Crafting in RPGs

One common feature in roleplaying games is the addition of a crafting system. This allows players to make useful items such as healing potions, weapons, and item enhancements. I personally do not like the way the system is usually implemented-where you must buy materials from vendors combined with materials you find questing and then piece them together. For example, here is a typical crafted item in Dragon Age:

To create a paragon frost rune, which adds frost damage to a weapon, a player needs to make 32 novice frost runes and upgrade each of them to the highest level as well as purchase 63 blank runestones and 56 etching agents from a vendor in the game. That's a hell of a lot to keep track of. And that's for just one rune-many weapons and pieces of armor can have several runes placed on them. The crafting portion of Dragon Age takes the player from enjoying a videogame to playing Microsoft Excel. Dragon Age 2 made a welcome change to this tired formula. Instead of relying exclusively on items purchased from vendors, the game's resources for crafting exist in the actual world. There are several different varieties of resources for each of the types of items you can craft in the game.

Here the common herb elfroot, useful for healing potions, is discovered.

I enjoy this method because it encourages full exploration of the world since crafting resources are found all over the place. Some are only located after defeating optional bosses, providing a benefit to undertaking difficult battles. These features make crafting a natural part of the game, instead of a task where the player has to open up a bunch of menus and do math to figure out what they can create. Additionally, the actual crafting screen in Dragon Age II is simple and elegant.

In the lower left it shows which resources you have located and the right side mentions what is required to create the individual item along with the information on what the item does. All you do is pay the gold cost required to make the item and it appears in your inventory, ready for use. Recipes for items are also integrated into exploration. Some are available from vendors, others from certain quests, and finally some are located in chests or other treasure areas. Throughout the game I always searched every area thoroughly to ensure that I didn't miss any precious recipes or crafting items.

Especially in the remains of this fellow after I slew him. Never know where some deathroot might be hiding!

 All that being said, there are some improvements that I feel could be made to the system. Some of the items like elfroot and deathroot are under-utilized because you only need three to four of them to make every item in the game, but there are a total of nine to find in the game. There also are not that many recipes. Perhaps adding some recipes that required more of the common items in the game would fix both problems.

The Best Way to Make a Game Fun? Do Something New.

The worst thing a game can do is bore the player. The easiest way to bore a player is to be repetitive. Whether it be reusing a puzzle, using endless waves of the same enemy, or the same game mechanic for every fight, it gradually will annoy me until I stop playing.


The first apple was great. The second was okay. The third was tolerable. The fourth made me vomit.

At that point, I'm unlikely to buy other games by that developer. So here's a few ways for a few of my favorite genres to avoid being dull.

Real Time Strategy
RTS titles have actually come a long way in avoiding becoming stale. In part, this is due to a lack of new releases in recent years, with only Starcraft II coming to mind as a major title this year. However, a much larger reason is that developers have shifted from a focus on starting with a small base, gathering resources to make your base larger, training and upgrading an army, and then advancing to destroy the enemy base. If you screw up somehow it means that you're set back a good half hour or more of playtime as you have to redo all these steps to try again.


It's a lot easier to blow up a house than to build a new one.

To evade this endless cycle, developers have added more creative objectives, optional side objectives that can make it easier to continue, and more personality to the game's storyline. For an example of the latter, Warcraft III featured an engaging storyline where you played with a Prince through his attempt to seek vengeance for an attack on his people by the undead. He then became corrupted and turned to the dead himself. In the next campaign you played him returning to attack his own people. Starcraft II included a number of missions where you were required to defend civilian populations, rescue prisoners, and perform other tasks that generally made the campaign stay fresh throughout the whole experience. A number of other games allow the player to pick different areas to attack, giving some interesting choices to spice up gameplay. Any new RTS game would be well advised to include these features if they want their game to impress anyone.

Unfortunately, there are still some weaknesses. In some cases, the campaign missions are just too long. For instance, there's one in Starcraft II where you are required to destroy a settlement that has been infested by the Zerg.


