Maybe find a more realistic way to limit the inventory so that the player constantly has to make hard decisions about what to pick up and discard. Make the player have to clean her weapons periodically to prevent them from jamming, and make jammed weapons useless until you can get a gunsmith to fix them in town, or something like that. This sounds intereresting, but what's the point of a mode that tries to heighten realism when you still have to carry around 5 assault rifles for spare parts? If you must include a durability system, I'd rather see something a bit more grounded in reality. So bullets will have weight again, stims will heal over time, etc. Fallout: New Vegas is introducing a 'Hardcore' mode, which basically sounds like a list of old Fallout mechanics that were scrapped in 3.

I guess this was an attempt to make you ration your resources, but all it did was make me shun these pretty cool weapons in favor of something a lot more mundane but easier to repair. But certain weapons, like Lincoln's Repeater of the Chinese Officer's Sword, were either incredibly rare of had no corresponding weapon to use for spare parts. For the most part this was annoying but not an insurmountable challenge - if you liked using the Chinese Assault Rifle, you could generally find more than enough of them to keep yours repaired. Fallout 3 made ammo and most healing/medical items weightless in an attempt (I assume) to simplify inventory management and make the game more accessible, but it also introduced a weapon durability system that basically forced you to either carry around loads of different weapons or multiple copies of the same gun so that you could always repair what you had.

It's unrealistic, annoying, and forces you to constantly consider a meta-game outside of the narrative. I have decided that weapon durability is the worst thing to happen to the franchise, at least the way it is handled now. A few weeks ago, I decided to go back and do another playthrough of Fallout 3 in order to pick up the last achievements I needed for my S-rank, and with the experience fresh in my mind I've been thinking about what mechanics in FO3 I enjoyed in comparison to FO1 and FO2, which ones I hated, and what this means for New Vegas.

I'm totally stoked for Fallout: New Vegas.

New vegas weapon repair