Multiplatform Meta: What Makes a Good Crafting system? [Archive]

Closet_Skeleton

2015-06-05, 04:50 AM

Biggest one I can think of, don't make it so that forging 80 iron daggers to level up is a better option than forging Nilehus' Lesser Sword of Godslaying.

Skyrim had the worst crafting progression I've ever seen...

Forging 80 iron daggers is only the best option because iron is the most available material and time is immaterial, you do get more XP the more the item is worth. You level up a lot faster cranking out jewellery once you have enough gold and silver and have been adventuring long enough to have a ridiculous gem collection. The well rested and warrior sign multiplier means that you get XP way more efficiently making expensive items than lots of cheap ones.

just go to the guy

There's something cool about having the option to do it yourself. If there's a material that can only be worked by the best smith in the world then sure an adventurer who doesn't have time to dedicate to smithing is not going to be able to work it, but in Morrowind there are enchanters in every town, being unable to do it yourself is insulting.

The actual functional difference between Morrowind's people and Skyrim's benches is pretty small though.

GloatingSwine

2015-06-05, 05:32 AM

Forging 80 iron daggers is only the best option because iron is the most available material and time is immaterial, you do get more XP the more the item is worth. You level up a lot faster cranking out jewellery once you have enough gold and silver and have been adventuring long enough to have a ridiculous gem collection. The well rested and warrior sign multiplier means that you get XP way more efficiently making expensive items than lots of cheap ones.

It's still tedious bollocks which exists only as a time barrier between the player and the things they actually wanted to do with the crafting system (because you trivially overwhelm the ability of merchants to buy anything off you so it's not even really interacting with the game economy).

This should be one of the iron rules. Everything the player makes with crafting should be something relevant and interesting.

Pronounceable

2015-06-05, 07:06 AM

Nothing. Crafting sucks.

However in the spirit of not pooposting, I'd propose integrating it into gameplay itself. Which means combat of course. Only the fiery breath of ancient dragon Xqwzst is hot enough to melt this mystical drakesteel ore so you must get hit by its breath while Not Dying to Dragonfire spell is on you to acquire a drakesteel ingot, followed by finding the mountain giant kinglord Urflgrablwhe and make him use his Divine Hammer Smash attack on the spot where you dropped the drakesteel ingot (which must of course be done before drakesteel ingot cools back to invulnerability in 30 minutes). Only the resulting forged drakesteel chunk can be used to make the legendary Drakesteel Sword.

Obviously, the amount of effort you'll need to put into this is so ginormous, you're better off making another CRPG with your resources.

Eldan

2015-06-05, 07:36 AM

I guess some people like customization, where you get a +2 to stat 1, and a -2 to stats 2 and 3. I don't.

I don't have anything against crafting, but I want the item I craft to do something new, not the same thing, but better.

Cespenar

2015-06-05, 08:33 AM

There's something cool about having the option to do it yourself. If there's a material that can only be worked by the best smith in the world then sure an adventurer who doesn't have time to dedicate to smithing is not going to be able to work it, but in Morrowind there are enchanters in every town, being unable to do it yourself is insulting.

The actual functional difference between Morrowind's people and Skyrim's benches is pretty small though.

I don't really care about the game not letting you craft it yourself, as long as I can somehow get my Titan's Pants.

Also, Skyrim doesn't have neither spellmaking nor the range of funny effects you can put on your items.

Rodin

2015-06-05, 09:37 AM

The only crafting system in recent games that I liked was in Dark Souls. Pick a weapon you like, customize it to fit your character. Get unique crafting items from bosses and make unique weapons.

Anything more complicated than that is just a time sink.

warty goblin

2015-06-05, 10:28 AM

I'll more or less second the 'none at all' responses. Crafting systems are usually just fetch-quests with even less window dressing, with the attendant joys of another (often terrible) menu system totally external to the gameworld. Oh, and obsessively hoovering up the contents of every rubbish heap I walk past. Because nothing gets me engaged in the characters, world, and action like rooting around in gutters for Rat Spleens. It's like a more fiddly version of having crates full of gold every-freak-where, and while I don't exactly love that either, at least it requires a lot less screwing about.

The only exception to hating crafting I can think of is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which does things differently. There's only two chances to craft weapons in the entire game, and it's totally optional. More importantly, you use standard game controls to perform the necessary actions entirely within the game world. This shifts the emphasis away from adding +2 froozles to get +15.1% damage per second or whatever, to being a genuine participant in the game world. Of course it helps that Dark Messiah is primarily an action game, and therefore much more immediate than most RPGs, but this is a sort of crafting I wouldn't mind seeing more often. But I could die very happy having never seen another crafting menu and a tooltip explaining how I can personalize my experience by crafting powerful new weapons and armor.

GolemsVoice

2015-06-05, 10:47 AM

I'm not big on crafting myself, but if it exists, it should add something to the game beyond just "more items". The crafted items should never be strictly better or strictly worse than found items of the same level, since either devalues the other. I think crafting works well when it allows you to add and customize what you have. The game gives you the basic items (say, a sword) and you can enchant it, to fit your playstile (more damage, more defense, a freeze effect, whatever). Crafting materials shouldn't be super common, but you shouldn't have to jump through enormous hoops just to get some armor that's slightly better than what you would have found anyway.

The_Jackal

2015-06-05, 10:57 AM

So, what, IYO, makes a good crafting system in a CRPG?

