GameMakersToolkit
patreon
Design deep dive - weapon durability in Breath of the Wild
🕑 Added 2017-03-16 21:32:52 +0000 UTC One of the most controversial aspects of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the fact that weapons are super brittle. Like, a powerful knight's sword will break down faster than a launch era Xbox 360.I've been thinking about this system, and trying to figure out why Nintendo used it, where it is beneficial for the experience, and when it falls down.
I didn't think this was quite interesting enough for a full ep of GMTK. Besides, I'm already doing a BOTW video, focusing on its open world (coming next week). So I thought I'd share my thoughts, in text form, with you guys and gals instead!
Let me know if you think I've missed anything, or if you have a different take. Okay, here we go.
Weapon durability is good because it...
Encourages improvisation
Breath of the Wild has a robust physics and chemistry system, where you can kill enemies through the careful use of fire, boulders, metallic crates, snowballs, bomb barrels, and more.
Games like Dishonored, which also allow for really inventive kills, can find it hard to incentivise players to rig up such ridiculous death traps... when you can simply kill an enemy with a sword or a gun.
But in Breath of the Wild, you'll want to use these ingenious death machines because it saves the wear and tear on your weapons. Better to squish a bokoblin under a metal bridge than waste your claymore.
Discourages monotony
In Dark Souls 3, I played the entire game with a broadsword. I was comfortable with the timing, and liked using it with a shield. By the end of the game, I was walking around with a pocket-full of clubs, spears, axes, and giant swords that I never used. Which is a shame.
Because in Zelda, I was forced to use everything and anything I could find. Spears, skeleton arms, tree branches, wooden mops, flaming swords, and so on. It was fun! Each battle had an ebb and flow, of using different weapons because something broke or because I didn't want to overuse a certain weapon.
And I used weapons I never normally try in games, like heavy axes that do massive damage but need a longer wind-up. Learning the timing for lots of weapons, instead of just one, is fun.
Games with guns can achieve all this through ammo. But durability is a smart way to do it with swords.
Provides moments of drama
Far Cry 2's jammed and broken weapons lead to brilliant moments of panic, surprise, and hilarity. And there's some of that in BOTW, too.
I'd often choose to throw a weapon just before it breaks (thrown weapons do double damage, but massively reduce their durability), leading to great finishing moves where I kill a tough enemy by lobbing my last worthwhile weapon.
Encourages exploration
Finding a weapon in Breath of the Wild is always exciting.
Like I said before, in Dark Souls a new weapon was normally just thrown onto the heap of pointless metal crap. But in Breath of the Wild, with its fickle weapon economy, a new sword, axe, or spear is always brilliant.
This gives players a really good reason to hunt for treasure chests, take on enemies holding good weapons, and steal from Hinox monsters.
Halts overpowered players
Because BOTW is so open and freeform, little is stopping you from finding a really powerful sword or shield at the start of the game. That would ruin the balance forever if that sword never broke - instead, it gives you a short, memorable stint as an overpowered badass - until the weapon breaks and you're back to being a scrub.
Weapon durability sucks because...
It's not fun
No getting around this. Outside of those few moments of drama, this system mostly just comes down to Nintendo taking your toys away. To the average player, who isn't thinking about the reasons for this system, it just feels annoying.
Weapons break too fast
I'm sure Nintendo decided to make weapons this brittle after much, much, much consideration - but it still feels too much to me. Weapons break crazy fast in BOTW, especially early in the game, which can be really irritating. Luckily, it gets better around the second half.
There's no way to see weapon durability
The only way to know that a weapon is about to break - is when it's about to break. At that point a message will appear on screen and the icon will go red. Up until that point, you just don't know.
This lack of feedback is annoying. You don't know how much damage you're doing to your weapons, you don't know which weapon to throw away when you find a new sword and your inventory is full, and you can't make good plans.
Adding in some kind of durability meter (likely on the weapon select screen) would impact the dramatic moments I spoke about - but it would affect no other benefit for this system.
There's no way to reverse weapon damage
Doing damage to a weapon is irreparable. Which makes sense, but it means every single swing feels kinda shitty. Like trying to kill a pigeon by throwing £1 coins at it.
I can't think of a good way to change this. If you made it so weapons started to repair after time, or damage could be reversed by a blacksmith in a certain town, you'd basically be encouraging players to sit around and wait, or fast travel around the map every few seconds.
