I've never seen a game execute on this idea well, or maybe I've got a misconstrued idea of how much they really add to gameplay. From what I've seen in many MMOs and other games their profession systems aren't any fun. Most of my memories consist of collecting a bunch of materials and then making my character build the same item over and over to level up my profession skill while I'm doing something else. Its not fun, but you do it to get ahead in the game. Has anyone seen a game deliver on this game idea very well, or at least engaging?
I know that the professions themselves aren't supposed to be fun, their just there to accent the main gameplay. Such as having the best gear being crafted gear, so when players get it they feel some level of accomplishment. I still don't like one dimensional profession/craft systems though.
ID:1675284
 Sep 7 2014, 10:33 am
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When you're dealing with games, you can't think in terms of complete realism. As with any skill, you can't be just told how to do something and be expected to do it perfectly on your first try, even with a full step-by-step guide. Some things just require practice.
That's the point of a crafting skill progression, it's the accumulated practice that your character has in that skill. You also have to remember that you're piloting a character, not yourself, for the most part, in MMO's. If you're talking about adding more diversity into a crafting system, I had one that worked something like this: You have your skill in the profession, let's say Blacksmithing. You levelled up your skill by making items or doing blacksmithing quests. When you first learn the skill from a trainer, you're given a few really basic blueprints to get started. That's where the simplicity really stopped, though. If you wanted to craft a sword, you needed a few things. First of all, you needed the materials to do so and secondly you needed the blueprints for the weapon or modification. Blueprints could be any number of things. For the sword example, you might have a blueprint for anything from blade design, hilt design, colour, modifications (such as reducing weight to add attack speed) and anything else like enchantments and abilities. You could get blueprints from buying them, quests, dungeons or other things. The rarest and most epic blueprints were designed to be given as rare drops from boss monsters, making them highly sought after. The problem was that the success chance was based on your skill relative to the total design and modifications of the item you were trying to forge. Yeah, you could just dump all of the abilities into the badest sword ever, but without the skill to do so, you were very unlikely to succeed. Even with max blacksmithing skills, extremely complex weapons, made from intricate (nice looking) styles and epic-tier enchantments would take a lot of luck and work to finish. Once you had the blade design finished that you wanted to start work on, it would give you a material list for everything you'd need for that particular design. Once you had all of the correct materials, you could work on it. Success didn't guarantee the finished product though and let me explain. Working on an item gave it a certain completion percentage, based on your skill rank and a random chance. If you succeed, the item's progression would increase depending on how well you succeeded. Once it's at 100%, it's finished and can be used. Once you work on an item, it consumes the materials to work on it, though, whether you succeed or fail. Added to the fact that you could only work on an item every so often increased the value of those priceless masterpieces. Say you've meshed your blueprints into this elaborate, super badass weapon of mass destruction. Your completion chance at max skill level might only be like 10%, meaning there's only a 10% chance of it actually increasing the completion percentage. Even if you manage to succeed, on average the completion percentage might only go up by 3 to 5%. And an item like this likely requires extremely rare and costly materials to use, 90% of which will completely go to waste. On average, you'll need to work on this weapon up to 300 times before it's completed and intricate weapons have a longer cooldown before they can be worked on again, up to a day. That's like spending an entire year doing nothing but working on this incredible, overpowered as shit sword, but by god damn, you'll have earned that sucker at least. The system was designed to be virtually infinitely scalable and allow players to create weapons to their perfect specifications, giving them almost unlimited creativity, as long as they possess the blueprints and skills to make what they want. I hope you could somewhat understand what I was talking about in that long post. It's a system I worked on for a while when I still programmed in DM, but I've adapted it recently for a Tabletop RPG under the same principles. | |
I have noticed a trend toward mini-games, which allow the player to actually pick locks or hack into computers or whatever. But crafting seems to still be boring as hell. I remember getting real sick of it back when I played Runescape...and now I watch my roommate playing Skyrim and there's almost no difference.
I like SA's system, it adds so much depth to something that is normally a time waster on the side. The only game I play right now with a fun crafting system is Minecraft (oh, really?!). I think its main draws are that there are no fail rates and no levels. As long as you have the ingredients you can make it. They do have "enchanting levels" but getting the maximum enchantment level takes about 30 minutes. So really the focus is on exploring to find materials. | |
For my game, I'm adding a cooking system in which after you make your custom formula, you may cook it, and depending on how long you keep it heated for, the end result will be different. In this way, it's more engaging. Other features along these lines will be added, but it's what I had in mind.