I think many, many games make the mistake of trying to make the crafting interesting by turning it directly into a game, ie: some sort of puzzle mechanic. Wildstar, for example, has a coordinate system where you can try to modify the outcome of a recipe. EQ2 has a very fiddly and frustrating system much like WoW notorious kungaloosh recipe, where you had to do 'simon says' style responses to stimuli, or lose your ingredients.

The reason these systems miss the mark is because what makes crafting satisfying isn't the process of producing the item, it's the item itself. It's an exercise with extrinsic motivation, just like in real life. I draw and paint, my girlfriend knits. The process itself isn't odious, but what's satisfying is when you've got a piece of your work when you're finished, not the hours of often repetitive work which were invested in making it.

So, what DOES make a good in-game crafting system? Closet_Skeleton gets at the core of it, in my opinion: The crafting system needs to drive you into the more INTRINSICALLY entertaining portions of the game. This is one way where WoW Warlords of Draenor crafting has jumped the shark: All your crafting can be done without going out into the world, fighting monsters and using the treasures they guarded to make stuff. You just safely collect rocks for your mine and feed it into your forge, getting completed ingots hours later.

Another thing crafting has to be, in my opinion, is optional. You've had lots of people in this thread bemoan crafting as always terrible, and for them it's utterly true. Understand that when you're making a crafting system, you're making a niche system in your game for a certain type of player. This is one of the ways where Skyrim's crafting whiffs: The best items in the game are crafted, the found items, even daedric artifacts, don't even come close.

Lastly, you should try to balance tedium against effort in your crafting system. Making crafting too easy short-circuits the sense of accomplishment you get from completing it, and completing it is the proper word. Think of crafting as a really long quest chain with a cool reward at the end. So, how do you shake it up? Number one, avoid repetition. Reward crafters by learning and completing new recipes, instead of just milling out 900 iron daggers (I'm looking at you, Skyrim). Put in quests to find lost recipes or to get unique ingredients or gain the trust of wise mentors. You need obstacles to make crafting feel satisfying, but the primary challenge should not be to your patience.

warty goblin

2015-06-05, 11:13 AM

The reason these systems miss the mark is because what makes crafting satisfying isn't the process of producing the item, it's the item itself. It's an exercise with extrinsic motivation, just like in real life. I draw and paint, my girlfriend knits. The process itself isn't odious, but what's satisfying is when you've got a piece of your work when you're finished, not the hours of often repetitive work which were invested in making it.

This is the exact opposite of my take on making things. I carve wood, mostly because I love the actions of carving the wood; figuring out how to get the cut I want, judging when to remove more wood, feeling the knife in my hand. I like the figures I carve, I think they make my apartment look better, but I enjoy making them much more than I do looking at them.

Another thing crafting has to be, in my opinion, is optional. You've had lots of people in this thread bemoan crafting as always terrible, and for them it's utterly true. Understand that when you're making a crafting system, you're making a niche system in your game for a certain type of player. This is one of the ways where Skyrim's crafting whiffs: The best items in the game are crafted, the found items, even daedric artifacts, don't even come close.
Does this matter very much in practice? By the time a person can craft powerful stuff in most RPGs, they're already so powerful all it does is shift the game from Cakewalk to Complete Cakewalk. Which is actually something like negative motivation in my book, since I like my games to have at least the semblance of a difficulty curve.

Grinner

2015-06-05, 12:41 PM

Lastly, you should try to balance tedium against effort in your crafting system. Making crafting too easy short-circuits the sense of accomplishment you get from completing it, and completing it is the proper word. Think of crafting as a really long quest chain with a cool reward at the end. So, how do you shake it up? Number one, avoid repetition. Reward crafters by learning and completing new recipes, instead of just milling out 900 iron daggers (I'm looking at you, Skyrim). Put in quests to find lost recipes or to get unique ingredients or gain the trust of wise mentors. You need obstacles to make crafting feel satisfying, but the primary challenge should not be to your patience.

When I was talking about "scavenger hunt" crafting earlier, I had the games Geneforge 4 and 5 in mind. The crafting system in the games doesn't allow you to make basic things like steel weapons or even Shaped (read "alchemically-enhanced") ones. Instead, if you keep your eyes peeled for recipes in in-game books and the often hard-to-find ingredients they mention, you can create progressively more powerful, artifact-like items. This sort of crafting gives a large payout for a large amount of effort.

Aside from these items, there are also simple improvements you can make to mundane equipment via enchantment crystals, which provide moderate payout for moderate effort or expense. There are more powerful items available, but a broadsword with an acid infusion can take you a fair way through the game.

There's a third sort of crafting available in these two games, but I've never quite understood it. Magic isn't hard for your characters to obtain, even melee-focused ones. Even so, you can create wands, each of which is good for six castings of a particular spell, I think. The ingredients they require though, like vlish tentacles, can be moderately expensive or rare. This sort of crafting I can't agree with, since its products provide minimal benefit for comparatively excessive effort. There are a few cases where I've found crafting wands useful, but they're few and far between.

The_Jackal

2015-06-05, 01:20 PM

This is the exact opposite of my take on making things. I carve wood, mostly because I love the actions of carving the wood; figuring out how to get the cut I want, judging when to remove more wood, feeling the knife in my hand. I like the figures I carve, I think they make my apartment look better, but I enjoy making them much more than I do looking at them.

Legit, but I doubt such 'process over results' satisfaction is likely to emerge in a video game. What you get instead is an exercise in annoyance and frustration.

