My friend Rowan has once against posted something that I feel the need to do a reply to. This time On Ultimate Weapons. And honestly I tend to really dislike them because they do tend to kill choice.
That said as an RPG player there’s few things as great as finding amazing weapons that do things that simply can’t be done normally. Just don’t make them no brainers.
The great thing about what I would call ‘Artifact’ weapons is that they’re something you can do a bunch of them, and then let the player decide what they want to use. Interestingly many party based games tend to do this a lot better than solo adventures. Hell I still get a little giddy at the idea of giving a paladin Carosmyr in Baldur’s Gate II and just letting them loose for the rest of the game (after defeating a Red Dragon), in point of fact it was this very weapon that really cemented my image of paladin’s using greatswords.
Image from Google Images. Content from Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Image from Google Images. Content from Baldur’s gate II: Shadows of Amn
But as good as Carosmyr is, it’s not entirely a no brainer. For a start ONLY a paladin can use it (not counting epic level shenanigans), this means one of your party members is a lawful good human. So players wanting to do an evil playthrough don’t really have access to this weapon, also most of its powers only work against chaotic evil magic users meaning it only peaks against a limit set of enemies. Lastly, there are a pile of crazy weapons in the game, most of them requiring assembly from components scattered around the world, or found in the loot of extremely powerful boss-level monsters.
Image from Google Images. Azura’s Star, Mehrunes’ Razor and the Oghma Infinium from Skyrim.
A pet peeve however is the crappy artifact. This tends to be a problem with solo character RPGs. A repeat offender for this is the Elder Scrolls series with the Daedric Artifacts, these are powerful pieces of equipment that requires the player to find then complete a side quest for various Daedric Princes (malevolent demi-gods). The artifacts themselves often have wholly unique and usually powerful effects (except perhaps for Sheogorath’s Wabbajack, but what else do you expect from the Prince of Madness?), however they are usually only made from the 2nd or 3rd best material in the game. Thus for a character who becomes a dedicated enough backsmith (and given the open ended skill system there’s literally no reason not to), they can create items that will exceed the base statistics of the Daedric Artifacts, but they can’t be disenchanted to replace the effects on a new item.
This tends to force the player to make a trade-off between better combat stats or the unique enchantments. Unfortunately due to the nature of the games, sooner or later the better combat stats wins out, although this does only effect the armor and weapon artifacts.
So my design tip as a lifelong RPG player would have to be avoid no brainer ‘Ultimate’ weapons. If you want to have a really powerful item, have a bunch of them and let the player decide what they want to use to suit their playstyle, just for Pete’s sake don’t make them practically useless in the end game!
I'm a Game Design student with an interest in narrative design. My focus is on how narrative can enrich games, along with games being used to explore new kinds of narrative.
Robert McPherson - Narrative Design 
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