I really couldn't care less about crafting in video games. Anyone else feel the same way?

[cthulhuspawn82]

I never saw the need to put an unnecessary step between me getting my new sword. I would rather find it or buy it from a vendor. I'm an adventurer, not a blacksmith. I do like the idea of enchanting specific items however. Not in the style of Skyrim, God no, but the way you craft magic items in Dungeons and Dragons.

I especially hate crafting in pay to play MMOs. I believe that adding any arbitrary time-consuming mechanic to a pay to play game is highly unethical. But that's all MMOs are.

 

[white_wolf]

Crafting in skyrim is ok but if given the choice of make it, buy it at very expensive prices, or scavenge it off the corpse of fallen mook I'd rather scavenge the thing I can get in the store.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I don't recall ever disliking crafting, and I really enjoy crafting in Mana Khemia and Rune Factory. I liked how in Mana Khemia, crafting stuff is how you level up and get abilities, it gives you a real reason to invest in it. And in Rune Factory 3 and 4, I like how it balances the game between those that want to fight and those that don't. Because you get stat increases for virtually everything you do if you want to just fight other enemies then you'll get the most challenge out of them if you just get to it, but if you don't really like combat then doing all the other things like farming and crafting will boost your stats so that combat won't be as problematic for you.

 

[Olas]

Crafting can be done well. In Skyrim, it wasn't.

As far as I can tell there are 2 reasons for crafting in a game:

1. It can allow you to make customized weapons that have more significance to you, and can add a level of strategy since you can create weapons to suite your specific needs.

In Skyrim most of the weapons you can craft are generic and can't be customized at all. I'm sure this changes at the upper skill levels, but you have to get there first and who wants to when it's so boring.

2. In resource management games, it can be a fun challenge trying to find all the resources to craft a really powerful item, and it feels rewarding when you finally make it.

Rather than keeping resources scarce and hard to get Skyrim floods you with more resources than you know what to do with. Not that you can craft anything interesting anyway.

I usually ended up crafting items just so I could sell them for a bit more than the raw materials would go for. It wasn't exactly fun, but what in Skyrim is?

 

[Requia]

Rather than keeping resources scarce and hard to get Skyrim floods you with more resources than you know what to do with. Not that you can craft anything interesting anyway.

Resources are actually incredibly scare except at certain points in the crafting tree. You can get enough iron to make iron armor right away, but you'll have to visit several different shops to make a full steel/elven whatever armor. The only point you're actually flooded (smithing wise) is the very beginning, kindof dwarven gear (you still have to aquire hard to find thermite steel making it hard to use dwarven metal for leveling), and dragonbone gear. Alchemy is similar, while you might have tons of ingredients the ones you actually *want* to have (either in order to power elvel or because they provide that actually useful in early game healing/mana potions) are only enough for a handful of potions and the rest are useless till you have high level alchemy and a ton of perks. It's only really enchanting you get flooded, but you have to be because enchanting is useless until around level 60.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Depends on the game, I suppose. On the one hand, such things appeal to my love of nested systems - indeed, most of my love for Bethesda games likely stems from this. In other games, it might appeal to some desire to roleplay. If you're going to play as a Cleric of Eilistraee in Neverwinter Nights 2 and you don't craft yourself a silver sword of some sort, you're just doing it wrong. But, broadly speaking, the actual act of crafting is rarely satisfying. Grinding for the sake of getting components to build a marginally more powerful doodad just isn't much fun by itself.

 

[Olas]

Rather than keeping resources scarce and hard to get Skyrim floods you with more resources than you know what to do with. Not that you can craft anything interesting anyway.

Resources are actually incredibly scare except at certain points in the crafting tree. You can get enough iron to make iron armor right away, but you'll have to visit several different shops to make a full steel/elven whatever armor. The only point you're actually flooded (smithing wise) is the very beginning, kindof dwarven gear (you still have to aquire hard to find thermite steel making it hard to use dwarven metal for leveling), and dragonbone gear. Alchemy is similar, while you might have tons of ingredients the ones you actually *want* to have (either in order to power elvel or because they provide that actually useful in early game healing/mana potions) are only enough for a handful of potions and the rest are useless till you have high level alchemy and a ton of perks. It's only really enchanting you get flooded, but you have to be because enchanting is useless until around level 60.

You're obviously more familiar with the system than me, all I know is my character has all kinds of strange sounding ingots and ores in his pocket right now, and I have no idea what to do with any of them. I can't make anything with them, and I don't want to sell them for fear that they might prove valuable later, so for now they're just dead weight.

 

[Requia]

You're obviously more familiar with the system than me, all I know is my character has all kinds of strange sounding ingots and ores in his pocket right now, and I have no idea what to do with any of them. I can't make anything with them, and I don't want to sell them for fear that they might prove valuable later, so for now they're just dead weight.

Allow me to free some space for you: If you don't have Hearthfire only silver, gold, and iron ingots can be used unless you spend perks in Smithing, if you don't plan to spend the perks toss the ingots. If you do have hearthfire you'll need corundum, a lot of steel if you want safes, and small amounts miscellaneous other things for alchemy/enchanting labs (which I gather you don't want) and altars (you'd have to build the altar base then check the recipes, every shrine is different except needing the corresponding amulet).

 

[sth1729]

It really depends on how it's implemented in a game, Skyrim's crafting systems weren't very engaging because it was just having the luck to find the things you need [usually through exploration, which is probably Skyrims strong point].
A lot of roleplaying games suffer from that flaw, where the crafting system requires lots of exploration to discover the necessary components and ingredients but fail to make the actual crafting as engaging as the process of exploring to find those ingredients[if exploration is engaging in of itself].
Minecraft probably did this better than most with the crafting grid, as many beginner items aren't to hard to figure out but the act of finding them on your own gives a sense of exploration in of itself, which helps reinforce the core concept of exploration that is the heart of Minecraft. Minecraft still suffers from the same problem as most traditional boring crafting systems though because many first-time players will follow walk-throughs or wikis thus destroying the initial sense of crafting as discovery. As well once you memorize all the crafting recipes through playing the game loses that facet of exploration and the game loses a bit of charm.

But yeah, it's pretty easy to see why you don't like crafting systems in games, they tend not to be anything more in a game than an arbitrary barrier between you and fun.