I'll keep it short, I hope Fallout 4 has durabilities for weapons and armors that last longer. In a fight with 4 sentry bots in Fallout 3 the other day, right? Get this, I used maybe 4 mags on them with my Chinese assault rifle to finish them. Durability went from full to probably 30%. My power armor went from full to maybe 65%. I only got shot around 15 times. I dont remember well and my numbers may be mixed, but my items wear away just too fast. I get it, it's meant to be realistic because they're old, but even still they'd have higher durability.

Yeah, some items do get worn out pretty fast, they could also solve the problem with more options for repair, besides finding an identical item or paying someone. I guess New Vegas had repair kits, maybe if they made them a bit more effective idk.

I hope that Bethesda includes the Jurry-Rigging perk and Repair Kits from New Vegas. Those were god-sends.

we'll see if durability is even a thing in FO4, skyrim did away with it and as I recall the first two fall outs didn't have durability on the weapons so they might just forgo it entirely

While fonv did right in the rate in durability loss while I think that fo3 did the right thing in how much it can be repaired due to what ur or the vendors repair skill was.

I think the implication is that a Chinese AK-47 is cheap and shoddy anyway - leave one lying around for 200 years and it falls apart at the drop of a hat.

The point of armor in real life is to stop the one shot that would kill you - it is pretty worthless beyond that, and is ruined easily. Take the ceramic body armor worn by NATO troops currently - it is good for protection against light shrapnel from a grenade, and needs to be replaced after the soldier gets hit once by a bullet.

I thought the rate of durability decay was pretty good in FO3. The issue was needing a duplicate of the item to repair it. The repair kits in NV solved a lot of that issue. I prefer FO3's limiting of how much you could repair an item according to your skill though.

Part of the problem you described is "bullet sponge" enemies which I hope to Sheogorath they fix.

I feel this is a game mechanic that's hard to balance properly. I think in a game like Fallout one of the core gameplay focuses is scavenging (some of my more memorable moments in the past games have been when I've been low on resources, sneaking through hostile territory and checking in every nook and cranny for useful items to get me through.) And you tend to lose incentive for all that scavenging when items aren't in short supply, and the tools you have with you are always reliable.

At the same time, I dislike when a mechanic becomes tedious - that's a sign of flawed game design in my mind. (ie, if the purpose of a videogame is primarily to have fun, then any time you are not having fun or doing something you find boring, then that speaks of room for improvement.)

I think the proper balance is items degrading enough for an eye towards inventory management and careful scavenging to be useful, yet not to the degree that it takes away from other aspects of the game. I would hope that Bethesda find that sweet spot and then justify it with in-game logic rather than figure out what was a "realistic" degree of degradation and then build the mechanic around that. In my mind gameplay trumps realism any day (especially in a game like this.)

Ideally, I would like item maintenance to be mostly a down-time activity that you tend to between dungeon crawls, back at home base, rather than something you're going to be finding yourself doing multiple times in an outing. Finding a weapon while looting and using that to improve the DUR on your weapon is one thing - but having to bring up the inventory screen after every battle just to make sure your gun doesn't become useless would be going too far, I think.

I believe the idea is to make for interesting gameplay moments - so that sometimes you find yourself in a tight spot with nothing but an unreliable gun that keeps jamming, for example. To me, a lot of these mechanics are more important in terms of supporting those kinds of interesting and memorable gameplay events than being realistic.

(For example, I played New Vegas on hardcoe primarily, but found it rarely offered me anything interesting - water and food were plentiful that I never was in danger of getting too low in either of those, and the resting mechanic just made it so I arbitrarily had to sleep on occasion - which broke up my gameplay rhythm in a way that just offering some advantages to resting didn't. I didn't want a Hunger Meter just so I'd have another bar to manage, but so that it could support the gameplay aspect of playing a desperate Wasteland survivor scavenging for every useful bit - to be honest, I think giving healing properties to food and making Stimpaks much more scarce would have led to the same gameplay perogatives. And likewise with resting it would often crop up at annoying times - I much preferred breaking up my gameplay rhythm when it made sense to me. I would still use beds whenever it made sense to me, and just giving me a small XP bonus was enough incentive for me to make use of that on occasion. ie, I probably rested just as often in Fallout 3 without hardcoe mode as I did in New Vegas with it.)

I would like to see a 2 prong approach to repair: a breakdown part and a repair part.

First, you could breakdown items for repair parts. These parts would only be good within a certain class (I.e. revolver parts from breaking down a revolver can't be used to fix a service rifle).

The amount/quality of repair parts is affected by repair skill (so a low skill might produce rusty SMG components with only increase your 10mm SMG's by 2% each, while a higher skill would give a pristine part with increases by 10% each).

With a system like this in place you could place more emphasis on equipment degradation because repair parts are relatively available but it in evolves more player in put.

Yes... they have higher durability after surviving the nuclear apocalypse of not just one nuke... but multiple. Heats of 50-100 Million degrees F. 8E7 Newtons of force from multiple blasts. And then finally... however long they've been sitting in the dust without gun oil, love, and care. Then picked up and abused in every way possible just to be dropped in the dust again, sold, and repeat.

Hmmmm... they don't sound like they should be holding up longer than what they already do in the game, do they?