The Legendary Game Mechanic No One Likes
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"When you’re going to change the world, don’t ask for permission.” - Ігри
What're your thoughts on durability?
Correction: As some comments have pointed out, Ultima III doesn't have durability mechanics. I came across some incorrect information during my research, it's a massive oversight on my end and I apologize for that. In the future, if I discuss a retro game, I'll consult directly with players and community sources to ensure accuracy. However, I'm confident in the accuracy of the rest of the video, since those are games I have personally played!
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Also since I'm seeing a few comments asking this, the texture pack used at the start of this video is by "Retro NES Texture Pack" by Befarrar. :)
It sucks
🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢 never say that again 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢
absolutely necessary for armor, works for tools too ig (gives gold tools a niche which i like)
Durability is complicated.
*PvE:* It is generally universally hated. IF there is no way to repair them it tends to force people to "hoard" items . People invest time and effort into getting "phat loot" and they want to USE it, not put it in a display case OR foot a repair bill. _Conan Exiles_ recently made the stupid decision that Repair Kits no longer work on Legendary weapons and it sucks. Durability in WoW also sucks because now one has to WASTE even MORE time getting gold to repair your gear.
_Diablo 2_ showed us that durability is an archaic game design mechanic. NO ONE likes it. _Path of Exile_ got rid of it and it is a godsend.
Minecraft _Bedrock_ sucks compared to Java because we CAN'T use F3+H to Toggle detailed item description which shows item durability.
*PvP:* it _sometimes_ makes sense to drive an economy but generally people dislike it here too. Imagine playing a shooter and your gun breaks in the middle of a fire fight. That is a HORRIBLE user experience.
*Survival Games/Sim:* Tend to favor it for "realism" but the problem is I play games to have FUN; not to micromanage my gear.
So yes, I understand the "rationalization" for "realism" but I've never any one who said they LOVED durability.
shit.
How Mojang could fix durability mechanic:
1. Removing the cumulative XP cost for repairing.
2. Making items not evaporate when their durability reaches 0 (just like the elytra).
They just need to remove the "too expensive" if you're trying to repair something, allowing you to repair your weapon infinitely if you care to spend the resources/xp. That would be an earlygame/midgame option. Mending would be an "endgame" option. So, after you progress enough, you can just enchant everything with mending.
Yeah, I feel like fixing repairing is not a complicated issue. If you’re gonna make the xp cost cumulative, max it out at 10-15 levels maybe. I do think books should have a cumulative cost though. Kinda forces you to get a bit creative I think with how you apply books to things like swords to get max enchants, and doesn’t make getting a maxed weapon too easy. Also, keeping the report cost low encourages people to mine more. I feel like mending kinda destroyed the need to get more diamonds. Smithing templates help a bit though.
This is basically what Tinkers Construct does, infact having no xp cost for repair
I think that diamond or netherite should just be unbreakable. That would be nice
There are mods that do that and I love them. Playing sky factory 4 right now as a matter of fact.
I like durability, I just hate minecraft's garbage "too expensive" "let's make this cost 500 levels to repair" repair system
It doesn’t even cost that much most of the time it’s just anything over 39 levels which isn’t even hard to get to with xp grinders
@@neonorangestrawberrybrenne7031 you still shouldn't have to use anything to repair. The repair system should be exclusive for, yk, repairing, and shouldn't interact with XP at all
@@neonorangestrawberrybrenne7031No. Past a certain point, the anvil will refuse to repair your stuff because its "too expensive".
My face when Mending, an enchanted book, completely nullify an entire (outdated) game mechanic.
@@neonorangestrawberrybrenne7031
you straight up lose the ability to repair after a certain point. theres a reason mending is considered "op"
I wouldn’t mind repairing my tools if it didn’t cost xp.
4:26
"Until One fateful day in 2001 when durability boarded a plane. Everyone's lives were about to change."
Me: *sweats*
september is a banger month, there's a song about it
legit was expecting a 9/11 joke lol, they got us in the first half not gonna lie
@@hagridthetable do you remebah
they really added durability to the twin towers
they were testing the durability of steel beams that day
Durability is just a usually poorly handled version of ammo.
Ironically I'd find it less annoying if it was MORE like ammo. As in, if you could say... dump all your iron into your iron pickaxe ahead of time, and have a 3000/100% pickaxe you could keep your resource economy in check without being NEARLY as tedious.
@@Godoflegos the ammo version of that sounds like welding mags together, do you mean like overflowing the durability value or having "repair kits" act similar to how mags would?
@@mindless_drift The former. I suppose when I was comparing it to ammo, I meant more like games that use ammo as a flat number (I think this is more common with energy weapons?). So like "You've found 300 bullets, so that's how many you can shoot". Essentially you'd be compromising between the game wanting to keep materials valuable without requiring you to stop what you're doing every few minutes.
@@Godoflegos Like in doom? Where you never have to reload but still use the ammo you have? (Exception being the super shotgun and the bfg)
Terraria did it well making enemies tougher as you progress forcing you to leave behind your old weapons and armour for better ones
I always get jumpscared when my pick breaks
WHO DECIDED TO THE SOUND BEING SO LOUD??
Dude fr I've played for dang 12 years and it still spooks me 😂
"CLANK JEKSOWNXUN4IWLQOX"
"oh hey look, gold armor! it must be good right?"
1 minute later
gold armor: *screams in durability*
I just don't complain about gold in minecraft because it being ridiculously fragile is the purest reality
In real life, gold is a metal that is not only heavy but also extremely soft, so much so that this is why no one tried to use gold weapons or armor, it is simply unfeasible, as it will be a huge weight for minimal results.
You can literally fill your inventory with 2304 Block of Gold in your inventory + full gold armor and walk around like it's nothing, I see your point, but gold doesn't follow neither reality's nor Minecraft's logic.
Heck, a simple solution if you don't want to completely rework how gold works is to double down on its gimmick, quick but fragile.
-For golden tools give them more durability than iron but make them destroy blocks quickly, now you have tools that are good for destroying their specific family of blocks and still break faster than the other types due how quick they are (Except hoes, no idea how to justify making a golden one).
-And for the armor it's even easier, make them have way better defense than before but keep their durability slightly lower than iron, now you are presented with the choice of using other armor for consistency or golden armor for better defense but higher risk of breaking.
Yes, both of those things contradict the whole "gold is fragile irl" but screw that, if covering a carrot in gold somehow doesn't kill you on the spot then, why should the tools and armor suffer from "erm actually" syndrome.
Also yes, this makes gold armor is now very good in the Nether due to all the advantages it'd have over the other armors, but is that really a bad thing? The Nether is already the one place where gold is used so something different than decoration or making golden food, it makes Piglins not attack you on the spot, it can be traded with them for some neat loot (It's only other practical use) and it's mandatory if you want to get Netherite Ingot and make the only type of tools you will use in the endgame due to how broken they are compared to everything and anything before them.
@@deringjosuegarcia1531 golden hoes are justified by flex
@@arthurdavicastroferreira2100 yeah but you suddenly have diamond armor having great durability
My problem with gold is just that it freaking sucks, like make the pickaxes at least on par with iron and the durability is completely livable. The fact that it enchants so easily makes it actually really cool. Having all the items be generally worse than wood is just sad.
That's why I like the Tinker's Construct mod when it comes to Minecraft.
When a tool breaks, you can still repair it instead of having to make a new one
It also does enchantments better too, overall TiCon is a shining example of durability done right.
tcon has a massive balancing issue when it comes to the weapons though
@@marquiseh5128 wdym?
@@willowshake023, they mean that the way you're able to upgrade your weapon is able to be min-maxed to the point that you could possibly kill ANYTHING in 1 hit (exaggerated somewhat)
@@waterlessant5355 that could be fixed, by also upgrading the enemies, with some enemies being weak to different types of weapons. skeletons could be resistent to cutting, but weak to blunt force.
You almost gave me a heart attack once durability bordered a plane in 2001
On september..
Im osama run tell obama im your fuck¡ng uncle
@@MarcelKędziora-w7r 11th
onety oneth...
@@MarcelKędziora-w7r BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM
Durability in Minecraft should not be a life for your tools, but an efficiency multiplier. When you create a diamond pic for example, you have, say, a multiplier of 10, and as you use it up, it drops to like 7 and it becomes slower than the new pic, but faster than the iron pic at its max multiplier. This is actually more immersive, since that's what happens when you use one tool over and over, it just dulls out until you repair it back to its original health.
This just reminds me how in older versions of minecraft, armor's protection was determined by how damaged your armor was meaning that leather had the same amount of protection as diamond when first crafted but because leather had much less durability, it would protect you for fewer hits.
@@Bogglemanify I actually really like the sound of that
Honestly these Comments are on to something here: This is typical to how Armor and Tools work in real life. A tool DOES eventually Break though, so there should be a hard limit I think
This is exactly how sharpness works in Monster Hunter. I need to say it's still not a good alternative and sometimes it still feels like artificial difficulty. It just doesn't feel right to be almost done killing a monster in a very intense fight, and have to put everything to pause because you need to sharpen your HAMMER for the 917393th time in the battle or otherwise you'll do less damage and the weapon will just jump out when you hit the monster and you could even get killed or let the monster escape if you timed it wrong. Better than durability? Absolutely. The best solution? Not in my opinion.
Minecraft at the stone tool level shows a decent example of durability, the tools are very cheap so you don't mind them breaking, but it still requires you to put some thought into your inventory.
