JarlFrank
I like Thief THIS much
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.
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.