The coolest crafting system I've seen was on Age of Wushu where there was this one Herbalist quest. What was so cool is that you had to heat the herbs to the appropriate temperature, cool them down and do something else that I can't remember now. Sadly, they only had that implemented for the one non-repeatable quest. Makes you think. | |
I do like Mini-games actually. Honestly, even adding mini-games to a basic RPG crafting system and let how you do on that game determine how well you crafted the item would be nice. The difficulty of the game could even scale depending on your level compared to the item you're trying to make.
My crafting system, like I said, was kinda taken from the Tabletop design I'd done, where it's kinda hard to do mini-games. Haha. | |
Crafting can't be a time sink. I've shown in my game how to improve crafting. First crafting isnt a level able skill. Instead harder minerals have harder "time bars" is what I called them. Also the reward is quick and some classes can even level through a crafting. Example my food class gains experience from eating good food.
I think what I did is entertaining but there's always ways to improve and be funner than my crafting system. It also depends on what you are going for. One thing is for sure people need to not make it such a grind just to extend gameplay | |
I intent to use another concept which has still has a lot of similarities to Mouchys proposition:
The crafting is based on individual skills for individual items or item-types. Like all the other skills (e.g. for fighting and magic) they are often independent from each other and can be learned any time when a teacher is met or something in the world has been accomplished/triggered. Some of these skills are interconnected because e.g. to craft a more complicated weapon type you have to practice with a crappier one before, while the crappier type can be fulfilled by learning any of range of possible weapone making skills. The pace of learning skills is limited by time intervals. Give the players a skill to choose each week and the possibility to safe up a few weekly skill slots when they don't find anything they are interested in. This way, everybody has time to spend on exploring the world, interacting with each other and trying things out. Crafting is a process of trial-and-error and communicating with others to explore possibly ways to reach desired skills ("How did you learn to craft such a masterpiece of craftmanship?" - "I once saw how a dragons breath turned the steel armor of soldiers into something totally different. The poor guys never saw the next day but it inspired me to ask the alchemist for a rare ingredient called the dragon's breath, too. Funny aye, how things work out?"). Everybody can do enything if he/she wants to develop in that direction and is able to tigger the respective events. Furthermore, you have to give them something to do while crafting. Give them main ingredients, and secondary ingredients which could be used instead (during shortcomings) and increase the worth of items and, thus, crafted items as a whole by using up more ingredients in total. Failing to craft the whole thing is disappointing for players. I could be beneficial to create an item stepwise while using up individual ingredients each step. If the players crafts in a favorable environment (e.g. a full-blown smithy) he/she is less likely to fail a step. You can give them buffs like fighters and mages. E.g. let them activate a state of "Deep Concentration" to reduce fail rate for a certain amount of time to succeed in critical crafting steps where they could lose the more valuable ingredients. as you might have guessed already: This whole structure is a mess to balance out. I don't intent to create a perfet balanced skill- and craft-system because I aim more for the exploration and roleplaying, not the comparison between player characters by skills and stats. One of the few games which accomplished giving craftign a deeper meaning was Runescape. Yes, it was/is grindy as hell and it is used for player comparison. On the other hand, you actually need it in varous quests and combine it with others skills (e.g. fighting) this way. You have territories which are unreachable until you have the the crafting skills. There are ingame-guilds (besode player guilds) which give you some feeling of accomplishment. This feeling together with more than just clicking to create stuff instantly or after a delay makes crafting professions interesting. Being able , or more like being encouraged, to play a hybrid is interesting, too. | |
MMO crafting is a grindfest. I like crafting systems that use experimentation. Mixing materials and creating new items is innovative. The intrigue grabs my attention.
I'd like to see a mix between Deadrising 2 and Skryim's crafting system. | |
Time for some shameless self promotion. This resource will cover all your crafting needs on BYOND.
http://www.byond.com/developer/RedHallDev/Craft_Pro With that you can basically add crafting to your game in no time at all. | |
This is some powerful necromancy bringing back this post...
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The system I am making no there is no leveling up of any crafting skill or leveling up material collecting skill. The whole idea of grinding crafting is just not fun.
There is only collecting materials and finding recipes. Materials and recipes are also scattered around the world. However any player can just tell another player a recipe. Or there is trial/error.
Lastly, I feel this is most important crafted items should be worth while. The player needs to feel like its worth the effort. If they are getting better drops fighting bosses then there is no point. So currently in my game crafted items are better then dropped items.