Durability usually requires a decent repair system, it should force recourse management, not resource hoarding. It's okay for it to encourage you to use cheaper items for the majority of gameplay, but should never punish you for bringing out your best when you need to.
I believe the saving grace for durability systems is the concept of soft-breaking, under which items turn into tombstones instead of vanishing upon reaching 0 durability, allowing you to repair completely busted items, as with Minecraft's elytra (honestly not the best implementation around).
The reason this doesn't inherently suck is that soft-breaking effectively turns durability into an obfuscated ammo system, and ammo systems _can_ indeed encourage exploration, weapon variety and provide meaningful challenge, as demonstrated by the "pistol start" concept for Doom playthroughs, which has the player reset their weapons, health, armor, ammo and ammo capacity to the initial values upon loading into a map, integrating them into the map's own specific weapon progression and allowing the map author's intended restrictions on weapon use and damage tanking to apply per-map.
Red Dead Redemption II does something similar; if you use a certain weapon too much, it'll become less effective until you clean it. I think it's moreso games that implement durability like Minecraft and Animal Crossing New Horizons (ESPECIALLY ACNH) that make the system bad
With minecraft it's that iron gets used for so much you can't really spare it on tools, and for diamonds it's rare enough that you don't want to use it on consumable tools.
Many of the Soulsbourne games use this system (apart from the mentioned crystal weapons, which are kind of a meme as a result of being unfixable).
That is what happens in grounded and repairing is really cheap.
Yes! And the other part of the equation for making a good durability mechanic is making the repair costs negligible. This is where Minecraft fails, because your options to deal with durability that aren't Mending are just way too expensive. In fact, Valheim for example has you repairing your stuff for free and it's perfectly fine. Durability still does its job of making your expedition risky once your best stuff breaks or is about to break but once you're back to base you just off load your loot, click a button to repair and can go on another expedition right away.
"Without durbility, the game becomes less realistic"
AND???
Which is hilarious, because tools take YEARS of constant use to break IRL.
@@Skyblade12 Exactly this. They'll degrade faster with bad treatment, but it would still take a lot of constant use over a very long span of time to actually break. On the flipside, *degradation* is something that's a little more immediate. Blades become dull, armor plates will dent, handles will crack or stiffen(depending on the material, either is a bad thing), and bows will lose tension. It's kind of something you notice, and thus maintenance is required for *effective* use.
with totally excessive wear and tear, the game becomes even less realistic
Exactly! If something being more realistic made it inherently more fun, we wouldn’t even play video games in the first place! As it turns out, there are things irl that kinda suck from a game design perspective… escaping those can be half the fun of video games
Remember that a smith has normally one sledgehammer for his entire life, but Link destroys one in a few swings
Durability not only discourage you use good tools instead of bad. It either make you constantly go back and craft new one at home or making you carry materials for crafting them again and again in a trip. That aggravates already exising inventory issue.
I was about to comment the exact same thing. Mining trips are severely hindered by the fact that you have to carry wood, a crafting table, and materials to craft more tools; and you have to calculate everything meticulously or else that wood will turn into planks and sticks which will take even more space if unused, and then if you want to upgrade to iron you have to smelt precisely 3 ingots so only one slot is occupied by the pickaxe and not two by the pickaxe And the remaining ingots....... And at some point you just give up and just begin carrying several pickaxes on you at a time and only mine and carry essentials because you have no more space left. It's a chore, frankly.
Absolutely right, the longest realms i ever partook in was characterised with me essentially “gentrifying” a village using mostly stone tools, i had diamonds. I just didnt see the value in using them for cutting the hundreds of cobblestone needed
I can easily think of away to make weapons breaking a reward instead of a punishment, have them break into shards that can be used in crafting even better stuff. Players would break their weapons even when facing weaker foes just to get at the shards. If you are going to break it down anyways, may as well use it.
That is just one possible solution.
The problem isn't durability, but that devs stop at "when number reach zero weapon break" when making the mechanic.
@@koekiejam18 not to mention when mining u have infinite stone and not enough use for it. not only it encourage use shitier tool it also encourage to use the most plenty resources.WHICH IS ALSO STONE. even when theres a stack of iron the chance being unlucky wasting all that iron into pickaxe to get more iron is not guaranteed will gain profit iron or other resources it makes STONE again the most logical pick cause youre gonna get more stone if yo break more stone anyway
@@doombybbrthat's actually a really cool idea that can even be extended to enchantments. Like, imagine getting a level or two of a book back, or just a decent amount of the experience that was put into enchanting it.
The entire effect of Durability is that it *interrupts* game flow rather than facilitating it. Like, that's literally the opposite of what you should be doing, you're taking the player out of your game,
Depends on the game, in death stranding managing the health of your gear is like half the gameplay
The problem is that things should usually be about as breakable as they are in real life and they basically never are. We just need to consider the way things break in real life.
If the wooden handle on my pickaxe never snapped or rotted away to nothing, if my stone arrowheads never needed re-napping, or if my iron armor breaks because the enemy banged it with a wooden stick, that would be weird.
If my diamond-crested, titanium-handled, god-like-efficient shovel broke into dust leaving not even a trace of the components after I did absolutely nothing but shovel soft sand into storage crates for three days, that would be weird.
@claraphillips7900 There's several things that can add to Durability as a whole:
• Add a better Space Encumbrance System, limiting the amount of Tools or Key Items Players can carry without them being forced to Crouch or Crawl. This would make Tool Selection more diverse, and eliminate that pesky "Carrying 10+ Pickaxes into the Mines" problem that was stated in this video.
• Add modifiers like "Deficiency", which slowly degrades the Tools' Mining or Damage Efficiency when it goes down to a certain level of Durability, or "Aging", which would prevent the Tools' Ability to be repaired at their full Efficiency after a certain number of repairs. This is accurate to how Tools work in real life, and should be in Minecraft.
• Add several Anvils made of different materials to circumvent the whole "I need 31 Iron to start repairing Tools?" Argument (if you can make an Anvil from a Wooden Stump in real life, you can make it from anything harder than Wood).
• If you're gonna require Lapis to Enchant, might as well require it to repair as well, since you're using Levels to repair Gear. It would eliminate the overall grinding of Levels to repair Gear, making Mob Farms less relevant for survival needs.
These are just a few things that make realistic Durability work less like a dumb mechanic and more like a force of nature, as all mechanics like these should.
@@dutch_and_dimes It was always weird to me that levels were a resource rather than an indication of a character's power.
@@claraphillips7900 From the Lore standpoint, it does make sense to use Experience (EXP) Levels as a Survival limiter to gate certain things off from others in the world of Minecraft. I'm not saying it's a perfect system (because dog no it isn't), but it is a system put in place that forces you to interact with several things in the World, gathering EXP as you go, and reaching Level milestones as a result.
EXP requirements are an example of a Hard Rule Limiter, it's just that it's executed poorly (because it's only used for a couple of things throughout the Game). The opinion that making more EXP requirements for other things isn't that farfetched, and would expand the trope for future developments (also it would be something I think that's never been done in Minecraft before, which is a great pitch considering the Dimensions talk the Devs tweeted about).
I would like you to note that I instantaneously subscribed when you said "Subscribe for more freedom unit conversions" at 23:05 . It's like the phantom of uncle sam possessed me for just long enough to subscribe. Keep it up with these creative gimmicks you wonderful lad
I totally agree with you. Mending is NOT the problem, durability system is ... if players worship mending so badly, it means durability system is broken
I have no problem with durability
what I *do* have a problem with is the "too expensive" limit to Anvils
I don't want to waste Anvil costs repairing when I could use Mending to get around it
That's just a dumb point to make. You have a lot of barriers in games and of course as you progress through the game you want to lift them. What's the point of progression if nothing changes? Staying on the topic of minecraft, it's as stupid as saying that all tools except for netherite are pointless to have, because everyone will want to get netherite so why you need said iron? It's as silly as saying that it doesn't make sense for monsters to spawn because the players will illuminate the area for them not to spawn. You could argue that having raw/lot tier foods is pointless, just make wheat or chickens or whatever drop straight up golden carrots. It's just removing gameplay until there's nothing left. Of course there are infinite options for game mechanics, but that's the thing exactly, durability is one of the options, deal with it. And mending is a prime example of what happens when you just try to strip gameplay from the game. It just becomes boring. There's no challenge for the player to go through. What's the point of said looting rare structures or grinding for something if you're granted with the best option at the start? And you could say "Then uhh, just don't get the best option at the start, whatever". But as said: the point is lifting barriers. The game favors the effortless way and that's the problem.
@@rydergolde3169 it's a little of both, but for sure if repair costs didn't increase over time then it would be more tolerable. But there's that again; tolerable. Why is a game system there to just make most people be "okay" with it rather than risk/reward? Why is there no "sharpening" or maintenance mechanic to avoid durability loss? It's always bothered me...
It is not the fault of the durability system, but the lack of alternative options
@@totallynormalminecart519
4 days late but this comment doesn't make sense. We are stating the durability system is bad because we don't have many ways to lift progression in durability. We don't have any other way to be able to constantly repair tools.
But what about making them? Well we run into the same issue. The only way we can get said tools, is either by trading with a blacksmith, or mining for them. We have no way of actually lifting progression except in the same way that many complain about with mending.
We can lift progression on food by making a gold and carrot farm. Maybe not completely automatic for the carrot one, but we can lift progression heavily.