Maybe you could fix weapons on the fly with rupees or crafting material? But I really like how reserved BOTW's crafting (aka cooking) is, and would probably be against micromanage-y tasks.
(This is different to weapons coming back to life (a few key weapons in BOTW can be re-made for a price, or come back automatically)).
Weapons break in shrines
This is a very specific thing, but there are shrines where you need to use weapons (and the stasis power) to make balls fly about. The fact that this hurts your weapon really discourages experimentation with the puzzle solving, which just sucks.
In conclusion...
This system is implemented for really good reasons - some that are made necessary by BOTW's open world design, and some that simply make combat more enjoyable.
However, there's no getting away from the fact that this will be an annoyance for players. It certainly irked me, at the start. The speed at which weapons break, and the lack of feedback, make it more irritating than it should be.
So I guess, the lesson is: if you've got a system that is really beneficial for your game, but is going to annoy the player, you better be careful with how you balance it. Make it too generous, and you lose the benefits - but make it too harsh and you risk annoying players.
Be smart!
Comments
Praem Kodiath
Thank you for the great write up, along with all your other content! One thought to your view of "There's no way to reverse weapon damage": If there was a way to reverse weapon damage, it would incentivize players to keep damaged but not broken weapons in your inventory. This then doubles down on the feeling of running out to space since a portion (or all) of your inventory is held up with the weapons you are hoping to repair.
Benj
One thing that was odd about that system was that you could only use identical weapons to do it (although there was a Perk in New Vegas that let you also use similar weapons)
NeoMaister
I think part of the issue is the preexisting stigmatization of Durability. Many games have systems that make durability not matter at all or add busy work to it by being able to repair weapons which is why I think the downside you mention is actually a plus of the system. There's never a challenge to it in these other games. If I had a choice between a system being undertuned and overtuned, I'll take overtuned because it means I have to engage with the system and it's a challenge from developer to player. It's like if RE4 gave you tons and tons of ammo on professional. People would use the Semi-Auto and Shotgun every time and never use melee. If BoTW never had its durability system, the enemy variety would have to pick up the slack and the variety is not as strong as games like Dark Souls (though I think the action RE games are a better comparison).
Michael Fury
Just a few quick thoughts on an alternative solution. I seem to recall, possibly in a fallout game, being able to sacrifice weapons in order to "heal" a different weapon. For example, your minigun might be about to break, but you've got several healthy pop guns which you won't use, so you feed them to the minigun and it pushes the durability way up. Loss for gain, you can decide what's worthwhile. However, it occurs to me that this might encourage grinding against weak mobs to grab their shite weapons and empower your end-game stuff. Busywork is obviously undesirable. I suppose it would make sense to assign a value to the weapons, so a wooden club is worth only 10 but a laser axe is 500, and so the weaker stuff won't give much durability benefit at all. Then again, the whole system wouldn't work as well here because you can't see the durability until a weapon is about to break.
Tim Romero
On the topic of weapons breaking in shrines, most of the times that stasis puzzles come up there's a sledgehammer nearby to alleviate the weapon wear.
mcwizardry
I think the system fits the game, you make a lot more choices regarding your use and inventory than you would otherwise. Plus, if your current weapon breaks you can always find a new one, very rarely do you encounter a weapon that you'll never find again.
OSW Review
These are all small gripes, I've been thoroughly loving the game: Weapons Fragility: I just wish there was an option late in the game to 'strengthen' your favourite sword/shield etc, as i miss having a reliable favourite weapon. Probably due to my own fickleness, i spent far too long in inventory management, being annoyed that it was full and unable to take what's in a chest. Weapons really need to last at least 2 fights. Having multiple weapons break down when dealing with the same (non-boss) foe is frustrating! These are nitpicks but i only found once in the game where i was out of bows (during a Blight fight!) and no idea where to get decent ones! After scraping through it (and demoralising deaths aside) the next main quest gave you tons of bows (on death mountain). I actually could've used more hand-holding/tutorials in the game. Like i had to go on the internet to get a grasp on how to cook properly (using your provisions to try isn't appealing) and I never got hang of the parry or shield block timing. I wish there were tutorial areas for those. Watching BotW vids i found out wow i suck, i should've been playing way differently! One last thing; i found the soundtrack to be fitting but disappointing. It's a sparse soundscape, not a rousing memorable score. It's piano plinks and plonks until danger or a village comes your way. It really does set boss fights apart (the score is great!) and storming the Castle has some added distinctive big feel with the music. But at the end of the day it's one of the least memorable Zelda soundtracks from a console and that's a sad negative. Overall though it's been so great being back in hyrule!
