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Should crafting be interactive?
Vermillion_Raventhal
Member EpicPosts: 4,198
Think crafting is one of the most challenging aspect of the game to make fun. Though some just like making stuff.
Mini games IMO are bad because usually they get boring and become tedious. Maybe just my opinion but any repetitive sequence can be boring.
I had ideas of traditional click crafting but being able to train an apprentice to do the work for you. For example you build a mine to gather a resource. You can hire a miner once you are grand master.
Another idea is to have a crafting wheel like wheel of fortune. Where when you craft depending on your skill you will create random range of quality with rare legendary for grandmasters. Sadly this kind of gameplay would likely be exploited for cash shop in this day and age.
What do you feel like they could do to make crafting more than click and produce?
Mini games IMO are bad because usually they get boring and become tedious. Maybe just my opinion but any repetitive sequence can be boring.
I had ideas of traditional click crafting but being able to train an apprentice to do the work for you. For example you build a mine to gather a resource. You can hire a miner once you are grand master.
Another idea is to have a crafting wheel like wheel of fortune. Where when you craft depending on your skill you will create random range of quality with rare legendary for grandmasters. Sadly this kind of gameplay would likely be exploited for cash shop in this day and age.
What do you feel like they could do to make crafting more than click and produce?
Comments
My favorite approach is to make it not obvious what you want to craft. Make it so that the optimal thing to craft varies wildly depending on your circumstances. Don't make it so that everyone wants an epic sword of smiting, or even that all level 40 warriors want a pointy stick of +1 sharpness. Make it so that you need crafting items often, they're cheap to get, but what's best for you depends tremendously on what you're going to do next.
A skill of the player component to crafting akin to A Tale in the Desert's glassblowing or blacksmithing can be interesting. You have to be careful not to make the best few crafters too dominant, however.
You can also have some research component to crafting, where what one player crafts from given components will be different from one another crafts from exactly the same components. Then it takes some tinkering to figure out what you can craft and how. See A Tale in the Desert's paint system for an example of this.
You can also make crafting fit into a broader economic system as in Puzzle Pirates, Uncharted Waters Online, or (again) A Tale in the Desert. What you want to craft can depend on prices that day.
Minigames aren't necessarily bad. Having to do the same minigame a hundred times in a row sure is bad, though. Puzzle Pirates handled this by making it so that you just have to play a minigame at least once per 10 days to remain current, and then could craft however many items at your proven skill level in that time.
What you should not do is ask players to craft a ton of junk that they vendor in order to level up crafting. Crafting a hundred of some useless thing that even the vendors who buy your junk are sick of seeing is not an interesting gameplay decision.
i despise games that force u to craft tons of crap for vendor , there is no fun in crafting 1000 ingots , nor 1000 tables just to gain 10 lvls
I'm not yet decided on this one, i think I'm okay with either.
I have two crafting games I like;
Factorio
Xyson
There are several I dont like;
WoW
Ark
Terraria
Life is Feudal
Don't Starve
Tough to come up with exclusive elements.
Terraria, Don't Starve, and Ark all have a wide variety of ingredients to always watch for or hunt down, and neither Xyson nor Factorio does. Can't really claim any thrill when acquiring and stockpiling many materials, and ive definitely been annoyed when required to track down some specific ingredient.
I enjoy needing to stockpile huge amounts of materials, yet I do not enjoy doing so in Ark.
Not really sure what the common denominator is here.
Just realized I forgot about the minigame aspect.
When I design crafting systems my immediate instinct is to implement a form of minigame that is more advanced than pin the tail on the donkey or equivalent. I assume the player wants to consider and juggle several finicky elements of the materials used to affect the final product; size, weight, age, quality, etc.
However I rarely randomize the outcome, whether by character skill or player skill. I assume they'll want it deterministic.
On the other hand ive never played any of my crafting systems, so...
Crafting resources flow easily and cheaply, so the "minigame" becomes "will i actually use this many" vs "can i sell this many." More of a balance game.
For me the efficiency maximizing aspect of planet um... mining was easily my favorite part; balancing input costs versus extraction rates.
So as in my previous post a small bit of calculation to yield a deterministic bonus seems key.
Personally, crafting is hard to make interactive.
I have seen some neat ideas to make Harvesting both interactive and even competitive. So that has been handled as far as making the harvesting more "Game Like", and Crowfall has put out some good ideas with this as well, building an idea of Team based harvesting, with their whole Motherload system.
I know some games have done wonders with lots of ways to make things work, like mixing metallurgy with needing to craft and create patterns, as well as having crafting/harvesting being it's own profession with levels and the like. Camelot Unchained had presented this idea, where there would be direct crafting classes, like a Black Smith, as opposed to everyone playing a generic combat class and players choosing to use their Bard to go craft with, because it has the fastest run speed and can get to the nodes faster or some such.
So there are things going on.
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 think SWG is the gold standard for crafting. For me the end result of crafting mechanics should be people seek out specific crafters for gear.
The time i played SWG, i was known as a good weapon crafter and i'd make people stuff all the time and id have repeat and new customers as word of mouth spread.
I experienced it in EVE a bit but more because i made super cheap ships than i made good ships.
A good crafting game has infamous crafters but problem is people who show up late to the party wouls complain that they can never compete.
So the way to fix it imo, is to have all the components have max efficiency themselves. So if you are awesome at making a sword, you should find the best handle maker, new patches can do this.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
I also heard that the Full Loot Open World PvP .. kinda put the game in the Ghost Town status.. but.. that is what they advertised the game as, some hard core game like that.
I played it for a few hours.. and.. not a bad game, just, not a great game either.. kinda fell in the meh range for me, but then again.. I didn't play it for long.
Major was the low pop
2nd was once i stop playing a game, the addiction goes away, and then it is hard to go back to it.
3rd im too cheap to pay the monthly fee (even though i buy like 50 bucks of red bull a month) and i used to pay 40 bucks a day for my tesla.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
I remember Vanguard having something like that, and it got BORING after the first hundred times of going through it.
I'm with Kano's suggestion; make crafting relevant. Don't make it more convoluted just for the sake of it.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
I think Vanguard did crafting best ... everything involved a mini game. EQ2 comes in second and FFXIV third. FFXIV when it first came out had more interactive crafting than it does now, but its still in top 3. My memory of SWG is fuzzy. I remember it as needing many parts but was just a simply click afterwards to create.
I dont just want to push buttons and autocreate.... I want to think while I'm crafting.
On topic, more interactive crafting could be fun if it was done right, but as monotonous as some games have made it in the past, “more interactive” could be a nightmare. I think its super subjective, as someone who doesnt care for crafting in the first place would be apathetic about it no matter how good or interactive it is.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
The other glaring problem with Vanguard's crafting is that it was more about grinding than crafting. Rather than asking you to learn a minigame and then use it to craft something, it asked you to craft a zillion of something stupid that you didn't want in order to grind levels so that you could eventually craft the one thing that you did.
My preferred role in any game is crafting, but very few games do it right, and the ones that do usually have low population mitigating the effectiveness of crafting which is other people buying your stuff.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.