History ArmorIsUseless / VideoGames

* Played realistically straight in ''7.62 High Caliber''. Combat is extremely lethal and even the weakest pistol in the game can cause fatal damage with two or three shots to the chest. Armor, like in real life, only provides a token amount of damage resistance, enough for several assault rifle rounds at the most; ceramic and titanium plates can be inserted for improved protection in certain vests, but they can be broken completely by enough damage and have to be replaced. Even worse, helmets and bulletproof vests only protect the head and torso respectively, so any shots not to those areas get no damage resistance (unless you turn on an option on the difficulty settings). And armor piercing ammo (or powerful cartridges) tend to just slice through that armor anyway, so it'll usually only provide just enough protection to escape immediate death and run for cover. As in real life, the best defense is to not get shot.

** In all lore, from novels to live-action films to in-game cutscenes, Covenant armor is consistently useless against any kind of bullets. Elites decked out in hundreds of pounds of the stuff fail to single shotgun shells or bursts of submachine gun fire that would be no-sold by any standard body armor today, once their shields are down. Grunts and Jackals are in the same boat. The exceptions are the Brutes, who actually have been scene tanking some fire when stripped of shielding.

* ''VideoGame/{{Overwatch}}'' subverts it. Armor reduces the damage of every projectile/attack by up to 5 points (a percentage until that point, so something that does less than 10 damage is only reduced by a percentage). Which means that characters who deal damage with rapid-fire, shotgun-style, or damage-over-time weapons (ex: Tracer, Reaper, Roadhog, Soldier: 76, Winston, Symmetra) have their damage noticeably reduced. However, since the damage reduction caps at 5 points, Armor does little to nothing against single attacks that do a lot of damage (ex: Pharah's rockets, Junkrat's grenades, Widowmaker's scoped rifle).

* Inverted in ''VideoGame/{{Warframe}}''. High-level Grineer enemies and numerous mechanized Corpus proxies wear alloy or ferrite armor, which sharply cuts incoming damage from most damage sources. [[AcidAttack Corrosive]] damage is one of the most popular damage types in the game because of its ability to permanently reduce the armor of those hit, rendering the target vulnerable. This is especially noticeable with the colossal Eidolons, who enjoy ContractualBossImmunity on top of insane amounts of armor that renders anything other than a radiation-specced weapon or an anti-Sentient weapon useless. Before you even get to that, you have to penetrate its [[NighInvulnerability nigh-invulnerable]] DeflectorShields, which can only be breached by [[spoiler:the Void energy produced by the Operators.]]

* ''VideoGame/MissionImpossibleKonami'': The instruction manual claims that Max Harte was ordered to wear heavy body armour to justify his slow speed in game. However, he takes the same amount of damage from attacks as the other two agents who wear normal clothing.

* ''VideoGame/DemonsSouls'' and ''VideoGame/DarkSouls'' players typically end up falling into this mentality sooner or later, as well as ShieldsAreUseless. Players will typically only equip heavy armour and actually use a shield for blocking when they first start playing the series, as a form of SkillGateCharacter. Once they get used to the mechanics, players will typically come to value mobility over defense, and discard both their heavy armour and shield in favour of light ([[FullFrontalAssault or sometimes no]]) armour to maintain full mobility and StatSticks that are glued to the player's back 100% of the time and never actually used, ending up with a GlassCannon that never gets hit rather than a MightyGlacier that can block or tank many hits. The "Fashion Souls" [[MemeticMutation meme]] resulted from this: the idea being that if you're any good at the games, you don't care about your armour's stats and only care about putting together a cool-looking outfit.

* [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] in [[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Deepwoken Deepwoken]]. There exists various armors in the game, with Master Armors being considered the best of them all. This is played straight on a character slot that has the Crestfallen echo modifier active, as armor is permanently broken, making them only useful for their talents alone and nothing else.

* In ''Franchise/AssassinsCreed'', Assassinations, Hidden Blade {{Counter Attack}}s and ''[[VideoGame/AssassinsCreedBrotherhood Brotherhood]]'''s new Arrow Storm and Execution moves will one-shot anyone regardless of health. Also, the Captain from ''Brotherhood'' multiplayer is a OneHitPointWonder despite wearing full plate. On the other hand, Ezio's damage-taking improves as he gets better armour and more heavily-armoured opponents are themselves harder to kill in a straight fight, with Borgia Captains ([[GetBackHereBoss those that fight you anyway]]) and [[PraetorianGuard Papal Guards]] needing multiple Hidden Gun shots to kill. To add to this, the Armor of Altaïr saved Ezio from a nasty stabbing at the end of ''2'', while part of [[spoiler: the Cesare fight]] is spent stripping off the boss's armour so he can be properly hurt. They seem to be improving on that with the enemies, as in ''[[VideoGame/AssassinsCreedRevelations Revelations]]'' the Janissaries cannot be [[OneHitKill one-hit killed]] by the hidden blade.
** Is played slightly differently with the RPG turn in ''[[VideoGame/AssassinsCreedOrigins Origins]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/AssassinsCreedOdyssey Odyssey]]'', in a few ways. First, enemies can come in ranks such as Captain and Polemarch that denote their health and damage. Normally these ranks apply logically to what the enemy is wearing, but sometimes it's thrown out the window, resulting in lightly-armoured foes requiring a full-on brawl to kill, while a heavily-adorned normal enemy can be assassinated with a single blade through the head. Second is your own gear thanks to levels and rarities: a Common Conqueror's Helmet will protect you less than a Legendary-rank fabric Shroud, and visual customization can invoke it to be even worse. Third, many attacks finishing moves completely disregard armour [[RuleOfCool just to look cool]], so swords will cut and stab straight through armour and send blood flying.

