Design deep dive - weapon durability in Breath of the Wild (Patreon)

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!