It’s not breaking, but Monster Hunter’s sharpness system works really well.

Every melee weapon (even the hammer and hunting horn) has a sharpness bar, broken up into smaller colored bars. It goes from the most sharp (purple), all the way down to red sharpness. Every attack that hits a monster will dull the weapon a bit. Higher sharpness will have a higher damage multiplier attached, while lower sharpness will penalize you. If an attack is too weak, or your weapon is too dull and is hitting a tougher part of a monster, then you’ll “bounce” off of it, interrupting your combo or attack flow and leaving you vulnerable to attacks. During a break on the right, you can use a whetstone for 4-ish seconds to sharpen your weapon again.

I like it because as you’re crafting and upgrading weapons, the sharpness is a factor to consider. Do you want a weapon with a ton of green sharpness, or one that has a sliver of blue and then a little green, but it quickly drops to yellow? It also affects your armor choices, because there are armor skills that allow for faster sharpening, or reduced dulling, or increased overall sharpness, or the ability to never bounce no matter how still your weapon gets. And in a fight, you have to pick and choose your targets a little more carefully, and know when to back off to sharpen and come back hitting harder.

I really like this mechanic on paper but in practice it makes games miserable. What I’ve found that I want is to earn my weapons and I want those weapons to stay exactly the same forever unless I upgrade them.

Minecraft is pretty good with tool and weapon durability. The game’s progression is built around getting tools that last longer, and the ones that break quickly are easy to replace. Repairing is fast, and pretty cheap for the first few repairs. By the time you have things that you want to never break, you’ve probably been able to find a Mending book or 2, so that they last forever

I still hated it, but RDR2 had a decent weapon maintenance/damage system. Most of it gets done in downtime between missions, but it’s also possible to just pick up others’ weapons as often as you need depending on how you play.

That’s probably why and when it works, when it encourages you to choose between 2 different styles of play: hunt down top tier weapons and then spend time/strategy keeping them maintained, or rip through missions aggressively and pick up everything you can.

I pretty much always have more fun when weapons don’t degrade, and I am so far from a grinder that I am 100% down for unlimited ammo and overpowered weapons, but I think weapons breaking can work if replacements are super easily found and increase in quality as the game progresses, or if repairs are pretty much optional depending on how you play.

I’ve been playing For the King II and I like the weapon system. Might not qualify as a “true” weapon degradation system, but it boils down to there being only some weapons that are breakable. They’re stronger than their non-breakable counterparts, but the breaking comes down to your stats (as well as a couple special abilities. Overall a great mechanic to use different types of weapons, and when they break, you can revert back to ol’ faithful.

Fallout: New Vegas. The game pushes you across the map even though it is an open world game. You don’t have anywhere to start hoarding stuff and use it around much, since you have to move quite some while, at the early-mid game at least.

Both weapons and armor have a condition, which degrades with use and damage and can be simply repaired by combining 2 of them, or having some form of universal repair kits that are rarer iirc. The damage system makes the “on the road, always moving from place to place” feeling better imo.

I can’t think of any time I enjoyed weapon degradation systems. I’ve been able to tolerate some, but usually because the degradation happens so slowly that the system is basically moot.

My problem is how blatantly the hand of game designer feels in these systems. “No, you can’t just be powerful all the time!” the system says by forcing a resource sink into the game in a very annoying and disruptive way. These systems often encourage obsessive searching of common enemies if the weapons are repaired by combining them with enemy weapons.

There are easier resource sinks in the way of ammo or consumables. Even for melee weapons, in scifi they can still need power packs or in fantasy some whatever magical gem blah blah that acts as ammo. If a weapon is so common like a wooden club that it seems illogical to need some kind of magic ammo, then I posit that shouldn’t have degradation. What is the point of a club that breaks after five hits if those wooden clubs are laying around everywhere? It’s just annoying business to pick them up.

I could get behind a sharpness system, where over time your blade dulls, but it just changes your damage from slashing to bludgeoning. You can sharpen it and it is more deadly, but smacking someone full force with a dull blade is still gonna work

I tried Breath of the Wild because it got so much praise (I’m not really much of a gamer). The weapons breaking all the time bogged me down so much and gave me so much anxiety it ducked out all the fun. When I got killed by lightening I quit playing. I think weapons breaking should be something you can toggle like the difficulty level.

Breaking for breaking sake is bad, like any game mechanic added for tradition reasons (i.e. we do it because that’s what you do). I often can this Anti-QoL, and that concept is killing me in these retro inspired games lately.

Consider why you break weapons and you can see when it can be done to a positive effect. BotW, I think, adds it for the sake of encouraging you to get more weapons or find steady supply of decent weapons, since they generally respawn. That seems fine, and honestly plays fine when you get to mid game and can utilize weapon spawns effectively (I think it’s lame just how easy they break, and that they break even if you are breaking rocks, but that’s a balancing issue, imo.)

Dark Cloud noticably does not do a good job justifying it’s breakage system. It’s more about fusing new ones, so you already have a way to recycle and encourage new weapon usage (plus, weapons are kind of rare). Not to mention, weapon customization is a big part there and iirc, you even lose the stones you put in the weapon if it breaks. So, at this point, the breakage is more a harsh punishment for an easy accidental crime- fighting too damn hard. Clearly not a well thought out feature included for inclusion sake.

A good system is going to use perma-breakage to encourage use of an abundance of weapon and armor drops, and temporary breakage to encourage resource management, be it repair items or stat bonuses, or in the case of Monster Hunter (mentioned in another comment), valuable seconds and potential vulnerability when sharpening the weapon. There are probably other good rationales, but punishing players is not one of them.

Into the Radius is a VR game that has weapons get dirty as you fire them. For lower amounts of wear you can find/buy a ramrod and some toilet paper and just clean the barrel pretty cheaply and it only takes a few seconds if you maintain them well. For more worn out weapons you’ll need to spray some cleaning fluid and scrub them with a brush to bring the durability back up to the levels where you can work on the barrel, and fluid can be expensive or hard to find. The more worn a weapon is the more it will start to misfire or jam, requiring you to clear rounds etc.

It feels pretty balanced if you keep on top of maintenance in your downtime, and feels like a good excuse for some VR interaction.

Dark Souls 1.

The only time it even really comes into play is if you use Crystal weapons or katanas. Or crystal katanas that will break after 2 hits.

Tears of the Kingdom.

Unlike BOTW where if you wanted good weapons, you would have to go find them and keep your inventory full of them just in case, TOTK has the Fusion power so you can take any piece of shit and make it viable with monster horns.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas come super close to what I would think is perfect. I hate using duplicate weapons to repair, but modding the game to use duct tape and weapon scrap for it makes it work way better. It’s been hella long and I think NV is like that in vanilla but I know FO3 isn’t and keeping those unique weapons working was such a PITA.

Dark Cloud 2 (Dark Chronicle in the EU) keeps the weapon upgrade system but only removes some weapon EXP if it breaks, and the EXP drop is negligible in my opinion. The biggest problem with letting weapons break here is that they’ll deal no damage until you repair them.

The Dark Souls games had a system. Attacking enemies would wear down the durability over time.

You even had to be cautious about swinging weapons around walls because you might hit the wall instead of the enemy.

Some weapons had special attacks that might erode the durability significantly for a high damage payout.

IRC I don’t think weapons could completely break, but if durability reached 0, it would do drastically less damage.

BotW durability rocks because it encourages experimentation and using cool weaps and combos. Any direction is viable for this reason. I also like New Vegas’s durability cos repairing is so satisfying. Mmm, love me some Jury Rigging