Does this matter very much in practice? By the time a person can craft powerful stuff in most RPGs, they're already so powerful all it does is shift the game from Cakewalk to Complete Cakewalk. Which is actually something like negative motivation in my book, since I like my games to have at least the semblance of a difficulty curve.

I think it matters, because the game shouldn't become less challenging because you're more powerful, it should enable you to take on tougher challenges because you're more powerful. In Skyrim, they do give you that convenient difficulty slider, which might almost work, except their gear crafting is so monumentally overpowered that it trivializes even the highest difficulty and renders all other rewards irrelevant. Balancing crafted gear versus loot might be one of the hardest choices to make in an RPG, I think. Make it too powerful, and crafting becomes mandatory for anyone wanting to maximize their power. Make it too weak, and the completion of crafting feels unrewarding.

Ultimately, I think the fix is to gate the best crafted gear with loot. WoW did this pretty well in Wrath of the Lich King. I also think there needs to be more of a quest component to high level crafting, so that every mighty relic you build requires some other investment other than buying mats off the auction house and rolling up to a forge and clicking combine. Vanilla WoW had an excellent idea in that, to make Dark Iron gear, you needed to reach the Black Forge, deep in the heart of Blackrock Depths. This is an idea that appeals to me a lot, and something which more games which want to include crafting in their features should consider.

My bottom line is this: As a designer, you need to resist the player's impulse to adopt shortcuts. Your job is to present them with fun, varied, challenging content, not to cater to their whims and simply install a loot or cash dispenser.

warty goblin

2015-06-05, 01:54 PM

Legit, but I doubt such 'process over results' satisfaction is likely to emerge in a video game. What you get instead is an exercise in annoyance and frustration.

Process is pretty much why I play games. I don't particularly care about the end result of 'kill pixel dude,' a task I can in essence accomplish instantly by never turning the game on in the first place. However I enjoy the action, strategy or whatever of killing that pixel dude in some particular game.

I think it matters, because the game shouldn't become less challenging because you're more powerful, it should enable you to take on tougher challenges because you're more powerful. In Skyrim, they do give you that convenient difficulty slider, which might almost work, except their gear crafting is so monumentally overpowered that it trivializes even the highest difficulty and renders all other rewards irrelevant. Balancing crafted gear versus loot might be one of the hardest choices to make in an RPG, I think. Make it too powerful, and crafting becomes mandatory for anyone wanting to maximize their power. Make it too weak, and the completion of crafting feels unrewarding.
I don't think there's a way around this. If crafting does not let a person create more powerful items than they can loot, it is pointless from a power perspective. If it does, then by necessity if you want to be as powerful as possible, you have to craft. If the delta between with-crafting power and without-crafting power is small enough, then the loss of power may be irrelevant to a lot of players; some of whom will then complain that crafting is pointless because the return isn't sufficient to be worth the time.

Further, I don't think you can effectively pull off the 'more challenging content' thing in an RPG particularly well. Consider an open world RPG. If I craft myself a bunch of high power stuff, I can go fight tougher enemies. But unless every single enemy in the game gets tougher, all this allows me to do is some extra quests or what-have-you. The random bandit I encounter on my way to the hard encounter will be entirely trivial, which I would consider making the game easier. I can go kill the Epic Dragon, which is one hard fight, but in return I've made the next 99 fights totally trivial. And if every enemy in the game gets tougher to compensate, then it's just a treadmill and there's no point to crafting at all. You've got pretty much the same problems in a linear game; where if I'm well enough equipped to do the optional stuff, I'm gonna steamroller the main quest material that most of the time is the majority of the game.

Really, I think the fundamental problem here is that in RPGs, character power only ever increases, and challenge only increases by throwing monsters with larger numbers at the player, which the player in turn can only beat through having bigger numbers of their own. Which in turn means that pretty much the only meaningful actions a player has, when it comes to gameplay, is which numbers to increase how fast. So crafting either increases your numbers faster than not crafting, or it doesn't matter. It may be involved enough in the world that it doesn't feel that way, but at the end of the day it's all about the numbers.

Rodin

2015-06-05, 02:10 PM

After thinking about it some more, my one biggest complaint with crafting is the gathering of the materials. I do not want to go into an area and find 500 herbs that I have to pick if I want to make fancy potions, or 200 veins of ore that I have to mine. Including masses of the material on monster corpses isn't much better, since my inventory ends up bloated that way anyway.

Keep it simple. Potion crafting is almost never a satisfying experience. For swords, armor, magic, what have you, don't make me farm. Each crafting item should be unique, and the materials to make them rare.

Making me gather 200 Elfroot just to level up my potion-making only brings on WoW flashbacks. It's an annoying formula that far too many games have started mimicking.

Closet_Skeleton

2015-06-05, 06:18 PM

Self-crafted weapons always being better than loot wouldn't be badly balanced if say you had to choose a smith subclass to make them and were missing out on other combat related subclasses to take that option. Then you'd have a equipment based build rather than in Skyrim where you hit max stabbing skills pretty quickly and then have to branch out into smithing to improve your damage any more.

The Witcher series' alchemy was a good crafting system, pity it had to ruin it by adding other pointless and less thematic crafting systems as well. If you have one good system for combat buffs don't throw in other worse thought out systems on top of it. I don't need strength potions and a whetstone both boosting damage. Crafting potions was only really interesting because the potions were also interesting and crafting was the main way to get them.

