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Think Tank: How do you make crafting meaningful?
Vigiliance
Member UncommonPosts: 213
Just as the post describes if you were told as a game designer you need to make the crafting meaningful, what ideas what would you present?
To me the best way of making crafting meaningful without making it the best equipment is item decay..
Now I understand alot of people hate this idea.
The idea that something eventually will need to be replaced and will not be usable indefinitely.
Your thoughts?
Comments
3 letters, SWG.
Agree 110%, SWG have THE best crafting system ever.
Also to make crafting meaningful you also need an active economy much like EVE have atm.
yes yes, but how do you make that happen! Anyone can just point to a game and go oh look that was good, but how did the developers do it?
Make it crafting rather than rudimentary manufacturing.
I have a means in which a game could implement this, but they'd have to pay me to get me to spill it.
It'd change crafting in all video games, and it could be done with current tech unlike a lot of systems people propose.
But the basic idea is in my first sentence.
I used to play MMOs like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
The SWG crafting system was pretty good and so was EQ2. It all starts with being able to craft things that people want. The crafted items need to be better than most others in the game, and certainly better than what is easily obtained.
Crafting should be separate from questing or raiding in that you shouldn't have to kill something (or have someone else kill something) to get your materials. Make the best materials difficult to obtain, but avoid the trap of limiting the ability to obtain materials based on level; if someone wants to level crafting to 50 but only has combat at 20, that's not a problem, that's a player who earnestly wants to contribute to the game economy.
Interdependence between different crafting professions was pretty good in EQ2 - I could gather leather and tan it and make it into bags, except that I needed belt buckles or whatever from a blacksmith, so I had to buy or trade for those. Other classes needed my leather straps. Even if nobody was buying my finished goods, other crafting classes were buying my intermediate materials.
What I specifically liked about the SWG system was that you had to travel to a crafter's store to buy their goods. None of this server-wide market garbage.
While I cant answer directly as I havnt thought of this issue in a long time the basics are straitforward in my opinion.
The first item: You must be able to "win" or "lose" in crafting. It should be set up in such a way that the actions of the player can cause the crafting to suceed or fail. There have been several attempts at this from the original eq2 crafting system and I cant remember others atm. This would require some sort of mini game in which meaningfull choices have to be made. There are many different directions that one can take such as limiting a crafting process to number of points and set of actions. Each action takes a certian number of points and causes something to happen. When you run out of points the crafting process ends and you end up either with an item or a mass of crafting material. How good the item is and what the item is could depend on the initial items and the choices made. Higher skilled crafters will have more choices available and the ability to use more tools which have more pronouced effects. Also when talking about mini games I dont mean something based solely on a random number generator in which the choices you make are cosmetic in nature only and are forced down a particular path by a random number generator. This is ultimately what happened in I think Vanguard or EQ2 (dont remember which now its been too long) in which the number of failed, basic success and super success was controlled by the game in a form of percentage in which the mini game was made easier or more difficult in order to insure a certain percentage of item success across the board.
The second item as another poster has stated is some form of item decay can be usefull. Some will complain about constantly having to replace equipment etc, however, that happens in MMOS right now. Most games are set up that all equipment is replaced every 3 to 5 levels untill level cap at which point you start grinding gear and constantly attempting to upgrade gear in any case with the best gear bound to a player. Item decay wont change a lot except reduce the need for binding equipment to a particular player.
The third way is to allow crafters to upgrade and improve existing equipment. SWToR has a method in which this happens in that some armor and weapons are modable and crafters can make mods such that a moddable piece of armor is usefull forever by simply upgrading the mods in the armor. Mods are also available from vendors in SWToR so this doesnt necessarily help crafters 100% but it does help crafters. A variation in this system could go a long way so that a Sword gained at level 1 could be enchanted and garnished to be good for many levels with the idea perhaps of upgrading to a weapon with a better base material that has more enhancement potential.
The downfall right now is the "main stream" player wants to play a solo game in an MMO environment and thus complain when forced to have to interact with anyone.
FFXIV, for all it's faults, has a pretty amazing crafting system- at least conceptually. The game featured loads of customization options for items, recipes necessitating cooperation between groups of crafters, and a risk/reward system for synthesizing materials that made powerful equipment extremely satisfying to create. The biggest crafters made a name for themselves on their server and got a great deal of respect. Being able to make a legendary spear or suit of armor and show it off to your friends was far greater of an accomplishment than getting some random raid drop.
