The Blade system in Xenoblade 2. The Blades are basically beings that fight alongside you and give you a weapon to fight with. There's a number of unique characters that are Blades and a slew of generic ones. Basically, acquiring these Blades becomes like a gacha mobile game as you open up cores and different unique blades have a certain percentage of a chance of coming out.
I recall the devs saying they did it this way because they wanted players to have different experiences based on the Blades they got and share who they got on social media with each other. They wanted it to be a surprise or something when you got a new unique Blade. While the idea is cool and all, it mainly just lead to people grinding to get all of the Blades and sharing them was a bit pointless considering the devs showed off every Blade before release.
I think the weapon durability actually gave me more reason to explore. The fact that my weapons broke gave value to any new weapon I could find. If anything, being able to keep all the best weapons would have made finding other weapons less rewarding. Like "Oh, there's a fire sword in this chest. But I got a fire sword hours ago..."
To Xenoblade 2, I agree. The system itself once you have everything is just effing amazing. It's a ridiculously varied toolkit to play with. But the trudge to get blades to the right people (originally taking an item that was hard as hell to find meaning you could pop the wrong blade by the wrong driver and not be able to play with the amazing builds they open up) and the fact that blades were objectively better than others ruined it.
Torna rebalanced this and made it better, but the answer to the blades in XB2 Vanilla would have been having similar blades but just different elements, instead locking power behind gacha. My brain goes to a timeline in which this was money walled and I shudder to think of what the game would have been.
The gacha system has to be only skins/designs to work, if it's actual power it all falls apart. That's why I hope we get a base set like Torna in the next game if they do something similar (I liked controlling 9 party members at once) and then gacha blades on the side to vary it up. Things like Valkyrie Profile 2 where each sword was one of three sword wielders and it was random which person you got was a better implementation of this.
And agreed on BOTW. It became involved. I marked places on the map where I knew good weapons were, I'd know where to lead my gf to if she was looking for certain items for cooking and certain elements. It was great to me. But I know a lot of people don't like it at this point.
Not really, most of them have a skill and weapon progression system and introduce new, tougher enemies as you progress. I don't particularly like Open World games for the repetition and iterative content, but BOTW in particular felt like going in circles outside of the more significant content.
Nah Mechanically it works as intended for a bunch of people.
The carrot on stick mentality has been ingrained in most games that the idea of player strength versus avatar strength has become a foreign one. Instead of levelling up your weapons you level up as you explore and find new things to play with. Anyone who's made it to endgame or got through the game vouches for swimming in weapons outside of master mode gold enemy encounters, which, to me, is the system working exactly as it should, by having the player get better and better with the surroundings and enemy encounters and the systems they can manipulate to handle the gameplay, with the rest being exporation for exploration sake.
I agree some more variety and enemy types that need certain weapons could vary it up for the next go, but the system works as intended 9 times out of 10, it's just that 10% of the users don't like it.
Progression systems and skill level ups are, for all intents and purposes, fake progression because you didn't get "better" you just filled a meter for access to a shiny new thing to use. The benefit of BOTW is that you have access to all your skills from the getgo and all the weapons from the getgo if you know where to go meaning that your progression is intrinsically tied to your own exploration and gameplay.
I love me some level up systems and skill builds in games like turn based combat and stuff, but in a game like BOTW if it pulled some stupid level gating crap or gave you unbreakable weapons or made "skill unlocks" a thing to grind towards, a huge core of the gameplay loop would be broken.
