, 2024 releases I've played:

I'll take 100 Arco's & Felvidek's over yet another fantasy rpg with average to slightly above average mechanics

[rusty_shackleford]

muh immersion

******

99.9% of the time mechanics like this is just a waste of time with 0 upside

Depends on implementation. It isn't about "immersion" in my view, it is about creating more game play mechanics. Granted, if it is used as a "gimmick" such as most games do, yeah... that is garbage.

Feature bloat is an epidemic. I don't want a bunch of **** tacked onto the game unless you really knock it out of the park with the other stuff. But a slightly above average game tacking on half assed crafting/durability/survival/etc. mechanics can go die for all I care. 99.9% of the time it adds nothing. Hell, I'll add inventory limits/encumbrance to that as well. There aren't many games that truly pull it off. Most of the time you just can't loot 100 of the ****** generic swords that sell for **** all money lol

It's already a struggle to get a few parts of an RPG to be truly great. Every mechanic they try to add on just makes it more ****.

For example, 2024 releases I've played:

I'll take 100 Arco's & Felvidek's over yet another fantasy rpg with average to slightly above average mechanics

neither of those are an RPG

[Xenich]

muh immersion

******

99.9% of the time mechanics like this is just a waste of time with 0 upside

Depends on implementation. It isn't about "immersion" in my view, it is about creating more game play mechanics. Granted, if it is used as a "gimmick" such as most games do, yeah... that is garbage.

Feature bloat is an epidemic. I don't want a bunch of **** tacked onto the game unless you really knock it out of the park with the other stuff. But a slightly above average game tacking on half assed crafting/durability/survival/etc. mechanics can go die for all I care. 99.9% of the time it adds nothing. Hell, I'll add inventory limits/encumbrance to that as well. There aren't many games that truly pull it off. Most of the time you just can't loot 100 of the ****** generic swords that sell for **** all money lol

It's already a struggle to get a few parts of an RPG to be truly great. Every mechanic they try to add on just makes it more ****

That is the issue though, that most implementations aren't done because they actually want to enhance some game play mechanic, but rather because they are cheesing on some lacking in the design to force the player to spin their wheels.

I would say though, many people would hate a game that has layers of tactical design in all of its elements in play, not because they are "poorly implemented", but because many "players" really don't want a game as much as an environment they can mindless spam their keys in.

I understand your general point though, and agree... but things could have so much more depth and require more attention in play than simply spamming a silly button on a controller, which is essentially the base design of most games out there, console trash for those seeking "entertainment".

[Norfleet]

After finishing a dungeon or going on an exploration, my gear should be in tatters. This makes it a very good part of any well-designed attrition system(which tends to be lacking altogether now)

It depends on the gear. If your gear is a bronze sword, yeah, those things get ****** up pretty easily and need regular maintenance. If your gear is an AK-47, then no, it's perfectly fine after you dragged it through the mud, filled it with sand, used it to bash a man's head, and then put a ham sandwich in it. It will still AK. Works perfectly.