LogFAQs > #906509408

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

As for BotW, it seems it does/would have your interest, but it hinges over one relatively minute game mechanic?

Also to be fair, weapon degradation isn't really a "minute game mechanic" in BotW, it's a key design choice that influences a lot of gameplay.

ie, the entire point of it is to force you to use weapons you wouldn't otherwise use, so you have a more varied experience, which ties into the philosophy that exploration and discovery are/should be the core motivating principle of the game. But while that will certainly appeal to a lot of people, its also going to be something that pisses other people off.

The real problem is, no matter how much people like to think that the things they love have universal appeal, there will always be people who don't like the same things you do - and indeed, most things are only going to appeal to a smaller subset of potential audience. Even the best-selling games of all time tend to only manage a small fraction of the overall market-share.

(For reference, people act like BotW is the best Zelda game for years and is almost a reason to own the Switch in and of itself, but for all the praise it's only 10 million sold copies - in a market where individual consoles have sold more than 100 million units, and PC gamers make a very large separate demographic entirely. Realistically, less than 10% - and possibly even less than 5% - of all current gamers have ever played it. Part of this is the aforementioned flood of competing media issue, but part of it is that, for all that people who love the game might not want to admit it, there are a lot of people out there who took one look at the game and went "NOPE".)

For one person, weapons degrading might be acceptable because it's what the developer wanted, and because it forces them to experiment with other weapons and not just rely on the most powerful sword all the time. They might even feel like it ultimately makes the experience more enjoyable for them. But for other people, it's going to be an unnecessary pain in the ass, which takes good weapons away from them as soon as they start getting used to them, and which may encourage them to hoard good weapons "for future use" rather than "wasting" them on weaker enemies (see also, the JRPG plight of never using potions and having hundreds of them unused at the end of the game). And even for people who agree that they don't like the concept, there will be some who see it as a minor evil that can mostly be ignored or worked around, and others who see it as a far more significant problem that makes the entire gameplay experience frustrating and annoying.

(See also, the previous comments of how timed pulse gameplay in Legend of Dragoon was a positive for some people, while for me it was the single biggest problem with the game and the reason why I never actually finished it.)

Also worth noting is that the rest of the game certainly plays a role in just how intolerable something is. For someone who loves everything about BotW except weapon breaking, they'll likely be willing to overlook it in favor of everything else. But for someone who is already ambivalent about most of the rest of the game, weapon breaking may seem like a far greater sin, because the rest of the payoff isn't worth the annoyance.

(See also, why I wasn't willing to put up with combat timing bullshit in Legend of Dragoon, but why I was far more tolerant of it in Stick of Truth, in spite of still disliking it. Because Stick of Truth was tickling my fancy in so many other ways on a near-constant basis, while Dragoon's plot never really won me over.)

In the same vein, the magic draw and junctioning mechanics in FFVIII would probably bother me less if the plot of the game wasn't kind of shitty and the main character wasn't a repugnant loathesome little shit.


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