The only crafting system I wanted to make for a game was in a magic user centered RPG. You crafted your own staff by inscribing runes on it, but the runes were just focuses for spells so it was really just a part of the spell preparation system. The time you spent on crafting came from the same pool of downtime you spent on training so it was basically just a part of the level up system. Sadly nobody is going to pay me to make MGS meets Deus Ex meets Tokimeki Memorial meets Vancian casting.

Would you class a weapon customisation system like in the original Mass Effect to be a type of crafting system or not? I enjoyed some of the options in that one but on the whole it was too many stupid minor improvements and horribly cluttered in a terrible inventory system.

It's still tedious bollocks which exists only as a time barrier between the player and the things they actually wanted to do with the crafting system (because you trivially overwhelm the ability of merchants to buy anything off you so it's not even really interacting with the game economy).

To you maybe. I enjoyed making tons of high end jewellery from all the flawless diamonds I looted and then giving them over the top names and throwing enchantments onto them.

It was tedious busywork that I was just messing around with but so is combat in that game.

It may be involved enough in the world that it doesn't feel that way, but at the end of the day it's all about the numbers.

Sometimes it not about numbers but about tactical options. Crafting traps isn't the same as improving a +2 sword into a +3 sword, picking up spring attack is different to picking weapon specialisation. Its often pointless and when you start getting +2 traps then it ends up as a numbers game but in theory you can make things about possibilities rather than numbers.

Aotrs Commander

2015-06-05, 07:06 PM

I think PoE's system was not bad. While on the one hand ti did require you to hover up items, at least the game gave you an essentially unlimited stash to store them in (that you could turn off if you wanted).

It was basically geared to adding stuff to weapons/armour/shields (and you were sort of expected to do it, to some extent, to max out your weapons, within the stringient limitations of what you could add), making potions or scrolls (which 95% of the time I never USE, let alone feel like I need to craft, though in games like DA:O, I made a lot of healing and mana potions) and food, which is basically about the onmly way to (lightly) buff before combat or dialogue. You could do it anywhere, and it easn't related to skill or anything. (I personally would have liked to be able to add enchantments to some of the other item slots, but PoE was paranoid about not letting to actually have much in the way of rewards...)

I think item crafting is a useful thing to have when weapon choice matters, as in PoE (where the weapons actually have a reasonable approximation of differing abilities) or BG (where you couldn't pick up and use any item), where if you didn't take the modal weapon choice, you were limited in what you could do. Or for allowing people to optimise their gear, perhaps.

Morrowind's system wasn't bad either, though I recall Oblivion's was considerable less good.

So, well, maybe I'm not so much in favour of crafting as much as "enchanting magic items" (or equivilent in KotR 1 and 2 especially, which come to think of it, wasn't actuallty too bad either.)

The ability to make mundane items always seemed a bit pointless to me.

On the whole, though, I can take or leave crafting. I might use it if it's there (I did in KotR/KotR 2/DA:O/NWN2) but I could cope without it.

I don't consider quest-related crafting to even really be craftinhg, since if it's a quest, I'll do it whether or not I want the item, because it's a quest. (I consider that there is the no such thing as a optional quest: if it's there, I'll do it.)

Hiro Protagonest

2015-06-05, 07:09 PM

I think PoE's system was not bad. While on the one hand ti did require you to hover up items, at least the game gave you an essentially unlimited stash to store them in (that you could turn off if you wanted).

...You're going to have to clarify what that acronym is, because I don't remember crafting (I guess you could stick some magic stones on items?) or an unlimited stash in Path of Exile.

Aotrs Commander

2015-06-05, 07:10 PM

...You're going to have to clarify what that acronym is, because I don't remember crafting (I guess you could stick some magic stones on items?) or an unlimited stash in Path of Exile.

Pillars of Eternity.

Tvtyrant

2015-06-06, 12:50 AM

A good crafting system imo should be based around meeting objectives or collecting plot items. Mining and the like can be entertaining for some people but it does not help the plot and is extremely slow.

Partysan

2015-06-06, 05:16 AM

Note: this is somewhat RPG specific, sorry.

1. Choice and Sidegrades

A good crafting system can only exist in a game that allows a certain amount of choice in equipment to begin with. Numbers are not interesting, options are. This means that a game in which intricate choice of equipment can be used to customize a playstyle are best equipped (npi) to host a crafting system.

How much in depth the choice goes very much depends on the specific game in question. A melee heavy game could very well feature a large array of weapons that do not just distinguish themselves by being bladed or blunt but by materials, weight, blade shape, handle and guard options. The important part is that there need to be several options that are on a similar power level but offer different playstyles. This allows the player to make actual choices, weighing advantages and disadvantages to create their most fitting equipment. How about a mace with a handguard?

Point here is that the actual upgrade in power isn't significant, it's the additional freedom of expression and customization the player gains. This can lead into power when versatility leads into a "right tool for the job" situation, but this isn't a bad thing.

There's another way that you see in minecraft and survival games in which you have to find your way up a ladder or increasingly complex things to make and look for recipes, but this only works in a scenario that doesn't allow you to buy equipment.

2. Immersion, Convenience and "Realism"

As said in 1. the actual equipment and crafting system has to integrate into the world and experience of the game without dissonance. A part of this is minimizing menus and providing fitting animations for atmosphere. Games like Gothic (2) did this well for their time and someone already mentioned the two or three instances of crafting in Dark Messiah. Skyrim has nice animations but they're hidden under a huge crafting menu.