Illuminating the area for monsters not to spawn is lifting progression, specifically base progression. And if manipulated correctly can make an extremely efficient natural farm.
Durability is not an option for lifting progression. Because you can never lift it besides for mending. You can never easily get the materials or have an easier way than the very start of the game, everything else in the game can be decently automated to some extent, or further improved, except for durability.
As a final clarification, im pretty sure most are fine with durability existing, its just that the tool breaking system is heavily outdated, minecraft was once a really simple game where you didn't need tools to last a hundred thousand blocks, but now? Mega structures, mega farms, are becoming more and more normal, and you need long lasting tools. Or at least a way to maintain them that fits everything else becoming "mega"
how many times has "durability" being said?
yes
170 times according to my script
@@XayXayYT my voice would run out of durability before i could say "durabillity" that many times
@@Deftempura Wow you're still using stone voice? I am currently using the Iron one. Skill issues man.
@@CoolSandwich111 stone? What are you talking about? I got a gold voice that got enchanted with curse of vanishing since i got sick and my voice broke
Ngl, durability in horror games makes so much sense. It adds to the experience. But in many games it’s not necessary
People always say "Removing durability would make the game too easy" for any game that has it, but nobody ever complains when a game doesn't have durability.
Because the games without durability are balanced without durability...
@@minedantaken1684 Minecraft is unbalanced *with* durability. The only way to viably maintain a tool is to get a very specific enchantment.
Wanna repair the tool in a grindstone? There go all your enchantments. Wanna repair it in an anvil? Oops, you already spent 30+ levels a couple times to repair it earlier, it's too expensive now. Mending, however, is a onetime cost per tool and essentially removes durability, at the cost of negligible exp.
@@minedantaken1684 You're not saying that there are any games which are unbalanced because they don't have durability. I have to agree with that, because no game needs durability to be balanced.
@@givlupi2686 I am saying that chess is balanced, because it was made with all it's mechanics in mind, if they added durability, it'd be a different mechanics set and You'd have to redo it all, while Breath of The Wild is made with durability in mind. You can't just add a mechanic and expect everything else to stay balanced without considering the interplay.
Why would you even use the repair system when you can get the exact enchantments and exact tools you need or want from trading with different villager types? Like sure you need xp, but you can just make a small easy xp farm at that point (assuming you have maxed out tools)
The problem with durability is you get punished - not for taking risks, not for playing badly - but by default for just playing the game.
Intermittent rewards for taking risks is proven to be addictive, and most modern games use this phenomenon in one way or another. Durability has a 100% chance of breaking your stuff, there's no risk and no skill involved.
That's the issue with it.
Isn't this also the case with *ammunition*
It's resource management. It means you can't infinitely spam something and have to manage how often you're doing it. Should bows no longer need arrows because it "punishes you for playing the game"
@@spinosauruskin not exactly, ammo punishes you for missing bullets or over using a gun in every mob (RE for example). This way you can play around limited ammo by either not missing(it can even be rewarding for hiting crit points so you use less bullets per target) or avoiding unecesary fights.
Also playing around mags and reloads can require skill, if you enter a fight with one bullet on your mag you will have a harder time.
Finally if you ran out of ammo this games usually have some kind of melee weapon(without durability) to replace the gun untill you get ammo, so running out of ammo doens't mean you lose the weapon.
The problem with durability is that is unavoidable and you will lose your equipment(In MCs and BOW case) once it reaches 0
@@spinosauruskin no ammo? Find ammo! It should be easy. While durability you could do nothing about it.
@@PHyN1151 I mean atleast in minecraft you can do things about it.
I dont think of it as a punishment, it's another task that makes the game fun. Like in minecraft if you want to make a mega base, you cant just immediately start building the mega base, you have to gather materials first. I dont think anyone would argue with that and say its bad game design. But then why is it such a bad thing then that in order to have good tools to gather materials and such you need to find a way to work with durability?
Durability really acts like a manual reset of your progress in a game. It just makes the game feel repetitive to get your tools or weapons back over and over again. I hate the fact that several games do it and force you to spend more time to get stuff that you previously had.
A good example of durability is the long dark
hm, i think the best kind of durability system is when it’s progressive to a point where it can’t break for end game weapons, maybe making a gameplay loop in the beginning but it will really increase the sense of progression, starting from weapons with 1 to 10 durability for trash equipment, 10 to 100 for not so bad/realistic equipment, 100 to 1000 for rare/magic weapons, from 1000 to 10000 for boss weapons, and then toss some legendary weapons which are unbreakable, that are normally used in the end of the scenario when you have to do a lot of bosses so it is quite fair
and something to make durability around skill could be dynamic durability, which means the loss of durability depends on how you use your weapons, prioritizing some attack combos that would use less durability, and make errors more impactful when you could save yourself from big damage by dodging, and if you can’t you still can block which is easier, but make all the damage it would do to the player… to the weapon. so it would be quite balanced and much more skill based
@@firegaltw.steller4717 your pfp matches you lolol
@@manbatluka yup 😂
I like how Valheim does it. Nothing ever permanently breaks, and every thing is free to repair at the correct workbench
Also since Valhiem lets you bring a late game character into a new world it forces you to with revisit the world either the nessery crafting available OR not abuse your late game weapons.
pretty sure thats something they took from ark
@@mewmere6069 its not, ark costs take half the craft cost and multiplies it against the durability lost for repair costs
valheim allows free repairs
Yeah, and in Valheim the mechanic is more meaningfully and consistently tied into progression. Your stuff breaks, but it breaks less the more you're able to handle new biomes and upgrade your stuff. Each new biome ratchets up the difficulty again, and when you're new to a biome and making long journeys in is riskier, you can trade old high-durability gear for new, higher-defense gear with lower durability. Either way, the new environment keeps you walking a line of risk and reward, determining your strategy and then testing it out. The limited inventory and weight systems, as well as the building mechanic, mean you need to return to base-- to drop off, restock, farm, whatever-- anyway, so tool repair is just a natural part of the gameplay loop, instead of being a dominating factor that dictates most of your choices. It works a lot more smoothly and feels much less punishing.
That said, Valheim still isn't perfect. There are points of friction, like the time-eating process of transporting ores and ingots, which can be tedious when establishing a new base, especially when the ocean isn't particularly enthralling and, until you've cleared a substantial portion of the game, luck-based due to the winds. Losing hard-earned equipment somewhere you can't retrieve it can be devastating to morale and desire to play. Items like the hammer are also really annoying to repair, since you're likely to use it in concentrated bursts and it has very limited upgrade options to increase the durability, leaving you traipsing to repair the damn thing four times just to fix up your base from rain damage, or building janky little workbench huts so you can keep repairing your cart when greylings punch it. (I'm not bitter!)
Even with the occasional friction, though, Valheim does a really good job incorporating durability in a way that reinforces its core gameplay and (mostly) creates more interest and agency for its players rather than taking it away.
I agree, but I also think that valheims durability mechanic is kind of redundant. Most of the time it might as well not be there, all it pretty much does is busywork when at your base and shorten your exploration trips or force you to bring a portal with you, which makes exploration more low stakes
You are absolutely correct.
That "stone picks with 1 iron Minecraft hotbar" is my hotbar. Except I don't bother with wood tools. The speed is offset by my cobblestone gen.
Also, Ironically, with durability players will stick with the same weapon the whole game...
Eldin Ring has no durability and has leveled weapons. I found myself changing weapons even from max leveled ones to unleveled ones to try out different styles, judge if a new weapon would be stronger if I leveled it, or for a change of fashion. Also, some of the enemies resist my normal weapon's damage type, so I'd switch to one with less resistance or a status effect.
Oh god it's mine too 😭 My friends are always making fun of me asking "why don't you use iron tools??"
Because I'm not gonna waste my iron when it's gonna break anyway and the only difference is speed. I'll dish out the iron for a sword since it does more damage, enough for an iron pickaxe to use for ore that needs it, and then use stone (including a seperate stone pick) for the entire rest of the game.
@@_afancyhat_ One time when playing Minecraft on survival with a small group of friends, I got yelled at for using the iron from the communal crafting storage for shovels to do my landscaping work with. I still have never used communal iron for a shovel since, no mater how much iron was stored up.
"golden axes existed and they were unbreakable, ironically"
😭 Cries square tears in Minecraft 😭
😂
Yknow what needs to break and vanish? Durability.
My issue in breath of the wild wasn't about the weapons breaking, but that you couldn't buy new ones. you had to go all the way out to timbuck two and wait for a blood moon then fight some annoying monster for the 100th time to get a new flame sword every sing time.
You had to go to Two Buck Timmy? I had to go to Timbuktu
That is not how you were supposed to play tho, the intended gameplay loop is to pick up weapons as you go, the very good ones you don't use until you have to face something you can't face without them, while you use other slots to use your normal stuff that you find constantly over the place and is easy to replace without going out of your way, it is a resource managing minigame, where you have to balance how much power something gives you with how much power you actually need to face a challenge. Due to this the really good weapons felt special as you used them only for special times while at the same time these good weapons didn't trivialize the rest of the game as it was a waste to use them on whatever.
It is a genius system if you engage with it instead of trying to go around it, if you try to go around it, it turns into a grind fest, you are not supposed to go out of your way to get weapons, you are supposed to get weapons as you go around exploring, and saving them for the appropriate moment
@@diablo.the.cheater I understand that. But even doing so it more of a nuisance than adding anything positive to the game. None of the weapons felt special when you can't use them. It's like having comic book in a display case. You have it, but what's the point if you can't read it?
