durability for items?!!

[heron]

yes or no? I think it could work for grim dawn.

[Renevent]

I never thought it added anything fun/interesting to the games that included this mechanic. It's more of a minor annoyance imo.

[Llama8]

Oh dear god no!

*goes off to scrub eyes with bleach*

[jiaco]

I made your post into a Poll. Hope you dont mind.

I voted NO.

I think Crate has already gotten this message, but lets make it loud and clear.

No durability, no gold, no potions, no weapons, no monsters, no death. Just pretty graphics that require 15,000$ graphics cards, heavy DRM and a single inventory slot to hold a turtle.

Plus lots of other turtles, NPC turtles, decorative turtles, and turtles wearing advertising...

[Roros]

There are some cases where I can enjoy it, but none of those apply to arpg's I think.

I feel it makes sense for mmo's when you want to enforce player cooperation and interdependency, or when you want to have a distinction between "special case" awesome weapons that you only use when you really need to, and "regular" weapons for every day use.

Diablo's item degradation made a little sense because ethereal items that couldn't be repaired were innately better. I think they could have done without it for regular items though as I don't see the purpose of it other than artificial busywork. It hardly even goes as a money sink as by the time you get gear that costs 50k to repair every few hours, you're getting tenfold that back in loot.

[Void(null)]

Oh my god I hate Item durability!

There simply isnt anything FUN about it. Its a pain in the ass, its needless and its lazy.

Item durability is a lazy and painful means of trying to restore some form of balance to a game economy, rather than properly balancing item values and drop rates to begin with.

There are far better and enjoyable money sinks, such as crafting and gambling. And if items are correctly balanced to begin with, then why deprive the player from what they have "Worked" for?

[Llama8]

No durability, no gold, no potions, no weapons, no monsters, no death. Just pretty graphics that require 15,000$ graphics cards, heavy DRM and a single inventory slot to hold a turtle.

Plus lots of other turtles, NPC turtles, decorative turtles, and turtles wearing advertising...

Don't forget the rainbow coloured turtles that cast hyper-dimensional rainbows to bring love, peace & eye-searingly bright colours to the invading hordes.

[Delysid]

Durability is just a pain..

[Scryer]

So what's your penalty for dying then? Just being dead for a second?

[shawnmck]

I personally don't mind item degradation, so long as it is implemented right. I really hate the way some games do it so that you spend so much time repairing things constantly. Fallout 3 is a good example of this. Items degrade way too fast in that game, and they also affect the use & damage of items well beyond what it should.
If a games can implement a slow degrade where you don't have to worry about it so frequently then I think it would work & add an element of realism to it. Blades should get dull the more you use it, & armor should get weaker the more hit you take. Just make it so that the need to repair is minimal and doesn't require you to travel to a blacksmith every mission and it would be a fine feature.

[Yggdrasil]

Where's the fun with durability ?
Never found it.

[heron]

I think it adds value to your gold, unlike TQ or other arpg the gold can get in the millions easily.

[TheRani]

As long as there is something cool to spend gold on, it's fine. It doesn't have to be repairs. Could be gambling, enchanting, formulae, Wirt, etc.

[cel]

Durability is quite a challenging subject to get right in a game, first and foremost I'd say that degrading items _can_ create a fun aspect to a game, as long as the durability is something more than just a way to force the player to run for repairs all the time.

In a game like GD, where the player will most likely be upgrading his equips quite often, I could imagine that the implementation of item degration to the point where the item actually breaks could bring something extra to the game.

The rate at which items degraded though, would have to be very carefully set, as setting it too high would make even the best equips quite useless, as you wouldn't be able to use them for a very long time, while setting it too low would make the whole system obsolete, as the player would find better many times over before the item actually broke.

The first thoughts that such a system brings to mind are naturally negative, the thought of losing some good item you found doesn't seem to bring anything positive into the game; but wait, do we really _need_ to be using those items forever? I don't think we do, as in a game like this the act of getting new equips is a very big part of the game and when we try to think about how such a system would play out in the game, we always imagine ourselves finding a few epic pieces (or whatever quality floats your boat) and then losing them a while after leaving us with the feeling that whatever we found, it would lead to no-where as it would just end up breaking anyway.