I think the system works fine for the most part, but my main issue is that the weapons have very little variation. In terms of melee weapons you have one handed, two handed, spear, and magic wand. Sure weapons all look different and have different stats, but within a weapon category they all feel exactly the same. So the game encourages changing it up but within a couple of hours you've experienced all it has to offer in terms of melee combat. As a result "Finding a weapon in Breath of the Wild is always exciting." isn't true for me at all. Finding a weapon is basically the same as finding a consumable item.
Duker
I like it when weapons break, so that I don't have to pass on a dozen good-but-not-as-good weapons until one of my current ones break.
Julian Sterling
I think the visibility is the biggest problem. Players are more likely to see an obstacle as a challenge and not a drain if they're given the tools to adapt, and being able to read the game state is a huge part of that
Really good analysis. I agree with you. I didn't like the system at first, but after some time I realised it made the game more spontaneous, much less mundane. The thing I didn't like about it was the inventory management; there's not a lot of slots to keep weapons, but a risk that yours will break during a combat so you hoard them to be safe, but every time you find new ones, you need to check your inventory, drop the weakest weapons to make space for the new less weak but not great ones that’ll probably get discarded next time you find a weapon. It gets pretty annoying after some time.
Felipe Lins
I find myself since early game almost always full of weapons and having to drop some in order to get more powerful one, which I save for bigger enemies. I kinda try to use environment, to perfect dodge, and even in times of despair reflect stones thrown into me back to cause minor damage, I also try to make good use of bombs, and hurling boxes to enemies. Another strategy I always do is trying to steal a foe's weapon and use it against him. This way I save weapons and use everything that comes to fight enemies, also using the different weapons for specific enemies types (like polearms against bats, which is very effective). In general, this made the game much more harder, which makes BotW definetily less "childish" in matter of difficulty. Looking forward next video, pal. Great work, nice thoughts.
One approach (albeit more complex from a design perspective) is make the player 'want to' experiment before you make them 'have to'... I won't bore anyone with backseat-game-design and theorycrafting is no substitute for play-testing so I won't spout my various takes on how I would have tried to fix it, instead I'll just leave this here: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
Dan Root
Like you mentioned about being able to fix weapons, it'd be good if you could upgrade them with all of the materials you can find, so that they last longer. I know elixirs and meals can up your defense and offense, but it's not enough.
Adam Russell
I agree with all of your plus points, but I actually like the fact that you only see 3 stages of durability on a weapon (brand new, used, and close to breaking), for me that provides enough information and any more would be too much micromanagement - I feel I'd constantly be switching weapons during a fight so that I didn't break anything. As it is, I now use everything to breaking point as soon as it is no longer brand new. I also had an amazing battle last night against a really strong enemy, I got him down to half health but all I then had left in my melee weapons were a korok leaf, a torch, and a woodcutter's axe (I like to keep these with me at all times for convenience) - In the end I managed to kill him purely using bombs, and after that fight I felt a huge sense of accomplishment. If my 'proper' weapons never broke, I wouldn't have felt the same thrill
Rich Stoehr
Really good points all round, Mark. Both on the positive and negative sides. My first real experience with breakable weapons was Silent Hill Origins, and I remember a similar feeling of "it seems silly to smash this monster with this TV... But what if I threw it instead?" Exploring the different uses of different weapons was kind of fun there (though in that case, broke the mood of the game a bit). Also, "trying to kill a pigeon by throwing 1 pound coins at it" is way too funny an image! Thanks for the chuckle.
