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Crafting systems
Blecod
Member UncommonPosts: 43
Hello,
I have been thinking lately what are the most amazing and in depht crafting systems in mmos and just games in general.
The first mmo that comes to my mind is Guild Wars 2.
I have been thinking lately what are the most amazing and in depht crafting systems in mmos and just games in general.
The first mmo that comes to my mind is Guild Wars 2.
Comments
Star Citizen – The Extinction Level Event
4/13/15 > ELE has been updated look for 16-04-13.
http://www.dereksmart.org/2016/04/star-citizen-the-ele/
Enjoy and know the truth always comes to light!
Sadly Saying games which don't exist anymore like swg is not particularly useful...
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
They tried to make their system seem deep with that little discovery system thing they had, but that was just a poorly done illusion-of-depth.
Obviously, most everyone who comes here will mention SWG for crafting. The other runner-ups will be EQ2(it's so-so) and Vanguard(never played it after beta, so can't comment).
I never got into Ryzom, but I've seen people mention it from time to time.
Puzzle Pirates had a neat crafting system if you like puzzles
You also have those indie games out there that are less traditional crafting, more extremeley-tedious-realism-crafting. Iirc, some of those being A Tale in the Desert, Roma Victor(I can't remember if that's the name), etc., where you spend weeks building something.
Camelot Unchained(in development) has an interesting sounding voxel-hybrid type system from what I can gather, somewhat more like Landmark, I suppose. A system where you actually place bricks and the like.
FF14 had the best crafting system in recent days, but the gathering was a repetitive chore. The actual crafting was enjoyable, but I don't know if there's really much point to it, in the end(economically speaking), but at least it was fun for a time.
The simple truth is, there really aren't that many deep crafting systems. Most games throw in crafting as an afterthought and use the traditional system where you click button to create a bunch of worthless stuff that no one will use.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
I like the exploration parts, how crafting several of the same items speed up and how it handles the materials.
But crafting is too easy which together with the mega server auctionhouse means you can't earn money on it. There is no customization options, if I make a lvl 60 leather armor it will always look the same even if I unlocked and can create all crafted skins I can't make something of a specific level or add any type of customized look. And I can't put my mark on the gear I made, neither does who made it gets mentioned in the description.
It is still better than many other system, you don't have to make a 100 tin swords to unlock the skill to make a tin longsword, you can craft gear that is useful and as good as dungeon drops.
Any minigames in crafting sucks, when I started crafting way back in EQ2 I thought it was fun, for the first 5 tin daggers. a 1000 tin weapons later and moving on to bronze I was bored beyond belief.
It is hard to make a good crafting system, it needs to be fun, you need to get useful items from it, you need to be able to earn money (and preferably a certain server reputation if you are a master crafter) and you should be able to do some customization, both in looks and stats to your crafted gear.
Also, it needs to make some sense, forcing you to craft loads of useless vendortrash turns off most people, it is far better to make it hard to get recepies and rare mats then to let the players spend the time to just grind crap. It surely must be possible to make it so that learning to craft something could be just as fun as any other part of the game, more like a scavenger hunt then a test of patience.
Recipes c an be vendored, but most high lvl drop from mobs. Mobs ten do be hard there.
Then, you cna customize what status you want in the equipment...or just leave empty places for crystals. Crystals are lootable only, no purchase from vendors (though some quests rewarded with these).
Yes, it had "craft 100 bronze swords to be able to make 1 iron sword", but it was not a proble for me.
http://www.mmoblogg.wordpress.com
Crafting in most games isn't shitty, it is just serving different purpose - alternative non-combat gameplay.
For crafting to be complex and in-depth, you would need very different game design because popular gear progression makes it next to impossible to implement together.
Most importantly, people generally dislike complex, crafting-economy systems. They want that alternate rewarding gameplay/minigame.
1. Ryzom. This is probably the closest game currently running to what SWG had
2. EVE Never played, but from what I understand, everything is player made.
3. Perpetuum. Like EVE, but the game suffers from a very low population.
4. FFXIV ARR. Very intricate crafting system. Probably the most intricate crafting system for the type of Theme Park the game it. But the end game recipies leave me with a few questions.......I'll leave it at that.
Love how your crafting skill, tool quality, and material quality all combined to determine the quality of the finished product. Hunting down high-quality nodes was fun.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Let us instead learn reciepies in the game, a blacksmith might teach you a thing or 2 if you do some stuff for him. You might have a stealth mission to spy on an secretive swordsmith and a tailor might teach you a thing or 2 if you are popular with her political faction in the town.
Another somewhat strange thing is that you need to gather a lot of very common things. In AoC I killed 20 mamoths to get leather for a single belt when the hard thing IRL is to make the buckle, a leatherworker would usually just buy the leather or maybe own a few cows.
Instead of forcing me to cut down 20 trees to make a bow, at least let me search for a perfect tree instead, maybe a yew and then get bone from a horned animal. The glue to bind it as well as the string are things that are easier to buy (even if you could use tendons from the animal you got the horn from).
Focus on rare materials instead of forcing us to gather common crap that should be more or less everywhere.
Also, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to make that composite bow to any level with stats scaling for it. Not that needing to make a new bow a few times a week makes much sense anyways of course, IRL you only need a new one if the old one break or if your physical strenght changes (bows are made custom to how strong you are, 80 pound bows are rather common for example while those Chinese bows you use your legs to shoot can go to 200 pounds. The hardest bow ever might be some steel bows found in a shipwreck outside Wales that was 300 pounds but many archeologists think they have become harder after a few hundred years under the sea).
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Crafting needs to be both fun and useful and it usually fails on both those accounts.
Imo, most people who ask for "meaningful crafting", actually just want to be special snowflakes - crafting based on RNG directly via crafting process or through gathering of rare resources, having a name inprinted on the item. But that does not make crafting any more meaningful. Satisfying? Maybe...
If you want meaningful crafting -> EVE Online but that is very far from what those people ask for.
But you certainly have a point, a good crafting MMO needs to have a different endgame as Eve have and pre-cu SWG used to have. Then again, I think MMOs endgames need to change anyways. I think that putting a more sandbox endgame in a themepark MMO might be the way to go. Far too few of the players in most MMOs play at the endgame and most of them that do just do the early stuff.