Infesting things always involves tentacles!


That sounds well enough, but there's something like 400 buildings you have to destroy, most of which take a long time to blow up. Additionally, you can usually only destroy them during the day because at night the buildings spawn large numbers of enemies that move toward your base. These enemies aren't THAT much of a threat but they do make it difficult to continue your offensive during the night. Even worse, the enemies are all of one type, a bunch of zombie-like foes who shamble without any strategy or tactics toward your main base. As the planet shifts between day and night every five minutes, you're left with having to spend somewhere around 40 minutes destroying enemies and buildings that aren't particularly engaging or interesting.

The original Starcraft campaign featured a similar problem in that the game featured three races, Terran, Protoss, and Zerg, but frequently in each campaign you would only fight one or those for the vast majority of it. This would get somewhat boring fairly quickly as you would keep having to kill the same types of enemy units. In the Terran campaign, you only got to fight against the Protoss once in the entire 10 mission campaign! If you go to the trouble of making multiple races for your game, you should at least allow the player to fight against each of them a few times.

Multiplayer games tend to avoid the problem of repetition because humans are far superior to the AI in their ability to use creative strategies with the tools at their disposal.


Although playing online does pose some other problems.

This makes sure that the game is always a challenge. However, if certain strategies are far superior to all of the other ones, the game quickly devolves in depth to become a matter of execution as opposed to strategy. This is why it is important for developers to continue to support their game through patching after it has been released. The balance problems, where certain units or strategies are far too strong or too weak, need to be addressed to keep the game interesting. With support, an online community can exist for years to come. People still play Warcraft II online and it came out in 1995!


And still features realistic explosions!

First Person Shooters

I addressed this a bit in my article about creating challenging enemies, so I won't add too much more here. Basically, avoid making the game into a series of identical firefights. Add something to spice it up. Make enemies be more intelligent, force the player to use more strategy, add some interesting set-piece events. A great example of this was in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, where for one mission you were shifted out of the action entirely to be the gunnery officer on an AC-130 gunship.


It's a nice change of pace to be able to point and click to blow up the enemy. Leaves a hand free for a beer.

Another instance in the sequel to Modern Warfare was when you had to use a shield to repel enemy gunfire while advancing through a prison against the guards. The enemy bullets make huge divots on the shield and a loud thump as they ricochet off. It really is quite terrifying at first.


It takes balls to want the enemy to shoot at you.

Role-playing games
One thing many RPGs do is reusing the same model of an enemy for much of the game. Sometimes they color them green or red or something to try and trick my brain, but it doesn't work.


No, sticking a couple arrows in its head doesn't make it a new enemy type.

I want to see a progression of different enemy types throughout the entire game. I also want them to use different abilities and attack types. It's much more fun to play against a group of enemies that uses magic, ranged attacks, and melee attacks instead of just one of those three.

The best example I can think of for a game series that has done this consistently well is the Final Fantasy series. Throughout the entire game you face an ever changing mix of enemy models with different creative abilities that you have to prepare for. Almost every boss fight against stronger enemies has some unique elements as well, such as a specific weakness or a powerful attack that you have to prepare for in order to survive.

I would also add that RPGs that choose to use a leveling system need to have choices available when your character gains levels. If you don't have any options as your character becomes more powerful, the game becomes dull much faster. Ideally, these will make your character somewhat unique so that the game can feel fresh each time you play it.

One game that did this well was Dragon Age: Origins. For instance, if you played as a warrior, you could choose to use two handed weapons to deal high damage. You could use a sword and shield to absorb damage for your group. You could also use two different one handed weapons to deal high damage. If you were a mage, you could pick between a number of different types of magic to specialize in healing and support magic for your party, dealing damage to the enemy, or other options. Finally, you could pick two of four specializations for each of the three classes, allowing you to have access to different abilities. This level of customization helped keep the game fresh throughout, as you could choose to make your character whatever you wanted to be.


