Does an item system where you can pick up any item and use it in combat sound like a good idea? Like if you see a piece of wood, or a rock lying around. You could pick it up and use it? Characters would still have their own weapons that they keep. But you could pick up the stick and use it as a club. Or you could throw rocks, or axes if you ran out of arrows. I was thinking that maybe you could even pick up shields and weapons from fallen comrades and enemies and use those too. But I had a question about that. Should I make it be possible for the player to finish the entire game without using a sword or owned weapon? And give them an accomplishment? Or should it be impossible to do that kind of thing? Or maybe without ammo or something like that. Maybe a reward could be given to players if they come up with a creative solution to killing a boss? What other design issues might I be overlooking with this kind of system?

I like freedom and flexibility in games, so I like those ideas.

About being able to complete the game without weapons: I think yes for the same reasons, but, especially given your other ideas, that shouldn't render melee weapons as irrelevant.

In short, yes. Its hard to answer in detail without knowing much. Do weapons degrade? Is ammo very limited? Are rocks only on the ground in some areas or does the ground have an unlimited supply?
Something to be aware of would be amount of objects that you can pickup having enough but not too many to cause performance issues. And another thing, the items need to be easy to spot and pick up. I've played games where objects very hard to distinguish from the environment, where weapons from the fallen would pile up and it would be hard to pick up the right item, and ones where there would be so many weapons on the ground that they would disappear meaning I can't go back there and get that arrow.

Yeah, I'm thinking the rocks will break, and the sticks and stuff like that will degrade over time. Good sturdy weapons will be rare to find just lying around, and you're right about the pickups needing to be easily spotted. Maybe they'll have some sort of subtle graphical effect applied when you get near them. Melee weapons are not really going to be irrelevant, because the ranged weapons have limited ammo, and they're not rapid fire.

If you want to go with this, you shouldn't just stop at items picked up as single weapons. If I have a stick and a rock, I should be able to make a spear!

It's a cool idea, but it would require a lot of work if you want it to feel natural for the player. You would need to carefully monitor every object that is either already in the environment, as well as anything that can be brought in by the player. You also shouldn't reward players for being more creative, because creativity is too relative/situational for it to make a good score counter.

I think ideas like this are great because I love having freedom in games to create new solutions to problems.

Some issues I see with this are:

-Visibility issues with making items that are usable stand out from the non-usable stuff with out it looking too weird or having the player encounter that situation when you are looking at something and going why can I use everything else but this.

-Balancing all the variety of items to make sure they can keep the suspension of disbelief. Like if you have a durability system you have to make sure that people don't end up using a brick for the whole thing because other weapons break down too fast. Also draw backs from using things incredibly heavy to fight with damage vs. movement restrictions vs. how much visibility will suffer from carrying it in front of your face. Also making each have a viable use rather than having a lot of garbage like Fallout 3 and Oblivion where there is so much stuff but no point in picking it up and using it and it just clutters up the game world.

-Also there would be some issues with the why the player can use all this stuff but NPCs and enemies can't, unless you have some reasonable A.I that can deal with that sort of thing.

But I think you have a good idea, these sort of systems can open up a lot of gameplay for the player to discover and it should be entirely possible to complete the game by MacGyvering.

Achievements and rewards can be placed on anything you think is a challenge, I don't think they are a neccessary thing to think about unless you want to make them part of the gameplay by either giving in game rewards or using them to push people towards making certain gameplay choices.

And now I'll stop myself before I start rambling.

Yeah, I was planning on figuring the AI for this out later. It might be enough to just have some scripted in predetermined ways the AI could use them.

Well a cheap way to get around it would be to create a variety of the same enemy that just uses that one certain weapon. While it'd probably take a while to create a bunch of straight forward A.I.s that use each object or a variety of them it would save you having to make dynamic ones.

Or just creating enemies that wouldn't use those objects.

It sounds like you're describing a game system like Dead Rising, unless I'm misunderstanding your idea. If that is the case, then yes, such a system can be amazingly fun and interesting, and you can have a lot of item-combining options and fun, creative uses for things. You should look at Dead Rising 2 for a reference, as that game implemented this kind of system better and more fully than any other I have seen.

I think that you might have a hard time balancing an owned weapon with environmental pick-ups though. Variety is one thing, but if you always have a sword that never breaks, it'll seem inconsistent with the rest. And why use another weapon if your sword is always at the ready? Maybe some items would be better, but then players will just disregard all items except for those superior to the sword and they won't be involved in gameplay much. Unless you have some good reasons for giving owned weapons to players, I might just ditch them and focus on making environmental items more robust.

I think that you might have a hard time balancing an owned weapon with environmental pick-ups though. Variety is one thing, but if you always have a sword that never breaks, it'll seem inconsistent with the rest. And why use another weapon if your sword is always at the ready? Maybe some items would be better, but then players will just disregard all items except for those superior to the sword and they won't be involved in gameplay much. Unless you have some good reasons for giving owned weapons to players, I might just ditch them and focus on making environmental items more robust.

This is the only issue, if that, I see with this type of mixed weapon system. Another way would be to have pickups that maybe have an advantage in certain areas/enemies, but at the same time it feels more like a hack than balance game mechanics. Just like Khaiy said, [color="#1C2837"]Dead Rising is a good implementation.