I think such thinking is equal to thinking that you shouldn't leave the house because if you walk on the sidewalk, some drunker driver will run you over and you'll die. Where do we get the idea that every item will eventually be broken and we'll be left without proper equipment, who says some items couldn't be indestructible (by mods or relics) or that the item would break before we found a replacement for it? We only think about the worst case scenario when we consider wether or not this could actually add to gameplay,even though we have no experience of it within the context of this game.

I think that the possibility of items breaking (even if the values would be tweaked enough to ensure that in 99% cases, the item wouldn't break before we found a new one / replacing one) would create a slightly pressuring atmosphere within the game, where the player would feel as if something was running out (even though it really wasn't, not even close):

You all know games where ammunition / other equipment is rather scarce and you feel as if you have to save them up or else you'll be screwed? Well, tell me, did you have enough ammunition in the end anyway? Yes you did. Does that mean that it would've been the same if you had unlimited ammo from the beginning? No, the scarcity of that resource - even though in the end, there was enough, most likely more than enough - created a pressuring atmosphere in the game that forced you to fear for the worst (running out of ammo) and thus try to "play better" than you normally would, even though the reality was that you never ended up running out anyway and even if you did, there was always that other weapon that you wanted to get to use anyway - most likely you even liked using it more, but you never got around to because you didn't want to "waste the good ammo", the result however was that playing the game as more "thrilling" than if you never had to worry about ammo.

That being said, I'm all in for degrading equips, as long as the degrading is slow (even better if higher quality items degrade slower than lower quality ones) and that indestructible items would exist as well (through mods, perhaps relics) to create some variety and possibly even something to grind for (for some players, if they wanted to go with a full set of them beasties) as I at least believe that people enjoy playing the game alot more when the feeling of impending item breakage is upon them, even if it's just a delusion (as they will in most cases change their equips anyway before it comes close to breaking, rarity of higher quality items is balanced by lower rate of degrading, so that won't be a real problem either) created by their fears of losing their precious items (there's nothing that prevents there being some rare / very expensive repair methods for these items, but they should be rare / expensive enough so that the player couldn't be using the to repair everything he had all the time but rather to either prolong the time you could use an item or slowly bring some old piece of equipment back to life).

Other than that, I don't think that a system that would just force the player to spend their gold on repairs would create anything more than a something that would annoy the player as he had just one more thing to remember that didn't actually have anything to do with anything.

Of course, there are a multitude of system between these two, a combination of fast degration that repairing will - well - repair and slow degration that is caused by the imperfection of the repairing process, that will slowly lead to the destruction of the item. These can work quite well too, but as the slow degration progresses, so does the intervals at which the player actually needs to repair get shorter, which will again create an annoyance where you have a perfectly good piece of equipment - you just have to go repair it every 10 minutes to be able to use it >_>, which is why I would go for the one discussed earlier.

[Void(null)]

Nope, sorry. Item Repair can not be "Fun" it can be "Not public hair pullingly annoying" but I have never heard a player scream "Hot fucking damn! My equipment just broke and now I have to spend money on repairing it! This is the most excitement I have had in a game ever!" Nor have I ever seen a player turn down a raid or party because they would rather grind out the cash to repair their equipment.

Fallout 3 and Lord of the Rings Online are two huge examples of why equipment degradation is just a bad idea, and needs to die in a fire.

Its a money sink, its not fun, its not enjoyable for anyone other than the people milking the little content they have rather than putting time and effort into creating a balanced game economy.

[yerkyerk]

Ow, I can see the benefits of degrading equipment (I beg you cel, please work on shortening your posts - you have a good insight but it's such a wall of text that it's not very enjoyable to read - though I want to read it because it has good points and I don't want to skip part of the discussion).
Replacing your equipment from time to time sounds fun in theory - in practice though, I've never seen a game working with it. Asides from repairing, Diablo 2 had ethereal items - they had about 50% extra base stats and thus were much better than non-ethereal items. Still, nobody used equipment that didn't last.

