thinking about the Breath of the Wild durability system
the weapon balancing in BotW is not great. at the beginning of the game, the scarcity of weapons and the amount of hits enemies take makes combat not terribly worth engaging in, not because you can’t defeat them, but because you don’t have enough swords
at the end of the game, you’re so replete with weapons that you barely have to think about it
but neither of these are what I’m talking about
what I’m really talking about here is the way, especially in the midgame, that you’re encouraged to fluidly change between weapon types and snag enemy weapons off the ground. maybe even out of their hands! it’s pretty cool, and breaking a weapon over somebody’s head for extra damage does feel good
it really feels like there’s something in that core mechanic trying to escape, to me
Daemon X Machina also tried something similar, where you’d snag weapons and parts from dropped enemies
this had a couple problems: you had to track down the downed mech, pick through the available gear with other enemies still shooting at you, and replace your existing gear with the new gear (which of course usually had few or no tuning parts, decreasing the probability it’ll be any kind of upgrade)
ultimately one of the big frustrations I always have with systems like this is that, like in most roguelikes, you don’t have much choice. if the game wants to only give you spears, you’re going to use spears
I think Halo did this feeling of “flexibly changing between available dropped weapons depending on the situation” best, honestly
@gardevoir you kinda do have choice in botw, but only if you know that weapons aren't randomized and you know where they're located
-F
this reminds me of how I bounce off of survival games because they're invariably tuned to make the 'already read the wiki top to bottom' gameplay experience fun, challenging and balanced, so my 'blind and new to the genre' experience is 'I don't know what to do, starve and still don't know what to do'. they almost seem like they'd be best served by an 'explore' mode then a 'the actual game' mode so you can understand what you're expected to do THEN do it
@Felthry yeahhhh
further complicating things, “BotW if you do an early castle raid for weapons” and “BotW if you play it blind” are basically completely fundamentally different experiences lmao