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Crafting sucks in 99% of cases

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
It's become a trend to add crafting systems to games. A vocal minority of players who like repetitive resource farming for some reason even demand it to be added into classic CRPGs, and sometimes even pure action games... even though it rarely adds anything to the game. In fact, it usually massively detracts from the game.

How most crafting systems work:

- farm resources by standing next to an ore vein and attacking it with your pickaxe till it's harvested
- gather 100 pieces of the resource so you can craft a weapon or a piece of armor
- farm the next better resource to improve your equipment

It's very grindy and boring and ruins the itemization, especially in RPGs. And it's either pointless or the best skill in the game: either found unique items are better than crafted ones, in which case you can completely ignore crafting. Or crafted items are much better than found unique ones, in which case discovering a unique item isn't exciting but a letdown.

And crafting an item is usually a lot less fun than looting one off a tough boss enemy or finding one in a secret room within a deep dungeon.

Discovering a unique item is always a surprise (at least on your first playthrough). You kill a tough enemy, then get to wield his fuckoff sword. Or you explore a dangerous tomb and find an ancient king's ceremonial armor which has a unique enchantment on it. In both cases, you are rewarded for performing a core gameplay activity (combat and exploration, respectively) with something new and shiny that you didn't know you would find there.

Crafting, on the other hand, gives you predictable rewards for what's essentially a grind. First, you learn the recipe for the fuckoff mithril sword +10. Long before you even hold it in your hands, you know exactly what its stats are going to be. Then you have to find the resources for it. 100 mithril, a ruby to set into the hilt, and fireoil to infuse the blade with. But neither of these is a unique item: these resources can be farmed in various different places, or they can be straight up purchased from a vendor. Unique items that are found in dungeons or dropped by specific enemies are fun to acquire even on a replay when you already know where they are and what they do, because you have to go into that one specific dungeon and defeat that one specific enemy. The resources for crafted items can be gotten anywhere, unless they require a specific unique ingredient which is only dropped by a certain boss enemy... in which case you can scrap the entire crafting crap and just make the boss drop the finished item.

I tried several of these survival crafting games, and while I like survival, the whole crafting aspect just feels boring and tedious. And in RPGs, I usually never go for the crafting skill because crafting is such a boring and grindy endeavor. It's repetitive by its very nature.

It feels like you're doing the job of a villager in Age of Empires, except instead of just sending him off to work you have to manually click on the tree 100 times in order to harvest all the wood.
 

TheHeroOfTime

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The main issue I have with the crafting in games like Ark or Conan is that is more aimed to the muliplayer than playing solo. Thankfully you can tweak the drop amount that you get harvesting and make it way less grindy, while keeping the interest of having to explore and gather new materials for new equipment or building stuff.
 

Ghulgothas

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I like crafting in RPG's when it's condensed into as few variables as possible, makes it feel more like a treasure hunt for all the parts than grinding for the industrial quantities of raw material you need to build your ideal Robinson-Crusoe Island Megaplex.

Like in Arcanum where it's only two components of iterating complexity from earlier in a chain; or UnderRail where it's a handful of fundamental pieces and optional modular components; each form dependent on skill investment that also affects other aspects of gameplay like feat requirements.

Better yet if you can hand that it off to a follower/hireling/trainer to do it for you.
 
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Crafting, on the other hand, gives you predictable rewards for what's essentially a grind. First, you learn the recipe for the fuckoff mithril sword +10. Long before you even hold it in your hands, you know exactly what its stats are going to be. Then you have to find the resources for it. 100 mithril, a ruby to set into the hilt, and fireoil to infuse the blade with. But neither of these is a unique item: these resources can be farmed in various different places, or they can be straight up purchased from a vendor. Unique items that are found in dungeons or dropped by specific enemies are fun to acquire even on a replay when you already know where they are and what they do, because you have to go into that one specific dungeon and defeat that one specific enemy. The resources for crafted items can be gotten anywhere, unless they require a specific unique ingredient which is only dropped by a certain boss enemy... in which case you can scrap the entire crafting crap and just make the boss drop the finished item.
This sort of crafting only works in a game like EVE Online, where leaving the safety of towns is dangerous and unpredictable due to unrestricted PVP. If your game isn't built around an unrestricted PVP environment, you shouldn't even be considering this mechanic.
 

