The Best and Worst Crafting Systems you've seen

[Roboshi]

Title says it all try and give an example of the best and worst crafting you've seen, they're in half the games produced and so it's a good range to grab from.

Best;

Thought I'd go a little lesser known for this one and say "Story of Seasons" the spiritual successor to harvest moon where 90% of what you get in the game need to be crafted from a blueprint, however the part I love is that your crafting table will automatically take items from your storage chests and will give you the choice between your different levels of crops when cooking. It's a crafting mechanic that allows ease of use and convenience and in a game where time is constantly ticking that's a real asset.

Worst; FarCry 3/4 pouches.

I can forgive a lot of things in games but for some reason the pouches in farcry just take me out of the game and make no sense. Why do you need to kill 2 whole bears to make a quiver that cannot be larger than your torso? And if you want the best pouches, you'd best force literal endangered species to extinction.

 

[Stewie Plisken]

I can't give a best and worst, crafting is something I rarely notice, but I did enjoy Two Worlds' crafting system. It wasn't really crafting in the traditional sense, it was merging identical equipment and raising stats, but it was an interesting approach that motivated looting and allowed on-the-fly upgrades.

I guess the most recent crafting system in my memory, which I disliked, is the one in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Nothing particularly wrong with it, but it wasn't innovative in any way and I found so little reason to actually use it that to me it speaks to how useless and/or insignificant of a system it was.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Honestly and I'll need a stiff drink after this one because its my favorite game of all time, but Bioshock. And not because it was bad, but because it was piss easy to completely break the game!

At least in Dragon Age: Grey Knights or WOW or that God-awful MineCraft game you at least had to work for it! There was a sense of triumph finally getting enough dragon bones or dragon bones or block-y dragon bones to craft dragon bone armor. Bioshock just had spare copper wires, nitroglycerin, cans, tubes and whathaveyou in every damn trashcan and corpse. So there was never any real balance.

Even on hard with no effort(as in just mashing X against things) by the time I reach Cohen I have max ammo for everything, 5 autohacks, Adam and health out my ass. And let me tell you, grenades + exploding shotgun shells makes Big Daddies easier than Street Fighter to babies.

I wish there was more stress and grit in Bioshock's crafting. Or just make it so its an in-game thing, not a separate screen. Its too easy to be losing a fight, run around the corner and craft 6 extra grenades and trap-arrows and boom! Fight over! It took all the threat out of the game.

 

[sageoftruth]

I just started playing "Atelier: Escha & Logy" this month. As a game where alchemy/crafting stuff is the main focus, it's got some pretty interesting mechanics for crafting. It took me awhile to figure it out completely.

Unlike lots of other games with crafting, it doesn't require you to have specific items to craft stuff. The recipe can simply be something like a ruby amulet + any plant + any kind of metal, giving you several ways to create the same item. However, the ingredients you use, the order in which you use them, and the alchemy skills you apply to different ingredients can cause the finished product to have a variety of buffs or special qualities, like a healing potion that also restores MP, or a weapon that also has a chance to put enemies to sleep on hit.

The game doesn't tell you what any of the bonus effects are before you discover them, but it does show you what you need to do in order to discover these unknown effects. However, that part is kind of vague as well. For instance, it may tell you that an unknown bonus trait can be added if you add 30+ units of fire element to the concoction, but it leaves you to pick your ingredients and use your alchemy skills to get the fire element up to 30.

In the end, it feels a lot more like an art than a science, making it more fun than simply gathering all of the required ingredients and putting them together. I can't think of any other game I've played that has done crafting better.


As for worst, I'd go with the weapon synthesis system of Transformers: Devastation. Just take a weapon you like and fuse all the weapons you don't like to it, to give it better stats. It might have been more tolerable if I was allowed to fuse several weapons to a weapon at once, but the game forces you to do it one at a time and it takes forever. It was clearly an afterthought. Platinum's forte is combat, not crafting.

 

[DrownedAmmet]

I find crafting to be boring, so I would rate it based on how easy it is to ignore. I'd put Skyrim near the top because I made one dagger and thought "fuck it, I'll just buy my weapons from the shop" and never crafted again in the three or so dozen hours I spent there.

The worst would be Dragon Age: Inquisition but mainly because they added an insanely long gathering animation that I had to watch over and over and over again

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Best: SWTOR. Your partners do most of the work, the items you create can be useful depending on your build (and Biochem is always useful), and most materials can simply be gathered from certain types of enemies, such as droids if you are a Scavenger.

Worst: Archage. Everything must be gathered by hand from rare resource nodes, the things you build must be left somewhere and can be taken or destroyed by other players, and both gathering and creating expends Labour Points, which can only be regained by leaving the game off. Also if your LP is at 0, you become 'Exhausted' and extremely weak in battle.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Al Khemia by far had the best. Because not only would you craft weapons and items for yourself to use but by crafting them you unlocked abilities and stats for your characters. It was ingenious, fun, and rewarding.

 

[meiam]

^

Second that, interesting, well integrated into the story, always giving you new stuff to do while keeping older stuff relevant and making ultimate weapon/armor was really interesting. They screwed up a bit in the at the end when they by pass most of that and crafting the best stuff was just using rare item from the last dungeon, but otherwise was really fun.

Worst is probably FF14 because of how big of a time waste it is, constantly have to redo item, especially if RNG screw you up.

 

[DefunctTheory]

Worst is probably FF14 because of how big of a time waste it is, constantly have to redo item, especially if RNG screw you up.