* In ''VideoGame/BaldursGateII'' there are classic AD&D rules and values of [=THAC0=] ("to hit armor class 0") and AC ("armor class"). They work in a way that the lesser number is stronger, that is, a chain mail armor that gives an AC of 2 is better than a leather armor with an AC of 5. This can be sometimes confusing, i.e. when an enchanted full plate mail +1 gives a value of -1. A virtual die is rolled to check if the attack is successful and does damage or is absorbed/blocked, and it depends on the AC of the defender and the [=THAC0=] of the attacker. Both are influenced by character weapons and skills, such as dexterity, or even by spells. In the first game, AC was very important and could make the difference, with negative AC making you almost invulnerable against weaker opponents. But in the sequel expansion Throne of Bhaal major enemies start to get [=THAC0s=] ridiculously low (to the point of -30) that they will hit you anyway (unless they roll a 1 which is a miss). Minor enemies are still suffering your armor, but by that time you are so much powerful that they wouldn't represent a menace at all. That being said, the powerful magic armors available in the game might not be useful for preventing you from being hit, but they do offer things like resistance or immunity to different damage types, the ability to cast various spells, and other useful properties. So there's still a reason to equip them.
* Zigzagged in the ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamSeries'':

* In ''VideoGame/BlackSigil: Blade of the Exiled'', armor isn't entirely useless so much as Defense is. You appear to take the same damage from introductory-area enemies, even after abusing a specific shop's buy/sell mechanics to purchase hundreds of Defense Up potions and using them to max every character's Defense. It's for this very reason that it's best to equip armor based on any offense and status resistances they have, as opposed to Defense. At least ''technically'' the armor itself isn't what's useless...

* In ''VideoGame/{{Diablo}}'', armor was virtually mandatory for players but due to a bug, monsters with high armor rating were actually easier to hit. Diablo himself had a 95% chance to be hit by even a level 1 character swinging a broken dagger.
* In early versions of ''VideoGame/DiabloII'', enemy attack rating was actually four times bigger than displayed, making the "chance to hit" percentage meaningless. As a result, and because most advanced armor types didn't have unique versions and required more strength (which was a dump stat unless you were a barbarian) there was little point in going higher than the most basic armors. Furthermore, defensive skills that increased armor were useless. The attack rating change was made at the last moment before release because the game was considered to be too easy. The expansion reduced the multiplier from x4 to x2 and added unique versions of better armors. It still wasn't enough because for some reason you had a 95% chance to hit while moving and you're always moving. Using a shield was infinitely better.

* How straight this is used varies with the game in ''VideoGame/EtrianOdyssey''.
**

* DoubleSubversion in ''VideoGame/Fallout3''. Normally armor does a pretty good job reducing damage. Then you go to [[DownloadableContent Point Lookout]], where [[ArmorPiercingAttack the enemies automatically get a certain amount of free damage in]]. This means that a player who easily mows through Enclave soldiers and Super Mutants can get pwned by mutated rednecks with shotguns. It can also be double subverted because of the equipment degradation reducing effectiveness over time and the low-quality (as in broken, not poorly made) equipment most [=NPCs=] have, which can result in a pair of Brotherhood of Steel knights in PoweredArmor getting killed by a trio of raiders in Mad Max-style armor.

* How important armor is depends on which ''VideoGame/EtrianOdyssey'' game you're playing. It's at its peak in ''VideoGame/EtrianOdysseyIII'', where stacking accessories is generally more productive than wearing armor - ''VideoGame/EtrianOdysseyIV'' gets around this by letting you only equip one accessory at a time, but defense still factors in little enough that you'd rather equip armor that doesn't impact (or even increases) your speed and that gives you good stat bonuses. This changes in ''VideoGame/EtrianOdysseyV'', where having a defense score that can keep up with your enemy's attack stats are ''far'' more important.

