14 DAY TRIAL // How much would you pay to make sure that you will be able to use again that nice little baseball bat with attached nails instead of seeing it dropped on the ground, ignored until the end of the game?
This is a real and very important question in Dead Island, where the weapons that a player uses to battle the zombie menace require copious amounts of money to remain in tip-top condition and where knowing where to find a workbench becomes more important than finding health sources.
The zombies that you kill and then loot usually yield pretty low cash quantities, which kinda makes sense considering the many services that they could spend their allowance on on the island, and the prices for items at the various vendors are pretty low.
This means that gamers looking for money need to do a lot of missions for other characters, including fetch quests that have little to do with the actual apocalypse, in order to get the cash needed to keep good weapons in top condition.
And, in a move that distracts from the Dead Island experience, the high price for weapon durability means that most players will find themselves using the foot stomp move a lot during the simplest fights in order to give their weapon as little use as possible and keep it in mint condition.
It would have been better if the developers at Techland would have linked durability to something other than money, perhaps including just a limited number of people who have the skills to repair weapons and a number of quests that can help the player get their loyalty.
Or they could have eliminated durability altogether and made stamina use the only limiting factor for weapons use, forcing players to swing less and use their feet more rather than using the current immersion breaking system.