@@knightsofthebedrock938timbucktu 😂😂😂
@@diablo.the.cheaterthat's lame as hell tho let me use the cool stuff when I want
For me, the idea of durability isn't exactly bad, but it's execution mostly is not the best either
A small change i already saw someone suggesting was that durability could change the sprite of the weapon, looking more broken the less durable it gets
Broken tools not disappearing will certainly help, but then the durability mechanism basically simply forces you to do more grinding
@@shellpoptheepicswordmaster755 You'll have to do more grinding and regularly stop what you're doing to repair the damaged tools
@@張謙-n3l Nah just a cheap repair while keeping all the enchantment won't be any grind.
@@TheHeavieKiwie If you mean Minecraft, what do you think about the increasing repair cost and the annoying "too expensive"?
@@張謙-n3l I mean a quick fix wouldn't hurt as long as it's implemented as a quick fix right?
I've got an idea that could fix Minecraft's durability: Tools now do not get damaged when used on materials softer than them.
Stone pick is immune to things like sandstone, iron pick to all stones, diamond all ores, and netherite can mine even obsidian for free. Likewise for weapons vs. armor. Now in full netherite, fighting regular mobs is no longer annoying, but when fighting other players/bosses, you need to watch out for attrition and being caught without armor.
This doesn't encourage using worse gear to save the better one, yet keeps some of that resource management aspect, and as a bonus makes upgrades feel more satisfying.
I like that idea but I think it'd get complicated when applied to other tools. Swords as you've mentioned would be hard to decide what mobs should or should not take durability imo (until Netherite). And stuff like shovels where there isn't much tiers would also be hard to decide.
Props for making Netherite actually worth it
@@XayXayYT Wood, stone, and gold degrade as normal, iron breaks on bone, chitin, and leather or higher armor, diamond breaks on metal armors, and netherite is netherite.
Shovels and other utility tools... yeah, idk. Outside of wood, stone, and gold just remaining largely unchanged there's really not much reason to go past iron tools for those jobs.
(Using the wrong tool for the job should definitely still damage it though. Looking at you pickaxe lumberjacks!)
@fgvcosmic6752 bruh Netherite has always been worth getting, since it's the best gear
Here's the thing, netherite is quite op. It makes you almost invincible and the only way u can die is if u don't have food or your stuff breaks. Stuff breaking is already hard because of unbreaking and mending. Buffing durability of tools is gonna make grinding for materials will have no point, which is one of the biggest point of minecraft, and hence will make grinding for materials almost pointless.
Ratchet & Clank is an example of a long running series that encourages players to use multiple weapons
They encourage switching weapons with a weapon progression system, where weapons level up with use (Note: The first game didn't have weapon leveling, instead you could buy an upgraded in New Game+ IIRC)
They also force switching weapons as aside from Ratchet's wrench or Clank's fist, every weapon has limited ammo & while there are typically ammo crates throughout levels & in boss battles the only control the player has over what ammo comes out is based on what weapons lack ammo; That said folks who have worked on the game acknowledge that the games feature active difficulty tuning & that at least in the PS2 games the had the game adjust the amount of bolts (effectively the games currency for buying weapons & armor, sometimes weapon mods as well) to try a ensure that players will have at least a certain amount of bolts after completing a level; So it wouldn't be a surprise if ammo crates were to drop ammo for less frequently used weapons to try & get players to switch
Non-Ratxhet & Clank mechanics
-----
Another way to strongly encourage players to switch weapons is to have a type system where weapons of certain type might be great against one type of enemy, but they're weak against another & mid against the rest
Also, I watched a video on Warframe & IIRC it mentioned that Warframe has something along the lines of a "pilot mastery" mechanic which encourages players to switch warframes as using & leveling multiple there character get better at using all warframes; This sort of mechanic could be implemented in over games as a "weapon master" skill that could passively buff a players attack, raise their evasion, and/or in games where morale matters boost their morale all because the player character has used a ton of weapons & knows how to weild them most effectively, the weapons range & general timing of attacks to dodge, & an individual who knows how to fight with or against any weapon should generally be more confident than the average combatant as so long as they're alive they can find something to fight with.
Another way to make people want to switch weapons would be to make weapons characters like spirit swords, where the weapon has a personality & talks; Then there could be weapon bonding quests & weapon maintenance be the player character chatting with the weapon & building a friendship with it which could see the weapons attack increase as the spirit becomes more friendly towards the player character
Durability is just an MP system for basic actions, except sometimes it lacks an equivalent to an MP potion to restore it.
The worst consequence of durability in Minecraft is that it makes acquiring enchantments sooooo much grindier. The anvil's repair feature is useless because it forces the player to grind for more levels, with the cost getting higher and higher as well as being a mechanic with a finite number of uses due to "Too Expensive!", which is already a very broken feature because there is NO WAY to decrease the level cost and once you go over the limit you HAVE TO start from scratch. Without mending, you are pretty much forced to go through the gruelling process of relying on the glorified slot machine that is the enchanting table and then the anvil over and over again. So yeah, mending is a NEED, not a choice, unless you simply don't care about having mid gear.
I have literally wasted so many levels and books trying to make Sharpness V before
because at the time I didn't understand the "Too Expensive!" mechanic
and while I now undertstand how it works, I despise its existence
it disincentivizes the entire purpose of a repair station, what good is the ability to repair when doing so fucks over the item's potential?
this exact reason is why I will always prioritize rolling a Librarian until I can get Mending from them over any other enchantment
and even then, I'll probably go and make a mob farm *for* the Mending
even with all this in mind, I play vanilla so infrequently that I don't have to worry about "Too Expensive!"
because I will almost always run Apotheosis in my custom modpacks
it doesn't just overhaul enchanting, but it also removes the Anvil cap, and makes gear into rare mob drops
not only can you repair indefinitely, assuming you're not on Peaceful or something, you should have a decent supply of backup tools
Not to mention that they are now trying to add a feature to where villagers will only have certain trades in certain biomes making it impossible for you to have a mass villager trading Hall just because they want people to use the enchantment table more well if you want people to use the enchantment table then fix the stupid enchantment system once they Implement that hopefully they never do cuz they're only considering it right now but if they do I will never play Minecraft without mods again
It really reeks of Stapled On.
I think durability mechanics fail when either it is too hard to repair items, or when items completely vanish from your inventory after breaking.
A game which I think does durability really well is The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (which you didn't list in the video). In Morrowind, there are two easy ways to repair your items. You can pay NPCs to repair your items, which adds a necessary money sink to the game and makes resource management more engaging in the early and mid-game. You can also buy repair hammers or prongs and repair stuff yourself, but your success rate is based on your repair skill and the "quality" of the repair item. Carrying around repair tools also leaves you less room to carry loot, so it's a trade-off either way.
Another meaningful way durability affects the game is economics. As an item degrades, it's price ingame decreases, which rewards you for repairing your items before selling them. You can also buy higher-tier items for cheaper if they're damaged, but then you'll have to find a way to repair them, and the more an item needs to be repaired, the higher the cost will be, but you can often still save thousands of gold on an item even after the cost of repair.
It also affects how much damage weapons do and how much armour will protect you, which is another level of engagement, and the best part is items don't vanish when they break, you just can't equip them any more until they're repaired.
I think the reason Minecraft's durability doesn't work well is because it doesn't meaningfully engage the player or create any interesting mechanics. It just forces you to put mending and unbreaking on everything or forces you to carry a bunch of backup tools in the early and mid game, using up valuable inventory space. It's also way too hard to repair stuff, because the asinine anvil mechanics. Even in the early game it's usually easier to just make a new tool than to repair an existing one. If a tool only ever will require 3 material items max, it's pretty much never economical to try and repair them.
It is as you said, just artificial difficulty. I seriously hope Mojang considers reworking how the mechanics work at some point, because the current meta is just extremely boring.
Agreed, durability as a concept I think isn’t the inherit problem, it’s other things that are around it that causes the issues (namely items being too hard to repair or just leaving the inventory entirely).
Durability alone is an annoyance but durability with a proper supporting mechanic that is balance and fun to do will enhance better gameplay. Most time it just wasn't executed properly with the right solution which lead to people dislike it.
Morrowind mentioned :)
If memory serves, Oblivion allowed you to repair your weapons and armor past their normal max durability, provided your armorer skill was high enough. This actually enhanced the item and made it more effective.
@@darkprinc979 That's right, Armorer skill 75-100 allows repair up to 125% in Oblivion, and it boosts weapon or armor stats :D
I've always hated the "People would use the same weapon all the time" argument.
Because, even when they're right, who cares? It's that player's loss if they just decide to never use other weapons. If you wanna use other weapons, you don't need the game to force you to. If the game's other weapons are fun, you'll use them just because you can.
Rune Factory had a good solution to implore players use other weapons by giving all of them their own separate skill level, which in addition to improving how strong you are with (X) Weapon Type, also gave slight improvements to your overall stats.
This is on top of the different magical elements you could use with The Rods/Staves also having their own levels which also improve said overall stats.
I agree. If the player never try's other weapons, then it's because those other weapons are uninteresting or too bad in some way, and the enemy design is not varied enough.
