The Legendary Game Mechanic No One Likes

What're your thoughts on durability? Since I'm seeing a few comments asking this, the texture pack used at the start of this video is by "Retro NES Texture Pack" by Befarrar. :)

I like durability, I just hate minecraft's garbage "too expensive" "let's make this cost 500 levels to repair" repair system

How Mojang could fix durability mechanic: 1. Removing the cumulative XP cost for repairing. 2. Making items not evaporate when their durability reaches 0 (just like the elytra).

"Without durbility, the game becomes less realistic" AND???

4:26 "Until One fateful day in 2001 when durability boarded a plane. Everyone's lives were about to change." Me: sweats

I totally agree with you. Mending is NOT the problem, durability system is ... if players worship mending so badly, it means durability system is broken

That's why I like the Tinker's Construct mod when it comes to Minecraft. When a tool breaks, you can still repair it instead of having to make a new one

You almost gave me a heart attack once durability bordered a plane in 2001

Durability not only discourage you use good tools instead of bad. It either make you constantly go back and craft new one at home or making you carry materials for crafting them again and again in a trip. That aggravates already exising inventory issue.

Durability really acts like a manual reset of your progress in a game. It just makes the game feel repetitive to get your tools or weapons back over and over again. I hate the fact that several games do it and force you to spend more time to get stuff that you previously had.

"oh hey look, gold armor! it must be good right?" 1 minute later gold armor: screams in durability

I believe the saving grace for durability systems is the concept of soft-breaking, under which items turn into tombstones instead of vanishing upon reaching 0 durability, allowing you to repair completely busted items, as with Minecraft's elytra (honestly not the best implementation around). The reason this doesn't inherently suck is that soft-breaking effectively turns durability into an obfuscated ammo system, and ammo systems can indeed encourage exploration, weapon variety and provide meaningful challenge, as demonstrated by the "pistol start" concept for Doom playthroughs, which has the player reset their weapons, health, armor, ammo and ammo capacity to the initial values upon loading into a map, integrating them into the map's own specific weapon progression and allowing the map author's intended restrictions on weapon use and damage tanking to apply per-map.

In my personal opinion, if a game you are playing has a tool that breaks, your controller or keyboard should just crumble away also. Would definitely make games more immersive.

I've always hated the "People would use the same weapon all the time" argument. Because, even when they're right, who cares? It's that player's loss if they just decide to never use other weapons. If you wanna use other weapons, you don't need the game to force you to. If the game's other weapons are fun, you'll use them just because you can.

how many times has "durability" being said? yes

This video was literally an eye-opener and made me actually rethink the way I view Minecraft and its durability mechanics. I was so used to this feature that I've never ever fully realized that it was THAT problematic. I always thought that mending was the issue, or the anvil's obnoxious limits, but I guess I was wrong all of this time. I remember building a railway in my survival Minecraft world. In order to do so, I had to dig up a big-ass tunnel. And when I got to work, in a shocking turn of events my ultimate netherite pickaxe almost got sent to Heaven, so I had to severely slow down the process of mining to save the pick. What adds insult to injury is the fact that to repair a netherite tool you need a bloody netherite ingot. Did the durability mechanic provide any fun gameplay on that occassion? No. I had to use severely limited unenchanted iron pickaxes to mine out the tunnel or alternatively dig out ANOTHER tunnel just to get the materials to repair mine or make another pickaxe. This is extremely time-consuming and tedious. Yet, at the same time, like Xay said, if you remove it - it'll leave an empty space and maybe cause an even bigger outburst. However, I don't think that durability mechanic in Minecraft will ever receive any major change like that. It's too fundamental in the game with so much other mechanics built on it. It's too big of a risk, and we all know for sure Microsoft and Mojang don't have the balls to make such a move. Not after the Combat Update. On the contrary, is durability such a problem in Minecraft? You can easily bypass it using Unbreaking and Mending. With some xp bottles, you'll basically create an undestructable machine that'll last for your entire playthrough. Yep, the setup is quite tedious, but not as tedious as mining for the materials back and forth for the eternity. So yeah, it's actually an interesting and mind-breaking video, probably one of the best on Xayllernste's channel

"We must remove durability." Curse of binding: 💀 Edit: Hate to be that person, but this is the most likes I've ever gotten.

I think durability mechanics fail when either it is too hard to repair items, or when items completely vanish from your inventory after breaking. A game which I think does durability really well is The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (which you didn't list in the video). In Morrowind, there are two easy ways to repair your items. You can pay NPCs to repair your items, which adds a necessary money sink to the game and makes resource management more engaging in the early and mid-game. You can also buy repair hammers or prongs and repair stuff yourself, but your success rate is based on your repair skill and the "quality" of the repair item. Carrying around repair tools also leaves you less room to carry loot, so it's a trade-off either way. Another meaningful way durability affects the game is economics. As an item degrades, it's price ingame decreases, which rewards you for repairing your items before selling them. You can also buy higher-tier items for cheaper if they're damaged, but then you'll have to find a way to repair them, and the more an item needs to be repaired, the higher the cost will be, but you can often still save thousands of gold on an item even after the cost of repair. It also affects how much damage weapons do and how much armour will protect you, which is another level of engagement, and the best part is items don't vanish when they break, you just can't equip them any more until they're repaired. I think the reason Minecraft's durability doesn't work well is because it doesn't meaningfully engage the player or create any interesting mechanics. It just forces you to put mending and unbreaking on everything or forces you to carry a bunch of backup tools in the early and mid game, using up valuable inventory space. It's also way too hard to repair stuff, because the asinine anvil mechanics. Even in the early game it's usually easier to just make a new tool than to repair an existing one. If a tool only ever will require 3 material items max, it's pretty much never economical to try and repair them. It is as you said, just artificial difficulty. I seriously hope Mojang considers reworking how the mechanics work at some point, because the current meta is just extremely boring.

I've got an idea that could fix Minecraft's durability: Tools now do not get damaged when used on materials softer than them. Stone pick is immune to things like sandstone, iron pick to all stones, diamond all ores, and netherite can mine even obsidian for free. Likewise for weapons vs. armor. Now in full netherite, fighting regular mobs is no longer annoying, but when fighting other players/bosses, you need to watch out for attrition and being caught without armor. This doesn't encourage using worse gear to save the better one, yet keeps some of that resource management aspect, and as a bonus makes upgrades feel more satisfying.

For me, the idea of durability isn't exactly bad, but it's execution mostly is not the best either A small change i already saw someone suggesting was that durability could change the sprite of the weapon, looking more broken the less durable it gets