Why do many RPG fans hate crafting?

[Chippy]

It just hasn't been done right yet.

What would "doing it right" look like? What would the challenge to overcome be? Describe the gameplay value of crafting "done right".

I was taking the mick about something else.

Ok, Umm, good crafting:
KOTOR2. Because they realised crafting is the most interesting just as you start your character, as it could be the difference between life and death. They also tied it to the story by having you scrounge for any materials that may give you and advantage over the odds set against you. Scrounging was important because you were on a station that didn't have access to the weapons available in the universe because the energy weapons would cause a reaction that blew the station you were on up. So it was very much a low-item setting at first which I think works best with crafting. The story aslo provoked me to go outside of my comfort zone and craft traps and meds instead of just buying the best weapon and assuming I'd find health potions.

Baldurs Gate. I know it didn't have crafting but it should have. Based off my point above, it was a relatively low magic setting, and they implemented the iron crisis. Starting off early without any money and having to choose between investing in plate, shields & iron weapons that would possibly break, and wooden weapons could have been great if they made the iron crisis more crippling. I know that the price of iron was supposed to be high - but really it wasn't, and the price of wooden weapons was always dirt cheap. If they had both been high, I would have invested in crafting wooden weapons and it would have stimulated different playing styles. It could have been a difficulty setting.

Arcanum. The schematics were more interesting than the magical items I found, and they were placed with distinction. E.g. The schematic you found by the ancient submarine or the final alchemy concoction in the vendigroth ruins. Also, you weren't guaranteed to find the weapons available to a tech player, so learning the schematics and then making powerful items/weapons out of them made you choose between investing in attributes, skills and statistics and the tech schematics themselves - as opposed to most RPGs where you get this guaranteed selection of +1 to +5 weapons over the course of the game. Plus you had the found schematics which you needed the attributes for.


Done bad:
Skyrim. Just craft to lessen the time it takes to kill stuff. If they had introduced crippling sun damage for vampires and got you to craft daylight rings that minimised the damage, or explored werewolves actually being powerful and requiring silver...

Modding weapons: Deus Ex, Fallout:NV.
As above, you just killed stuff quicker, or invested in the mod to replace investing in the skill.

Believe it or not, I think King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame was onto something with magical items, and it introduced randomised crafting in the sequel. But the first game made your characters more powerful using the environment: the terrain, forest, a spell for fog or a storm. So it did what a lot of RPGs fail to do - it made me choose to equip items that only made me more powerful under certain conditions instead of all of the time. Which is where late game boredom usually comes from; characters that are too powerful for the endgame.

So if developers start to give us crafting that we have to invest in over the course of the game, and then use the environment, the economy, and the setting to provoke appropriate choices in crafting to work with character development (instead of being an alternative to it) instead of randomised loot that just makes your build damage a bit more until you get the best weapon (energy sword in Deus Ex, dragon material in Skyrim), it might even solve the broken economy and late game powergaming typical in most games.

Sooo ... tell Saywer I just solved it.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

In DOS, getting a level and making new weapons and armor makes and keeps you OP. It is way, way more powerful than looted items.

I suggest you play with the total overhaul mod they have for the EE (called epic something or other I think). It does wonders for everything, especially combat, but also balancing crafting a little.

Regular crafting only increases base numbers, such as armour value, which is useful but not everything, you can buy or find gear that offers more interesting stats, such as immunities and attribute point bonuses. For example, I bought a belt which allows my PC to have the regeneration spell without having to invest any skill points in that school of magic. You can't craft that AFAIK. My heavy hitter is using a sword taken from a boss, etc etc. Crafting stuff is ok for getting through the game, but it lacks that something extra that only genuinely looted or well chanced drops can offer.

 

[zapotec]

I am not big fan of crafting, but I liked the subtle hint in gothic 2 to get a job. very realistic

 

[thesheeep]

I'm surprised to see some people praising Fallout 4 crafting here. You're pretty much obligated to pick up hundreds of pounds of general office crap and garbage to condense to crafting materials, it's a retarded system, hate it. I don't want to be a junk collector in my RPGs.

I think something similar can (or could) work in an actual survival RPG, where you carry a device that lets you turn scrap into actual materials and then craft something from them.
But in Fallout 4 it was just tacked on, as it is on most games that don't focus on crafting.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

Too many different crafting ingredients or a clunky crafting UI will ruin the crafting experience. OP crafts will ruin the rest of the game, though.

