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Anon encounters a Switch owner
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this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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People really hate weapon durability, huh? I thought it was kind of genius, and that TotK introducing a way to repair weapons was really bad for the gameplay loop.
TotK didn't introduce a way to repair weapons, it reduced their durability to near nothing then gave you a way to buff them.
It did. In TotK only, put (almost) any weapon or shield on the ground in front of a Rock Octorok and let it inhale it and spit it out. You'll get back the same base weapon, with the same fused item, at full durability, but with a rerolled modifier. Each Rock Octorok can only do this once, so kill it afterwards so that you remember which ones you've used. They'll respawn at each Blood Moon so that you can repair again.
Some special weapons can't be repaired this way, so you have to use a workaround. If you want to keep whatever you have fused to them, go to Tarry Town and have the goron separate it. Then fuse the unrepairable weapon to anything that can be repaired. Feed that to a Rock Octorok, then take it back to Tarry Town and have it separated. The "unrepairable" weapon will good as new.
My Eldin map is covered in stamps showing where Rock Octoroks are, and I have a full inventory of strong weapons because I switch when their durability is low and then go on a somewhat tedious repairing spree when most of my weapons are flashing red.
And so much of this is just grind:
BoTW was a grindfest, and ToTK chucked more grind on top
It's mostly just that it doesn't make any fucking sense, most especially after the beginning of the game. None of the weapons are mostly diverse enough that the frequent changing created by durability encourages you to really play the game any differently, usually you have a stockpile of extra weapons anyways so you don't really even need to pick up new stuff, and most of the hard enemies drop the weapons that deal higher damage, meaning you'll want to use the high damage weapons on those enemies, so there's not much decision-making going on there. After fighting enough hard enemies later in the game, you get enough high damage weapons that it's not even really worth it to interact with most of the random bokoblin camps. Not that doing so was super interesting to begin with, outside of like the first couple hours of gameplay.
TotK solves some of these problems with the fusion mechanic and having increased enemy variety, but it's still not great, and most of what it does serves to assuage the shittiness of the system rather than provide a reason for it to exist in the first place.
Yeah. Weapon degradation in a video game that isn't trying to go for a realism vibe is absolutely fucking garbage. You've got arrows that light on fire, turn to ice, or have lighting as soon as you pull them out of the quiver, but yeah. Totally makes sense that my Master Sword needs a lil sleepy time to become usable again. Just fucking garbage.
You know I absolutely hated it at first until I realized, they just did it so that we would get to experience the full range of weapon options in the game. Otherwise you just stick to the one you find early on that works the best and completely ignore everything else they give you.
Well, I’ll tell you that I tried all the weapons in the game even with the stupid durability mechanic turned off. Each weapon has its own advantages. So, with durability turned off, I had the master sword for all the mobs I didn’t feel like dealing with as I was exploring. I had a fire sword to use for tactics or to light stuff on fire/cook. A ice wand because I liked the tactical advantage, and the same can be said for the thunder wand.
After that, every other weapon in the game was a reskin of other weapons. There was no point to them other than to have them there because of the stupid mechanic. Your rusted sword swings the exact same way as the master sword. It’s just a pin in the ass to use. Wow. That is just so fun.
But in all seriousness, it’s just not a good mechanic to have in a video game that is not trying to be a realistic video game.
I don't experience the full range, though. I experience the Master Sword until it needs a nap, and then whatever crap I just picked up in my last slot because I don't want my fancy swords to break.
In prior Zelda games, the game designers would actually think about making monsters where certain types of attack are more effective than others. I would prefer experiencing a variety of weapons that way.
And that's your choice. If you don't choose specific weapons like Spears to deal with lizalfos for example, then you're just making the game harder for yourself. As I said earlier, I hated the durability mechanic at first too. To each their own.
The lizalfos are trivial to just avoid until they swing at you, and then just spam the sword attack until they get staggered. All of the enemies in the game are trivial once you get used to their attacks. Literally just avoid, attack, repeat. I hated botw until I set durability to 10x in cemu. Also set revalis gale to infinite uses, because a player shouldn't be punished for wanting to explore and you shouldn't have to spend 20 minutes climbing to reach some relatively pointless summit with yet another cokerock hiding at the top.
