@ConanTheStoner said:
So I'm trying to stay blackout on this game, but knowing about how weapon degradation works won't kill me lol.
If you have some more detailed insight on it, I wouldn't mind hearing it.
@smashed_pinata said:
@charizard1605 Yes please can you explain why you think it works well?
Okay, just bear in mind that this was in a very short vertical slice- so it's possible that I would have gotten tired of this had I played it more, or had I stumbled upon a super cool looking weapon that I wanted to keep using, but wouldn't out of fear that I'd lose it forever or something.
There are two primary different things with how Breath of the Wild handles degradation- one, unlike other games with similar mechanics, new weapons, even new weapons that are exact duplicates of the ones you are using, are not hard to find at all. Within just the first five minutes, I had an arsenal of four different kinds of weapons, and eleven different weapons on me overall- this was just in five minutes. What this does is remove the entire scarcity of weapons that makes weapon degradation so stressful- if one breaks, there is another right there, and almost certainly, there is another right like it right there.
The other thing here is just how fast weapons degrade- again, this was maybe a low level, early game thing, but weapons often didn't last an encounter- which you might think should add to the problem, but paradoxically enough, it trains you really quickly to understand that weapons in the game are commoditized and dispensable. They're literally stuff that Link is foraging and scavenging, getting rid of and moving on once they have served their use (if you think about it in the context of the game being a survival game, it makes even more sense, but I'm not even going there right now). So when your nice little club breaks, you aren't sad that the club broke, you just shake your head, dodge the attack, quickly switch to the spear or the staff you have, and move on with your life. You are trained by the game to not give a shit about any individual weapon you have- and again, the sheer number of weapons you run into in the wild adds to the sense of commoditization and dispensability.
This basically means the weapons are no longer individual weapons for you to be attached to, they are effectively ammunition. And like in any game, you don't get sad when you run out of ammunition for your AK-47, you just go get more ammunition. So when your spear breaks, you don't start crying about it, you pick up the other spear that that enemy just dropped and moved on.
Finally, and this was probably just me, but I liked this- each weapon plays differently, and I liked the chance to get familiar with all of them in combat (especially since combat here is actually worth a shit). Eventually, I found there to be a flow to taking on an enemy, switching a weapon, taking on another one, and so on (and the game makes it so easy to switch weapons on the fly, you can sort of 'string combos' not in the traditional sense, but get into a rhythm of attack, switch, attack, switch, attack).
That was just my impression after my time with the game- as I said, entirely possible that I'd have eventually gotten annoyed had I played more.
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