Gaming How Crafting in Games Is Deceiving Players

Best Crafting System ever... Starwars Galaxies

 

Long before Minecraft was a twinkle in Notch's eye (and even before Infiniminer) these mechanics were an RPG staple. For example, Materia in FFVII. These mechanics never had some fancy name to slap on the box, but they're not some new development. Companies didn't go "hey, lets add a crappy Minecraft knockoff to our game!", they've just stuck a name on it.

 

Agreed, you could make anything , it had a lot of depth to the game.

 

Not to mention gathering resources, especially in MMOs. You can't pick this flower because your level is too low. You can slay dragons and stuff but this daisy is just too much you. Then there's mining, which is basically picking up rocks from the surface of the ground, and your level is too low to pick up that rock anyway. WOW kinda improved this in Warriors of Draenor, where you have followers to do some of the gathering for you, but gathering in MMOs is still far from intuitive or entertaining.


Don't get me started on fishing. It's ridiculous how often people people request this feature which basically amounts to clicking the water and clicking again after 4 seconds. Repeat 5000 times to "max out" fishing. Sega bass fishing came out in '97, almost 20 years ago. If an RPG-style game is gonna have fishing, that's the kind of gameplay they should try to emulate, with the added risk of getting eaten by seamonsters.

Then again, I'm talking about MMOs. They're literally the gunk in the bottom of the barrel of game genres.

 

How is the crafting deceiving players if it is so obviously garbage?

 

That Scrap Mechanic looks a bit like Garry's Mod.

If you want creativity, expect the actual game to suffer. Having devs put hours and hours into making crafting option for every conceivable combination of "things" is impractical and I'd rather the rest of the game works properly.

Lastly, every Lego game I've played involving anything close to crafting has been a massive let down. Just saying.

 

...if you like 'genuine' or crafting that doesn't pull any punches look towards Life is Feudal...

 

Did 3.5 years on that game and spent a lot of that time as a crafter (mainly architect, was much needed but also dabbled in armour and weapons from time to time).

Once the space side of things came out and you could be more varied in your build I focused mainly on squad leader with some ship crafting, the parts modification system was fantastic (especially tier 8 weapons....)

 

I like how from the depths does it. You don't really craft, but you build your own ships & planes & fortresses etc. It is very satisfying to fire off a volley of missiles of your own design and see them take down that stupid fying squirrel or sink a plunderer, if you dare

 

I quite like how GW2 does collection - you need the right tool grade to harvest/log/mine the stuff effectively.

Archeage, for all that it's the most P2W game I've ever played, got it's sport fishing correct, it's a fun mini-game kinda thing which runs the added risk of you getting your entire catch for the day pirated if you don't bring friends. It got nearly everything else wrong though.

 

Quote, "Minecraft offers no instruction about what you can craft. Instead, it requires the player to assemble tools and items out of component parts according to a fairly consistent logic. When you figure this system out, it's a fantastic moment of discovery, and you can then experiment with that system, following the logic to discover new tools and items"

I hate three things in games, over complexity [because I am mentally disabled], endlessly searching for clues - behind a book in some town, in some building, or under some rock in the middle of nowhere, and crafting.

I played a game called Dark Age of Camelot for at least 11 years. In the earlier years crafting was a pain in the axx. Each character class could only use two crafting paths, items were more difficult to get compared today's DAoC, leveling up took longer, and I crafted far too much - for years. The main draw to DAoC was RvR [realm vs realm warfare] which was highly rewarded with spendable realm points to make a character more powerful.

Unfortunately, many, if not most players needed crafted gear and it seemed like it took forever to get to the point where you could make 98% to 100% highest level gear in the early years. It was expensive, very time consuming and sometimes people did not want to pay you for making the gear - I lost three platinum on one customer back when a platinum was a huge amount of money.

So, there I was crafting hours, weeks, months and years of my life away when the main focus of the game was RvR - the most rewarded endeavor of the game. If crafting in DAoC would have been rewarded with realm points I would not have disliked it quite so much - even if it did nearly bore me out of my mind. Consequently, I never got a single character above 7L7 [realm rank], a moderately good level, however, far below [level] RR 12. And, if a person never crafted it was not that difficult to get RR 10, just time consuming.

To make matters worse, good dropped or rewarded items are better than high level crafted items. In that game alone I called crafting a necessary evil. And, to this day I hate crafting.

 

I'm not a huge fan of it. In Fallout 4 I only built what I had to and I can't say it was much fun either. Just felt like a chore to me.

It's funny because in Fallout 3 I actually crafted all of the weapons and loved using the dart gun which was sadly absent from Fallout 4

 

I'm surprised the Article did not mention 'The Forest', as survival games go it had a pretty good crafting system, using items that made decent sense thematically.
Not that I am a fan of survival games of crafting systems in general but comparing them to others I have tried, the forest was up there in the top 3 for me.

 

Real crafting in FPS will no doubt lead to massive abuse and cheating, and then you need to update, then a day later it's misused in another way, another update, ad infinitum.
Although in single player it might not lead to an update, but then it's just boring because people can easily win.