According to a datamine, there was nearly an Elden Ring weapon and armour degradation system similar to durability in the Dark Souls series - and it may have been removed quite late in development, as the open-world game seems to have several hints towards it.
The Dark Souls games have a system called durability which allows weapons and armour to become gradually more ineffective and eventually broken completely over time. Elden Ring launched without such a system, which is probably for the best, given that Dark Souls 2 durability was tied to fps on PC and so was completely messed up.
However, according to Soulslike game dataminer JesterPatches on Twitter, Elden Ring once seemed to have a durability system of some type. After digging through the fantasy game's files, they found references to weapons and armour being "broken" or "at risk" - presumably pop-up alert messages for when it happened, judging by the other things on the list.
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