* ''VideoGame/WarcraftIII'': Armor reduces damage taken from standard attacks, but the effects aren't very visible at low levels. The type of armor also matters: Fortified armor takes a lot less damage from most attacks, but takes more damage from siege weapons.

* While armor ''is'' quite important and tends to provide benefits other than sheer protection in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'', these values don't necessarily correlate with the ''amount'' of armor. [[ChainmailBikini Females get away with much less armor in general]], and an Eyepatch provides just as much protection as a full plate helmet, as long as it's given the same armor class. Another weird instance is the druid's bear form, which, despite not showing any armor whatsoever, magically ''quintuples'' the armor rating of his equipment, enabling the usually rather fragile, leather-wearing class to be a very capable tank which outranks full plate warriors and paladins in terms of sheer physical damage reduction (however, they can't use shields to block or weapons to parry, and have a rather limited array of abilities). Of course, given their magical nature, it's possible that this is representing the druid's bear form incorporating the magic from his or her armor into a magically reinforced thick hide. In addition, this trope applies when fighting elemental enemies whose elemental damage ignores armor, as do spells. Which kinda makes sense to some extent; getting hit by a fireball will probably melt you the same regardless of the thickness of what you're wearing -- it may even be worse with metal armor if it's hot enough -- but considering how the fire came from a flaming boulder, and therefore part of the damage is blunt force trauma, there's many types of magic for which you must scour your brain for the reasoning of how it damages someone, in that you'll survive a fireball from someone around the same level around you, despite how it's hot enough to ''set a boulder on fire'', which makes it kind of like a meteor...
* ''VideoGame/XCOMUFODefense'' is a peculiar case that caused a fair bit of Administrivia/{{Natter}}. A soldier wearing the most powerful armor in the game, hit where it's thickest, has roughly a 2/3 chance of surviving one hit from the most common alien weapon. There's no guarantee against multiple shots. What would be rejected in most games is here a crucial improvement from losing half the squad on nearly every mission. The first armor available occasionally saves from getting their faces imploded, and instead leaves them in dire need of a medic on the field and time in the infirmary when they return.[[note]]Thus doing exactly what reasonable armor can be expected to do in real life; making what would have been fatalities into living casualties.[[/note]] It's another major development.[[note]]The reasoning behind the armor in the game is somewhat complicated and involves random numbers. Basically, when a unit is hit by an attack, the attack can do between 50 and 200 percent of its base damage. That damage value is then compared to the armor value of the unit (which varies depending on where it is hit), and an additional random value is either added or subtracted to the armor value. If the modified armor value is greater than the modified damage value, the armor holds and ''nothing happens'': no armor reduction, no damage to the unit, nothing. If the armor value is less than the damage value, then the armor is damaged and some of the damage "bleeds" through to the unit. With plasma weapons and rookie soldiers, ANY damage bleed is likely going to kill them, but the damage roulette means that it's entirely possible (though ''extremely'' unlikely) for a human rookie with no armor to survive a Heavy Plasma shot to the chest. Better armor obviously means higher armor values but they don't guarantee survival odds, just improve them.[[/note]]

* ''VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown'', the 2012 reboot of X-Com, plays BodyArmorAsHitpoints, and it ''does'' improve your operatives's survivability in battle as long as you take care to avoid getting exposed to flanking attacks, as {{critical hit}}s will still hurt like crazy. In some cases, the armor can even help your operatives avoid being hospitalized in the medical bay for days or even ''weeks'' if the damage they suffered is less than the bonus health provided by the armor. Furthermore, the advanced suits of armor all possess unique abilities that give your operatives other benefits besides protection from weapons fire.
** The ''Enemy Within'' expansion pack adds MEC troopers wearing PoweredArmor (although they have to literally lose AnArmAndALeg to be able to do that, replacing them with robotic substitutes). MEC troopers are very tough to kill, especially since going into Overwatch without moving during the turn adds more protection. This is to compensate for the fact that MEC troopers are too large to be able to hide behind objects and are thus always exposed.
* ''VideoGame/XCOM2'' has armor pulling double duty: in addition increasing hit points, heavy armor (and a specific Grenadier skill) provides armor ''plating'', which is a straight damage reduction: 1 point of armor plating reduces the damage from an attack by 1 point. However, armor plating, while nice to have, is rarely worth stacking: there's a number of attacks, including common grenades and increasingly common acid attacks, that can shred armor plating for the remainder of the mission, rendering it useless, and it's difficult to get 3 points of armor plating on one character[[labelnote:*]]requiring a W.A.R. Suit on a Grenadier that took the Blast Padding skill[[/labelnote]], which is not very useful when enemies start doing 10+ points of damage per attack, most of which shred or even ''ignore'' armor. The inverse, however, is not true: the alien enemies you can fight against get plenty of armor, from the lowly Shieldbearer with 1 point, to the Andromedon with 4 points, and all the way up to the Gatekeeper with ''7'' points, and usually with excessive health pools as well.