I chose to make my character show off his pecs.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games
I'll preface this by saying that the only MMO I play is World of Warcraft. However, any MMO that features RPG elements needs to feature all of the above RPG features as well as a few more. The only big annoyance I have with WoW is when the drop rates for items for quests are abysmally low. For instance, if you have a quest that requires you to hack off heads to return to a NPC, you can almost guarantee that half the enemies you find will inexplicably not have a head.


Even when you can clearly see a head on the ground with your knife sticking out of it.

Simply put, if you're going to have a quest that requires items to be found from an enemy, have the drop rate be reasonably high. It should not take fifteen minutes to collect items. That's not fun.

Travel time is also a big nuisance in some cases. Many times, a quest would have you go out and kill an enemy, go back to town to turn in the quest, whereupon you would get a new quest to kill a different enemy at the place you just visited. Why didn't they just tell you to kill all of the guys there at the same time!? Fortunately, the new expansion, Cataclysm, has pretty much removed this problem, but it's important to make sure that it doesn't come back.

A final complaint is when you have quests that demand that you kill one kind of enemy, but that enemy is nowhere to be found. For example, if you have a quest to kill 8 Scourge Siege Engineers at this one location, you may find that out of all the monsters at that place there are only 1-2 Siege Engineers.


But don't worry, there's at least fifty mindless zombies to kill in the meantime.

This means you have to wait for them to respawn, which takes quite a while. This is silly design and shouldn't be done. There should always be enough enemies to fulfill the number you have to kill.

RPG Leveling and Character Development Systems

Most RPGs feature some sort of system where characters gain power as the game progresses, allowing them to fight more powerful monsters. As with player equipment, there are some games that do this well and others that make it a confusing mess.

Games that do this well include, by no means an all-inclusive list, some of the Final Fantasy games, Mass Effect, and the Baldur's Gate series. Games that do this poorly include The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion and Final Fantasy 8 and 12. I'm sure Final Fantasy 13 does it poorly as well, but I haven't played that one.

What separates the first series of games from the latter? I'll compare Final Fantasy 9 with Final Fantasy 8 to show how 9 is far superior.

Both games feature characters that level up automatically after the turn-based battles. However, Final Fantasy 8 has the additional quandary of having Guardian Forces, or GFs-which can be summoned during combat to attack the enemy. There are quite a few GFs in the game, which more than doubles the number of characters you have to gain experience for in order to compete with enemies. In Final Fantasy 9, all you have to do is gain experience for the main characters of the story, simplifying the process greatly.

Both games handle how abilities, which can range from stealing from enemies to get items to casting spells, are learned. In Final Fantasy 8, many abilities are taught by GFs, which have to be leveled to learn these abilities. Then, any character with that GF can use the abilities it knows. Some characters have to have books purchased for them to teach specific abilities, such as the tricks for Rinoa's dog that it can use for her limit breaks. Lastly, any character can use magic, but they have to "draw" the magic from enemies during battle, at a rate of about 5-10 units per use of the draw command, or from various points around the world, which only provide 5-10 units of the spell and then run out for a period of time. This is tedious because when you find a new magic spell on an enemy you have to spend 3 hours drawing it out so all your characters have enough of it to go around. You can only hold 100 units of each spell as well. Additionally, this magic is used to bolster the regular abilities of each character. For example, you can put the spell "cure", which heals a player's characters, into their health stat to provide a boost to health. This boost depends on how much of the cure magic you have on hand drawn from the enemy. So, when you use magic, it depletes your statistics as well.

If all of this isn't confusing enough, whenever you change characters you have to move all of your drawn magic and GFs around to each of them so that they will be competent. If you fail to do this, they will be worthless. Additionally, unlike most of the Final Fantasy games, monsters become stronger as your characters level. So spending time leveling up doesn't really give you a boost if you're having trouble with a particular boss fight or area-the monsters will still be roughly the same difficulty. This entire system is the reason I never finished Final Fantasy XIII-it was needlessly complicated and forced the player to put a lot of tedious work into each character.

