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.

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.