What are your feelings about implementing crafting in to your game? I like the idea and feel it adds to the game play.
What about items in your game that are only acquired by crafting? I like this idea some, but players who dislike crafting won’t do it and could miss out on getting that really cool item.
Which leads me into, what do you think about crafted items being stronger that items that are normally found in the game? I can understand that if you had some “end-of-game” legendary weapon, it would be the strongest, but up to that point I like the idea of player crafted weapons being stronger.
Your thoughts?
Crafting is and has always felt like an excuse to focus on superfluous activity, to me. Often, I feel like the activity is a means to distract from the real emptiness of a title. Crafting, in my opinion should be an afterthought and relevant to characters which have an understandable need for it. Creating the need simply to implement it is, in my opinion, poor design philosophy and worse stage for execution.
It always plays out like this in my head:
"Our heroes have trained hard and fought tirelessly to rid the world of whatever the setting is. Every town has someone that insists upon the importance of the overall mission. Some heroes lost loved ones, they fight for a cause.... which is in no way given value by crafting things. You know who trained hard to craft things? A Smithy. is my hero a Smithy? I didn't think so either so why am I chasing all these parts and seeking otherwise irrelevant people in the game to do it? Thanks for the chores, mom..."
I loved Dragon Age: Inquisition for many reasons, but crafting was a bad move. While the consumers liked it and it was a good move in a business sense it eroded the sense of time and distracted the player from the overall goal. Some feel this was good because it gave players a break from the normal routine. Sure, but if you make a game players need a break from - it might be time to rethink aspects of the game. With the title, I found myself being sucked out of the story and while it lessened by the playful banter between characters (on repeat, after a while), it still made me question exactly how important the mission really was and why I was hunting down material to make things that didn't' really impact much more than minor aspect of play-style. Fun, at first - sure but it got old and useless quickly, especially since you can find equivalent things and explore abilities more thoroughly without crafting.
I loved the Witcher for many more reasons and in this title crating was well executed because it was relevant to the setting and character needs. It was reduced to minor field salves and potions the character was already setup to know and use regularly. Crafting weapons and armor required reforging existing weapons and networking with the right people with appropriate skills. The ONLY complaint was that it broke the sense of time because in the back-end, there was pressure to solve the initial problem. Yet, without the pressure there's no real reason why the character wouldn't let it fall to another... so, win some and lose some.
I get the objective of crafting and I understand the value of implementing it in limited quantity and context, but fine tuning it can be cumbersome. For it to be robust requires a very large database of item combinations. Too simple, it's pointless; too robust, it's a distraction from the point.
To be fair, I'm a "does the story drive the mechanics or does the mechanics drive the story?" kind of guy with an aversion toward the latter, and RPGs are in this mixed state where the lean to the latter to reinvent the former.
Thats just my exhaustive 2 cents
