I tend to dislike durability in games, but I am playing Fallout: New Vegas (again) and I think it is implemented quite well here. Durability affects the effectivity of the equipment, but you can repair it yourself at any point if you have the right equipment (and with the jury rigging perk you get a lot more options to do so). Gear is never 'destroyed', just not usable when durability reaches 0, and can be repaired to max again, so you will never lose any gear

This really depends on design and math. If repairs / identical replacements are available and resources are plentiful, it incentivizes grinding. If replacements are worse, it incentivizes grinding with worse weapons and saving better ones for "later" indefinitely. If there's a finite amount of weapons or the return is bad, players will carry every weapon in the game and use them up starting with the worst ones which are still "effective" in winning battles -- player skill is a factor in the latter (better players can win with worse weapons), so it does actually punish grinding but can lead to a death spiral where a bad player exhausts better weapons and has to fight a boss with a pointy stick and a chamber pot.

All of the above presupposes an infinite or "sufficiently large" supply of enemies. Obviously, if enemies are scarcer than weapons, thoroughness (not quite the same but commonly associated with grinding) becomes more important, and the watershed makes for an optimization problem.

FWIW, Arcanum has a damage system close to what you're describing. It's not durability per se, since weapon and armor damage is (for the most part) random rather than cumulative. But things get damaged enough that blacksmiths stay in business, and learning to fix your own gear is a viable in-game option.

I kind of enjoy having to take time out and smith a fix for my sword after long time battling, it adds immersion to the game. Ive even made an effort to only repair next to an anvil etc. but its a fine line between immersion and just being an annoying game mechanic with no purpose. Ive played games like Divine Divinity where it was almost right, tho the only thing that would every need repair was my sword and not my armor which was weird. Ive played other games where it wasnt worth it to repair your equip as it lost durability too soon, was just easier to trash/vendor it and equip loot drops as you went.

so maybe an ideal time length betw repair would be about 1/2hr to 1 hr of active battling imo, not just questing

The only game i know of that gave a reason for weapons breaking so quickly....
The iron from the mine is tainted all none magical weapons break without warning.
No recycle no reforge just discard them...and get a magical weapon asap.


For a game like Way of the Samurai 4 the system used is tedious.
You can slow down a weapons degradation, with oil, powder...but that becomes a slow grind.
The road to a unbreakable weapon is a long process, one that killed off a great deal of the pleasure i had playing.
Not a great mechanic, that could of been tamed down, i don't mind grinding but not to that extent.

Yet to play a game where said mechanic adds to and doesn't distract, items don't need ticking clocks to give you a clue they are about to break.....Mmmm, maybe a game has done so by visual means only.
If so i've never played it....anyway happily see the back of it. Don't mind smithing and all that good stuff.
Just take away durability...happy bunny.

I actually think that weapon durability might work better in games where enemies are finite. I actually think it works reasonably well in a game like most Fire Emblem games, in which you only have finitely many enemies to kill, so using consumables to kill them doesn't feel as bad.

On the other hand, Battlespire, while also being a game with finite enemies and weapon durability, doesn't handle it as well, mainly because you can escape the durability system by using bare fists. There's also the fact that magic doesn't use it, so in areas with accessible magic crystals, or (if your class has the Spell Absorption advantage) lots of enemies that cast spells on you, you can use magic as a way to avoid the durability system entirely.

How about this combination of mechanics (in a game where you can't just return to town anytime you want to):

1. Repairing a weapon costs more per use than buying the weapon in the first place.
2. Selling the weapon gives you an amount of money only depending on the weapon type; selling an almost broken weapon will give you just as much money as selling it when it's brand new.
3. If the weapon reaches 0 durability, it breaks at the end of the battle. (Until the end of the battle, the weapon only does half damage.) When a weapon breaks, you get as much money as you would have gotten if you had sold the weapon.

This description would describe SaGa Frontier 2, though that game has escapes from the durability system in the form of magic (which almost everyone can use), martial arts (which only some characters can use), quells (powerful magic weapons that never break), and steel weapons (strong weapons that weaken the wielder's magic, but which never break, but are unsellable).

Interesting. At least I don't recall the game crashing due to me using fists for fighting. Maybe this is fixed in the "ENSETUP" version that I played?

If durability is a factor, I prefer if there's an intelligent non-grind-based point to it e.g. in the form of a puzzle. Case in point: Melting Grog mugs in Secret of Monkey Island.

I only like durability in simulation games and certain survival games, for obvious reasons.

I don't like it in RPGs and similar. These games are typically either Fantasy or Sci-fi, and are thus highly unrealistic to begin with. It's different if you are making a game that models reality, say GTA 5 or Sniper Elite, since they have to follow the natural laws [that we know of] and current levels of technology as best they can. In Fantasy and Sci-fi you can imagine anything you want, you have a blank page where the nature of physical laws and technology are only limited by the extent of your imagination. It simply feels like an uncessarily annoying element to impose durability in games like that.

Actually, I decided to test this with my current install (1.06, non-CD), and it didn't crash. I used my level 14 Nightblade for testing, and I even got a few critical hits in. Maybe the original release had this issue, and it was later patched?

Incidentally, fortifying my Strength made a huge difference in the number of hits it took to kill an enemy.

I could point out, however, that hitting myself with a Drain Willpower effect *did* cause the game to crash. I think the playtesters neglected to test some of the effects they found less useful.

That was awesome...

I find it annoying when item maintenance falls into routine busy work (e.g. Diablo). So one option is not having item breakage at all.

On the other hand, I also like it when items break very very rapidly, that they are essentially expendable. You break one, switch to another one, are never starved for satisfactory equipment in the process, and the game keeps you in the action always. This allows the player to experiment with many different kinds of items and weapons, instead of sticking to one good item and ignoring what the game has to offer for the rest of your play time. (i.e., exact opposite of System Shock 2)

Really depends on the game.

It fits well with some rogue-likes and shooters where weapons are "disposable & cheap". You pick them up as you go from stashes and fallen opponents and adjust what you use based on the state of the weapon and the type of ammo you got.

It's also aright in more RPG-ish games where you have an entire skillset that focuses on building/maintaining your gear (it gives value to those skills).

Finally, It's great if there are interesting mechanics that affects gear status (ie, you can break his weapon with a special maneuver, your badass superhuman armor gets damaged if you are right next to an explosion or your sword takes a beating if you swing it into a foe so heavily armored that it can easily widthstand a catapult hit).

The rest of the time (in your typical clickfest action-rpg game where you wear out your sword from swinging it into baddies without rhyme or reason and then you need to get back in town to get it fixed by a blacksmith for a couple bucks), I find such mechanics add absolutely nothing to the game.