Jonas wrote:The only games where I ever really liked weapon degradation were Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3. In FC2, that was because I could see that it served an important function: it made it useful - in fact downright necessary - to purchase and use your own weapons instead of just grabbing whatever your enemies would drop when killed. In Fallout 3 (and New Vegas) I liked it because you could use other weapons to repair your own degraded guns, which gave you a use for scavenged weapons without having to pack-mule them back to a trader.
In STALKER, it was just annoying, because you had no way to repair your guns yourself. In fact was there any way to repair them at all? I forget.
In STALKER Shoc there's included scripts for repairing weapons but they're disabled by default because the game was buggy and rushed. Pretty much every single mod for the game enables the repair system (talk to a trader and there's dialog options for "fix my shit"). Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat all have repair, and item upgrades, by default. The degradation thereafter works basically just like Far Cry 2's, except you have to spend money when you return to base to get a fresh gun (via repairs) instead of just grabbing an identical copy out of the gun warehouse. Sometimes they jam, but mostly the point of the weapon degrading system is to act as a control on the economy, giving the player a steady money sink as he progresses. Spend weapon condition you have to repair to get back, in exchange for loot off the people you killed (also ammo, but unless you're using guns with rare ammo types like 9x39mm (Vintorez, etc), leaning heavily on shotguns, or are a terrible shot you're almost guaranteed to loot back more than you fire out).
Stalker Call of Pripyat really is an amazing game, everybody should play it. It's pretty much my GOTY for 2010 and 2011. Nothing came out in either year stood up to it for me, no matter how good they were. I've fully replayed it twice already since 2012 started, experimenting with different mods (and recently contributed to the development of a new one currently in beta).