Morpheus Kitami

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grinding for the industrial quantities of raw material you need to build your ideal Robinson-Crusoe Island Megaplex.
I think this may be why people keep wanting this to happen. Because who doesn't want to live like Robinson Crusoe, or build a cool log cabin out in the woods? Thing is as we've seen so many times, there's a lot of unavoidable busywork in these games. Whack tree with hand twenty times, whack rock with hand fifty times, make stone axe, kill deer, make bandage out of deerskin to heal broken hand, now chop down twenty trees for your first house. People aren't necessarily playing this stuff because its fun, they're playing it so they can do a fantasy survival LARP. Can't make that easier by blowing up chunks of the forest with C4 or doing some Dragon Ball Z ki attacks or something, because that'd take away from the LARP.
This is probably why the games that do it well usually make it a side system for a handful of special items. You don't need to melt down that generic +1 dagger for iron ore or some crap in those systems.
 

Butter

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Is anyone going to disagree? Crafting is just a boring way to grind out items that could have otherwise been used as loot or quest rewards.
 

Moaning_Clock

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I liked the Alchemy and Crafting system in Dungeon Rats and Age of Decadence - simple crafting system. The Alchemy system in Morrowind was also interesting. But these didn't feel like crafting. Everything that's overly complex or the main part of a game, is not my cup of tea. I dislike the system in Sword of the Stars: The Pit since I don't want to look it up in the wiki and just try out different recipes - after playing that game for years from time to time I got like 5 recipes out of it - including just cooking meat. Minecraft just feels like busy work to an extend.

If it's simple and a side aspect great, if it's complex and main draw meh.
 

Devastator

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I found BG2’s approach agreeable. You on occasion find some rare artifacts and you bring them to an expert for assembly (I’m an adventurer not a blacksmith!). I find that more complex systems (where it’s a grind) do not add anything to the game. I always ignore such crafting altogether. Games really should have the option to turn off crafting out of the box. Inventory management is time consuming enough; I don’t want my inventory full of assorted lengths of wire.
 

vazha

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I liked the Alchemy and Crafting system in Dungeon Rats and Age of Decadence - simple crafting system. The Alchemy system in Morrowind was also interesting. But these didn't feel like crafting. Everything that's overly complex or the main part of a game, is not my cup of tea. I dislike the system in Sword of the Stars: The Pit since I don't want to look it up in the wiki and just try out different recipes - after playing that game for years from time to time I got like 5 recipes out of it - including just cooking meat. Minecraft just feels like busy work to an extend.

If it's simple and a side aspect great, if it's complex and main draw meh.
Even there, albeit its competently done, I enjoyed it least compared to the other aspects of the game.
 

deuxhero

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To work, crafting needs to make it so either
a: finding the resource is the reward in and of itself.
b: the resource should be common and easily obtained.

Never in the middle. One unique component plus some common ones is fine, but no ingredient should be only somewhat rare.

In the case of a, the resource is of very finite quantity. The advantages over just giving the player an item are room for customization (do you want the wondermetal to be made into a sword, an axe or a shield?), and for characterization (if a character's background in swordsmith, the player expects them to make some damn swords).

In the case of b, the crafting functions is a way a skill gate for to avoid having the item laying around in the world "raw", and to add a skill gate to having the item (so not just any shmuck can buy it.) This skill need not be (and in many ways shouldn't be) a skill exclusively for crafting, but rather a multi-purpose skill. A good example of this being handled well is New Vegas's explosive skill. It wouldn't make sense for improvised grenades to be everywhere in the game world, but it does make sense a character skilled with explosives could build one from powder, an empty can and some other stuff, and that serves a useful role of letting an explosive focused character have weapons to play with without making every other character risk facing them.
 

Grunker

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yep. KotC is one of the worst examples because it literally makes all other items in the game completely useless. Any drop or item in a shop is way less useful than what you make yourself

The only way to make it work is to make the crafting system seperate from other systems: i.e. what you craft you can't get in other places and vice versa. Kotor2 kindda does this, or The Witcher's alchemy.
 

curds

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Crafting system like Arcanum = good.
Crafting system like ToEE/KotC (just costs gold and XP, no farming resources) = okay.
Crafting system like Witcher 3, Skyrim, or any number of MMOs = bad.
 

Fargus

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I think crafting belongs in repetitieve survival trash.

But Arcanum's crafting was great because it was simple. You learn a schematics and tech discipline, you craft some good, useful shit and feel like Tony Stark. Nothing more nothing less.
 
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The only games where I've ever enjoyed crafting are those where I can automate it, such as Factorio and Satisfactory. I hate having to collect junk in an RPG.
 

curds

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Crafting was good in The Witcher 1.

Everybody already knows about the great alchemy system, but there was also only like three sets of armour in the game, and the best one required you to collect three or four components that took you on little mini-quests to find, and then a smith made you this awesome armour. Was very satisfying.
 

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