Thanks for sharing this one. I was surprised at how engaging I found the teaser content - that usually just annoys me, but they made it fun. As Soren says, the devs seem to be very involved with the community. ESO has made me wary of early access hype, but if this team can deliver what they promise, it sounds great.
I'd like to see how crafting turns out, since that's usually my primary focus. Their MMORPG piece was interesting:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/1214/feature/9325/Building-Upon-Star-Wars-Galaxies-Crafting.html
What do you think happened to the crafting scene in MMORPGs?
It really came out of the need to make sure that every player could be an island, and not have to rely on other players for his or her progress.
If every player can play the game completely independently, then it stands that crafting should be a “secondary activity” for everyone, not a primary profession for anyone. If you wanted to be a master crafter, you had to do that in addition to gaining combat levels through PvE.
Since it was an optional secondary profession, the endgame “evolved” from dealing with other players (or beating on them and taking their stuff) to forming large groups and killing raid bosses for phat loot.
Thus began an eternal struggle between loot drops and crafted items. There can only be one! Crafted items better than dragon loot?! Preposterous! Take a boss drop to a crafter to craft it for you? No way! Of course, loot drops won out, because it’s easier to control the player experience by setting drop percent chance. In fact, loot drops won out so convincingly that crafting is mostly used to fill in equipment gaps while waiting for raid boss loot drops. How sad is that? To relegate a primary game profession to a sad time-filling activity?
As designers in our desire to make killing big monsters worthwhile we killed the concept of having a crafting class as “the thing you do.” We have replaced depth and community interaction with clever and in some cases very good mini games. How you craft is where we have been focusing all our efforts, not why you craft.
Speaking as a player who made virtual fortunes in UO as a Blacksmith and in SWG as an Armorer, I’m bummed I can’t find an experience like that in the current marketplace of games. No one knows who the crafters in the community are, there is no debate on how to produce masterpieces in the forums. People think of the exploration game as “looking for new zones”, but it used to be so much more than that!
As a result, the crafting community has largely gone by the wayside. I’d like to see what Crowfall can do to change that.
What do you propose to “bring back” crafting?
I’m not claiming to have a silver bullet on this one, just some ideas based on years of playing and observation. There are a ton of lessons to be learned looking at games like Star Wars Galaxies and EVE Online which had and still have success with their crafting and economic loops. From a very high altitude, crafters need to be able to: craft unique items, explore new recipes and profit from the results of this exploration, and create customized items for all styles of play. Crafters must have an audience to buy their goods. The loop between crafter and combatant has to exist! And, ideally, crafters need to be able to “mark” their product so that they can build a social reputation and a following.
The very concept that players can and will lose their items at some point is required, otherwise the game loop breaks. It is a very controversial topic for those who don’t like the potential of losing their items, and we understand that. But sometimes you have to embrace ideas that may not be popular at first glance, because they open up amazing areas of gameplay that are otherwise not accessible.
On Crowfall, we’re willing to take some of these risks, because we know that the payoff will be worth the effort.
How do you determine who can craft?
Every character has the ability craft some items, from the beginning of the game. Further crafting requires the accumulation of recipes through gameplay and class specialization.
Do you have to use the crafting system?
Of course not! Our goal is not to “force crafting on the masses.” We just want to make crafting a viable profession, a core part of the player-driven economy. We do want to support it as a valid type of gameplay and crafters are very valuable members to any guild.
How are Crowfall recipes different than other games?
Most crafting systems recipes are very specific. 3 iron ingots and 2 wool cloth will craft an Iron Plate Helm. This recipe is repeated up the chain, mapping each tier of metal to a unique recipe. At the end of the day, the crafter has 500 recipes, most of them unused.
The recipe system is heavily inspired by the designs that Raph Koster created on both UO and SWG, the randomized enchantment system is more like Todd’s work on Shadowbane. The recipes are fluid; because the ingredients are not as strict, that leads to a higher degree of system exploration.
For example: You have a single 1 recipe for “Plate Helm”. The requirements are 3 metal and 1 cloth 1 Leather and 1 additive element. The player can choose which tiers of those resources to put in those slots. As long as the slots are filled with something valid, the recipe will craft. They can even add something special to the additive slot to alter the item in a significant way. This reduces our recipe count by about 90% and every recipe in the Crowfall player’s book remains useful. Moreover, the result is more varied and it’s going to be up to the player to figure out the “right” combination of reagents to produce the desired result.
In a nutshell, it is largely left up to the player to decide what items they want to craft, and how. Woot!
Though a shorter list it is still a limited list of combinations, correct?
While the recipe list is shorter, the possible outcomes from the Forging stage alone are much greater than a standard crafting system. Next, you add in additional stages before the item is done. For example, you might: Refine your alloys, Forge the blade, and then Enchant it by binding an Elven Blademaster Thrall into the blade.
The Refinement step alone varies greatly based on which Alloys are used. We are showcasing a small sample of Metal Alloys in one of our illustrations released today.
Interesting. How do the Metal Alloys work?
Metal Alloys are made from combining various types of ores in the crafting process. Each ore combination produces either a Pure Metal or an Alloy. Pure Metals grant Attributes, while Alloys grant Attributes and Statistics. Ores from all resource tiers are used throughout the entire crafting tree to ensure that no ore becomes obsolete. The amount of combinations gives the player a gigantic palette of options to use when crafting.
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» Edited on: 2015-01-26 18:45:43