Nioh

Nioh kept durability's purpose but redesigned it after alpha players asked for its removal. Alpha players asked Team Ninja to remove item durability. It existed to stop players using one weapon forever, so the team turned it into item familiarity, where a well-used weapon passes its best stats to a new one.

The change keeps the push to swap weapons without the annoyance of breakage.

Director Fumihiko Yasuda treats player feedback as questions for developers, not solutions. Yasuda argued that a complaint shows where something feels wrong, and the designer then works out why and how to fix it.

The durability change follows this approach: players' complaint about the mechanic led the team to ask what it was for and rebuild it.

Nioh uses a tough parry window so parrying doesn't become a waiting game. Its parry timing is much tougher than Batman's. A tight window is one way to stop parries from drowning out the rest of the combat system.

Unchecked parries can turn combat into a reflex test, in the words of the source "turning the whole thing into a waiting game".

Nioh uses stamina to stop players stun-locking enemies. Stamina limits force a back and forth between offence and defence. Without such limits, a player who hits an enemy during its attack anticipation can cancel the attack and keep wailing on it.

Dark Souls calls the equivalent mechanic poise and fighting games call it super armour. The aim, quoted: "we don’t want the player to aggressively chew through enemies without ever thinking about defence".

Nioh is named among games that follow the Dark Souls template closely. It is listed with Lords of the Fallen, The Surge, Salt and Sanctuary and Death's Gambit as a Souls clone. The source says such games stick rigidly to the formula and feel more like sequels than new games.

Clones in this group rename estus flasks, bonfires, souls and even the homeward bone, adding only small ideas like stance-based combat. The lesson is not to copy a game's named items and systems under new names.