Scott Masters
I feel like the system works rather well once I got through half way through the game perfectly. Moments of tension were at their best without become anxious, I used weapons appropriately depending on how tough the enemy I am facing is, and I conserved elemental weapons and arrows for special occasions. Early game becomes a nervous encounter at each camp, where I just hope that I can carry enough or scavenge while I fight, creating an interesting-if annoying-player world dynamic. Late game, weapon durability sort of becomes a joke. When I can kill an enemy without breaking a weapon and have them drop something equally or more powerful, it becomes a simple cycle, of dropping what I have for what's there. My biggest problem with the durability system is how it affects throwing weapons. Aside from boomerangs, throwing weapons was only used to discard a weapon so I could pick up something better, because 98% of the time, after impact, the weapon shattered. I don't even bother throwing near shattered weapons anymore. It's best to just keep an engagement at the range I'm at than to back out, then throw.
Ben Visness
Really, I think the worst part about destroying weapons is when you break a weapon that has some emotional attachment - like the trident you get from the Zoras.
Ben Visness
I think if I could see a weapon's durability, I would stop using it once it was half-broken. I'm always reluctant to consume items because "I might need them later." So, weirdly, I think not seeing a weapon's durability actually encourages me to use that weapon more. After all, if it's not about to break, I might as well use it - and if it is about to break, I might as well break it for that extra damage.
I haven't played it, but reading based on your comments I would say they haven't provided the right incentives. As it stands it seems like it suffers from the issue of all consumables in RPG's. You have this valuable thing, but to get its benefit you have to destroy it. This leads people to wanting to horde the "precious" items hoping for the best time to use them. I would have suggested some type of reward for their destruction. Build a prize system behind their destruction and then every one that you break, comes with a potential reward. So right at the moment of sadness, you have the surprise of a gift. Then you make better weapons provide a better chance to drop the best "prizes." It wouldn't fix the shame of losing something you love, but you would also feel less punished for losing a "good" thing, because it would be the only way you had a chance at a "great" thing.
Whenever I think about this I recall how a friend told me he had basically broken all of his weapons in order to take down a powerful enemy that was "meant" to be fought much later in the game. I put "meant" in quotes because of course it's a non-linear game for the most part and you can do whatever, whenever, but I think the low weapon durability has an additional function in discouraging drastic sequence breaking because even with extremely good combat skill you'd still end up running out of weapons to use if you're not actually at that advanced point in the game. On the whole I like the system though--if anything, the lack of a "replace weapon when inventory is full" mechanic is much more annoying and I find myself spending more time than I should dropping/throwing away items before picking up a newer, better one. Looking forward to your BotW video!
I can see why people could be annoyed by durability, but I personally find the system to be great. I actually found it incredibly fun to have my weapons break early game. I had a comedic moment early on where I broke my last weapon at the beginning of a fight, had to run away in a panic, and managed to fight off the enemies with bombs and a stick I found on the ground. No indicator+repair taught me to manage my equipment carefully and adopt new strategies on the fly, and I know I never would have done that if nothing broke. The shrine part is the only complaint here that bothered me. I would also add lack of weapon type variety (beyond sword, g sword, spear, etc.).
Game Maker's Toolkit
That's a great point!
ThunderRazor
So far I am really enjoying this system. When I decide to use my good weapons to take down a massive enemy there is a great thrill to it. It also teaches me to not just kill everything I see. Instead I ask my self, "what do I gain from fighting this enemy and is it worth it?" If not, I avoid the battle. It makes the world more threatening, which is very welcome.
Pedro Aguilar
There are places where the player can always get certain weapons, either on the ground or from some enemies. I personally marked a place on the map that I could farm several nice swords from enemies consistently. It's a bit of a context-switch, but this approach definitely emulates a feedback loop that other games employ by allowing weapon repair. I agree with your shrine example though - that was a really fun shrine hampered with the fact that I had a limited amount of tries before I had to either reload my file or go out and look for more weapons.
Game Maker's Toolkit
Oh nice, must have missed this when I was on a Zelda spoiler blackout! Will watch soon
Josh Foreman
Been thinking along the same lines. Arlo hit all your + points in this vid. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCMDG51cf5w" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCMDG51cf5w</a>
Jakub Pander
Great insight as always. Can't wait for the full Zelda video. The topic of how we could make this system better is definitely worth looking into. The improvisation moments are just so good.
I really like the system because it never lets the player get comfortable which is awesome so improvisation is awesome. I actually was having the opposite problem later on in the game where my weapons weren't breaking fast enough so I just had an arsenal of over powered weapons. One thing I don't understand is why players can't craft weapons because with the weapon durability it would have been a great system to mesh with it.