And my biggest problem with making equipment destructible is that it also takes the fun and usefulness out of farming. Why farm for that Hallowed Revenant Helm of the Magus if it's just getting destroyed after a while? You'll just put on whatever helm is useful to finish the game and than be done with it. You take away perhaps the biggest endgame activity in an aRPG by making weapons destructible. I would find it very interesting in a hardcore mode though.

And no to durability. I found it an annoying hassle. And even though it was a (poorly designed) moneysink, it served the same purpose as money in D2; none.

[cel]

Its a money sink, its not fun, its not enjoyable for anyone other than the people milking the little content they have rather than putting time and effort into creating a balanced game economy.

I invite you to read the great wall of china I just wrote. Restricting something creating the feeling that it is not infinite and making it an annoyance is a question of balance of values, not a question of what the feature is, everything can be balanced accordingly regardless of how many souls there are on earth who are unable to fathom it and I have faith in GD's developers abilities, do you?

And making equipment destructible also takes the fun out of farming. Why farm for that Hallowed Revenant Helm of the Magus if it's just getting destroyed after an x number of games? You'll just put on whatever helm is useful to finish the game and than be done with it. You take away perhaps the biggest endgame activity in an aRPG by making weapons destructible.

That is the whole point of it, item degration should not be implemented in such a way that the player was constantly having something broken (save for low quality items, where having something broken would increase the anticipation of finding the higher quality items that actually wouldn't break like that further making it more fun to progress through the game - just in the beginning, as the higher quality items would stop doing that, but still), but rather as something gave the player the feeling that this piece of equipment isn't going to last forever - even if the player would be able to grind multiple rare pieces of equips before it actually broke.

PS. I write long posts because I have learned that if I do not cover everything in the theory behind my arguments immediately, people will go for the holes like wolves and I'll end up explaining different things to 5 different people who all said the same thing but in a different way, then after I'm done explaining, we'll have 4 pages of crap and everyone has forgotten what the original post was actually even about.

[Void(null)]

I invite you to read the great wall of china I just wrote.

A Forum post should be like a skirt. Long enough to cover the subject matter but short enough to keep things interesting.

[VeggieBoy]

I like the realistic view of durability.

Its so lame that people complain about how it's an "annoyance".

You guys need to be playing this (http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=7198) instead.

[shawnmck]

To me, item degradation is not too much different than using health & mana potions to re-fill health & mana bars. We are talking about how something has a set limit to it, and an outside force acting on it causes said item to decrease. When you take a lot of damage your health goes down. Take a health potion & you're good to go. Use magic & your mana meter decreases. Take a mana potion & there you go. The same principle is at work with the way an item would degrade. The problem is that a lot of games make an item degrade too rapidly, or don't allow you to repair it easily. It would be like an enemy taking your health down almost all the way with one hit & then you would have to run into town to have your health replenished. That would be no fun at all. But most games allow the replenishing of health & mana to be easy, yet at the same time it is a tactic used to implement a form of resource management. I see the same mechanic used for item degradation. Just implement it in a wise way and it wouldn't be so bad at all. Don't let items degrade rapidly, and allow them to be repaired easily.

Of course, if the feature doesn't make it into Grim Dawn then I'm not going to shed any tears or whine about either.
;)

[VeggieBoy]

To me, item degradation is not too much different than using health & mana potions to re-fill health & mana bars. We are talking about how something has a set limit to it, and an outside force acting on it causes said item to decrease. When you take a lot of damage your health goes down. Take a health potion & you're good to go. Use magic & your mana meter decreases. Take a mana potion & there you go. The same principle is at work with the way an item would degrade. The problem is that a lot of games make an item degrade too rapidly, or don't allow you to repair it easily. It would be like an enemy taking your health down almost all the way with one hit & then you would have to run into town to have your health replenished. That would be no fun at all. But most games allow the replenishing of health & mana to be easy, yet at the same time it is a tactic used to implement a form of resource management. I see the same mechanic used for item degradation. Just implement it in a wise way and it wouldn't be so bad at all. Don't let items degrade rapidly, and allow them to be repaired easily.


http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/1691/clapn.gif

[heron]

GD should be a challenging game and not something you can just pick up and play for a few minutes. Making it for casual gamers is not the direction the game should go, it should rather go the opposite. Remember the game will be shorter than TQ so let's try to not completing it under 10 hours.