It's not harder in any meaningful way. That's part of what I mean. If they designed enemies better I would be actually motivated to find and use a spear or other tool. That would be more fun.
It's fine that you like the durability but the experience as a whole is nothing like a Zelda game. I had a good time but if I had played it expecting a Zelda game I would have been profoundly disappointed.
It forces resource management, decision making, and engaging with the full array of tools you have at your disposal. It also means you never run out of the need for more good weapons.
I agree. This mechanic was super annoying at first, but I learned to appreciate it after putting more hours into the game. Now I fully understand why the developers made it this way.
People hate that they removed everything about the Zelda games that made them fun and charming, and left a mid grinding experience. The weapons breaking don't really bother me much.
Old Zelda: find a temple, new set of enemies, solve puzzles until you get to the new tool, solve puzzles with the tool, fight a large boss that the tool conveniently works really well on.
New Zelda: find a shrine, fight yet another of these little guys. Find a shrine, solve two or three of the same puzzles with the tools you got in the first hour of gameplay. Spend large amounts of time just walking through areas of the map fighting the same campsites and outposts, hoping for a radar beep so you can find a shrine.
Yup, I finished BotW, and only because my kids wanted me to. I would frequently hand them the controller to make me some food or whatever, and I ended up looking up a guide to find the shrines for some special equipment because finding them wasn't fun. The boss fights were okay, but they got pretty same-y (basically, find the one secret, then smack it a bunch).
It has little to nothing to do with the Zelda games I love, so I didn't bother getting TotK since I've heard it's largely more of the same. Instead, I bought Link's Awakening and Skyward Sword and had a really good time. Those are great Zelda games, BotW was kinda meh.
The boss fights were okay, I guess. Once you have enough armor or hearts to survive a hit, you can just wander in with an entire restaurant of food and knock it around for a while. In the classic Zeldas you have your hearts and maybe four jars for healing, and you try to make it all the way through on that.
The beasts were neat little puzzles but the enemies inside are like 99% purple gunk shooting floating skulls. It's such a dull challenge. The only thing I like really enjoyed were the minigames getting inside the beasts (except the lizard), although those were all the same also.
Maybe I'll pick up Skyward Sword, I haven't done that one yet. I might still get TotK, like used or something. It was still chill to wander around aimlessly looking for stuff.
Skyward Sword reminded me of Ocarina of Time, but with a bit less interesting story (imo). But it has a really unique combat system designed for the Wiimote, which is still fun with the analogue sticks (or joycon probably).
It felt like a real Zelda game and I enjoyed it much more than BotW.
The entire system was trash from the get go. I don’t care that weapons break IRL; I’m playing a fucking video game, get that shit out of there.
It isn't about realism, but creating a resource-management gameplay loop. Need better gear? You have to regularly work for it. It also encourages using weaker weapons in weaker areas, which makes the difficulty more consistent and fresh.
Yeah that’s all trash. I’m playing an action adventure game, not a logistics game. Get that crap out of there.
It's not that deep, lol. Again, it drives creative problem solving by adding a price to each action. Using your tools like the slate or other mechanics is free, and results in a more engaging gameplay experience than just "swing my strongest weapon forever."
Deep or not, it’s unnecessary trash.
You believe mechanics that support interesting problems and encourage creative solutions are "unnecessary?" What would you replace it with, to get the same results?
The main problem is weapon durability is in direct contention with how the dungeons are designed. The shrine puzzles try to encourage experimentation in finding solutions, but when using the time lock tool hitting objects depletes your durability, then once you run out of weapons, you need to leave the shrine to find new weapons\materials which ends up being a big interruption in the main gameplay loop. It's made even worse by the fact every weapon applies a different amount of force to a locked object per hit. I'm not sure what interesting and creative problem solving weapon durability adds. It really just encourages you to avoid combat and use easy to come by weapons wherever you can.
That's why shrines usually have additional weapons in them, though that bit is a valid point.