This is where ToTK shined
Even though the weapons broke the ability to fuse your weapons with other stuff allowed for MANY interesting weapon combinations you otherwise wouldn’t have even given a second glance
Although I hate durability like most people ToTK was different, it had the perfect ability to make it fun and reasonable
BoTW weapon breaking was hella annoying tho
If someone likes using just one weapon, more power to them. Durability shouldn't be the rule to force them out of their weapon of choice.
Probably a long shot, but Destiny 2 (obviously) doesn't have durability and you just use what you like or what suits you most in that scenario. Need long range? Equip a sniper or a scout rifle. Enemies up close? Shotguns or SMGs. Mid range? Auto rifles and grenade launchers. Granted, some encounters do want more specific loadouts, but most of the game you can play with the guns and build you enjoy, and that makes the game enjoyable for me. Just like how durability forcing people out of stuff they enjoy is just bullshit. Sure, trying something new could make someone like that new thing even more, but that should be a free choice, not a forced decision.
ARPGs solved this ages ago, you just make all your weapons drop with massively different and unique effects. So unique in fact that players would use a different weapon entirely based on their build. Also they would farm to get that one weapon that is perfect for their build.
They would not play the whole game with the same weapon unless it is best in slot(which is very hard to get)
4:38 I appreciate the detail of the plane standing still but positioned so the clouds fly by, that was cleverly done.
Ay, was wondering if anyone would notice that neat trick
Way back when things took longer, items in Minecraft also took longer to break and everything was sort of balanced back then and durability didn't feel like a chore. These days it does, because mining speed has increased by such a high amount that tools will break way faster if you don't have the necessary enchantments, and even then they still break very fast.
I think the games that did durability best was BOTW and RDR2. BOTW, like you said made me think about combat scenarios more often, like "should I engage these enemies or should I wait until later". Fighting every Bokoblin you saw was unnecessary, unless you needed their items for upgrades. That gave incentive to fight them and also go looking for new weapons. Also the way the environment was set up gave the player different ways to defeat the enemies, not only hacking away at them with every melee weapon you have.
As for RDR2, the durability mechanic was almost unnoticeable and only added to the immersion. I feel it did a very good job and fit into the game perfectly. Making your weapons more dirty over time instead of breaking them, but having the same down side effects like the weapon jamming, having less accuracy etc.
My point is, games can do durability and the mechanic isn't bad in of itself. What makes it bad is when it's inserted into a game when it either doesn't feel necessary or when they don't have a good plan for how to balance it.
Some ideas on how to make Durability more enjoyable
1. Made high tier tools like Diamond and Netherite act like an elytra, where you don't permanently lose them (Or add an enchantment that causes this) (And maybe make it where a "broken" tool / elytra can only be repaired on an anvil, mending wont work once the durability is completely gone)
2. Make low tier tools (
These are some amazing ideas! I wonder why "Too expensive" was introduced to begin with. Probably because at first you needed 50 levels for a full enchantment and people complained "ItS tOo ExPeNsIvE!" and they thought "wait, wait, write that down!"
For 1, you could alternatively deduct durability based on the hardness of the block broken, and have the tools increase in durability faster.
Ya know I never thought about it but I guess Netherrack is a soft substance.
To be clear, I am not defending durability:
In BOTW there is a mechanic within durability that changes the damage dealt by a weapon when the durability is low. This is a dynamic feature. If durability had more interesting mechanics. For example, imagine Minecraft makes it so that the tools only loose durability when you use them on blocks they are not intended to break. Pickaxes should not be used to cut down trees. If you do that, it's going to damage the tool! I'm sure that's an incomplete solution but it would at least stop the mechanic from punishing the player for playing the game and it would allow the mending mechanics (like repairing a tool using an iron ingot) to be enough because the tool only breaks when you misuse it.
Again removing durability entirely is probably going to lead to better solutions, but id also be interested to see people in ovate durability to refine the ways that it impacts gameplay.
imo the way to handle durability is like how fallout new vegas and some newer fire emblem games (like 3H) handle it. when the weapon hits zero durability it becomes unusable/barely usable, but can be repaired at numerous locations, for cheap if the player takes the time to collect resources for repairing, as well as having multiple repair options in some cases (in new vegas there are repair kits, vendors that are essentially blacksmiths, and with skill investment you can break down lesser wepons to repair better ones, the similarity necessary becoming broader once you have certain perks, in three houses some special weapons can be repaired either at the smith using rare resources, or by resting on your weekend instead of doing an activity)
giving the player options and having them be readily available, alongside not deleting the damaged equipment from the material plane when durability reaches zero is what keeps it from being frustrating
The best example of durability I've seen in a game was a piece of cut content from the early versions of warframe, and it wasn't even called durability.
I'm referring to melee channeling. This mechanic had your melee drain your ability energy to massively improve the damage potential of your melee weapon.
There were a few problems with it, though. Chief amongst them was the resource cost. In warframe, you have energy to cast abilities. At the time of melee channeling, most of the playable characters had around 100 energy, which could be expanded to 225(which took a lot) if I remember correctly. Well, melee channeling had a drain of 1 energy/second as well as 5 energy per swing. The benefits were amazing, though. Double damage, double crit multiplier, and double status chance. The problems were low enemy density and no forms of sustainable energy generation, causing channeling to be very expensive and punishing to use. The other aspects were accidental activations and newbie frustration.
HOWEVER COMMA! Since then energy has been made way more abundant and I strongly feel it should come back or even be used as a basis for future in-game durability. It's an optional resource, you still get to use whatever gear you like, and it massively improves gameplay.
"Oh, this wasn't even its final form." 💀 I lost it! Perfect delivery!
4:38 Plane flying without retracting the wheels >:^)
I was hoping noone would notice that... 💀
Happens more often than you may think
Plot twist: the plane is actually hovering in place, just the clouds are moving backwards
Funnily enough, that's how I recorded the scene, I just stood still and recorded the plane as the clouds moved to give the illusion of the plane moving
In fantasy RPGs durability works because you can
A) Find materials for repairs
B) Buy the weapon again
In Minecraft and BotW, it makes 0 sense because you need to craft it back or find the same weapon by exploring, which is fine at first, but then it becomes repetitive and sometimes a weapon you have is amazingly good
There's mending
@@merlinmelon the problem with mending is that is not really intuitive and creates another problem making it mandatory to all of your gear. And let's not talk about how it can make an enchantement "too expensive". If you take the Diablo III or Three Houses route it's basically "buy the repair for all your gear" or "buy these materials/go hunt down this monsters for materials".
I agree that "too expensive" being in the game is stupid. Honestly, I don't even like mending, what do you do with your resources if you're not crafting and repairing gear? You only need 34 diamonds to get a full set of gear, and maybe three extra - for an enchanter and a music box. After that diamonds would just become a decoration item
Hammern staff here I go
Biggest issue I see is that Minecraft as a whole doesn't discourage other factors that make Durability much worse, because Durability is a good thing, in that it provides consequences for overuse of the same Tool, making Survival situations much more hectic, but other factors seems to make Durability suck, like being able to carry 10+ Pickaxes into the Mines without some sort of Space Encumbrance problem (Ark heavily builds their Game on these Systems), or not giving some of the materials back after the tool or armor breaks, taking some of the grind out of making the Tool again, or refusing to add deficiency and age modifiers to tools that go down to a certain level of Durability, making it more ideal to just repair the existing tool rather than make a new one (and take my word for it, you can, in real life, turn a Wooden Stump into an Anvil if you wanted to, despite the fact it wouldn't last as long), or maybe fixing the already bad Level Repairing System that Gates you from Repairs via. the 30+ Level gap it would take to Repair it.
Durability isn't bad for Survival Games, but it doesn't have to suck like it does in Minecraft.
This video was literally an eye-opener and made me actually rethink the way I view Minecraft and its durability mechanics. I was so used to this feature that I've never ever fully realized that it was THAT problematic. I always thought that mending was the issue, or the anvil's obnoxious limits, but I guess I was wrong all of this time.
I remember building a railway in my survival Minecraft world. In order to do so, I had to dig up a big-ass tunnel. And when I got to work, in a shocking turn of events my ultimate netherite pickaxe almost got sent to Heaven, so I had to severely slow down the process of mining to save the pick. What adds insult to injury is the fact that to repair a netherite tool you need a bloody netherite ingot.
Did the durability mechanic provide any fun gameplay on that occassion? No. I had to use severely limited unenchanted iron pickaxes to mine out the tunnel or alternatively dig out ANOTHER tunnel just to get the materials to repair mine or make another pickaxe. This is extremely time-consuming and tedious.
Yet, at the same time, like Xay said, if you remove it - it'll leave an empty space and maybe cause an even bigger outburst. However, I don't think that durability mechanic in Minecraft will ever receive any major change like that. It's too fundamental in the game with so much other mechanics built on it. It's too big of a risk, and we all know for sure Microsoft and Mojang don't have the balls to make such a move. Not after the Combat Update.
On the contrary, is durability such a problem in Minecraft? You can easily bypass it using Unbreaking and Mending. With some xp bottles, you'll basically create an undestructable machine that'll last for your entire playthrough. Yep, the setup is quite tedious, but not as tedious as mining for the materials back and forth for the eternity.
So yeah, it's actually an interesting and mind-breaking video, probably one of the best on Xayllernste's channel
Mending and unit repair are two bad solutions to a terrible problem caused by the durability mechanism
If the problem is actually so easily circumvented by subjecting yourself to tedium, how is that not an awful thing to put in your game? Whatever issues that would arise from no durability should logically already be there with mending and xp bottles. It serves no actual purpose other than to prolong gameplay by giving you chores to do in the middle of it.
