Dying Light. Having a good weapon break in the middle of a fight, surrounded by a crowd of zombies, is one of those "oh shit" moments.I honestly never felt tense thinking about my items' condition. To me, it just felt that I had to take a few extra annoying steps and talk to a vendor in the middle of my adventure.
What games specifically gave you this feeling? If it's BotW, I haven't played it so I can't comment.
It works really well if it's carefully implemented in the core gameplay loop like they did in BotW.
I hated it there. Broke battle pacing IMO so that integration worked against it.
The treatment of durability in BotW is a far cry from how ammo is implemented; the guns in Doom don't disappear when they run out, and the method of engagement is not primarily one of higher numbers as distinguishing characteristics about why someone would want to use one weapon or another.I can understand the thought behind weapon durability but i personally think it works against people not wanting to loose their hard earned favorite weapons.
I believe there can be a in between solution like in Doom (2016)...
The idea behind breaking weapons in Breath of the Wild is to get the player to use different kinds of weapons and think on their feet. But in the end you don't get an attachment to your weapons. It's just something to use and throw away because the next is 1 minute away. There's only one weapon without this mechanic and it's the Master Sword. The Master Sword is working on a kind of ammo basis. You can use it x times before it's done for a time. After it recovers you can use it again. This is the ideal way to do it imo and that's why i would compare it to Doom (2016).
In Doom (2016) your weapons never break, they run out of ammo. On the higher difficulties i had to use at least 4-5 different weapons in a big fight because the ammo of a "favourite" isn't going to last. This way you get to keep your hard earned weapons but have to constantly change weapons. It's the same goal of getting the player to not rely on one weapon for the majority of the game but without anyone loosing their favourite toy.
Enemies being tougher against certain kinds of weapons add another soft way to get the player to change tactics without destroying their hard earned loot. And this way you get them to use their gear instead of "saving" for the whole game because they might need it later.
Dying Light. Having a good weapon break in the middle of a fight, surrounded by a crowd of zombies, is one of those "oh shit" moments.
Weapons aren't the only way to kill zombies.
Edit:
A lot of the complaints about durability are really about the lack of alternatives to weapons, once they break.