Weapon durability does a few things:
Discourages using strong weapons on weak enemies
Encourages using weak weapons on weak enemies
Encourages using tools to save durability, using the environment
Maintains a drive to explore for more high level weapons
Discourages farming areas you can move beyond
All of these plant incentives to encourage the player dynamically, and without them there isn't really much of a carrot and stick. Not all games need a durability system, but in Zelda's case they are important so you don't just use the master sword for everything, or royal claymores.
Most of this is gonna be about BotW, because that's the one I played, but TotK seems to have gone a little ways to smooth over these issues.
I would say that maybe number 3 is the only real point there. Most of the other things that it "solves" are "problems" that are created with the weapons system in the first place. Like number 4, that's not a problem with the alternative of a weapon that doesn't break, like what happens in the other games. The difficulty scaling could've just been done by the devs with a basic, regular master sword style thing, like what existed in the other games. It doesn't help balance at all, is what I'm saying. I would say, precisely because the weapon system exists, there's actually less balance in this game overall than pretty much every other zelda game to date.
Some of the harder enemies are more likely to appear in different areas, and so entering those areas with low tier weapons means that the weapon system kind of acts as a mild gate, right, in the sense that you will go down to a one hit KO and be able to do no damage. Sidenote, but if this were how the game really worked, it would actually act against point number 4, since you wouldn't be able to surmount those areas without properly scaling up to take them on, and going and farming the weapons in some other area which is a "lower level". This gating is especially true of the castle town, more than almost anywhere else in the game, where it kinda happens more in discrete, singular locations. At the same time, most of the areas in the game, the overworld, level up their mobs to scale with the player's weapon rating, making the entire point moot. There's certain areas where higher tier mobs, relative to the player, are more likely to spawn, sure, but again, that maintains throughout the whole game and is totally relative to link's current character, which means they could've gotten away with a steady state, singular weapon throughout the whole game kinda deal. Basically, those areas with higher tier monsters, stay higher tier regardless of whatever you do. The only major exception I can think of is the guardians, and I'm pretty sure they scale to your level anyways, they just don't do it in visually distinct tiers.
The player playing dynamically isn't really incentivized outside of the immediate intro, because, as you said, most enemies drop weapons that are the same kinds of weapons you'd use to beat them, and later on the player can kind of be expected to have picked up enough weapons of a similar scale with the enemies. The thing which incentivizes the player to think outside of the box is the enemies being slightly harder than the player can be expected to take on and the terrain and scenarios in which they fight enemies to be varied and unconventional, which I have found to sometimes be the case, but again, isn't due to the weapons scaling. That's something the game could've been designed to facilitate anyways, the weapons scaling just complicates it.
So, uhh, yeah. I don't think the weapons scaling does much to help the game's design at all, I think it probably overcomplicates it while offering basically nothing in return. Maybe the continuous scaling until the end is supposed to offer some sense of power fantasy for the player, but I think that kinda stinks and is dumb, because the game is basically functionally identical, in terms of the mechanics of the pure combat system, basically all the way through. Outside of the immediate intro, anyways.
I would replace it with nothing since the system did not support interesting problem nor encourage creative solutions, it just made me button mash more to get more weapons to replace my broken ones. Once I turned it off I felt free to experiment with interesting ways to kill enemies since I wasn’t worried about my weapons anymore.
Combat was not an essential part of this game anyway, the puzzle solving and world were the best part. They could have just given me a set weapons that never changed and it would be essentially the same game. At least for me. The environmental interactions are just icing on the cake.
I played the game as a rom with weapon durability turned off. It was a great game after that, previously it had been tedious, which is the exact opposite of what a game should be. I get enough tedium IRL & through talking to people like you.
That doesn't answer my question, so go off, I guess.
I guess you should work on your reading comprehension then
You replaced a system designed to present interesting problems and encourage creative solutions, like using the abilities, with nothing, reducing encounters to mindless button mashing.
That doesn't answer my question, it just denied it, plus you've been nothing but rude.
You choose to engage with rude, then are surprised you found rude? I think I understand why you like games with meaningless problems.
I think I'd be fine with it if they buffed it with everything and had a system that told you how much durability is left that isnt just the weapons' last few hits. It feels way too low for me and is somewhat unpredictable imo.