"You can easily bypass it using Unbreaking and Mending"
thats exactly the problem. Durability has such a profound impact on the game, yet it's just as easily circumvented with 1, maybe 2 enchantments. And all of it is just extra pointless work, sometimes taking hours. Reminds me of an interview someone did with Hakita (ULTRAKILL creator). One of the questions went somewhere along the lines of, "Why did you not decide to add ammo for the guns?" His response was essentially that the player wouldn't play as optimally, he answered it by saying "Imagine if Dante (DMC) had durability on his sword, you wouldn't try to play flashy or go for combos for the risk of it breaking". It's not good game design if it takes hours to repair one good tool.
Durability in itself is not a singular problem. It's the grind that goes into repairing said durability that is. Durability is done well in Outward and Dark Souls and similar games where you can just keep the item in your back pocket until you can get it repaired, needing at most 1 backup for when your main armament is too damaged. Then you just go to a blacksmith or rest to instantly repair all your stuff. Meanwhile in Minecraft, you have to farm for your desired item which involves going through dozens of tools beforehand, set up an enchanting table, get the right enchantment, set up a mob farm to get emerald fodder and Mending xp, and set up a villager farm to trade those emeralds for bottles of enchanting. And even then it may not be enough because like you said, any ultimate netherite stuff can just break if you don't watch the durability closely even with Mending applied to it. So if you aren't careful, you could have to do that base grind for the materials all over again, going through dozens of tools and spending hours upon hours searching for enough netherite to remake the item that broke. Not to mention the time you need to spend in the mob farm gathering xp, the time needed to farm leather for books, and the regrind of gathering xp from the mob farm over and over again until you get good enchanted books to apply to the item. Unless it's a game like Diablo where you're literally given hundreds of free, good weapons throughout your playthrough, hard durability is never a good thing as it just ends up creating hesitancy to use and punishing grinds.
Really nice video! I like how you incooperate Minecraft into these videos, but also mix in other footage in the game. The editing and the added sound effects are great. I agree with what you said about durability. I'm always so happy when I get to the point in minecraft where I have mending and an XP, where I can avoid durability almost entirely.
27:47 I think this point specifically could work great as a replacement for durability in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. There are already rare weapon drops that have special augments/abilities in the game; they should remove durability, and instead make the list of augments way larger, and make them much more common. It would still encourage players to switch weapons and see the effects each augment could have on each weapon.
It could also encourage exploration with in-universe lore that certain parts of the map could have certain augments that are rarer everywhere else, like a conversation about how a bokoblin tribe makes their weapons more aerodynamic than usual or something like that, and you have a higher chance to get a “far throwing distance” or a “fast swing” weapon.
There would of course have to be a lot of testing with balance, as you wouldn’t want:
1. A player to find a medium-tier weapon with a busted augment that makes the medium-tier enemies a joke and allows the player to advance further than intended just because they got lucky
2. A player to get a crappy augment maybe one too many times and reduce their desire to fight enemies and loot new weapons, causing them to lose interest in progression just because they got unlucky
I think this can be done in many ways, but I have two ideas:
1. Make the weapon augments/buffs adjacent to combat, rather than direct upgrades to damage output/effectiveness. This could make combat inspire more creativity in fights, such as a “wider arc” augment making it easier to hit multiple enemies instead of having to focus on each one separately, or a “timing” shield that does more damage/stuns longer depending on the accuracy of your perfect guard; buffs that are decently beneficial, but their true value is brought out the better a player you are, hence rewarding exploration/getting better.
2. Add debuffs/integrate debuffs into the buffs themselves to make the the combat more risk/reward, such as an augment that could increase attack speed of a weapon, but the cooldown period after your combo finisher is longer to match it, making it harder to dodge or put up your shield, or even bringing durability back in exchange for a straight increase to damage on a weapon. I personally prefer the first balance option, but I think either one could work with enough fine-tuning.
In my personal opinion, if a game you are playing has a tool that breaks, your controller or keyboard should just crumble away also. Would definitely make games more immersive.
So true, also if you die in the game you die in real life.
Thanks for the kind donation!
I know this is a joke but this is a fucking awful idea
I could use a break from gaming I'm in
😂
For Minecraft, I think the material tiers could be leveraged to alleviate this problem.
For example, instead of a diamond pickaxe breaking at 0 durability, it downgrades to "damaged diamond pickaxe," which has the stats of the prior material tier (in this case, iron).
By the time a player gets netherite, broken equipment wouldn't prevent a player from being reasonably effective. Yet, players will be encouraged to repair their gear in preparation for dangerous excursions, like doing a raid or fighting the Ender Dragon.
We'd still need a repair system that doesn't suck though.
This is kind of what Monster Hunter does with their sharpness system, and I've never found myself annoyed at that! The weapon gets worse, but it can't break permanently; you're highly incentivized to get higher tiers in order to maintain better sharpness for longer, but sharpening them is something you can do within combat if you know your enemies attacks, or out of combat if you're more nervous. I feel like this kind of degradation system is better than the standard durability number.
If we're looking at your example, Minecraft, how about changing it so using an anvil to repair a tool *only* costs the material x however many tiers it's been degraded? Experience is only used to combine enchanted items or books. And maybe make anvils not have their own durability while we're at it. Then, a diamond pickaxe might take a few diamonds to repair back to full, but you'd have been able to use it to mine a lot of blocks and theoretically gotten a lot more diamonds in the meantime; enchantments like unbreaking would mean you'd be using less materials on your tools; and they could make Mending harder to get like they initially wanted it to be. The absurd degree to which Mending is almost required for any advanced level of Minecraft gameplay is a pretty big clue that players don't want to engage with the current durability mechanics.
Honestly I actually genuinely like durability. It doesn't work in all games, but it does in ones like minecraft, breath of the wild, and others. It's easy enough to get weapons that you're never at risk of running out, and it encourages you to try to be efficient. Managing durability is honestly fun for me. In a modded minecraft server called minez, weapons you found were always degraded, so you had to repair them with others you found. This way, even finding the same weapon more than once is fun instead of it being useless once you get one. I could go into detail about why exactly I like durability, but to summarize, it's just satisfying and fun to me.
Playing deviljho's advocate here as I usually hate durability mechanics, but there is a game series I know of that actually does it well; you listed it at 28:45 and I suspect it's one of the ones you admit you haven't played because you didn't mention it and it is very different from the usual weapon breaking thing: Monster Hunter.
In Monster Hunter, melee weapons have a Sharpness level (even if it's a Blunt weapon, or looks like it should be) that goes down as the weapon hits things. At lower levels your attacks deal less damage and depending on the monster or body part you hit your weapon may completely bounce, dealing almost no damage, interrupting your combo and locking you into a recoiling animation that leaves you vulnerable. At the minimum sharpness tier, all attacks bounce no matter what, and every weapon can reach this threshold.
You raise sharpness again by using a Whetstone, which requires you to stop and sit through a five second animation. This may sound annoying, but instead it is used to create tension, because most of the time you'll be in the middle of fighting a big monster when you do this, so there's a probability assessment challenge in finding an opening to sit through this animation without getting hit - remember that if you get hit or the animation is interrupted in any other way, you don't get _any_ sharpness back, _and_ you only have one weapon at a time so you have to do it.
This also compels the player to aim for the target's weak points and not waste as much time on smaller monsters since you'll want to get as much bang for your buck as possible against your main target, so it rewards the player for playing well (and taking risks by leaving lesser monsters alive) and punishes mistakes. It also enables a stat progression system that feels impactful, since you can really see the difference between for example a weapon that at first can only hit the monster's weak points without bouncing, and can only do ten or so hits before bouncing of everything, vs. one that can last 20 hits then only bounces off of suboptimal targets, vs. an even more powerful weapon that can cut through anything but literal stone for a while before degrading to a state that's still much better than the first weapon.
And, most importantly, you _don't completely lose your weapon at zero durability._ Because of that and because you can only bring one weapon into the field there's no switching to your tenth backup sword that does the same thing like BotW. Gog, I hate BotW's durability.
P.S. I noticed you listed Skyward Sword as a game that has durability mechanics, but that only applies to shields, and I think only if you don't do a timed block. Your sword has infinite uses and your bow requires arrows which is fair enough, plus you can get an unbreakable shield anyway. That's also a good implementation of durability mechanics because it rewards good play and punishes mistakes but doesn't completely stop you in your tracks or bog you down with inventory management like BotW.
one game i feel has durability as a part of its design and done well is Don't Starve. In that game, one of the main premises is that EVERYTHING comes at a cost. Its unforgiving survival aspects come from its lack of safety or security in anything really. Its a game about resource management first and foremost, constantly feeding fuel to both the figurative and literal fire to keep yourself alive. One upside of durability mechanics that DS does perfectly, though, is incentivizing not using tools at all! Instead, pushing players to try and find creative solutions to get work done besides just manual labor. For instance, Using giant mobs to clear forests or mine for you in don't starve rather than doing it yourself. I get that breath of the wild was trying to go for that, incentivizing not taking fights or trying to find cleaver ways to sneak around or take out groups of enemies with minimal resources...but that doesnt really work in a game as directly-combat-focused as zelda. Durability works best when just using the tools isnt the only, or even better yet, not the best way to go about getting a task done. Instead, being a way to push a player to find better and possibly more fun solutions to an otherwise tedious task or issue.