[mamba]

GD should be a challenging game and not something you can just pick up and play for a few minutes. Making it for casual gamers is not the direction the game should go, it should rather go the opposite. Remember the game will be shorter than TQ so let's try to not completing it under 10 hours.

I fail to see how this relates to degradable items, unless you want to prolong the game by running to the blacksmith every 10 minutes to get items repaired.

I am certainly all against degrading items, I never liked that concept. At best it is a nuisance at worst it is killing the fun / game.

[Kirii]

I think degradable items fits in with the GD universe, much like Fallout 3's Wasteland we are fighting in a gritty rough environment and things will have wear and tear from use.

I don't see how having to return to town to repair is much different than returning to sell loot. It's all part of the management of your character.

A way to make it more interesting though would be adding bonuses from repairs. For example; repairing yourself in the field you could get your item to 100% durability, but if you used the time to return to town and have a blacksmith repair it he could get the durability to 120%, which could give your weapon/armor temporary bonuses until the durability wears down to below 100% again.

Just a thought:)

[Void(null)]

If my character can kill demonic lords and save the world, why cant they learn proper gun maintenance, or learn to oil down their sword after use?

It's really not that hard to take care of your gear, nor to fix it when it breaks.

When you own a suit of armor and a blade, you learn to take care of them, as well as remedial metalwork and leather working to repair the damage they will sustain, its only if the item irreparably shatters that a blacksmith is required and in those cases, very often they are reforging or recasting the metal which is much akin to created a new item.

As for firearms, with proper maintenance and care a firearm should maintain a high level of reliability and last a lifetime.

Its only in Video games that Guns, Bows and Swords break or take irreparable damage after a couple of uses.

That is the furthest thing from realism in my mind.

[heron]

Not to sound like a wow ripoff but maybe for guns and bows, we can introduce ammunitions (bullets and arrows).

[yerkyerk]

Not to sound like a wow ripoff but maybe for guns and bows, we can introduce ammunitions (bullets and arrows).
I never played WoW. Is that like in Diablo 2? Finite ammunition is quite annoying...
I'd prefer to have ammo modifiers of some sort. They'd decide the damage done and would never deplete
Incendiary ammo would transform the base damage to fire (could have different modifiers also), armor piercing would transform base damage into piercing, cold arrows would transform the bow's base damage in cold, etc...
Gives more moddability to ranged fighters, which are often 2handed and normally loose that second hand slot.

[Tarrok]

Ultimately it comes down to the pace and style of the game. Fast paced ARPGs, I found, never benefit from durability. D2's Ethereals never appealed to me, nor Fallout 3's constant repairing of weapons to keep their damage up.

If this were a slower paced game/survival game then weapon jams/breaks/malfunctions would definately add a lot of spice and "Oh Shitze!" moments.

Yet, experience tells me that it's a big downer to have to repair your equipment in these fast paced games, especially if you have to do it back in town.

Therefore, the vote is no.

Since this is all about the effects of combat on weapons, why not simply add an animation or graphical effect to ease our realism craving minds:

Melee will wipe/clean their weapon(s) after battle. A rotating, casual swing of a sword cleans it of blood for example. Guns could have smoking/glowing barrels.

Lots of ways you could do this and it would definately add flair and a bit of life to the characters.

[Roros]

I just don't see the appeal in durability and repair for the sake of durability and repair (or even "realism", for that matter), and I put it on the same shelf as your character having to eat, drink, and sleep to prevent debuffs.