The main problem with the system is that the actual process of crafting is boring as hell and totally unwelcome to newcomers (at least when I played). If wikis hadn't been datamining all the recipes long before the game was actually released, crafting would have likely been nigh impossible. Also, running around and hitting mining locations for 10 hours on end just to level up once is stupidly dull and unenjoyable. It's as if the developers simply didn't think the act of mining and synthesizing materials should be anything resembling fun.
A good crafting system would take the cooperative reward system demonstrated in FFXIV and make the process of collected and mining those materials an enjoyable test of skill in itself. Maybe they should give us a minigame to play, or some sort of competition among crafters for the best materials. Anything to make crafting more enjoyable and less of a chore.
Here is the basic explaination of the crafting system I'm using;
All food and potions (expendable items ) have item decay- nuff said
Weapons and armor have condition- can be repaired, only if not broken
All materials have stats for crafting- for the process of crafting ( heat resistance, durability) and for the quality/effects of the item being crafted (use you imagination)
Well technically we're discussing how to make it more meaningful, since "best in slot in ~4 slots" tends to be pretty meaningful.
There are plenty of examples of games which are focused on crafting and therefore have better crafting than MMORPGs, but forcing that type of gameplay certainly doesn't make sense for every game.
But if you want to make crafting a more enjoyable activity, certainly one way to do it is to have a lot of timed activities that can be initiated simultaneously, as in Haven & Hearth or ATITD. That way the player is constantly bouncing from object to object keeping things running, and there's an element of skillful optimization to keeping everything going full tilt.
Then of course a dynamic quality system with quasi-permanent resources (1-3 weeks to mine out before needing to search out a new quality hotspot node) would make for a rather excellent base of crafting materials.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Im not that well-versed with the complexities of crafting, but from my own game experience, i would like to suggest that all items have a degradation/durability value--and fixing an item will still decrease its maximum degradation/durability value. I believe this can protect crafters (and the whole player base) so items will not become undervalued in the long run.
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This is mho as a veteran mmorpg player (started with UO: the second age...so yeah, i love sandbox games).
While good loot comes from raids these days (isnt a bad thing imo) the loot that is created by players should be better then ALL the rest imho....why......otherwise crafting will never mean anything. (i realy think its that simple)
What features would i use to make this happen? (i can only refer to existing features cause i aint a dev myself)
1. Make items decay when using them like UO did.....when the decay lvl hits 0% the item just dissappears, BOOM gone.
Yes people will whine about that but after losing two good items they will remember to find a blacksmith to repear their items (dont use NPC's that can repair). This will stimulate the player interaction and economy.
2. Make crafting fun and include the chance of failure.....without the chance to fail crafting wont be rewarding.
I realy loved the way EQ2 and Vanguard made crafting simply awesome imho.
3. AH from newer games will make trading a bit more easy, and gathering resources should be time consuming (just a bit tough) but not so that crafters will need to enter a higher level dungeon to get some recourses if they want to go mining themself. (placing crafting recourses in high lvl zones would be ok me thinks).
4. as in UO the type of metal used had a meaning also......like a silver sword/spear or kriss would be very affective against liches.....this way you can craft the same weapon but in different mats to get other stats (stats seems kinda a bad word for this tough).
5. make sure only alchymists can apply poisons or other temp effects....this will also stimulate player interaction and economy.
6. Not realy about crafting but the UO feature that humanoid mobs could loot one of your items was SOOOOO COOL.
7. Make it so that only crafters can make dyes (they should be usable but crafters would have to refill them when empty.
I know its alot of UO features but i dont think i am on this alone when i say that someone needs to make UO2: a modern gfx, semi sandbox mmorpg.
But hey, all this is just mho.
Item decay isn't really crafting mechanics even though it influences crafting.
Anyways, this is what I would do:
First of all (and almost most important) I want the player to be able to choose the skin he or she want. Preferably by mixing 2 or 3 parts together and then add color and the creators name in runes (or for high end gear maybe a custom message). Those skins you can choose from should depend on where your character is from, his or her race and what the character have unlocked in game.
As a dwarf you should be able to craft typically dwarven sword, but since you are from the north you could also make it looke Norse instead, or using a legendary style you found the instructions for in an old ruin.
Ok, now we know how the item look. Next part is crafting materials.
