Seriously, it makes the game too easy.

Item Degradation
Let's say you're a level 5 character with 20 points in smithing & one-handed, and you find a glass dagger. For the purposes of this post, give it a blade rating of "advanced". You can use it, but at lower one-handed levels, it degrades faster.

Smithing
At low smithing levels, repairing the glass dagger goes ultra-slow & does not advance your smithing skill as fast as repairing a steel weapon would.

Potions
The use of a potion is tied to your body's adjustment to taking them. There's no skillset involved, just a running count of the potions your body has ingested. Taking a health potion when it gives no effect (ie, you have full health) does not increase their future potency. Think of it like real life proteins, where a high-concentration introduced into a body that's not used to it is wasted. So a 100pt health potion used at a low level might restore 50% of the potion's possible abilities.

Enemies
Skyrim sort of did this right, with Giants and whatnot. The problem is that while the sliding scale works at lower levels, at 26 now I can go almost anywhere. In Morrowind, I was deathly afraid of certain areas and would write down where they were to come back to them at higher levels. The only places I avoided since ~lvl 15 are Giants' camps.

Lockpicking
I could pick expert locks at level 15 with only 1 skill point used in the section. A better way would be to have the current system + turning friction that could break the lock. The higher the lock, the slower it turns with a chance to break even if it's at the sweet spot.

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Half my Skyrim experience have been thoughts of the marketing tachnique "make the game easier so more people will buy it", and that's the wrong signal to send for TES. It's DEFINITELY the wrong signal to send if you want to produce something different and innovative. If voice acting is a cost issue(and in Skyrim, Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonators are everywhere), go back the Morrowind's text system and only use voices for walking by, or introductions or whatnot.

No


The only time item degradation has made a game harder was in 2004 in world of warcraft when we first started clearing molten core. We had to fight through respawns and patrolling mobs and attempt to go far enough to a boss to stop respawns before our gear broke. There was no way to do field repairs so we'd have to go outside the instance and repair up and hope to get back before we lost position due to respawns.

Every other time in gaming history item degradation is an annoyance.

I do think that potions are overpowered, which is why I don't use restore potions. You shouldn't be able to instantly fill up your health with potions, they should either regenerate health or even have a use animation.

I also agree that lockpicking is too easy and doesn't require perks or anything beside a bunch of cheap lockpicks.

I thought item degradation was a terrible part of Oblivion. I literally had to repair stuff after every fight. Realistic perhaps... but very monotonous!

Item degradation makes sense being gone.
It wasn't difficult to do, just annoying.
It isn't a matter of making the game "new player friendly" it is about taking out frustrating, not fun elements of the game.
It doesn't take any "skill" to have 25 repair hammers in your inventory you found while raiding random boxes and barrels around the Imperial City.
I completely support item degradation being gone.

I saw your oblivion edit, and agree with you there. Which is why the weapon you use will be skill-based on smithing + weapon type. Using a weapon that you're good with (Iron before Steel, Steel before Elven, etc) will degrade much slower than using weapon types before you're good at them. Constant repairing is essentially a non-issue with that style of degradation.

Item degradation is an essential part of limiting this auto-balance thing based on levels that ruins the immersion. Level 20? Suddenly, glass weapons!

There's a reason I didn't mention Oblivion at all >_> Why did you leave out Morrowind? I get the feeling you haven't played it.

If you find them too easy, then use Master. If it's still too easy, find a MOD or build one then..

repairing is waste of time, it just makes the game annoying and takes out the fun. i don't wanna be exploring in the mountains, fight a troll and my weapon break, then go back to town and repair so that i can continue exploring. Only reason it exists in most games is to regulate economy in mmo's for the most part.

item degradation wasn't fun for me. I agree with the rest of your post.

If the original game is not to your liking and enough people agree with you there will be a mod for it.
The game came out on Friday and it's Wednesday...

Degredation has never been anything more than a tax. It's a money sink or skill tax, little else. It's not an intelligent system. It's not difficult.

Then don't use a weapon you're not proficient with. Everyone starts out proficient with iron, and your comment on the trolls is directly tied with another point I made: Don't fight them if you can't beat them.

I'll personally create a mod adding item wear to the game. It will most likely work differently than Oblivion though.

I didn't mention Oblivion and don't know what me playing morrowind has anything to do with this (I did play it btw, and item degradation didn't make it harder in Morrowind either )

Item degradation in daggerfall was actually an issue, because you couldn't just repair up magic items.