This isn't just about appearances though. Lets consider Skyrim's iron dagger flood for a moment. Realistically it makes sense to practice something for hundreds of times before having mastered it. However, realism isn't what we want in a game, we want immersion. This means that there needs to be enough verisimilitude for us to accept what we're presented with, but actual realism will almost always get in the way of actually having fun.
Nobody likes making hundreds of worthless (and heavy) iron daggers and even if there's a bit of realism to it it also doesn't fit the game world very well. To actually be realistic, you'd not only have to make a lot of items to master smithing, you'd have to spend years on it. That's not a thing in games, and it shouldn't be. Thus, it makes sense to cut the practice a little more.

This is also because while the character does get better while making daggers in Skyrim, the player doesn't. The player is completely uninvolved in the crafting which they direct from a menu. Consequently, the feeling is not as immersive as it was in games like Gothic in which the player did go through all the steps of making a sword.
That's also the reason why some people like the idea of having a crafting minigame. I'm ambivalent about the idea. To be good a crafting minigame has to fulfill two conditions: it needs to be fully integrated into the world as such (i.e. no extra window opening for a crafting puzzle) and it needs to be balanced for a low skill ceiling so the player will need to practice for a bit and get better at making the item, but it needs to be possible to make the item without flaws after a reasonably short amount of tries.

3. Integration and Discovery

Finally, crafting in games like RPGs where you'd most often find it needs to seemlessly connect to the other elements of the game. Crafting is a means to equip you for your adventures, but it can also be an adventure hook in itself. Skyrim allowed you to liberate mines from Bandits to mine the ore inside and that's not a bad start. But there's also the hunt for new recipes, in books, paintings, by instruction of by finding items and studying how they might've been made. There's looking for rare ingredients, legendary materials, monster parts, trading and questing for items and secret information. There's experimenting with materials and parts to find new combinations. It wouldn't be impossible to base a whole RPG plot just around a person who wants to become a legendary smith in a fantasy world.

This way, a positive feedback loop is created. The player find things on adventures, they can use those to craft items which they then again use in adventures. A rare find will make the player happy about new options in crafting and a new finished item will motivate them to go out and try it in their adventures.

One last thing about the question of found loot vs. crafted equipment. I'm not sure it is really a bad thing to have crafted equipment be a higher quality than looted equipment. Not only does this make sense as it can be made to order and properly fitted, it will also usually require a greater investment of playtime of the side of the player. Now if we're talking legendary artifacts, then yes. But even then, I wonder what a legendary crafter could do with those...

LibraryOgre

2015-06-06, 08:13 AM

Do you have different crafting system requirements in single player games v. MMOs?

Knaight

2015-06-06, 09:07 AM

I've seen a handful of good crafting systems, all of which have had certain similarities - the crafting connects to the core gameplay experience, and there is actual skill involved in the crafting itself. Two examples:

Baten Kaitos: The core combat system involves playing cards from a deck under a time limit, paying attention to types and card number, making quick decisions with actual tradeoffs (with a lot of high speed numerical approximation). The crafting system interfaces with this, because to craft things you have to play a set of particular cards in particular order. In addition, these are generally hinted at somehow. For instance, there is one helmet that can be used offensively (not for any use, but with deck-clearing purposes when you don't particularly need it), which has text that hints that it doubles as a rice pot. There is a rice healing item, which hints that if you put water in it and heat it, you can steam rice. There is a combination of that helmet, the rice, water/pure water/a low level water spell, fire/a mid level fire spell that produced cooked rice. To get it, you need to manipulate the hand of at least one character while in combat, keeping at least one foe alive while also not losing. Or, you can get it by chance - but if you take that option, you risk missing out a turn that's immediately useful.

Rune Factory Frontier: The game is repetitive, because it's about the maintenance and managing of several routine activities, while also dungeon crawling. Crafting fits in there with the other routines, provides stuff for the dungeon crawling, and is generally nested in. It benefits from doing good crop maintenance, which itself benefits from maintaining a balance of nature spirits. It benefits from planning and thinking ahead as to what you might want when when procuring materials. All of this together lets you get set up better to begin with, but then there's a timing mini-game which keeps stuff entertaining, and provides more decisions.

NichG

2015-06-06, 10:58 AM

I think the primary thing is that I'd like 'crafting' to be different than just 'obtaining items', otherwise there's no need for the extra system. One thing I like in non-RPGs is when you can both design/build things, and then use them in a way that is associated with the design you made. So you can design things to 'handle' well. So it would be interesting to do that in a cRPG, so that the craft system helps you tune how your character(s) behave to play in a way that is most comfortable and interesting for you as the player.

With a cRPG, you have to be sparse enough that the game isn't just crafting but crafting just augments the game, so you have to be careful with going overboard. A few tunable elements though can add a lot.

I think the best such thing I've seen so far is the combos you can do in the game Transistor.

The_Jackal

2015-06-06, 01:18 PM

Do you have different crafting system requirements in single player games v. MMOs?

In my opinion, no. Really, every multiplayer game needs to stand up as a single-player experience, because there will be a lot of time that players will be doing things solo in the game. Conversely, single player games that don't pay attention to stuff like balance in multiplayer games on the undertaking that 'it's only single player' are copping out of giving the single player interesting choices. Take Skyrim again: The magic system in that game scales SO poorly in comparison to weapons that you're basically trivializing the game by using weapons and optimizing with crafting.

Basically what I'm saying is that, for me at least, a multiplayer game is just a single-player game with your friends.

Draz74

2015-06-06, 02:19 PM

Do you have different crafting system requirements in single player games v. MMOs?