 

[Barbalos]

I'm surprised to see some people praising Fallout 4 crafting here. You're pretty much obligated to pick up hundreds of pounds of general office crap and garbage to condense to crafting materials, it's a retarded system, hate it. I don't want to be a junk collector in my RPGs.

I think something similar can (or could) work in an actual survival RPG, where you carry a device that lets you turn scrap into actual materials and then craft something from them.
But in Fallout 4 it was just tacked on, as it is on most games that don't focus on crafting.

Yeah sure, it could be suitable for game based around crafting. But I would never play such a game, and that's not an RPG (at least primarily), so I woudn't run into it.

 

[Zombra]

Regular crafting only increases base numbers, such as armour value, which is useful but not everything, you can buy or find gear that offers more interesting stats, such as immunities and attribute point bonuses. For example, I bought a belt which allows my PC to have the regeneration spell without having to invest any skill points in that school of magic. You can't craft that AFAIK. My heavy hitter is using a sword taken from a boss, etc etc. Crafting stuff is ok for getting through the game, but it lacks that something extra that only genuinely looted or well chanced drops can offer.

Speaking not to DOS specifically but to all games: when you can indeed apply every effect in the game to crafted items (e.g. first I take a belt, then I make it out of gold for +20 efficiency, then I add the regeneration spell effect, then I add the penalty of -10% to movement speed to reduce the cost, etc.), it perforce drains all the "specialness" out of everything and turns all loot into dull assembly line commodities. No longer can you have the Sword of Omens or the Eye of Vecna, it's all just "weapon type Y with effects #2, 4, 7, and 26". This type of thing can be a lot of fun to build but something is definitely lost.

 

[J_C]

If crafting is all about crafting basic items like ammo, consumables or adding a small enchantment to an item, I immedeately disregard it. It is just boring busywork. Crafting which is limited to a small number of recipes, blueprints, which result in powerful equipment and where it takes actual effort to get the ingredients/parts is much more fun.

Take Divinity Original Sin or any new Fallout games. You can basically craft any basic items. But you don't have to, you are not required to, the game can be easily finished without them. Why? Because in a game where crafting is just a small side activity, the game has to be balanced for players who don't want to use crafting. Thus, it doesn't matter if you craft or don't craft. So why would I waste my time collecting shit if crafting won't yield anything cool and unique.

There are 2 examples which come to mind when it comes to good crafting. Baldur's Gate 2, where you have to collect pieces of powerful weapons/armor, and Age of Decadence, where you will probably only craft a few items, but those items will help you a lot in combat.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Take Divinity Original Sin or any new Fallout games. You can basically craft any basic items. But you don't have to, you are not required to, the game can be easily finished without them. Why? Because in a game where crafting is just a small side activity, the game has to be balanced for players who don't want to use crafting. Thus, it doesn't matter if you craft or don't craft. So why would I waste my time collecting shit if crafting won't yield anything cool and unique.

The crafting in DOS is a lot more interesting than it seems at first glance, there's a lot more than just making basic equipment. It's kind of a game within a game puzzling out what everything does & when you hit on something useful its a great reward, for example one of my characters really needed some movement bonus as none of their current equipment was helping in this regard & the equipment that did help was quite a few levels old, & at that moment I just happened upon a crafting solution that provided me with a ring with a movement bonus. Likewise the rubies were a great discovery.

Just like diablo-style loot systems (which the game uses) the trash crafting stuff has some epics hidden amongst the great clog of trash.

 

[Beastro]

I usually hate crafting, but I love "crafting" quests, like collecting pieces to rebuild some legendary weapon.

 

[Roqua]

I'm honestly having a hard time seeing how people can't see how OP the crafting was in DOS. You pump up blacksmithing and I played the game based around collecting mats for new weapons/armor on my next level up and got items way, way more powerful than I could ever loot. It really was as clear as day. The crafted weapons/armor were so good and so clearly superior it dramatically hurt the game. I'm really having a hard time understanding how other people didn't see this. Just like in Underrail - the shit you could make, especially with the right feats, was light years beyond anything you could loot - but at least it was somewhat balanced with the hassle of trying to sell shit and hunt down the needed mats, and the random quality of good inputs. DOS just had huge tier jumps between levels and not much required to make the new weapons/armor for each level that were way, way better than anything looted for weapons/armor.