First of all should stuff that could be fixed by a farmer be something players could make themselves by having a garden and some animals in their player housing or guildcity. A sword do need a string of leather from an animal, a bit shark skin or a horn for the handle. This should affect the skin a little bit. The player could get the leather or horn from a goat for example which he could breed at hiome, he could hunt a deer for it, fish up a shark or something similar.
Then she needs to get the basic material for the weapon. That should affect the wepons damage, enddurance and weight a little but not too much. The best material for a sword (often called broadsword by clueless people) is steel or a special material like Orihalicum, Mithril, admantium or meteorite iron. You could however make one out of bronze as well. Steel is made by mining iron nodes and purify it, bronze from copper and tin, and the rest are rare drops or something you could get by luck while mining.
Ok, say way choose steel. That will give the sword these stats: Damage 1-8, weight 2 Kg, endurance 5 (meaning that the sword will drop 5% every time the weapon should loose the stats. It is not magical right now (and some creatures should be immune to magical weapons BTW).
Now you save the build as a receipe so you don't have to do this every time you want to make a blade like this.
The third part is enchantment. You should be able to enchant any non magical weapon. Preferably can you choose between adding magical gems to the sword or by having a magic user make a ritual (with the right compnents) to get it enchanted.
Lets say we add 1-6 firedamage by putting in a ruby and we lower the endurance to 3 by adding a diamond so the weapon will last longer (or not be repaired as much depending on your system).
This system is pretty simple, as a dev you would need to add some more skins than you usually do for crafted weapons and you would also need to balance the materials needed so that rare materials like mithril and rare enchantments don't get too common.
This system works both for games with and without levels, in games with levels you just add a levelrestriction to some materials, let the player select what level he want to make it and adjust the damage after that.
Our sword would at level one have these stats: Damage 1-8 + 1-6 fire damage, endurance 3 and weight 2Kg. If you instead make it level 40 it would have these stats instead: Damage 8-56 + 8-48 fire damage, the endurance and weight would be the same.
That is basically how I would make crafting.
The solution is simple. Eliminate all armor/weapon loot drops and quest rewards. All drops and rewards should come in the form of crafting ingredients and 'gold'. Also eliminate all NPC vendors. Every ingame item should be player-created.
This simple, elegant idea if ever implimented would create the most robust MMO economy ever devised.
Youtube it.
Sorry but eliminating all loot drops will make for a ghost town of a game, look at SWG
Crafters needs adventurers to survive, no one enjoys combat without loot, or not many.
No loot = BORING
Hsving said that, to me this would be a fun way to make crafting fun and challenging.
Crafters needs a massive amounts of time and materials to help build cities, forges , shops, towns, roads , bridges, access to new areas , and need to learn new techniques in engineering to accomplish some of this.
I think it would be amazing if it took 100's of people a decent amount of time to build a place , or to learn ways to bruild a bridge and get mats to cross some body of land to access new zones for people to adventure in.
Also crafters should be able to improve the loot that drops, without them the uber leet gear you found would be pretty awesome, but not nearly as great if someone with the right knowlegde can improve the gear you find.
And maybe not sure if this would work, but for those that enjoy crafting more then fighting, maybe give them bonuses in their trade for specializing in cragting , but for this they take a hit to their abilities to do combat..........not sure how well this would go over tho.
exactly.....if crafters aint needed ingame then ubers crafting aint worth anything now is it?...
Love the way you think on crafting btw
ps: man i miss standing around the forge in britt waiting for people who needed repairs
As a person who is now getting into some of the more 'design' aspects of programming this post doesn't make sense.
From a design perspective, having a mob drop crafting loot (Steel XYZ) or just straight up loot (Sword of awesome +2) is the same thing except the crafting option takes more kills/time for the player.
Might as well drop 'Sword of awesome +2 part 1/16'.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
I find it difficult to answer the question. I like crafting in several (former) MMO's, but all have some mechanics that I would like to change. It also depends on what kind of MMO it is. For example, I loved SWG crafting, but that would not fit very well in a medieval setting.
One thing that I never liked is how crafting an item becomes slower and slower the further you progress into it. While it makes sense that more complex items take more time to craft, at the same time when you become experienced, you should be able to craft items faster in general. EQ2 crafting is the only crafting system that comes to mind that implemented this.
What I loved in SWG crafting was the immersion. Being able to create your own crafting room to your taste with actual practical use. Labled chests , buff from playercity, crafting stations and even npc vendors with items that showed up on the bazaars in cities. Then being able to send out probes to other planets to check resources. Having to survey to find a rich location of the resource you want and then place a harvester. The factories that let you mass produce.