Absolutely, assuming that crafted items can be bought/sold/gifted from one PC to another in an MMO.

Mx.Silver

2015-06-06, 03:14 PM

I think as with most systems, that would depend on what purpose a crafting system is meant to serve within a game. With most RPGs, they seem to be there for the sake of having a crafting system in the first place*, at most as a safety net for the letting the player choose from a wide range of weapon options without crippling themselves. This is why you get a lot of games where they just function as yet more time-consuming speed-bumps or busywork, either in the form of more stuff you have to go looking for or adding equipment slots to the things you put in your character equipment slots (sometimes both).
This isn't necessarily a bad function (the actual crafting part of Minecraft is primarily a speed bump, for instance) but since RPGs tend to be full of things that do this already, most of which tend to be more directly integrated into the game as a whole, crafting systems can often feel like an unnecessary burden.

One direction that it might be worth exploring would be a system that serves an aesthetic rather than a practical function. That is, a kind of 'fashion design' system for customising the look of clothing and equipment. There is some precedent for this (moreso in JRPGs, although given that the complaint of 'picking the best equipment makes my character look weird' isn't uncommon in WRPGs I don't think it would be unwelcome there either), but I don't think it's ever been developed that far, possibly since pursuing it further would put more strain on art departments.

*i.e. the same reason a lot of common systems in RPGs are common systems in RPGs

Knaight

2015-06-06, 11:53 PM

In addition to what has been mentioned, there are a few other "crafting systems" of note that I've seen in weird corners of gaming that have been really interesting. One was a game that was also supposed to teach some CAD system, where you had to replicate a 3D model from scratch of every item you picked up. You'll get better at the CAD system, you learn new tricks, there's the matter of how you build the item (some viable ways are vastly faster and more efficient than other viable ways). That whole concept has some real merit, as it gets the idea of actually building something across. A similar thing is cropping up in the whole 3D pixel aesthetic, where you can build your equipment pixel by pixel, with the aesthetic customization that implies.

Partysan

2015-06-07, 06:55 AM

Do you have different crafting system requirements in single player games v. MMOs?

Yes, slightly. In MMOs there's player interaction which changes the processes of crafting and there's a higher need for balance than in a single player game.

In MMOs you often see two behaviours: division of labour, i.e. people dividing up different tasks like harvesting raw materials and combining them and specialization by which is this context I mean players concentrating on a specific aspect of the game such as only crafting and trading and ignoring the combat content.

Depending on the game in question, such behaviours are generally en- or discouraged in certain ways. For example, many MMOs will limit the amount of harvesting and crafting skills one character can learn, often to a degree that forbids self-sufficiency. This is supposed to force players to work together. (I happen to like soloing MMOs and thus dislike such artificial limitations.) In the same vein, materials will often be found inside of combat zones, which makes it necessary for the harvester to be either appropriately levelled, thus forcing them to do combat content, or to be accompanied by players with combat-oriented characters. This very much reveals that combat is the main mechanic of most games, and the only way to level up a character.
This also explains the tendency of MMOs to never let crafted equipment reach the level that equipment looted from bosses/raids has. The group fights are the core content of the game, thus they need to reap the highest rewards. As a result crafters will sometimes only be useful through their consumables instead of their main business.

Then there's the thing about not wanting characters to be over-equipped for their level and playtime, but that's usually solves through level and trade restrictions. Point is, when equipment is a significant source of power and players can split up and specialize, crafting needs to be factored into the balance of a multiplayer game which is usually a tricky thing to do. However, at the same time it also allows for bigger, more ridiculous crafting projects that you wouldn't expect a single player to work out on their own.

Tvtyrant

2015-06-07, 11:01 AM

One way that might be cool would be the ability to collect deeds. So you clear out a dungeon, a forest or a guys basement. When you do you could be rewarded with a deed, which grants you a certain amount of materials for crafting on each level up. As you defeat bosses you pick up more and more deeds, which effectively replace random drops with custom weapons you can make. Now instead of invading a dungeon over and over again to try to get a random sword you might be trying to get a diamond mine deed, which would get you access to adamant.

Morty

2015-06-07, 11:16 AM

In order for a crafting system to be anything other than a nuisance, it should be the only, or at least primary, means of gear acquisition. If it needs to compete with buying and finding items, my patience for it drains quickly.

GolemsVoice

2015-06-07, 11:48 AM

I'm with Morty on this one. Either stick to one way of gear accquisiton, or make the crafting for upgrades and customization. Because otherwise you're only adding ANOTHER layer to the comparison-congo some games have, where you not only have to match a weapon to your skillset, your playstyle and your gear, but also compar eit to craftable wepons and future craftable wepons.

warty goblin

2015-06-15, 04:06 PM

So out of morbid curiosity I tried ARK: Survival Evolved, one of those open world craft'n'survive early access things. Mostly because it had dinosaurs, and as I have previously argued, far too few games feature dinosaurs. This would be one of those games where you have to craft things in order to get any sort of tool at all too; so I figured maybe I'd actually like it.

Yeah, not so much.

So I start out on a beach, and need to harvest stuff. So far so good. I harvest things by punching a piece of driftwood. This mostly gives me thatch, and also drains my health. This is where things are not good. I would accept punching as a generic 'use your hands to work this material' animation just fine; except that in that case it really should not drain my health, because if you can break up a log barehanded at all, you don't damage yourself doing it. Also you probably don't want to use that wood for anything, because it's almost certainly rotten. Which still wouldn't give me thatch.