 

[Wunderbar]

I just started Underrail and i want to say that crafting is really interesting.

 

[Yosharian]

By far the biggest problems for me are hoarding useless shit because it might be useful (oh, you sold that piece of junk in the first 10 mins of the game? Too bad, it's actually one of the ingredients for the best weapon in the game!) and being afraid to use ingredients because I figure new loot will drop 10 mins after I craft it that'll obsolete it instantly.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

A lot of my annoyance comes down to how many games staple crafting into it, or list it as a feature to be excited over when it often times boils down to the same repetitive shopping list we've seen before. I don't know who it appeals to, collecting all sorts of silly shit, maybe some Rainman idiot savant.

When you put crafting in your game, it will always be much more interesting if it's a rare event that requires a really badass monster dead and a really skilled craftsman to put it to use. When you're collecting tens of hundreds of generic items, that is the sort of thing that makes me check out of ever doing crafting. Why would I waste time clogging my inventory when I could do the more fun option of exploring and finding a proper weapon in the depths of some dungeon?

It really annoys me when an RPG puts some sort of durability thing into its weapons/armour and here you are, able to craft Icy Sword of Astral Devastation +3 but if your cuirass is breaking? Well apparently you can't repair it because you're conveniently retarded and the only cure is an in-game merchant/blacksmith you would never care about otherwise but will solve your problems by repairing all your gear yet mysteriously never making any gear that is worth buying.

And that's another thing, when you're crafting you often invalidate the existence of trade NPCs. They don't become NPCs anymore, they're just moving pylons that you interact with to sell trash to and move along. I'd rather those NPCs have a purpose and offer convenience to you, not you being the walking Swiss army knife.

The UI usually sucks dick too.

 

[Zombra]

By far the biggest problems for me are hoarding useless shit because it might be useful (oh, you sold that piece of junk in the first 10 mins of the game? Too bad, it's actually one of the ingredients for the best weapon in the game!) and being afraid to use ingredients because I figure new loot will drop 10 mins after I craft it that'll obsolete it instantly.

I'm experiencing this big time playing Witcher 3. I need money to buy water, and I have 8 'doses' of emerald dust I can sell for a few pennies (Really dude? You'll give me 17 coins for a pouch of emerald dust??), and the description says I can craft cool stuff with emerald dust. I guess I'll sell, I don't know, half of the emerald dust? Maybe I can get by without water? Maybe I'll just sell one? If I need to buy emerald dust later it'll be about 1000x as much as I can get for selling it. I hate this.

I also found my first full set of recipes for 'Witcher gear'. Cool! I even have most of the random garbage I need to craft it, but I need ... huh? Meteorite ore? I already have some which I found randomly who knows when, but not enough. Alchemists don't sell it. So now what? I just walk around and hope I randomly find some more? Sometime? When can I expect to find it? In an hour? 10 hours? Why is this fun?

Give me a quest to find the parts, then when I do the quests and find the parts let me make the item. Collecting rusty screws and bone fragments for 50 hours in case I want them later is garbage gameplay.

 

[Ranarama]

Because as frequently implemented it's fiddly busywork that involves the worst parts of inventory management.

In actual RPGs you pay someone else to do this crap.

 

[laclongquan]

Because in many games crafting is not a central part of gameplay thus ruining the game. Crafting can easily do that.

Arcanum done the thing right. Take smithing: you collect materials, you make weapons and items, you use it in combat. And the higher your tech rating is, the better the things you make can function.

Prince of Qin done the thing right. You can choose to NOT invest in the skill thus have a stronger, better character, or you can invest in the skill and start crafting. And the things you craft, you can buy near-equivalent in shops, but you dont have the freedom crafting can give you. IE if you dotn want time to shop around, crafting is a reasonable method.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Because in many games crafting is not a central part of gameplay thus ruining the game. Crafting can easily do that.

Arcanum done the thing right. Take smithing: you collect materials, you make weapons and items, you use it in combat. And the higher your tech rating is, the better the things you make can function.

Prince of Qin done the thing right. You can choose to NOT invest in the skill thus have a stronger, better character, or you can invest in the skill and start crafting. And the things you craft, you can buy near-equivalent in shops, but you dont have the freedom crafting can give you. IE if you dotn want time to shop around, crafting is a reasonable method.