It's not that it makes the game particularily hard or challenging, it's just that I don't see the fun and satisfaction from having to go back and repair.
I don't feel it compares to potions as that's more a game of balancing the monster dps against your potion regen.

It's one thing if it has some purpose, like making certain special gear temporary as it can't be repaired, encourage cooperation by having a player class who can repair, or a well-balanced money sink, but I honestly don't see the point when it's just arbitrary busywork.
I remember I got this sweet dagger in diablo2 that would break after about 5 minutes and cost 150 gold to repair. This was when a random monster would drop 500 gold and a white low level chestplate would sell for 5-10k. It didn't make the game more fun and challenging to play, it just made it tedious and laboursome. I suppose it can be compared to the mining in both mass effects - it's almost like it's intentionally boring just to prevent you from abusing it.

[Void(null)]

Since this is all about the effects of combat on weapons, why not simply add an animation or graphical effect to ease our realism craving minds:

Melee will wipe/clean their weapon(s) after battle. A rotating, casual swing of a sword cleans it of blood for example. Guns could have smoking/glowing barrels.

Lots of ways you could do this and it would definately add flair and a bit of life to the characters.

Could actually be done with no negative game effects at all, simply by tieing this stuff into the idle animations.

If standing around for too long, characters would begin inspecting/cleaning their weapons along with any of the other idle animations the characters may perform.

[Scryer]

Lets be honest, Grim Dawn won't have any secured servers, so it's not like the developers have to worry about making the cross-player economy work. They just have to make the single-player economy work. So this particular game can easily do without durability.

If they did, however, implement durability, they should just make it a penalty that the player receives at death. Items should not degrade during normal combat. But if the player keep dying, it would be a pretty good way to tell the player "You're dying and that's bad for you, go to town, repair, rethink your strategy, and try again."

I think durability is a fine gold sink, but, it's not totally necessary for this game, unless the developers are trying to make money management and death have real consequences.

[Llama8]

I like the idea of having some idle animations for checking/cleaning gear, maybe some merchants could have a smithy & while you're shopping (assuming there's semi-transparent merchant inventories, or that they don't take up the entire screen) your character could give them a random piece of armour & they could do a repair/hammering animation.

And while I agree with Void(null)'s whole "weapon maintenance" thing, if your character doesn't go to sleep, there's not really much point in having them maintain their weapons (other than as an idle animation).

[Chameleon]

Durability?

No. No. No. A million times no!

[Scryer]

Idle animations are unnecessary, if durability isn't going to be in the game then there doesn't need to be any wasted effort on animations to explain it.

Spend effort / money on animations and material that will actually count towards better game play.

[yerkyerk]

Idle animations are fun :)

[Scryer]

I'm not entirely convinced durability is all that bad, at least as a consequence of death. The only thing is, if when you die, you get ported back to the last town you were at, then this would become a completely pointless feature.

Plenty of things to think about, eh?

[Void(null)]

Titan Quest offered a Death Penalty without trashing your equipment, it did it by a loss of XP and progress on the world map.

Why would Grim Dawn move away from that proven formula?

[shawnmck]

I see another cool benefit to degradability (if implemented) of weapons & armor ...
It would be kinda neat to see a weapon & armor's look change as durability is affected. Say you start off with a nice looking sword. As it degrades it starts to show wear in the blade with cuts & nicks, & eventually starts to look dull. If it degrades to a certain point then it breaks and you are left with half of a sword that needs to be taken to a smith & repaired, where it would then look all shiny & sharp again. Same with armor.

I'm just thinking is all.

[yerkyerk]

As it degrades it starts to show wear in the blade with cuts & nicks, & eventually starts to look dull. If it degrades to a certain point then it breaks and you are left with half of a sword that needs to be taken to a smith & repaired, where it would then look all shiny & sharp again. Same with armor.
Would be a nice visual addition, but you wouldn't really be able to see it. Perhaps on armor. I'd prefer to see bloodspatters on my equipment though :D
Still, I don't see durability adding any fun to the game. It's an unnecessary nuisance when you can repair and it kills the endgame if you can't.