* In ''[[Website/GaiaOnline zOMG]]'' your character's appearance is fully independent of your stats, to allow for total character customization. However, this also means that no matter how cool that Mythrill Armor(sic) looks on you, or how badass you look with your giant axe, you can still get killed by a flamingo if you don't have rings. The opposite is true as well. This is illustrated in the zOMG Manga, where a guard named Baldur is equipped with rare and expensive Mythrill Armor and an [[KatanasAreJustBetter Ancient Katana]], but is still taken out in one hit by a Buzz Saw. Conversely, Dani (Who is wearing Armor, but forgoes the chest plate) and Blaze (who isn't wearing armor at all, save for a small leather jacket) are much more effective fighters.

* Justified in ''VideoGame/{{Xenonauts}}''. Not only are the enemy soldiers using [[PlasmaCannon plasma weapons]], which wouldn't even be impeded by Kevlar, but the game takes place at the dawn of TheEighties when mass-produced bulletproof vests as standard issue infantry was still in the future anyway. One of the first research projects that opens up after capturing some samples of alien weapons is some armour that is ''not'' useless, although the best you can say for the cumbersome and only marginally protective "Jackal" armour you unlock first is that it's better than nothing. However, no armour will be of any use against Reapers. One blow from a Reaper will immediately convert any soldier it hits into a zombified horror, which spawns ''another'' Reaper when killed.

* ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'':

* [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] in [[VideoGame/BaldursGateII]]. There exists various armors in the game, with Master Armors being considered the best of them all. This is played straight on a character slot that has the Crestfallen echo modifier active, as armor is permanently broken, making them only useful for their talents alone and nothing else.

* [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] in ''[[VideoGame/Deepwoken Deepwoken]]''. There exists various armors in the game, with Master Armors being considered the best of them all. This is played straight on a character slot that has the Crestfallen echo modifier active, as armor is permanently broken, making them only useful for their talents alone and nothing else.

* [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] in [[Deepwoken Deepwoken]]. There exists various armors in the game, with Master Armors being considered the best of them all. This is played straight on a character slot that has the Crestfallen echo modifier active, as armor is permanently broken, making them only useful for their talents alone and nothing else.

* [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] in [[VideoGame/Deepwoken Deepwoken]]. There exists various armors in the game, with Master Armors being considered the best of them all. This is played straight on a character slot that has the Crestfallen echo modifier active, as armor is permanently broken, making them only useful for their talents alone and nothing else.

* [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] in ''VideoGame/Deepwoken''. There exists various armors in the game, with Master Armors being considered the best of them all. This is played straight on a character slot that has the Crestfallen echo modifier active, as armor is permanently broken, making them only useful for their talents alone and nothing else.

** Lampshaded in ''Gears of War 2'' though. During one level the group is complaining about the smell and even has to run through toxic gas later in the game. The one member wearing a helmet points out that they wouldn't have this problem if they'd wear one. Also, the character with the helmet is the Benjamen Carmine, little brother of Anthony Carmine.

'''Dom:''' Yeah, ''[coughs]'' but I wouldn't be able to see snipers so well, would I?"''\\
'''Marcus''' Cool it Dom...

* ''VideoGame/HorizonZeroDawn'' is all over the place with this. First of all, what Aloy's outfits look like has nothing to do with what they protect against, nor how effective they are at it. The Carja Blazon outfit for instance has escalating amounts of metal belts strapped across its chest while [[BareYourMidriff leaving Aloy's midriff exposed]], making it seem like a it's meant to defend against physical attacks at most, but it's actually the game's anti-fire damage outfit. Speaking of which, almost all outfits only protect against a single one of six damage types, and with most enemies attacking with multiple damage types, even the top-tier outfits always leave Aloy partially vulnerable. Said top-tier outfits only become available quite far into the story, and the initial ones are so worthless (providing a mighty 10% damage reduction on average) that the choice is essentially cosmetic. They also have only one weave slot, but that's okay because basic weave bonuses don't make much of a difference, anyway. It isn't until you get your hands on medium and heavy outfit versions, combined with some decent weaves, that outfits stop being completely useless and turn into situational life savers instead, especially on Ultra Hard difficulty where enemies deal several times their normal damage and [[ChangingClothesIsAFreeAction quickly donning an outfit that protects against the current enemy's main attacks]] can mean the difference between life and death. The only outfit that averts this whole discussion is the unique Shield Weaver due to its DeflectorShields always providing some decent protection against all damage types. Still, Aloy's main defense regardless of difficulty is always dodging, never relying on armor to soak up hits - if you got hit, you did something wrong, and on Ultra Hard you'll probably be dead.