Monthly Archives: March 2017

My thoughts on the weapon durability game mechanic…

Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a lot of people raving about how good it is, and watching people play on live streams, it certainly does look fun. And yet, there’s a problem that even people who like it have called out, and that’s the introduction of weapon durability. The problem isn’t that it’s a part of the game, though. No, the real problem is the exaggerated fragility of the weapons.

I’ll have to wait quite some time before I can play BotW, but I have played a number of games recently where durability is a mechanic in them, and I think it’s a good idea if it’s done right. For instance, it’s mostly okay in Dark Souls III and the original game (I still haven’t played the second installment so I can’t say how it is, but it’s on my “want to play” list.) while it’s decidedly more frustrating in Bloodborne, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Let it Die.

In particular, Let it Die has constantly annoyed me with how fragile the weapons are, especially in the higher levels. I can carry a supply of four or five swords for one level and still not reach the next floor before I’ve used up my supply. This is a problem for many reasons. One is the high cost of the upgraded weapons, requiring a half a day of grinding for cash just to afford a decent supply. But even with cash on hand, the game blocks additional purchases of the same weapon type with a timer, so gathering my arsenal requires upwards of two hours sitting around and doing nothing. So imagine the “fun” of wasting a whole day to buy a weapon cache, only to have said cache be wiped out in twenty minutes. Continue reading


A “Where the hell have you been” update…

Yeah, I know, I’ve been a very bad writer lately, but I want you to know, it’s not just you blog readers left isolated out in the proverbial cold. I’ve been just as horrid keeping folks in the loop on Twitter and Facebook, and if you think you’ve got it rough, the poor souls following me on Tumblr and Wattpad haven’t heard a peep from me in over a year. I would love to say things will change for the better for all parties soon, but I can’t quite make a promise because things here are still iffy. But with warmer weather coming, I hope my health will recover somewhat, and then I can devote more time to you lovely peoples whom I love, respect, and admire. (You’re looking very good, by the way.)

With butt smooching and apologies out of the way, I finally have the brain cells to sit down and whack out an update to let you know where I am and what I’ve been up to. First, I should explain that this winter has been pretty damned nasty to me, with several bugs tag teaming me like some kind of sadist Wrestlemania of flus and colds. I’d just start to get over one thing when I’d get something else, and so I spent a lot of time on my couch.

In theory, that should have meant another game review for y’all, only Let It Die has proved to be a lot longer than I would have expected from a free game. That’s not an issue with the difficulty, though. It’s the absolutely dreadful RNG for crafting item drops, leading to instances where I have spent whole weeks looking for one fucking item to upgrade a weapon ONE level, and then I got to look forward to hunting for that same rare item twice or even three times. I’ll talk more about this when I can finally do a proper review, but I’ll just let you know, I will not be kind to the grind of this game. Like, at all. Fucking hate it, actually. Continue reading