In other games, crafting doesnt add to immersion. The nodehunting is lame and cumbersome imo. Resource refining is some stupid arbitrary timesink that is just created to slow down player progress.
For me the good crafting systems let you craft items you can always use and are made in an immersive way so that it meaningfully adds to the game's experience. Also the resource gathering should be like this.
Yeah, having players that repair stuff is good for the economy.
But I think it is unfair that in games like EQ2 do a crappy tin sword and a epic weapon loose vitality with the same speed, it makes no real sense and it is a great variable that you can add to items. A real tin sword would be good for a single strike.
Same thing with weight, with a at least semi realistic weight system you would have to play tactical.
You could have 2 swords that makes a little more damage but needs more repairing, or a single one that instead last longer on you when you enter the dungeon.
I also feels that it is unfair to have metal in tiers, starting with worthless crap and go up to the best. It is first of all illogical (who would use a copper sword when the AH is full of steel swords?) and it takes away some great customizing options.
Another thing that is important in P&P but not MMOs is that some creatures are sensitive to certain imetals and ressistant or even immune to others.
Anyways, there are several options to make crafting more useful. Besides forcing players to fix or get new weapons since they break there is the classical that you need a new every 5 level, you can have mechanics that makes certain weapons more useful against certain oponents and armors and you can have consumables like poisons.
I personally think a weapon should go down in stats every time you die or every time you make a critical miss (one of those, not both). A weapon should have say 100 health and a standard weapon go down 5 every time. When you repair an item it should however go down 1 point max health.
So your axe starts with 100 health, first time you have it repaired it go down to 99 and so on. It is fine to have a limit on say 25 or so that it wont drop below, but players should be encouraged to get new stuff once in a while.
With that system you can even have weapons with scaling damage as you level since players will exchange their weapons every week anyways.
Nothing will ever make Crafting meaningful to me. I loathe it in every game I've tried it, because all Crafting does is leech money and time in return for making junk items that aren't even worth vendoring.
1. Item decay and destruction.
2. Stop making mmo item centric. Find better ways to keep people playing beside gear farming.
Sure item decay isn't crafting itself. But the OP was asking how to make crafting meaningful, and item decay certainly achieves that.
SW:TOR's crafting is actually vaguely similar to some of what you're asking for, with very customizable items (including weapon color) and harvesting/crafting which is time-intensive but not time-intensive for the player (you're still playing the game normally while your companion is sent off for a rare material to return 20+ minutes later, or queue up five crafted items which take ~15 minutes.)
And you need to repetitively craft and deconstruct (reverse engineer) items to unlock better versions of those crafted items (most recipes start as green-tier items, which can be reverse engineered all the way up to epics if you have the mats and the time.)
In reply to those suggesting failure, TOR is a great example of why failure is completely unnecessary. If your target is crafting an Exceptional Epic-tier item, then all of the repetition required to reverse engineer your recipe up to epic level, and all of the repetition crafting the epic recipe until you crit (create an Exceptional version of the epic) basically performs the function of failure without the dissatisfying gameplay of the game randomly screwing you over.
The goal in this case is the Exceptional Epic, and every item you had to craft to get there can be seen as a failure -- but every craft is also potential progress towards that eventual goal, and every craft got you an item which gave you some interesting decisions to make (sell it? use it? or deconstruct it for a few materials and a chance to learn the next recipe?)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I agree with this. Especially #2.
The reason (for me anyways) SWG's system worked was because items that weren't "the best" were still useful and competitive. If decent items are widely available, then the game has successfully de-emphasized gear in my opinion.
You just need a variety of other activities to fill the void of item grinding. A lot of games can't do that, so they just make it about gear grinds.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
You...BASTARD!
I was sitting here after reading the OP thinking of all these great crafting ideas like having items personalized by crafters, and letting them put together components in a modular fashion to give their goods a unique look. And then I read your post. And you basically stole all my ideas by thinking of them originally.
So I completely agree with your post...great post
.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Simple: To make crafting meaningful you have to make it so everything you craft is meaningful. So no making players craft a million pieces of vendor trash to get to the point where they can make something someone else may want. The easiest way to do this is to make your game with a 100% player crafted economy with item decay. You could also make it so the player with the skill to craft an item can also repair it back to full. Just my 2 cents on the issue.
Bren
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