TLDR: which games do WEAPON BREAKING without making you want to tear your hair out?
i’m playing through Dark Cloud and had forgotten how tedious the weapon system is. weapons function as “leveling up” instead of using a traditional experience-based system. weapons need to be upgraded, fused, and repaired throughout the game. and a durability system dictates that once your weapon hits 0 durability, it breaks. broken weapons can cost you hours of gameplay if you’re not careful. there’s even the possibility of breaking all your weapons and starting from square one near the end of the game if you’re not vigilant with repairs.
for Dark Cloud, this weapon system is a unique leveling system that differentiates itself from its action-rpg peers. it introduces a level of risk that keeps you alert while making weapons you’ve upgraded-and-maintained feel like valuable treasure. however, this system is also tedious to keep up with as weapon durability decreases quickly and repairs are time consuming.
after hours of playtime, i think i’ve isolated the reason why the weapon system is so annoying: menus. the entire system is menu-based. i often find myself pulling up the menu mid-battle to repair my weapon. there are automated repairs, but these require some setup. if Dark Cloud somehow incorporated more interactive ways (outside of a pause menu) to repair weapons or made weapon durability decrease at half the rate or made a broken weapon repairable (instead of gone for good), this would have gone a long way to reduce tedium.
games like Breath of the Wild are often criticised for similar weapon-breaking systems, and it got me thinking about the fact that i have NEVER seen a weapon-breaking system praised or even vaguely complimented.
are there any games that do weapon breaking especially well, and why?
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.
I actually hated tears of the kingdoms fused mechanic way more than botw. I disliked botws mechanic though, but tears of the kingdom was just so tedious. I stopped playing and 0 regrets. Tears of the kingdom just didn’t do it for me.