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Heya,
I’m intersted in learning about where in the crafting system you are going to have to make decisions. For example will recipes accept different materials and cause different outcomes or will each recipe be fixed and only create the same item?
I love crafting and it’s pretty much the resaon I join or leave an MMO. I’d like to talk more about what I like and I’d love to learn more about what you are looking at doing with crafting in Oort Online.
Here’s an outline of what I think crafting is and where it has the potential to be interesting or fun:
I have broken it down into 3 sections: Collection – the acquisition of materials and recipes, Assembly – the creation of items from materials and Modification – the adjustment to items after the fact, often by users rather than crafters.
Collection
The act of gathering resources can be quite varied; from farming mobs for money and items or just seeking out and collecting the materials used to create items and consumables. The harvested materials can take the form of static resources without attributes (copper ore in WoW), static resources with varying degrees of a single attribute (veldspar and dense veldspar in EVE) or dynamic resources with a number of variable attributes (coralite in Firefall pre 0.6 or steel in SWG pre CU). Increasing the amount of meta information on raw resources has the upside to making them more interesting but the disadvantage of extra server database overhead.
In the “Features of Oort Online” webpage I see that resources have a number of properties and the idea of visiting generated worlds for unique resources implies that there’ll be a lot of variety. This is encouraging and I am looking forward to learning more – for example are there going to be duplicate resources with different qualities or are there going to be lots of unique resources instead?
My perfect resource system would be one with both. Resources would be grouped into families and each resource would have a number of distinct family-specific properties. These properties would have randomly assigned values at the time of creation. For example you may have a resource called Redium which has three properties set to 10, 52 and 26 respectively while Greenium is set to 21, 7 and 88. Both are part of the Obtanium family of resources. Any recipe I have that requires an Obtanium can take either of these resources, but… the value of the properties changes the item I am making in some way. So depending on what the item is or how I plan to use it I will decide which resource to use.
To take this up a notch, the first property could have a range of 10-20 for Redium and 8-21 for Greenium so you can see that as far as that property is concerned, that’s the worst Redium I can find and the very best Greenium. The number ranges would be different for each resource but the properties would be the same for each family. Here are some pics from Firefall pre 0.6 with what something like this might look like.
That’s two different qualities of the same resource. The dots show the range that each property falls within and the shaded area shows where this particular resource is. The qualitiy number (called CY in this system) shows how good this resource is if compared to a completely maxed out version. Of course this is not really a true “quality” as each property on the resource is not equal. If you were crafting an item that wanted a high Density and low Conductivity then the lower “quality” resource would actually be better!
The next step is refining – I believe that resources should either be usable in their gathered state or be changed/merged into something else as part of a refining process. I don’t believe refining should exist if there is no decision making requred to do it. In the case of WoW refining copper ore into copper bars does nothing other than change the name of the resource and add a small time delay to the process.
In EVE refining effectively extracts a material from the gathered resource and your skills in the relevant area and relationship with the supplier of the refining equipment affect the quantity of resultant material. This doesn’t add any decision making to the activity but it does have long-term effects on your character’s progression path: You decide to forego combat training to train refining efficiency or you don’t; You decide to run missions for the faction that owns your refining equipment to raise your reputation and reduce their fees or you don’t.
My perfect system would take raw materials with their properties and allow you to combine them to create the materials and properties you require for crafting. For example you take that Redium and Greenium from before and refine them into Brownium. The resultant material might average the properties of the input resources and give you a Brownium with A of 16, B of 30 and C of 57. Maybe you used some Whiteium as a catalyst and created LightBrownium with 16, 30 and 67 properties instead.
Maybe your refining skill is still low or your equipment is not optimal and you got less Brownium out than the combined inputs – that’s something you can decide to work on later. Your guildmate Bob has spent his skill points in refining and might offer to do it for you and in return you give him a nice Brownium Gun with extra Brown damage.
The important thing is that resources you harvested are different to the materials you need for crafing or you created the crafting materials from the gathered resources and made some decisions about the process. Players that have no interest in crafting should be able to see at a glance that a particular resource has a property that’s high in the range and know it’s worth something to someone and so harvest it or save the location to sell. But even if they find a resource that’s middle of the road like this:
then they can still grab it because there’ll likely be someone that wants to merge that with something else and not mess with the averages in the process. Basically every resource has a point and nothing is so bad as to be not worth the effort so steering clear of the MMO colour grading system would be my advice 😀
Another thing I’d like to touch on is Receipe Acquisition. I believe that having a vendor sell you every possible recipe is boring and would like to ask about your ideas for this. I’d also like to suggest a few ideas that I think could be fun and/or interesting.
What I have listed as ‘discovery through activity’ is making 10 Widgets unlocking the ability to make an Improved Widget. Perhaps this is 5% better than a standard widget or maybe it takes 5% less materials, depending on the ideas around item balancing versus economy interaction you have in mind. ‘Experimentation’ is a cool one – what happens if I put Brownium into the Blackium Widget recipe? Maybe it explodes and deletes all blocks in a hundred meter radius or maybe you just learned to create a Brownium Widget. That’s kinda cool (well, the exploding one may not be…)
I think some recipes should come from world drops and bosses and maybe even some from achievments. Perhaps the use of specific items gives you some insight on how to make them better. Maybe when you reach max level swords you get the option to talk to a sword maker and (click a meta button) impart on him some knowledge that allows him to make slightly better/cheaper swords.
And finally reverse engineering which is a good way to remove items from circulation and give you the chance to make a better item. I especially like this one in places where there are multiple complex parts required to make an item. Let’s say you can make a sword from a handle, hilt and blade. Perhaps breaking down a heap of Skeletal Swords of Slaying that drop from the skeleton army on planet LV426 grants you a limited use recipe for the blade component. You might then get a hilt receipe from RE’ing the Redsword of Red Redness that drops from the Reddites on planet Red and a handle recipe from your guildmate Bob.