Nice job not even responding to the primary criticism of your idea that everyone in this thread has levied: Item degradation doesn't make the game harder, just more tedious.

As someone who busts a good number of lockpicks (and busted even more back in Oblivion), I'm not really on board with making the system a whole lot harder. Different system entirely, perhaps. But the current one with much more breakage? No thanks.

No. I hated repair hammers and having to keep them in my inventory. I hated item breakage. I like the game the way it is. It'll be months before I'm sure about what needs to be "fixed" for my preferences, but I don't think any of this will in that list.

A money sink? That's what jewelry is for.

A skill tax? You automatically get levels based on one-handed or two-handed use. I didn't say anything about a repairing skill tree. Smithing is automatic too, you wouldn't need to spend any points there. In fact, repairing would count as smithing so you wouldn't need to constantly make or improve weapons to raise it.

I didn't say it was to make the game harder. The entire issue is to reduce the auto-level balance via restricting the use of advanced weapons. If you're proficient in something, or upgrade it via grindstone/workbench, it would have to be repaired less. It's not really that hard.

I've only spent one point in lockpicking back when I was at level 10 or something, to make novice picking easier. Since then, with an amulet of lockpicking(+15%), I can pick anything. The entire skill tree is useless. I generally break 5-10 picks on doing a master lock and I consistently find/buy more picks than I break.

Then use whetstones.

What does jewelry have to do with it? Other systems that use it it's simply a money sink. For WoW and Oblivion both it was a money sink.

And that would be a skill tax. All weapon users having to use smithing would be a tax.

The entire idea that this somehow resolves glass weapons showing up doesn't strike me as well reasoned, either. You're going to need some extensive explanation behind that.

I agree with just about everything you said.

Potion spamming should be limited, but I'd rather see it tied into alchemy skill, or maybe health and magicka depending on the type of potion.

Lockpicking has improved, but needs more tweaks (and needs to be harder/more tied to character skill).

Most of your ideas could be wrapped into a hardcoe mode (that will only ever be seen in a mod). If you select hardcoe mode, items degrade, potion use is limited, locks break after a few failures, etc.

Also, though a text system has a lot of advantages, they'll never go back. Reading long blocks of text alienates some people almost as much as numbers do. It's a bummer, because it means less depth to the world and NPCs, but big game studios don't want to lose the sales.

I also thought item degradation was stupid and tedious, however I think they could have done something along these lines to improve it instead of just taking it out all together.

Maybe make some statistical chance of your item breaking based off of times an item is used VS enemy level VS power of attack VS random chance type of thing. Make it so items breaking is rare but it happens. That to me seems fairly realistic and you wouldn't be carrying repair hammers all the time you would just need to carry at least one extra weapon and during a battle you might lose some armor that you would need to replace. Might make thing more exciting without being edious.

You can make it at any skill level... it's expensive... and you can sell it... and there's a lot of it.

Explain to me how a passive skill system, when points aren't spent, is a tax?

It ties into the auto-level balance. As you progress you go from finding low-level potions to high-level ones. You go from constantly finding leather and iron to constantly finding glass and orcish. Using a degradation system is one of the ways to work around that.

The "entire idea" of me focusing on glass is probably because I just like the material. It applies less equally to the harder materials, but the concept is the same.

Item degradation .. seriously? Total immersion breaker, completely unnecessary and ANNOYING. I'm really really happy that it's not in the game. Thank you Bethesda!!

When I hear something like 'Bring Back Item Degredation'., I have to assume the poster is using a PC in some S & M dungeon to actually want a mechanic so vile and worthless to be re-introduced back into the game.

I like that I don't need to constantly repair my stuff.

Yeah, it would be kinda cool to have to do it occasionally since they have smithing. You could use smithing do repair.

However, if it was added either officially or via a mod, I would hope that it is significantly scaled back from Oblivion, because things broke much too often in Oblivion.

Make it more like WoW or something so repairing is still a believable thing, but not happening so frequently it just becomes an annoyance.

When you guys say "constantly repair" how constant are you talking about? If you don't want to constantly repair something, then don't use something you're not proficient in.

I'm talking about repairs made once every few levels, for items you're good in.

No. repairing weapons was annoying. I'm playing a game here, not a simulation. I'm sure someone will make an item repair mod once the Creation Kit is out. I don't think restrictions should be forced onto players who don't necessarily see the game in the same light that you do.

As for everything else, I agree somewhat. In fact, I would go so far as to remove lockpicking as an actual skill. Make it a minigame based on one's own skill/luck instead.