It sounds reasonable, but i have never played SH game so no idea how it works with rest of the game.


Now i realise, FNV has some harsh weapon degrading system too. Harsh = too fast, i don't mind repairing things, but it shouldn't be necessary repair everything every two fights.

I'd prefer a mechanic where if you take time to sleep then your stuff gets repaired. Not that things magically fix themselves while you're zonked, but that the 'sleep' time also represents the time one would take to maintain equipment, take a dump, scratch nuts / boobs, eat, write letters home, whittle, whatever.

DivDiv's mechanic isn't too bad, in that it's a couple clicks and done. You don't have to futz with carrying repair tools and spare metal, bow strings, etc. What is a bit lame is that the skill tree offers five levels of repair skill but you only really need one level to get by just fine: level 1 repairs items to 60% of max, and that's plenty to get you through. Er, looks like Raze already said that.

It was the master level for heavy armour, if memory serves me well. I don't think it was Oblivion that had lighter armour if equipped, however. Maybe it was a mod... I honestly can't remember what vanilla Oblivion was like!

Some games deal with encumbrance better than others. D&D games have different tiers of encumbrance (3?). Modded Jagged Alliance 2 1.13 is awesome because your clothing completely changes the type of equipment that can be carried. Its amazing how drastically it changes battle tactics. Done well, inventory management can really improve a game!

Oh... isn't that cool. Just thought I'd chime in and thank you for the spoiler wpegg!

Never cared much for inventory management. I'm a packrat, pure and simple, let me carry the entire universe!
The Geneforge series take away action points the more burdened you become, though this only affects combat, until you reach the limit and can't move at all.

I'm playing Might and Magic 3 and the armor occasionally get broken by a beast and such. Mostly the crummy padded armor for sorcerers. You can just have them fixed. I carry around extra armor, esp the one's I find that I can switch if I'm stuck in a dungeon. I have not played the D&D games yet so I don't know how they do it.

I actually like gear breakage, as it adds more challenge. In Might and Magic 6 for example, some monsters have the ability to break your weapon and/or armor when they hit you. Suddenly, your front liners are soft and squishy, and you need backup items/ options/ escape routes. It adds a tactical element to combat which can make it more exciting.

In Baldur's Gate, breakage was part of the story. I didn't like how little items broke, so I added a mod to make more break. For me it depends on the game whether I like inventory management/ encumbrance/ breakage/ eating/ sleeping/ etc. As Taran said, it would be nice if games let gamers decide for themselves how realistic vs hack n slash they want. I had some fun times in Morrowind casting erosion spells on enemies, and watching their armor and weapons disappear piece by piece until that armored knight was now naked and attacking with his fists (plus I like seeing what's under the hood).

Quite agree.

Some of the real problems for me in games are:

* You get a random encounter in the wilderness, and when the map loads, the monsters are all right next to you, inches from your face, even inside your party. This ROYALLY pisses me off, and this happens all the time in Baldur's Gate 2 and ToEE.

* Situations where the game forces/ expects you to walk up to a miniboss before initiating conversation that you know will end in combat. In one game, I don't remember which, my party entered a large cave. The game paralyzed my entire party while forcing the PC, a mage, to walk ALONE across the entire chamber to stand next to the evil chieftain with all his guards, stand there while he makes his speech, and then combat starts, with everybody locking on to me and getting initiative. There's no fucking reason why my character would ever do that and I screamed at the monitor as my mage died over and over and over and over and over and over. I think I quit that game for half a year at that point before finally going back and figuring out how to get past that bullshit dev scripting.

* Choices that aren't choices. "NPC has offered you a pie. You respond:

Yes, I will eat the pie.
I am hungry so I will eat the pie.
That smells delicious! (eats pie)"

* For a genre that's supposed to be about choices and letting you develop your PC as you wish, forcing PC to be a young hetero white male. Why can't I even create a PC in the image I want? Why am I limited to what the devs want?

A lot of scripted moments can break the immersion:

http://adventurers.keenspot.com/d/0012.html

Most recently this happened to me a bit in Resonance - every time something bad happens time reverses and you try again. And then you get to this one point.... WHY DID IT NOT HAPPEN THIS TIME???

I like the way Oblivion did it, more or less, though armor tended to break too fast especially at higher levels when facing lulz-level-scaling monsters. You could easily change the degradation rate in the CS, though, which I invariably did. The thing about it that was nice was that it added an extra layer of complexity to the game without being too frustrating, the repairs were easy (only needed a few hammers, nothing else) and you could actually IMPROVE your items rather than just fixing them.

Fallout 3/NV, on the other hand... weapons and armor degraded FASTER than in Oblivion, but everything was almost impossible to repair. After using your baseball bat a bunch of times, you needed to duct-tape other baseball bats to it or it'd eventually wear down to nothingness. Merchants, on the other hand, could repair items no problem, except they were shitty at it. When you factor in the fact that almost no equipment was ever found even at the 50% mark, and the slow scaling of the Repair skill, and that many items were unique and couldn't be repaired by the player, it made life really irritating. It's easy to understand why the "repair everything with scrap metal" mod was so popular, or why the alien repair goo found its way into NV.

Divine Divinity had a super-simple system that didn't really get in the way, but it was SO simple that it could easily have been left out. Items were at 100% effectiveness until they actually literally broke, so it just meant that you needed to invest 1 point in Repair, and you'd need to cast it every once in a while.

tl;dr I like it when it's done well, but it's usually NOT done well. It seems to be an area that's never adequately playtested.

I like the way the Wizardry games did it. Each character has a carrying capacity, but once you get to 50% of that, you start getting penalties. You get fewer and less effective weaon attacks, your stamina drains a lot faster, and your spells are more likely to fail. You suffer increasingly large penalties as you get closer and closer to your CC, and once you get OVER it, your character is almost completely ineffective in combat (though they can still move). The games still suffer from the "3 pebbles take up as much space as a 200-pound iron pyramid" issue, but that's more a factor of their age than anything else.

I don't mind armor degradation, and in many cases like it, but I agree that the way it is often handled feels artificial. I actually like equipment weight limits as such a mechanic combats my otherwise overwhelming desire to collect and carry everything.

My personal pet peeve? Probably the bright and oddly well maintained dungeons that are often seen in games these days. Who's keeping all these torches lit? Are there skeletal maintenance workers making the rounds when I'm not looking? Maybe the rats?

I miss darkness in games in general. If I'm out in the middle of the forest at night or deep in an underground labyrinth, I think I should have trouble seeing without a torch, light spell, or appropriate racial ability. For me this adds to the feeling of immersion.

Wasn't a spoiler, just referring to the fact it was damned near impossible to keep them both alive without a lot of reloads.

One too many "Yes, o omniscient authority figure" got Jaheira stabbed to death by gnolls while the rest of the team stood back and did nothing; Kaleid seemed to get over it pretty quickly.

*stares balefully at Arcanum* A game that can give you life-altering scars from fights, even if you use magical healing...unless you make a trek back to a gypsy wagon. It was actually easier to reload and refight the encounter than do that!

It took me 22 hours to notice the actual spelling mistake you were pointing out. Sorry.

As for RPGs, it tends to be annoying when there are actual optimal builds, especially in Hack&Slash games. Am I supposed to have a walkthrough in front of me?

Sorry, but that sounds pretty awesome to me. Is there some major disadvantage to being scarred, or is it just aesthetic?