You make each of these parts and combine them into a Reletal Redsword of Sledding and it looks pretty badass with the red bones all over it. You sell these to some guy that’s got an epic looking reddy bone themed outfit and he’s chuffed. After making 10 of each item you try mixing them around with other recipes and make a pretty sick Red Axe and a Boney Mace. These items are pretty close to unique as Planet Red was despawned after a few days and the likelyhood of another planet having the same mobs with the same drops is pretty low. Maybe you unlocked a new cosmetic option in the crafting screen and can now make Red Bone themed stuff forever. Maybe no other player has that combination of colour and theme (for now…)
I would love to have a crafting system that let me discover stuff that few other players have and that also let me decide what I was trying to discover. I chose to farm the Skeletons because I knew that I had a chance to get a bone themed recipe primer from them. My mate Bob killed a heap of squids on the squidworld he discovered and is hoping to unlock some wicked squid themed imagery for the clothing recipes he knows (he’s a tailor).
Assembly
This is the meaty part of our crafting sandwich and the place where we have the most potential to make awesomenss happen. This area is also very dependant on the rest of the game for cues as to what is possible. In games like EVE or WoW every item with the same name is identical. In Firefall pre 1.0 every item crafted by players was essentially unique. Not completely unique as there was only 1000 possible combinations of input for each component and between 2 and 5 components per item. So at worse there was only 1 million possible types of some items and only 1,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations of others. In reality a lot of those items would have had the same stats but technically that’s what was possible.
Ideally I’d like to see a system like Firefall’s but I suspect it’s not really sustainable as it means storing a lot of information about items. But with reduced steps in the quality system and by rounding numbers in the user interface, I think it would be possible to make a system that could support a few thousand variations of items and not be overly complicated or unweildy.
I can into more detail about items and how they could be created if required. I’d love to know more about how you intend to implement items in Oort Online though – are you going to make items decay with age/use/damage or character death? Are items going to be invincible – if so, how will you cause them to leave the economy? Is there a vertical character progression system that will see items being replaced via upgrades?
There’s a heap of possibilities and each changes the usefulness of crafting in different ways – invincible items and loot drops make crafting pointless (WoW, Firefall post 1.0) but players are happier [citation needed] while item decay encourages economies but disheartens players. If players are taught to treat items as consumables from the outset (SWG, Minecraft) then we get a healthy economy, happy players and required crafters (which makes them happy too 😀 )
Personally I’d like items to have some from of decay so crafters have a purpose and crafting can be a viable gameplay option instead of just a ‘may as well’ as it is in most MMOs. Additionally, and most importantly, I like crafting to be partially mutually exclusive with other gameplay options. If you choose to put a skillpoint into crafting then you don’t have that point to put into combat. So either like SWG where you have limited points and you choose to be a jack of all trades or a master of 1 or you take the EVE route and time gate skills so you can eventually master everything but are rewarded for specicalising and relying on others (or alts) to a degree for other things. Having everyone be self sufficient often turns co-operation into competition in my experience.
So, back to my lovely google drawing – Subcomponents. Personally I love subcomponents and love making things from lots of other smaller things. I love lego and Space Engineers for this reason. I know others don’t like this and would prefer to just be able to put resources in and get finished products out. So, if you are going to have a subcomponents system then I feel it should either be required as part of the final item stats adjustment mechanism or it should be used to encourage interaction between crafting professions. For example in WoW an blacksmith might make a Widget that an engineer needs to build an item. There should always be an alternative however – I should be able to buy that part from an NPC vendor or player marketplace OR I should be able to build an inferior version of the item myself.
Assembly is about taking resources and/or components and making an item. I believe it should also contain some kind of decision making process and these options I see here come down to a number of possiblities. I don’t think you should have to make too many decisions or have to decide multiple unrelated factors, but there should always be something to consider. Just following a shopping list and putting in materials to get a known item out is boring – EVE does this and it looks complex but at the end of the day you just follow instructions without having to know what you are doing or have any option to change the outcome. I call this pie machine crafting because
chickensresources go in,piesitems come out.I think you should be able to either choose to make something quickly or cheaply, adjust the stats on the resultant item, experiment with settings or inputs to risk making a better item or change the visual appearance of the item. Or maybe a couple of them. Experimentation needs to be done carefully so as not to promote repeatitive behaviour – SWG did a good job with this and I think a system like that could work. At no point should there ever be any randomisation in the assembly process. You should have the option to take a risk to get a better outcome, but it should always be a known quantity when you don’t.
Modification
This step can often be done by the user of the item rather than the crafter and I think it’s an important step to giving the system more flexibility especially when there are constraint mechanisms in play. For example in EVE your ship has a certain amount of CPU and Power Grid. You can only fit modules that will not exceed these limits. If you found/made/bought a laser gun and really wanted to use it but it would use more Power Grid that you had remaining then you’re all /o\ But if you could drop in a module/gem/enchantment that reduced the Power Grid requirement, even if it was at the expense of some other stat, then you’d be like \o/
So, I think that items should have the ability to have their stats and/or constraints tweaked by the end user in some way. Perhaps this is done with the help of consumables from another crafting profession – jewelcrafting in WoW for example. I also think there should be a reason to tweak stats. The existence of soft caps in WoW and constraints in EVE are good examples of places where someone that wants to min/max and tweak their gear to the Nth degree can while other players that are not interested don’t have to.
So, tell me what you reckon. What are your thoughts on item degredation, crafting profession inter-reliance, item stat adjustment, character and item constraint mechanisms and resource meta data presentation.
love,
kris -
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