Durability is never fun in any game. Ever. At best it’s a useful way to introduce a money sink in a game where there’s not enough cool things to spend it on instead.
I found a cool tunnel, pretty early in the game. There’s an alchemist in there who sends me on a quest to find a flower. I find the flower and it opens up all sort of new places to explore. Problem is, the chance of dropping to my death is more than 0. There are enemies everywhere, including big ones. I’m kinda early and don’t have great gear in the first place, but I feel like I should be able to handle the stuff in here.
Except I die a few times and start losing gear. Then I die a few more times and lose some more gear. Now I’m toast. Feels like the game is telling me ‘stop exploring, stop having fun, go do chores’. It feels bad. It’s the opposite of fun. I want to keep bashing my face against this challenge until I overcome it.
Losing experience would be fine. Losing gold would be fine. Dropping “souls” would be fine. None of those things require the player to leave, go do something else, and then come back to what they probably actually wanted to be doing - fighting a difficult encounter.
But durability eventually forces the player to leave, if they’re failing. It’s different, in that way.
Which may be intentional - I just don’t like it, personally. It takes agency away from the player. If a player is struggling too much with a fight and they want to leave to go do something else for a while, that’s totally fine. But don’t force them to do it.
I see, then I would prefer the game to have durability as a punishment for death instead of having an option to allow players to turn it on and off. I don’t think the game is suitable for that.
I would far rather lose a bit of durability than XP, as others have suggested. Durability is not a thing once you get further into the game. What the game needs is a softer intro/tutorial until you get to the first town. Death punishment is important in games otherwise, what’s the point?
If I am at a boss encounter and die a couple of times I hate to stop practicing because I need to farm money/ go repair gear
Hate to keep checking durability while playing a game
Sorry this is just how I feel, and I understand that this is not a big cost for dying, having xp loss is a bigger cost…but I don’t have to think about it, waste time or stop fighting.
Personally I think its a good system, cause it doesn’t cost a lot, but makes You come back to town, visit few npc’s, upgrade ur gear, buy some food etc. + u come back with fresh head to location where You had problem.
Good lord my dude, 5 minutes with lessened stats just for dying??? Why would you ever even suggest that. Seems like a crazy steep bill to pay for dying. Durability loss is ludicrous in comparison I think…
So the feedback proffered is to remove durability because its too invasive, but now durability might as well not exist as it is a nonissue and barely relevant. Its simply a question of how good is the system if it really doesn’t provoke good interesting gameplay.
Honestly it doesn’t bother me as it is now. It makes it so that you have to keep an eye on it but it’s not a huge hinderance. I find it quite immersive actually. I like the idea to go back and have to care for my equipment every now and then, especially if it’s not too expensive or punishing beyond any reasonable amount.
If you’re still playing this game and having this problem, here’s a workaround:
Create a new realm and do not kill Warrick. In this realm, Fillmore will repair your items for free.
IMO this shouldn’t be needed in the first place, but you can use this to your advantage as long as the problem stays.
I don’t think it needs to go. Especially in the start it is free to repair and in the first few levels all gear does is give you defensive stats. Later on when it helps you offensively or with stats like health regen it’s a nuissance.
There are also things to mitigate repairing costs somewhat, for example the repair skill, but also repair potions you find. I think the system is good the way it is.
To me that just seems like shallow thinking. Because even when using the rune you need to slot it. It’s costs gold and focus. If you want to use it asap you need to chug a potion. Else you’ll need to fight with the risk of dying to get focus to use the skill. There is still a cost, but not necessarily the money one.
The idea is you get punished for dying somehow. As with any game. The goal is to not die in every souls game. If you don’t die you get the chance to win.
Durability is only an issue during the beginning of the game and after that it’s fixed by a simple one time investment. You can just put the rune on a weapon you don’t use and repair outside of combat. I just periodically repair my gear and haven’t encountered any situation where it was at risk of breaking during a fight.
I understand that they want to have some kind of drawback to dying, but when it’s this easy to negate there is no point to the mechanic. There is already another punishment for dying, any consumables you’ve used are lost.
Durability serves the same purpose it did in DS1, you might have your gear break once but then you just buy a repairbox and fix it at a bonfire. There’s a reason Fromsoft moved away from using durability.
Also the goal isn’t to not die in a Souls game, the goal is to eventually win, but the game expects that you’ll die plenty of times. Which is why the punishment for dying is so low in the Souls games.