Arcanum is one of the worst offenders for hunt-for-materials gameplay, which is the worst thing about crafting in RPGs.

Luckily you can just play mage, melee or gish and ignore that whole part of the game.

 

[Xunwael]

Crafting is nearly always tacked-on bullshit designed exclusively to waste your time so the game feels like it has more length while you go digging through every single trashcan you come across. And oh, you miss trashcan#87 in AREA8300, that's now blocked off? Too bad faggot, that trashcan was the only source for one of Best Item's parts. Yeah, you already have the other 37/38 parts but tough luck, get fucked. Pathfinder: Kingmaker took this to its logical conclusion, with its stupid crafting pieces in story and gated areas, in the inventories of random garbage mobs (so make sure you loot every single spider you see!), and literally hidden under random rocks in the wilderness and further hidden behind spot checks way too high to reliably succeed for the area they were in (so if you passed by it and didn't spot it, and had no reason to come back to that area, you'd never know), and you'd need to gather a dozen of these pieces to craft any of the shit. Stuff was hard enough to put together even when you knew where everything was; someone who doesn't has no chance at all, for whom the pieces do nothing but clog up their inventory and distract them. Only thing they were missing was to make crafting a skill you had to put points into if you wanted to use, just to add that extra layer of bullshit in the form of an opportunity cost to negate any advantage the crafted gear may provide.

I guess it can be done well, but most games don't and I can't immediately think of any that do. Guy at the top of this page mentions Arcanum, but that game had awful digging-around-in-trashcans-tier crafting. And of course, it added vendor RNG to it as well, so not only did you spend all your time digging through trashcans, but you compulsively ran by every single vendor that had a chance of randomly having the crating item you needed as well. Even PF:K didn't have that. Never mind other stupid shit like, not knowing if something you find in a trashcan is important or not. Should I hold on to these piles and piles of literal trash? Or should I vendor it? Guess I better hang on to it for the rest of the game just in case I discover that actually the best item in the game requires me to craft 40 different crap-tier items as progressive reagents for the ultimate item, for which I need all those 8000 tons of garbage I've been foolishly vendoring. Back to dumpster-diving for me then, since naturally the vendors don't carry this shit or save it for me.

It's just such an awful system to tack on to RPGs. Unless it's a core part of the game, just leave it out.

 

[Yosharian]

Yes but Kingmaker gives you the option of looting everything before you leave an area..

 

[laclongquan]

Because in many games crafting is not a central part of gameplay thus ruining the game. Crafting can easily do that.

Arcanum done the thing right. Take smithing: you collect materials, you make weapons and items, you use it in combat. And the higher your tech rating is, the better the things you make can function.

Prince of Qin done the thing right. You can choose to NOT invest in the skill thus have a stronger, better character, or you can invest in the skill and start crafting. And the things you craft, you can buy near-equivalent in shops, but you dont have the freedom crafting can give you. IE if you dotn want time to shop around, crafting is a reasonable method.

Arcanum is one of the worst offenders for hunt-for-materials gameplay, which is the worst thing about crafting in RPGs.

Luckily you can just play mage, melee or gish and ignore that whole part of the game.

What Arcanum had done was to force player into being a hobo, dumpster diver, the which gamers hate to think themselves as such.

It's unique in that regard.

As for hunt-for-material, Witcher, Morrowind, Legend of Mana etc... all have similar methods in doing so: harvest the plants.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

Crafting turns otherwise passable games into autistic nightmares. No matter how much amphetamine I take, such pathetic excuses for games are still more boring than filling out paperwork. Go take a class in carpentry or metalworking and build something that exists in the real world.

 

[Roqua]

Because in many games crafting is not a central part of gameplay thus ruining the game. Crafting can easily do that.

Arcanum done the thing right. Take smithing: you collect materials, you make weapons and items, you use it in combat. And the higher your tech rating is, the better the things you make can function.

Prince of Qin done the thing right. You can choose to NOT invest in the skill thus have a stronger, better character, or you can invest in the skill and start crafting. And the things you craft, you can buy near-equivalent in shops, but you dont have the freedom crafting can give you. IE if you dotn want time to shop around, crafting is a reasonable method.