Zomboid is going to do something different but also extremely cool! It's going to add procedural weapon breaking, for example, if an axe's head flies off, you'd still be able to use the hilt for another axe, or, as a blunt weapon in and of itself.
in my opinion the durability is stressful when you know that your items is going to break forever, the sweet spot for me is when devs let you repair a broken equipement
I think durability depends on the genre and tone. I don't play games like Dark Souls or BoTW, but if I did I would definitely hate the way those durability systems were implemented. Those weapons seem sturdy enough to last years, if not forever, so it makes perfect sense for them to be unbreakable for gameplay purposes.
On the other hand, games like 7 Days to Die are trying to capture the feeling of scavenging in a zombie-apocalypse, where you're stuck with crude weapons and tools until you can work your way up to sturdier gear that's easier to maintain. Another good example is Grounded, where your weapons are also fairly crude and being assembled by teenagers, so it's no surprise they'd break. In both examples, the weapons don't disappear when they break, there are several avenues to take when maintaining your weapons, and stockpiling resources for the future is an integral mechanic of the game, so you don't have to use your good gear sparingly.
It's great for games that want to give a feeling of scarcity or limitation. Which is why it does kind of make sense for Dark Souls, but BotW wants you to feel like a legendary hero exploring and conquering the world, which makes the durability feel pretty rough.
4:29 we all were thinking about it. Don't lie to me.
I laughed so hard at the "Freedom Unit Conversions", you can have my sub!
Freaking insane video you did such a great job with this one
100 percent worth the wait
I enjoyed every second of it
I think durability could be used as a way to make the player use the right tools.
Like, a iron pickaxe only degrades with tougher blocks like diamond ores, while with blocks that are more lenient like netherack wouldn't cost nothing to use it.
I could see like a way to push the player to make better things for each occasion, for example deepslate would cost you stone level durability because its tougher than your tool is.
"We must remove durability."
Curse of binding: 💀
Edit: Hate to be that person, but this is the most likes I've ever gotten.
Eh, just remove the Curses too. They don't add anything of value to the game.
@@matthewr6148 it's funny, it has multiplayer troll potential, and it always good to have for advnture maps
found a helmet once with both curse of binding and mending lollll
@@Scoitol then remove them from survival
@@nubidubi23 use a grindstone 🤓
in most games I agree, however when playing hardcore survival style (such as Green Hell, Stranded deep or The Forest) it's kinda needed. you can't expect that spear you made from a sharpened stick to last forever.
Something that these games do well is they only put durability on items you make yourself and add a limited number of manufactured quality items to be found. for example in the Forest franchise you start with a survival axe, it's not got the fastest swing nor does it do much damage buuuuuut you'll never be without the means to gather materials or defend yourself.
People that play these games (Like myself) play them to have that realistic realisation that things you make from a few sticks and stones are not invulnerable and that resource management is vital to survival.
The Borderlands series does a good job of encouraging weapon variety. depends on the game, but in Borderlands 3 here's a summary of everything that encourages you to "be immersed" in weapon selection.
- Weapons can do kinetic, fire, corrosive, shock, radiation, or cryo damage.
- Enemies have one or more of the following health bars: Shield, Armor, Health.
- Kinetic does pretty similar damage to all three. Shock, Corrosive, and Fire do extra damage against their respective type but reduced damage against others. Radiation deals damage to nearby enemies, and cryo damage can freeze enemies (making melee attacks more effective. This standard "damage type" system (pokemon, etc) encourages weapon switching.
- You can quickly switch between 4 weapons, so you'll have to pick wisely before battling in an area.
- Ammo type and enemy type(boss vs badass vs normal) also mean switching is important, since some guns do more damage to bosses.
- Lots of weapons have unique abilities that will be better for swarms or single targets, and each one can also get random anointments/enchantments which encourage close comparison of options.
- Different playable characters with different skill trees (which you can't completely fill) provide different bonuses to some weapons, and you can reset your skill tree at any point to switch it up.
- Many characters also provide bonuses for switching weapons. For example, the first shot my character does after switching does extra damage.
Here's an idea for making durability better!
When something breaks, it actually BREAKS. Like, maybe you chip a piece off your sword and it might make the enemy bleed sometimes, maybe your armor has a hole in it and it makes you more resistant to heat but more vulnerable to splash attacks, or maybe your magical spear's head breaks off. If it breaks in multiple pieces, you can keep those pieces and either repair it once you get the supplies or go the blacksmith, or you can use those parts for something else. Maybe the old handle from that spear would make a good torch, and you could use the spearhead as the end of a grappling hook to use that magical power for something movement-based instead of combat-based. The possibilities are endless there!
That could help with immersion, and you could even make it so repaired weapons can be imbued with new magic and buffs each time to ENCOURAGE you using your weapons until they break in the long run
Honestly, Fire Emblem does durability great, because its a gameplay _mechanic_ in its entirety. It is part of how the strategy works.
It also occasionally does durability very badly - such as the Relics in 3 houses, where it makes them essentially useless.
It also helps that most of the games a relatively short. It's easier to plan when and where you want to use your best gear.
@@lukebytes5366 you only need to think about durability in regards to each chapter generally, too. The game was built with durability in mind, not as an after thought
I wouldn't call relics essentially useless, since you get enough opportunities to farm Umbral Steel, which is required to repair the relics.
Pretty much all Draconic monsters drop Umbral Steel once their barrier has been broken, really not too hard to do.
Besides that, I agree, I just feel like making weapons repairable in most games should be a priority, so rare and character-exclusive weapons are hoarded less.
6:35 NOT THE FIRE IN THE HOLE 😭😭
@@alsolem Water in the eyes much better
i love how rimworld deals with durability it makes it so yes you can use low durability items but you will have limited efectivness( not only the fact that it wont last )like mood debuffs for your colonist and it forces you to keep producing good equipment and equiping it on only some colonist (yes i do know that it has some cheeses that makit so you can get marine armors in bulk)
either way good vid and you should try playing rimworld
Durability belongs in the same category as difficulty and censorship, as optional settings. Everyone wants to play games in the way they themselves enjoy.
THAT PLANE WAS UNCALLED FOR 💀
8:44
Can't believe pewdiepie created 3d terraria
Now I'm imagining an RPG system that has:
1. Hafts/handles that break and can easily be repaired with a wedge
2. Tool head materials that only degrade with "improper" use, maybe requiring occasional sharpening
3. Leveling skills makes items much less likely, and eventually impossible to break if you max it out.
The biggest idea with this is that durability will come into play with a tool only if you don't care about the associated skill tree, and by the time that your tool head breaks you've already progressed at least one tier
I saw a mod for Minecraft which changed durability to only affect you when you die, basically meaning when you die all your weapons and armor and tools take a huge chunk of damage, making it kind of an in-between between keepinventory on and off, where you can lose stuff from it but it's not 100%, also Project Zomboid is planning to overhaul the crafting system and with it, making it so when tools and weapons break, they turn into pieces of weapons that can be used to make more weapons. Both of these methods for durability seem to work way better than how it currently is in games, one is simply a punishment for lacking skill, while the other is a compromise and lets you make more weapons from the pieces of your previous weapons.
the point of durability is to add resource management, which is a strategic challenge.
this works as intended in games like fire emblem, while it doesn't work in games like minecraft.
the key difference: finite resource availability vs infinite resource availability.
in fire emblem (and pokemon, in the form of move PP), the amount of WEAPONS is limited, not just each weapon's uses. this forces the player to strategically take care when to use each weapon, especially if said weapon's purpose is to deal with a certain enemy type, which makes it too valuable to use on other enemy types lest you run out of that weapon and will have to use suboptimal weapons FOR THE REST OF THE GAME.
in minecraft (and breath of the wild), the amount of tools is unlimited - you can just go and get some more materials and craft new tools. this changes the challenge from strategic decision making to grinding. and nobody likes grinding (unless you play MMOs). theoretically you could force yourself to avoid grinding as much as possible, which will turn the challenge back to strategic decision making, but players will always take the path of least resistance, even if it will optimize the fun out of the game.
therefore, there's an unavoidable conflict between durability and making a fun sandbox\open-world game.
i think the only time i missed durability was in FE fates, the drawbacks they had to add to powerful weapons like the S tier and silver weapons was so detrimental they just weren't worth using at all, in games like shadow dragon u had powerful weapons like gradivus but you could only use it 20 times without expending another limited use tool the hammerne staff or holding the starsphere and there was a LOT of other things you wanted to use the hammerne staff on like forged ridersbanes or warp staves
Me at 14:36: "Oh, what a nice story about durability in games, it's an odd not to end with but I gue- *Checks timer* . . . Oh. . . Oh my.
I was cool with durability in BOTW until I realized weapons could have modifiers.
The 100ATK Savage Lynel Sword I grinded for Hours, gone because there's no repair mechanic, what a bummer
In Baldurs Gate durability isn't a mechanic but a plot point. Everybody being on edge because everything made from new iron or steel suddenly starting to break is the first hint of and the start of te paper trail leading to the conspiracy thats going on.
and it also only applies to basic metal weapons (enchanted or wooden ones are immune), and only until you resolve a certain quest
11:00 as someone who has 2 stacks of useless diamonds, i certainly do this
After replaying terraria and making a new world on Minecraft that I promised myself I would not use mending in, it’s come to the point where I find the durability system to be more of a bother than a challenge on using resources responsibly, I think the only time I could say i tolerate the durability mechanic is in Monster hunter rise, but then again it kind of has its own version of mending with Malzeno’s hunting horn (which as horn main i absolutely love aside from the sounds it makes) as it not only has weapon durability reduction but also sharpness regen. Great Video as always xay! Was definitely worth the wait!
