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How the fuck can we solve the crafting OCD shit in RPGs

Unwanted

a Goat

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Dumbfuck Edgy Vatnik
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Crafting by itself may be worthwhile mechanic, but often in RPGs you end up gathering tons of materials that you never use because hurr durr. So you end up with backpack or stash full of useless reagents stored just in case and not sold because "maybe I'll need them". Happens to me every fucking time.

Which RPG's did crafting right?
 

Cael

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Crafting by itself may be worthwhile mechanic, but often in RPGs you end up gathering tons of materials that you never use because hurr durr. So you end up with backpack or stash full of useless reagents stored just in case and not sold because "maybe I'll need them". Happens to me every fucking time.

Which RPG's did crafting right?
NWN2. There is never enough of the high end materials to make items for all your companions. You can upgrade certain materials to higher tiers. Recipes means that there will be reagents you won't want to keep because you don't want the enchantment that it is tied to.
 

Terpsichore

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Maybe some sort of decay system for consumable items and the materials those are made with. They would lose effectiveness with time and eventually turn into mush. Though that's ultimately pointless if the game doesn't require you to use such items.
 
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aweigh

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elminage games do it right, but that's more of an enchantment system using only a few different types of magical ores that you find in drops or chests or farm from spots in game areas; these can modify over 20+ variables on a single piece of equipment. you can manipulate a shit load of things, like giving a sword more behead chance or instead enchanting a main-hand weapon and turning it into an off-hand weapon that can be dual-wielded, or you can give fire resistance to your shoes along with upgrading its armor class bonus and also enchanting them into allowing them to be equipped by any gender or race, etc.

there are literally dozens of different values but like i said it's more of an enchantment system. the elminage games do have a limited CRAFTING system where you can make special items that increase or reduce encounter rates or items that let you breath underwater or see fixed enemy encounters on your map, stuff like that, but it's very small in scope in comparison to all of the enchantment variables.
 

Funposter

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tbh Skyrim, if you consider it an "RPG". Limited to things which affect gameplay positively (potions, enchantments, weapons/armor+improvement of) instead of having the player spend hours on superfluous or situational bullshit. This isn't taking into account the balance, which was fucked beyond repair before being patched into oblivion. I'd have preferred enchantments to be based on spells known by the player, instead of requiring you to break down and destroy an item to learn its secrets, but even that potentially provides an interesting trade-off since the game is based around the explore->combat->loot-> loop, and forces the player to sacrifice short term gain (gold) for later benefits (big dick sword with 867 fire damage enchant).
 

Doctor Sbaitso

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Don't craft and don't obsessively collect shit? It will probably make for a more interesting time.

Neo Scavenger did crafting right and so did Ultima Underworld.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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I laughed at people naming Arcanum until I saw someone said Skyrim.

The last rpg I played that had crafting that was genuinely fun to use and actually came in handy was Risen. In theory it's not rocket science:

1. Create an economy in which the things you craft are objectively useful.
2. Keep it in check, so that it doesn't turn into (often literally) trash collecting.

This is vital, the rest is flavor. But we're out of luck, since economy in vast majority of crpgs is either broken from the start or not much longer after and everyone and their grandma and grandma's dog seem to madly love games about traversing meaningless locations in search for garbage.
 

zapotec

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Gothic 2 crafting wasn't bad, i especially liked that you must get a job for advancing the main quest
 
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Baldur's Gate 2 has my vote. To hell with all that pointless busywork and materials, give me a couple of interesting components to find and an expert NPC to assemble them into something truly unique.
 

Sykar

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UnderRail. Best stuff has to be crafted though you can get by on found stuff.

:deathclaw:

Most painful crafting system ever imagined by mankind.
Carrying around all that shit with low inventory space and limited encumbrance, that was fun, for sure ...

You are either stupid or outright Al Fabet. The blueprints tell you what you need and no item needs more than four components, usually just two with one or two extra slots for certain modifications. If you think you need the same type of part in 10 different quality levels and therefore run around with all that shit and pick it up every piece of scrap then you are a dumbfuck, pure and simple. What is more most of the high quality stuff can be bought from merchants so again no need to hoard an endless supply, the only component I would recommend hoarding are bullet casings for your preferred calibere/s. The only annoyance is the varying quality levels among merchants and therefore makes regular visits a certain tedium but far removed from retarded MMOs where you hog every piece of scrap you can find. That and if you go biology you should have decent dexterity or fishing becomes very annoying.
It is a deliberate design choice by Styg that you should NOT indulge in your OCD and pick up every piece of scrap you can find. It is nothing but a waste of time and the limited amount of money and items merchants are willing to buy make this an idiotic behavior to indulge in.

Edit: Also low inventory space? Did you even play the game? The only limiting factor is weight. If you could have 100 strength you could theoretically run around with a hundred guns and a thousand pieces of armor.
 
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whydoibother

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Inventory tetris and abundant loot, so that you get used early on that you don't pick everything off the ground. Every time you loot, you are used to the idea that you will pick up stuff you want, since your space is limited, and you are trained to be okay with leaving shit behind.
You can also make a potion crafting system where the player caries around herbs, and crafts potions on the go as needed. The same ingredients, plus/minus one, make the frost resist potion and the fire resist potion, so that you don't need to carry both, make them as you need them. Old Witcher games sort of had that, with herbs being used for their reagent value, not the actual herb, and alcohol being used for all potions, etc.
 

Falksi

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Morrowind has the perfect balance of player-involvement & relying on what's already available in-game. Crafting in most games is not only usually quite game-breaking, but also generally quite boring too, with very few surprises in store.

Morrowind allowed you to manipulate weapons & spells creatively, so added a layer of discovery & excitement. Whilst at the same time it gave you enough freedom & unique items to make items which you'd find throughout the game still valueable.

All modern crafting feels like now is a numbers game, and subsequently all items in such games don't feel like special discoveries, they just feel like number manipulators.
 

Hobo Elf

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The problem of crafting in most games lies in what the developers make realistic and what they abstract. Typically the realism comes from how many times you have to create an item to get enough crafting XP to level up / hit skill cap and the abstraction is in the materials needed to make an item, for example 10 bars of meteorite metal to make a dagger, which is utterly fucking idiotic and both things here lead to nothing but grind. There's nothing fun or rewarding about creating thousands of daggers to get enough skill in blacksmithing to make something useful. It's grindy, it's not fun, but most importantly it's never natural for the flow of the game as it forces you to go out of your way to do menial shit. This is the key word here: not natural to the flow of the gameplay loop. The solution is to just flip the abstraction to the amount of time and items required to master your craft and make material consumption more realistic. This means you need to gather less shit as you need less junk items to make something and you needn't waste time on something that should be a sub-activity to support your main game. Of course some games let you put points into crafting as you level up via usual means of just killing enemies, but these games tend to have pretty tacked on crafting systems that rarely offer you anything that is truly worthwhile.
 

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