Arcanum is one of the worst offenders for hunt-for-materials gameplay, which is the worst thing about crafting in RPGs.

Luckily you can just play mage, melee or gish and ignore that whole part of the game.

I agree a little but not really. On my magic playthroughs you still had to travel around to shops to hunt for good gear. It just removes a step. Hunt for gear or hunt for mats to make gear.

I dislike random shop or loot hunting mechanics as much as I dislike crafting focused games. But I also dislike random loot and much prefer everything be hand placed and specific. I also dislike random dungeons, etc. I want everything hand crafted and specifically designed, from dungeons, to loot, to shops inventory, etc. Everything besides the deep and involved manipulation of the rpg system manifested in conflict.

Edit - I just want to add even on my mechanics playthroughs I usually always go melee too, which is heavily reliant on crafting.

 

[what am i doing]

I think the bad implementations of crafting have been pretty well covered - to my mind there are two good forms of crafting which have a bit in common.

The good kinds are alchemy and enchanting. By alchemy I mean as seen in Arx Fatalis and Morrowind, and by enchanting I mean things like Diablo 2's runewords and TES enchanting in general. What both of these have in common is that they aren't intrusive to the rest of the game; the acquisition of materials isn't a chore apart from the regular gameplay, and the product of the crafting does not conflict with the rest of the game (mostly). Considering alchemy in its implementation in Arx and Morrowind, collecting ingredients was never something you had to go out of the way to do - you just harvested plants as you were going about your business. Occasionally you'd brew potions. These potions were useful, but not mandatory, and you could acquire them from merchants (or sell them to make money). This is a good crafting system. It doesn't add any great tedium, and it's useful while also being safe to ignore.

As far as enchanting goes, looking at Diablo 2, runes were a grind to get, but they weren't separate from the core gameplay. Killing monsters, picking up a few good things, and killing more monsters was Diablo 2's core gameplay loop, so runes fit fairly seamlessly in there. They didn't add tedium, they didn't break immersion, they just dropped occasionally and you'd collect them. Eventually you'd get enough good ones to make a runeword. You'd also keep an eye out for suitable equipment to make it in. Then you'd make a runeword. The resulting crafted item would typically be powerful, but not always better than existing unique or set items. So it was worth making certain runeword items, but unique and set items were still valuable and worth collecting. You might make a Grief weapon, but you'd still use Gore Rider boots that you found. TES enchanting sort of went halfway as the enchanted items produced were never well balanced, but the process of creating them was a good implementation. You just need a base item and a charged soul gem. Getting and filling a soul gem is fairly straightforward, it's just one thing. Getting a good soul would often be more challenging due to the powerful creatures you had to fight, but it was part of the core gameplay and not grindy to do.

So a good crafting system should have ingredient/material acquisition be unobtrusive and/or part of the core gameplay loop, and the products of a crafting system should neither eclipse nor be eclipsed by found or bought items. And the whole thing should be simple and straightforward.

A bonus for alchemy is that it fits well with most characters in your typical RPG. Alchemy is generally a form of wilderness survival; it shows how your character can live off the land and produce what he needs out of limited resources, which is something that makes sense for an adventurer. Bad crafting systems, like Skyrim's, have your character somehow be an expert in making all kinds of stuff, which tends not to overlap well with the role of an adventurer. It makes sense for an adventurer to be able to brew potions out of ingredients he finds in his travels; it doesn't make sense for an adventurer to be a skilled blacksmith unless he's somehow lugging around an entire smithy to work and practice as he makes his way across the wilderness. I feel like enchanting also makes sense from a character-integration perspective as it can often be portrayed as a function of a character's magical skill, or known lore learned in the course of his travels (ie, what runes to use and in what order), while the fact that you use an existing item as your base means you're not straying into absurd "explorer and part time blacksmith" territory. It was best in the case of Diablo 2 where despite being crafted and not found, runeword weapons managed to feel similar to unique items. Yes, it wasn't an ancient sword out of legend that you found deep in a forgotten ruin, but the value of the runes used, the fact that the weapon had a name, and the rarity and value of runeword items in general meant it still had a special feeling. It worked a lot less well in TES where enchanted items felt more generic and mundane.

Most crafting systems are total dogshit, though.

 

[Zombra]

I mean jesus christ, in what world am I supposed to look at this

and get excited or care?