I love your videos so much I'm so happy that you're back!
He was never gone?
@@spire6_Yeah no video in a month
@@LimeSlimeee he posts monthly
Durability is a challenge to be overcome, but overcoming it has to be fun or interesting to be worth the players time.
I like when the tool isn't gone when broken, but just needs repaired to not be useless/weakened
Think the thing that annoyed me most in Breath of the Wild was that my favorite weapon type was spears but they dealt less damage per hit in exchange for rapid hits making it so you'd break them so much faster then other weapons.
As someone that gets unreasonably attached to items in games and gives them names and stuff durability is such an unnecessary emotional blow. It's also tedious and stupid. If durability was removed from Minecraft it would force the devs to develop more content to improve the game. They want the game to last another 50 years but durability (amongst other things *cough* inventory *cough*) is literally one of the biggest things hindering that dream.
This was amazing. Well done. Send to game devs everywhere
I think the best anti durability example is Ultrakill
Solution to “using one weapon” is simple, make multiple weapons bounce naturally off eachother in combat
If a weapon can only do one thing it’s kinda boring, if it can use speed as a damage multiplier or doubled as a mobility tool you might still use it a lot, but it’ll feel way less repetitive
Honestly, Ultrakill's weapon combat is more akin to Doom Eternal, and the DMC franchise (besides DMC2) where the best way to play it is with swapping weapons ever so often
@@Eddie-yv1ix doom eternal ain’t a great example because it forces you to
this guy is the pinnacle of comedy
i don't have any particular concepts to bring to the table rn as my brain is too tired after work, but i agree with most of what you said in the video. however i definitely think that durability *can* be balanced but it would definitely take a lot of time and testing to find the right balance. i believe in some games it can be extremely fitting and make sense, but it in others it is just thrown in as a bad attempt to slow gameplay, as mentioned. the key thing is knowing the game you are trying to develop, the other systems in play, and finding the right "feeling" for it. if your tool will break, it needs to worth the effort that you put in to get that tool. you should be rewarded for using it and feel the benefits of putting in the work to get it, and use that to make more of them and to make even better tools again
Durability is a toxic relationship
It breaks and then you try to fix it but it just keeps breaking
I like durability because it reminds me of our finite time in this universe, eventually we will all be gone, forever, you can delay it, but it will eventually happen.
I love comments that have so many layers of irony that you can't discern how serious the poster meant it to be
Not if I grab god's balls and fuse them together before absorbing it.
@@kenthartig7065 I can’t even discern how serious the poster is meant to be… I am the poster
@@nutsi3 Schrodinger's sincerity
this video is so great and informative!!!
I can think of two scenarios where
durability can actually work.
1) Let's say, there is a level where you can find a powerful weapon that has limited durability, and it cannot be used outside of that level.
This way there's no point in "saving it for later", because you can only use it here. This is a good way to add OP weapons to games, because durability makes it balanced.
You may have already seen it in the form of timed weapons, weapons with limited ammo etc. Durability is just another way to do this.
2) In a roguelike game, you can have a shop that sells a tool with limited durability.
It has to be dirt cheap so people actually buy it and aren't afraid of using it. You can use it in a run, for example, to find secret rooms that get better the deeper you go.
This is a good way to add resource management to your game:
"Do I use it now or do I save it and risk dying so that I can use it later for better loot?"
Again, this already exists in the form of expendable items, like bombs or staircases in Stardew Valley, but durability can work like this too.
In most cases though, durability is really a mechanic that exists for no reason other than to add artificial difficulty
Mods for Minecraft like Tinker's Construct and Silent Gear are perfect examples of a compromise with durability. Every tool is repairable, so you never have to re-roll enchants or upgrades. You only need the materials, not an arbitrary and increasing amount of XP or the hundreds of iron ingots for anvils you'll break. So cheap tools are easy to repair, but you'll be repairing them more often. Still not a huge deal, since there are mobile repair options that allow you to perform the entire process from your inventory. Breaking tools becomes a minor speedbump, and iteratively a non issue as you progress and gather better materials.
As long as it's not threatening you with permanently deleting your favorite weapon or tool, or with a tedious grind to re-obtain it, durability (like other mechanics such as hunger), becomes a driver for improving your arsenal - it's just another stat to optimize instead of a death timer on your fun.
AT 1:40 IMMEDIATELY NOTICED THAT SAID "HENTAI" AND STARTED BAWLING
NAHHHHHH
@@ProJohnson xay never changes.
@@blood-water for hot he was a fembo-
Bro got a whole ahh backstory
Love video keep up with the content❤❤❤
10:32 durability was so oppressive, providing more pressure than an Asian dad during finals. 😂😂😂 that’s saying something btw
4:33 bro... lol
The one game that I think handles durability perfectly is a game called Wartales. In Wartales, durability is strictly tied to your armor, not armor as in your companions' gear, but an actual stat which works as a secondary health bar. This means that there is actual decision making when it comes to encounters, necessitating taking out your opponents as optimally as possible without worrying about tiptoeing around breaking your weapons.
Armor doesn't regenerate by itself after a fight, rather you either pay a blacksmith or use Raw Materials to replenish it, the latter being obtained by purchasing it or having a tinkerer to dismantle gear you don't want or gain it passively.
There are also actual downsides to having no armor, such as DoTs, (except corrosive,) and certain attacks passing through armor and reducing health, non-war pony animals having no armor making them support attackers or fodder units, taking enough health damage can injure your companions and leave them with negative status effects. Having no guard without armor which is another damage negation source.
Honestly I think Durability is good when done like in three houses where you can repair it even at zero durability
the best uses of durability i've seen are either to restrict another mechanic from getting abused (like a vein miner mod in minecraft) or having a very strong weapon with limited uses (like Robin's levin sword in smash bros)
Levin Sword in nearly all Fire Emblem games*
Except Robin sucks in smash and Levin without durability wouldn't even make Robin significantly better. Its just a reference to the FE games and one that can be lived without.
I am currently playing a terraria mod. Almost all of my hotbar is weapons because they are all unique, even if they are about the same power or weaker
One idea that I feel is often overlooked is having the dulling of a blade's sharpness in addition to a standard durability.
The main idea is that sharp weapons would dull over time, much quicker than normal durability loss, which causes the damage/effectiveness to decrease. They can be re-sharpened without too much difficulty, perhaps using a whetstone or grinding wheel.
Meanwhile, the total durability of the weapon indicates how long until it is so damaged that it cannot be used. This is much harder to repair, requiring additional material and possibly having to entirely rebuild the tool.
Some weapons/tools don't rely much on sharpness. A spiked mace could have a little extra damage from being sharp, but would still bludgeon just fine while blunt. An axe won't cut trees effectively while blunt, but it could still bludgeon like a warhammer. A sword would be ineffective while blunt.
Different materials can react to sharpness and durability differently. Soft materials would lose their sharpness immediately, but they can still have some durability. Brittle materials would have little durability, or a chance to suddenly lose a large portion of it's durability. Flexible materials could be resistant to durability loss.
From there, you can explore using multiple materials in a single weapon (like the classic flexible metal blade with a hardened edge). You can create separate damage types (sharp/blunt) to make use of the weapon sharpness. You can change how much sharpness is lost per strike depending on what the target is made of.
Perhaps enchantments could have their own durability too.
The game that comes to my mind that involves durability in a way I actually enjoy was the Stalker: Anomaly mod, where durability was leveraged as a part of the progression system. I still remember finding my first, 30% durability AK as an upgrade from a O/U shotgun and by god that thing was so nice even if it jammed every fourth round until I fixed it.
In anomaly, you're able to find tons of weapons above your current means from enemies at low durability, and the weapon maintenance system was constructed in a way where you can disassemble weapons with compatible parts, fix those parts, and replace the parts in your current weapon, dramatically improving its condition. An additional benefit is that the cheap and easy universal maintenance tools are not usable below 80-90% depending on which item you use for maintenance. This means that once you fixed the armour or weapons from a barely usable state to a near perfect one, you basically skip all the downsides of durability causing jams or barely protecting you, as well as only having to occasionally use an item to keep it topped off every couple hours rather than dealing with the part replacement system.
You can also buy weapons in full condition to bypass this, but that's usually very expensive and difficult to do early on, so commonly the early game is based around finding a decent weapon to make your goal to fix, same with armour. It's also very fitting within the genre being very much about resource management and survival, and honestly fairly generous once you've gotten on top of it since it's not difficult to have your gear just never break again once you fix it the first time. It's one of the only times I can say that a durability mechanic that was actively punishing me (low durability ak) was still worth putting up with for the role it filled as well as being able to use it to find common parts from enemies in order to repair it.
Additionally, I recall that enemies can also have weapon jams too so it's not an entirely one sided system, at least with some of the crummier factions.
Broadly, I don't care for durability, but some games it works really well imo, and that's an example where I honestly enjoy the cyclical maintenance as a part of the atmosphere and the repair scramble as a part of early progression.