nomotog

When it comes to crafting, I don't think we should be borrowing from combat because crafting and combat are really two different animals. I have seen that in motion before and crafting combat doesn't have the same level of spectacle as combat with swords and spells. Well maybe if you forged swords by throwing them at dragons well ridding wolves, but that wouldn't really be crafting. I think crafting works best when you play the roll of a monkey banging rocks together trying to figure out which ones make fire. Make it all about exploration. Finding new materials and then finding out what you can do with them. I like to point to Dead rising 2 as the best crafting system I have ever seen.

I'll toy around with this. A big part of the setting seems to be souls. Maybe we should craft with that. Different souls have different effects. The soul of a master thief would be a sneak enchantment the soul of a old mage would give a mana enchantment. Kind of like TES, but you wont be killing people to collect their soul. You take a impression of their soul and use that to craft your enchantment. You could take an impression from someone alive, or dead, in combat or out. You can even take a impression when talking to someone. The impression you get also is varied based on what the person was doing at the time. If you snap a picture of a mage casting fireball, you get a different enchantment then a mage who has been made to feel stupid by a riddle he didn’t get.

Dragon's dogma. I wanted to give this one some thought because it's doesn’t work and it's hard to describe why. It's again the 1+2=3 system that I so loved from arcanum so it should be just as good right? Well I already told you it doesn’t work and after a lot of thought I think I know why. It's completely insular. The system in arcanum fed off of the character creation system and then into every other aspect of the game. You had to invest skill points into your different skills and that kind of informed you about how cool crafting was. Dragon's dogma doesn’t have any skills that relate to crafting. You can very easily go through the whole game not realizing that their is a crafting system. It also doesn’t help that the system feeds in on it's self. You can combine a dirty cloth with a flask of water and get a clean cloth. Then combine that clean cloth with a rock to get a dirty cloth again. I basically spins around and around without interacting with much other then it’s self. The system just dosen't impact the game.

You bring up a lot of good points about crafting, but I'll only talk about one of them so I can keep this post short. Setting plays a big role in how crafting gets implemented. Arcamum is a setting about the emergence of science and the player gets to play a part in that through their own inventions and creations. Fallout 3 is about taking the ruins of the old world to invent a ironic new world. Again you do exactly that through crafting. Ditto with dead rising 2, it's about seeing the trappings of every day life changing into killing weapons. These settings all work really well with crafting new and exciting items. (This is also why fallout NV dose crafting so poorly (in my view), it doesn’t have this idea of reinventing and transformation.) Now the medieval fantasy setting doesn’t support crafting as well. There is nothing left to invent. It’s all been invented long ago. That means the player is limited to just remaking the items they find in the dungeon or at the blacksmith. Crafting really serves little point because you can just buy it instead.

Crafting is a pet mechanic of mine, so I want to get in on this. I'll start by saying that the best crafting system I have experienced is Arcanum’s. It was simple and I think that's why it worked so well. Each recipe only needed just two items, and that allowed you to start crafting literally instantly. You could craft 4 or 5 things in the first 2 maps if you had the right skills. Latter on the system would totally brake the economy, but the game didn't really use money as a way to balance things, so I didn't brake the game just the bank. Tided for the best crafting system is the one in dead rising 2. The core is the same, You take two items together and get a third. The difference is that items no longer require a recipe and that allows for a level of exploration. The system is also integrated as a core mechanic. The game literally revolves around crafting. The inventory system also played into the crafting very well. You are limited to just a hand full of items and have to make choices of what to carry based on where your going and what you might be able to craft along the way. The whole system was just so tightly integrated. I think the reason I like these two systems is because they don’t push crafting back like most do. They make it take so long to gather the supplies, that your crafted items can’t keep up with your loot. I’ll also make a note about fallout 3. It dose push crafting back, but it also made the items you craft unique and powerful so they would still useful no matter when you actually got the chance to make them.