Why would Grim Dawn move away from that proven formula?
A negligble amount of xp lost and sometimes a bunch of huge boring walks back (Typhon anyone?). How's that a proven formulae?

[Void(null)]

A negligble amount of xp lost and sometimes a bunch of huge boring walks back (Typhon anyone?). How's that a proven formulae?

Because I did it a hell of a lot...

:D

[andreyy]

Durability would be nice, if you wanted to give the game more of a survival feel. Like in Fallout 3 - you live from what you scavenge. Slashing through such hordes of mobs you mean in ARPGs would make your gear detoriate rapidly.

It would be nice, if such approach would be taken. But it's not. It's an RPG, there's a lot of people who play those games just for the pleasure of completing gear. I wouldn't mind, but...

/thread

[Renevent]

/thread

Yeah...no :D

Some good points being made from both camps I think...it's obviously a mechanic that has been in games from the same genre so we know it at least works fine.

The real question is if it's something that adds to the gameplay enough to warrant the time and effort to implement it.

For me personally I think it's not...repairing items has always been something I just did in the games it was required in. Just a button I clicked in some shop-keeps window whenever I was checking out his wares.

[Void(null)]

Thats an amazingly good point.

Crate is a small company with limited resources and only a handful of developers. Any mechanic added is going to be time and money that could have been spent elsewhere.

Is there honestly anyone that would rather have item degradation over 30-50 new unique magic items, or a couple of new skills or some more map tiles?

I personally would much rather have a little more quality content, than a system that expands playtime by adding in annoyance.

[eisprinzessin]

From my very first :D post here:
Optional - not sure if this is fun: White items are non-magical. They might take damage and wear out (turn grey) eventually. So you need to replace them from time to time. Any enchantment on them should return to your inventory.

... despite of this I voted NO.

However, if worn out items provide you with some components for crafting, then this would add something to the gameplay and actually serve a purpose in the game.

[Llama8]

Some good points being made from both camps I think...it's obviously a mechanic that has been in games from the same genre so we know it at least works fine.

Like WASD movement? ;)

Void has a point, even if I liked durability adding it in would mean taking something else out & I prefer the sound of the other stuff more (ditto for WASD movement BTW).

[Malpheas]

Kind of a derail here, as I've been pimping the crafting aspect of GD a lot, but here goes.

I voted No, by the way... HOWEVER:

However, if worn out items provide you with some components for crafting, then this would add something to the gameplay and actually serve a purpose in the game.

That is brilliantly genius in concept.

Cheers,

Malpheas

[Renevent]

Like WASD movement? ;)

Void has a point, even if I liked durability adding it in would mean taking something else out & I prefer the sound of the other stuff more (ditto for WASD movement BTW).

I should have said:

"it's a mechanic that has worked well in other games in the same genre"

:p

Actually, my stance is pretty much the same on WASD as it is on this issue...well at least the WASD movement like Sacred 2. There was two basic thoughts in that thread...one asking for movement like in Sacred 2 and the other asking for movement/control like in alien shooter.

[evil medierra]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT9PQGygZwA

[PureKnickers]

I actually liked the durability system of STALKER. Weapons lasted a LONG time, but could never be repaired. By long, I mean about 1/3rd of the game.

An interesting way to implement durability into an ARPG would be similar to STALKER. Perhaps items would normally last about 2 or 3 acts? I am also thinking that items retain their full capability until they break. This would give use to all the duplicate uniques (*cough* felblade) and increase the excitement of collecting the more common ones. Since uniques might break without another unique to replace it right away, the use of non-uniques would be encouraged. I think this would be a nice balance between resourcefulness (see Cel's fantastic wall of text) and permanency.

Any system that requires constant visits to smiths has always just been a PITA to me. Visiting a vendor to sell loot was enough of a break in the action for my tastes.

[Bissrok]

As most people have said, durability isn't even a little enjoyable. It's just another reason to stop having fun and head back to town. Yeah, it can function as a money sink, but after the first thirty or forty minutes of gameplay it stops being a noticeable amount of cash and just becomes a chore.