FF14's crafting is absolutely miserable for a variety of reason, not just RNG. Gathering materials is time intensive, crafting them is time intensive, and worst of all, crafting is all about your gear. The way FF14 is set up, crafting wise, if you fall behind its almost impossible to catch up without sinking simply outrageous amounts of time into it, or getting someone who's on top of the mountain to drag you up. If you're already at the top of your server's crafting totem pole though (Otherwise known as one of the 1%), it's trivial to stay up there, and you can fairly easily keep everyone else down.

It's just fucking terrible.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

I find crafting to be boring, so I would rate it based on how easy it is to ignore. I'd put Skyrim near the top because I made one dagger and thought "fuck it, I'll just buy my weapons from the shop" and never crafted again in the three or so dozen hours I spent there.

The worst would be Dragon Age: Inquisition but mainly because they added an insanely long gathering animation that I had to watch over and over and over again

DAI is much improved by the mod that removes the gathering animation, and the one that gives you almost unlimited crafting mats. I hated the game first time I played it due to all the blasted collecting. The second time I used those mods and it was much better because I didn't have to stop every ten feet to pick up Elfroot and could craft whatever I wanted when I wanted (though having endgame gear as soon as I got to Skyhold does kind of break the challenge of the game).

As for one I liked, I'd say Witcher 3 because I never really went I any actual effort to gather stuff, but I never ran out of anything either. I just seemed to randomly pick up enough materials as I went along. That's my kind of crafting system - one I can completely disregard.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Good crafting, Minecraft I guess? Just because of how varied they are. I dont play too much games that need crafting.

Worst: Skyrim.

It takes 300,000,000,000 iron daggers just to craft Dragon armor, which materials need to be lugged around the entire damn game, unless you buy a house early.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

Actually one of the best crafting systems I've used was from Kingdoms of Amalur. Not only did it allow you to preview the gear before finalising the crafting, it let you rename it. So the 'Jade Superior Greatsword' became 'The Lime Wedge of Doom' or other hilarious bullshit. It also allowed you to break down items of a certain level to their base components to create other items with - that's a feature more frigging games need.

 

[Elfgore]

Persona 4 Golden has the best ever. You literally just run through a dungeon, kill a bunch of enemies, go into the weapons shop, sell all of the gathered materials, and then get a large amount of weapons, armor, accessories, and money as well. It's handy and you don't really have to go out of your way to get good equipment.

Bad is pretty much everything else. I don't like crafting in 99.9% of video games.

 

[NPC009]

Atelier games (Mana Khemia included) are pretty much the kings and queens of crafting. Each have has its own take on a system they've been perfecting the past 20 years. You don't just make a thing and be done with it, every step of the process affects things like quality or traits. Put some time into it, and you can make amazing equipment and items by looping base materials through several recipes. (Like: [metal] + [something with good traits] = [metal with good traits] Repeat until alloy is perfected. Have blacksmith make it into armour and laugh while the damage bounces off you. End-game Atelier is like Iron-Man, but instead of a womanizing and possibly drunk millionair you've got a teenaged girl in a frilly skirt who likes making pies in a cauldron.) And the best part: the games usually have a really tough boss or two to use them against.

Worst... Anything that offers too little award for time and resources.

 

[Wiggum Esquilax]

Worst? Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together for the PSP. Crafting not only entails combining reagents to create the finished item, but combining ingredients together across multiple stages of successively better ingredient.

Creating a single bar of Wootz Steel involves 37 fucking steps. Every single one of which involves a several second long animation and associated input delay. You don't experience crafting in LUCT, it is inflicted upon you.

Did I forget to mention that most craftings suffer a failure rate? Given the cost of reagents and the time involved combining them, expect to do some save scumming most times you upgrade equipment.

Between reloading and crafting time, a single good breastplate can cost you around 3-4 minutes. Given that you can accumulate a party of dozens of characters, expect to lose hours of your life to that shopkeeper's loaner cauldron.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Worst: Skyrim.

I don't mind Skyrims. Once I got Smithing of 30, I got Dwarven, and then went and looted all the Dwarven dungeons. Melted the junk down and made enough armour and weapons to ensure no knee would ever be arrow'd again. Grinding out Dwarven arrows was enough to get to Dragon very quickly.

 

[Axelotus07]

I found Final Fantasy XIII's upgrade/dismantle system to be very rewarding. I enjoyed how many accessories you had, and how important they were to your battle strategy. I like how there was a even a little math involved when it came to calculating EXP bonus multipliers. It may not have been the most complex presentation of systems, but I really like how deep it went with only a basic premise. I feel like that kind of approach sort of kept me eager to experiment with all the possibilities.

The fact that the game did a pretty good job at not holding your hand through the process was what I favored most. I'm an adventurer at heart, I like to discover things!

The problem I have with XIII-2 is that they massively simplified the system. It feels a bit more like the Kingdom Hearts series, whereas you take X weapon and use a component along with it and now you have Y weapon that is vastly superior, leaving the initial X weapon completely useless. I like how in XIII you still had more than an applied use for your "inferior" equipment.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I liked Odin Sphere's. Plant seed mid-battle, water with fallen enemies, reap fruit, eat to restore HP, repeat.

 

[Remus]

Best: Vanguard Saga of Heroes. It was time consuming but incredibly, undeniably rewarding. You could build anything from armor and weapons to furnishings for your house or guildhall, trophies to add guild perks, even galleons to cross continents.

Worst: Original Everquest. Too much dice rolling involved in making the best items so that you were forced to collect mats for multiple attempts.