In comparison, Final Fantasy IX is much easier to understand. Characters level automatically and each character has specific tasks they are good at. The main character, Zidane, is the only one who can steal items. Vivi is a mage who casts offensive magic. Steiner is a knight who is good at attacking with his sword. These basic facts aren't changed with the leveling system, instead their aptitude for their specific role is improved.

As for how abilities are gained, the system is fairly easy as well. Every weapon and piece of armor has abilities on them that the characters can learn through acquiring AP-which are gained from fighting enemies. Once an ability is learned, you can change the piece of equipment for something better, but you still keep the option to equip the ability on your character's menu. For instance, if you learn antibody, which makes a character immune to poison, from a piece of wrist armor, when you remove the wrist you can still choose to use the antibody ability. Every character has a specific amount of points available to allocate to equipping these abilities. So it becomes a tactical choice of which abilities to select. If you're fighting monsters with poison attacks, it's a good idea to equip every character with the antibody ability. Monsters also do not level up along with your characters, which means that if you're struggling with a fight you can go back and strengthen your party to progress further.

As I hope you can see from my summary, Final Fantasy 9 has a far superior system in place for character development. Stick with systems that are easy to pick up and logical and you increase the player's enjoyment of a game. No one likes to have to spend three hours in the menu trying to customize their characters when it could take three seconds.

Item Enhancement/Customization-Irritating and Unnecessary

I remember games like Shining Force and Final Fantasy III where all you had to do to pick equipment for your characters was to visit the weapon and armor stores in each town and buy the new gear. There was no confusion or additional complexity-just hand over some money and get items that did more damage or added more armor. Games like Baldur's Gate took it a step further by adding additional effects to weapons, such as fire damage or the infliction of poison. However, it was still pretty easy to figure out if the new sword you found was better or not.

I began replaying Final Fantasy X last week and what a difference. Items by themselves don't add anything, instead they have slots where they can be upgraded. So, for instance, you can get a sword that has four slots for potential upgrades and fill each of them with various abilities. These can range from adding bonuses to magic damage and healing, physical damage, armor values, immunities to certain damage types, and a slew of much more confusing abilities like SOS Nulfrost, which gives character protection from frost damage if their health drops low enough. This may not sound that confusing in this format, but then consider that many fights with bosses and other enemies in the game cause items to drop with various combinations of these abilities. Additionally, you can add them yourself to items by using various ingredients found in the game. So, toward the end of the game you may end up with around 10 weapons to pick from and it becomes incredibly difficult to figure out which one is best out of the list.

I usually end up ignoring the gear entirely because it doesn't make much of a difference anyway-but it's the idea itself that infuriates me. Since when is it fun to have to spend 15 minutes browsing through all the possible enhancements for items? You need a strategy guide to figure out the optimal choices and it's just a needless complication to my fun.

World of Warcraft is another game with many options for upgrading equipment. You can enchant many of your items with different boosts, add gems to items that improve them, and make other upgrades as well. This makes acquiring a new weapon or piece of armor, which used to be a joy for me in games like Baldur's Gate, a pain because I now need to go find out what items I have to dredge up in order to enchant and gem them to make them more powerful. Unlike Final Fantasy X, you actually do have to do this too, don't think you can skip out of enchanting and gemming your gear. You'll get kicked out of groups if your gear doesn't have every possible buff.

This concept is progressing beyond RPGs to other types of games, like FPS. Every single weapon in Call of Duty can have attachments added to them, ranging from different weapon sights to grenade launchers to an underslung shotgun. At least these are easier to figure out what they do, but I still don't like to see this trend spreading to more and more games. Do we really need every games for every genre to have a ton of customization options?

Keep things simple. It's fine to have new items, everyone loves getting rewards for beating bosses. But make them easy to figure out and for god sakes, stop adding complex systems that require collecting 50,000 insect wings from around the world to marginally boost their effectiveness. It makes it a lot easier for game balance if you don't have to account for all of the buffs that players will add to their items in addition to the item's regular statistics.