Seems simple to me, Ulitma Online had breakable weapons/armor and a simple system of it. Armor/Weapons have a durability stat, as they take damage/are used, it goes down. If it hits zero your weapon breaks, before it gets to zero you get notifications that your gear appears to be in bad condition. If you have the right skill you could look at your gear and be told a relative state of it in a role play type message. Repairs would restore a item to max durability minus one point. Failed repairs would hurt durability some.

This also has the benefit of removing magical items from the world/players hands over time. Seems like a simple thing that should exist in more games.

Is breaking your weapon fun?

Does it provide a fun challenge? Is taking it to a smith to repair fun? Is repairing it yourself fun? Is bringing a backup and therefore more weight into battle fun?

My answer to most of these is no, its not fun, its an annoyance, not a big one, but its not fun either. If the repair minigame was really fun, maybe then, but probably not. This is most likely a case of game designers thinking in terms of realism and not fun, something we all do pretty often.

I dont understand how you people can say that.
You didnt like Fire Emblem ? The series is brilliant, every bit of it (well, except for PoR). Swordcraft Story ? Immensely fun. Vagrant Story ? What about whetstones and hammers in Betrayal in Krondor ? They didnt annoy me, in fact it felt strangely satisfying to see the sword sharpened and hearing that little sound played.

I also think that not many people actually know how often and how fast real swords get dulled, rusted, dented...just your ordinary steel, cant have damascus everywhere.

Now, in games that have breakable weapons it didnt really make me think harder about my strategy, its working more like a chance to get away from the main gameplay, a small distraction that makes me stop my thinking process and start it from scratch. Its a little bit different from thinking harder, its like getting an additional chance to get a fresh look.

What about JA2 ? Your guy gets surrounded, he shoots alot, and his weapon breaks. Now try telling me this is not a good thing. Its not. Its a great thing to have in a tactical game, now you have to do something different from your normal routine.

So ? I find constant action and sweaty mouse pads annoying, yet everybody keep churning out clickfest games. You have your games. In hundreds. I want my games too.

If you were playing a game set in the present or future, how would you feel about running out of ammo? Chances are you're fine with it so long as you know it's easy to pick up more. Can you get players to think of a sword the same way? "Damn, my sword borke. Guess I better pull out my club. I'll take this guy's sword as soon as I kill him and I'll be good." In the case of picking up a legendary sword it'd be like picking up a BFG. You don't shoot it at the mindless drones (at least not frequently), you save it for the big bad evil thing at the end that you know is going to be able to take a lot of damage. You'd have to make sure that the player knows to save the big swords for special occasions but between gameplay and storyline it shouldn't be tough to get the hint accross.

If I want to go back to town, I will. Making me go back to town to repair, or stop between battles to repair is breaking my flow. Its a symptom of the problem that the best suggestions on this are to make it fast and easy. You know what is fastest? Not doing it.

And Kseh, its not a gun, and hunting for ammo isn't fun either. But the functionality of a gun means that there is a lot of variation between guns, so when you run out of ammo on one gun, there is strategy there because you have to switch to a different gun which works differently. Swords are swords are swords. Saving the big one for the boss cus its big is not the same as saving the rocket launcher for the room full of 10 zombies to take advantage of the AoE.

If your game is such that the only available gameplay is chopping, and your sense of progress involves getting better and better at chopping, and there's an element of gameplay that suddenly and bafflingly makes you worse at chopping, then that element is misplaced and should be removed.