weapon damage due to use

[rogerdv]

Testing this feature brought to my memory some discussions in Wasteland 2 forums about this issue. In Underrail, weapons get damaged after short use. Is this realistic? Obviously not, I have some basic military training and I have seen an AK-47 shoot from morning to afternoon in hands of barely trained people. After a day of work, an AK still can fire perfectly. Hell, you can even put an AK in mud and it still will fire (havent tested that myself). Also, I have at a home a machete, which has been in my family of 3 generations. I cut very hard bones with it, trees, whatever, and my grand-grandfather used it much more than I do (bones where widely available during his times and some of them even had meat!). The blade is in good conditions and seems that I will pass to my descendants at some point.
But, in the game, you shoot 2 rats and your pistol is damaged! Stab somebody and have to go back and get some expensive tool to repair the knife.
Item destruction is logical for armors. Armors get pierced during battles. Weapons dont, they are steel and some of them are made to last and endure severe battle conditions and management by inept people that, under more peaceful circumstances, you wouldnt trust them nothing more complex that a stone. It may seems realistic, but believe me, it is not at all.

[Idioticus]

I've used and taken care of an Rk 62 assault rifle for a long period of time during my conscription, and after each and every time the rifle was taken from the cabinet and taken somewhere, not necessarily even used for other than carrying it around, it had to be cleaned and oiled before it was put back.

Every time you fire a gun, parts move and filth gets everywhere. If you do not remove whatever it is that's gotten to a place it shouldn't, it will wear out the parts, until when it's done that enough the parts break, as their structural stability is not what they're supposed to.

So, being a curious guy that I am, I decided to do a small scale test to see what'll happen to a small spot I didn't oil. In just a couple of days that small spot was rusty, badly so. Do note, the gun rusted while it was in the cabinet, not when I carried it around, so the damage was actually less than what it could have been. It took me a little while to get the rust off and in the end, the spot and the rust were so minimal nothing happened, and the gun passed all checks done by professionals when I returned the gun back to the armory for good.
Also, running in the woods caused tiny pieces of twigs and such to somehow manage to get into the gun.

My point is this:
If I didn't take care of my rifle at all, it would have become useless in a week or less, even without firing it.
I'd say if they gave me a couple of hundred rounds to fire, in one day of running in the woods and shooting all those bullets, the gun would jam or have parts break.

Underrail guy doesn't clean his guns... ever. Using firearms, he's constantly allowing dirt to go to the wrong places and cause the parts to wear out more than they should.
Laser weapons are probably more fragile by default and certain parts will wear out even if he cleaned the gun, and he'd have to replace parts anyway.

You will also have to understand that sometimes you have to ignore realism in favor of game balance.

[Elhazzared]

The problem of bringing RL to this discusion is.

Take an M4 as an example. Even bumping it against a hard surface as you run can jam the weapon. The M series is incredibly fragile. Now it is a very precise weapon but it is not the thing you want to have with you if you're not going to be able to clean it and take care of it on a regular basis.

Now take an AK-47 or a G3A4 as an example. You can kick the gun, use it as a club, you can fill the barrell with dirt, let it rust as much as you want and it will still fire. Obviously the more bad treatment it has, especially in the barrel, the worse will be it's acuracy, but they are guns specificly made to tolerate the worst treatment you can imagine.

This is why you can't bring RL into games, at least not in any specific cases because to try to emulate it is just unnecessary complexity. I will agree that durabilly loss still needs to be toned down a bit further than what it has been, but let's not get carried here.