But whatever. I punch some driftwood, then I punch some bamboo, then some more driftwood, pick up some rocks, and make myself a stone pickaxe. For some reason this is the first tool I can make, even though it's one of the last I'd want for actually making things or harvesting wood, killing and cleaning game, etc. Also it looks exactly like a modern pickaxe - complete with long, narrow head and socketed shaft - except the head is stone instead of steel. Now you absolutely can make a socketed stone tool; the Egyptians used socketed stone mace heads all the time. But boring a hole right through a hunk of rock is not exactly trivial; the Egyptians did it by heating the rock in a fire (which I can't make yet) then dripping water on the stone to cause rapid cooling and microfractures, followed by a lot of boring and polishing. It is not in other words a simple matter of combining stone, wood and (for some reason) thatch. Plus the head design of a modern steel pickaxe is very stupid for a stone tool, and would result in a tool so fragile as to be near useless for any actual work.

At this point I'm killed by a random dinosaur, because I'm unable to defend myself with my idiot pickaxe. I approve of this, as it demonstrates the harsh reality of what happens to morons who punch trees to make crappy pickaxes on a dinosaur infested beach. Evolution in action.

So I respawn, and repeat the sequence of bizarre steps to acquire another stone pickaxe. At this point I'm told I've leveled up, which lets me increase my health by 10%, and learn how to make a fire. I bet early hominids learned firemaking exactly the same way; and evolved to walk upright to be able to punch trees more effectively. I am however unable to make a fire, because although I can get enough wood and thatch and stone, I have no flint. But flint only really helps make a fire if you also have steel. A person could start a fire using only wood and thatch and stone using a bowdrill or even more primitive methods like rubbing two sticks together, but in a world of thatch-bearing logs, clearly that's out of the question.

Then I'm told I'm dehydrated, and am eaten by another dinosaur while looking for water. After punching myself another pickaxe, I set out in search of flint, but am told I'm starving before finding any. So I harvest some berries. Fascinatingly enough, one single plant can simultaneously produce two separate types of berries, one of which I magically know yields red dye, and the other yellow. Botanists and dyers alike will be stunned by this news; although the dyers will probably still want to get a decent mordant from somewhere. The berries do little to assuage my hunger; but fortunately a dinosaur eats me before I starve to death. Gotta be thankful for the little things.

Another respawn; another few trees punched into oblivion. I feel I should note that tree-punching yields only one or two pieces of wood per tree, but lots and lots of thatch. And for some reason it takes multiple pieces of wood to make a pickaxe; which basically means I'm a quarter dead by the time I've made the most basic tool. All my tree-punching has apparently gained me enough experience to level up again, so I learn how to make a spear. Which naturally requires flint. Apparently using a sharply pointed stick is too complicated.

At this point I'm eaten by another dinosaur. Before me stretches an eternity of punching trees and collecting nonsensical lists of ingredients to nigh-instantly create stupid tools; as if assembling a functional tool from raw materials is like making cupcakes from a box mix - just add thatch! It's like playing a game called Sim Cook, and spending it all punching supermarket shelves to get flour. Of course what it really is is open-world Fetchquestia, but with substantial savings in the dialog department; go there to get the thing to make the deal to get the better thing to go there to get the other thing to make another thing with which to gouge out my eyes and make the stupid go away.

I exit out and use Steam to craft myself a refund, which makes it the only kind of crafting that doesn't suck.

Closet_Skeleton

2015-06-15, 05:22 PM

That system worked in Minecraft because it was clearly abstract.

This is just blatant copying. You make stone tools by taking flint and other flint. They could very easily have made a sensible stone age tool making system. Unoriginality isn't a problem, but you can't just copy something and change only one aspect, you have to adapt everything to keep the world consistent.

druid91

2015-06-15, 07:14 PM

Personally? When it has litterally nothing to do with making a +1 sword. And everything to do with cobbling together working mechanisms with a physics engine. Less Diamond Swords, more TNT cannons. More Gary's mods.

DodgerH2O

2015-06-15, 10:40 PM

The first crafting system that didn't frustrate me was from an old MUD. It was more or less class-based, and while every class could learn every skill, they used different amounts of "character points" or somesuch, so for instance Alchemy was easier for a Shaman and Blacksmithing easier for a Warrior. Total points were limited and couldn't be "re-specced" so crafters had to choose more or less between say crafting and a secondary weapon or magic type, it was a significant cost to become a master craftsperson.

Crafted items thus were generally much better than equivalently priced vendor items, but the players who learned to craft were able to make a good profit from their skill investment (Essentially you traded combat potential for better income). In addition, materials for the highest quality items were located in dangerous or hard to find spots. Once someone showed you it was easy, but the game would lead you there on your own eventually if you just played through normally. It was a small enough game that there wasn't a FAQ and so crafters naturally kept some things to themselves, the first time I found a rare material like dragon bone it seemed like a big deal.

In addition, "recipes" tended to be only a few steps and not tedious. That dragon bone made exactly one weapon or piece of armor. Maybe required a few other consumables but you automatically succeeded at any recipe you met the skill requirement for. The consumables were NPC purchased and not fetched or looted and so the typical MMO grinding aspect was almost nonexistent.

I can think of a few key reasons this system comes to mind as a Good Crafting System. It encourages interaction and commerce between players. Crafting requires an investment but not a grind. And not every character could reasonably have every craft skill, making it a nice way to differentiate your build from others with a similar role.

Brother Oni

2015-06-16, 06:26 AM

Do you have different crafting system requirements in single player games v. MMOs?

The only crafting system I really ever sunk any time into was the one in Eve Online and that has an entirely different focus and resultant issues.

While I do like the quality of life improvements it has (being able to remotely gather materials, have them delivered to your crafting site and start crafting jobs remotely, etc), the whole blueprint system has problems, not to mention actually trying to turn a profit requires more time than I have to invest into the game.

BannedInSchool

2015-06-16, 12:16 PM

One of DDO's crafting systems (before the game moved on and they didn't update that system) was basically a way to create random loot without the random. On one hand your crafted Silver Holy of Evil Outsider Bane weapon wasn't any better than one you could have found, but on the other hand you'd likely never actually find one and instead have to pay a fortune to someone who had. Levelling crafting took an annoying amount of "essences", but you found those essences in normal chests and from deconstructing random loot and could buy them from other players too. It was convenient but not necessary or strictly superior, which was nice.

Guancyto

2015-06-16, 07:18 PM

Crafting! On the subject of singleplayer vs MMO, one of each that I feel does it well.

Baldur's Gate II had crafting. It was small and relatively limited and restricted to the really powerful stuff (and the Equalizer). Generally there were two components; you'd find one in the course of the main story, and you'd find the other in the course of one of the long, important sidequests (that were really more like independent D&D adventures than anything else). Then, you'd pay some money and forge ye stuff! There were only two items with really finicky requirements; one was entirely useless, and the other was the most powerful weapon in the game. The Throne of Bhaal expansion did something similar, where pretty much always one of the components would be attained in the main storyline and the other in the expansion's one big sidequest. They went a little too heavy on the power of the craftables in ToB I feel, making it essential to trick out your characters.

Eve Online has crafting. SO MUCH CRAFTING. FOUR HUNDRED CRAFTING. Here it forms the cornerstone of the economy, making miners, refiners, industrialists and haulers all part of the vast process in turning asteroid materials into a proper ship or a set of guns or what-have-you. However, for the individual player that doesn't like it, it can all happen completely behind the scenes; someone dedicated to the game's other facets can simply buy the ship and equipment they want (if they have the money) and set about blowing things up. EVE's crafting system would be completely intolerable in a single-player game, but as it is, it works extremely well.

Kaptin Keen

2015-06-17, 04:45 PM

This is what a crafting system is: It's a grind you add on to an existing game to make it seem like it has more content.

A good crafting system is one that wasn't included in the game.

GloatingSwine

2015-06-17, 05:27 PM

This is what a crafting system is: It's a grind you add on to an existing game to make it seem like it has more content.

A good crafting system is one that wasn't included in the game.

That's true of a lot of things implemented poorly.

It's not necessarily true though, it just depends how much interface fiddle there is and how much the system expects you to make uninteresting things before you can make interesting ones.

Cespenar

2015-06-18, 12:24 AM

Eve Online has crafting. SO MUCH CRAFTING. FOUR HUNDRED CRAFTING. Here it forms the cornerstone of the economy, making miners, refiners, industrialists and haulers all part of the vast process in turning asteroid materials into a proper ship or a set of guns or what-have-you. However, for the individual player that doesn't like it, it can all happen completely behind the scenes; someone dedicated to the game's other facets can simply buy the ship and equipment they want (if they have the money) and set about blowing things up. EVE's crafting system would be completely intolerable in a single-player game, but as it is, it works extremely well.

Was more or less same in Ultima Online. Blacksmithing, Tailoring and all that jazz were essentially grinding on their own if you looked at them on an individual basis, but spread them out to a community and suddenly you needed to find the resident master blacksmith PC, actually speak to him to put a custom order on that masterwork specific-material halberd that you wanted.

NichG

2015-06-18, 06:38 AM

If you want to use crafting to encourage socialization and player-economics in an MMO, one idea I think would be neat would be that making customized items for another player takes the form of a sort of puzzle that is specific to that other player's character. So for example, lets say each character's particular optimum for a type of item is represented by a continuous line on a 2D grid. The crafter gets to see some information about the line (some cells it passes through, the total number of segment lengths in an unknown segment, places the line absolutely does not pass through, etc) and has to make a guess at the shape of the line. The better the guess matches the real hidden line, the higher the parameters of that item for the player. The puzzle doesn't change (or doesn't change much) for subsequent items of the same type, so following a good guess the crafter could tell the player their diagram (so they can go to other people to have items made in the future), or could keep it secret.

If you want to get very elaborate, maybe as the player uses the item, it starts to reveal the most strongly mismatched areas of the diagram the next time they have someone craft an item for them. So you could literally have the PC crafter give the PC player a quest - 'go use this to kill a bunch of golems so I get more information about the Earth-alignment arc of your knot, which is the part of the puzzle I can't solve right now'.

Kaptin Keen

2015-06-18, 07:57 AM

That's true of a lot of things implemented poorly.

It's not necessarily true though, it just depends how much interface fiddle there is and how much the system expects you to make uninteresting things before you can make interesting ones.

I'll admit that it could be done well - but at the same time, I want to state quite clearly that I've never seen a crafting system that was anything but a pointless grind.

You do this: You base it on random drops - so you have to repeat boring stuff over and over again until you get your viridium ore, or flawless soul gem, or pristine beast hide.

And basically, if you don't make it a pointless grind, it's not a crafting system. Then it's a quest reward instead. So ... I say again: All crafting systems are bad.

Brother Oni

2015-06-18, 11:55 AM

I'll admit that it could be done well - but at the same time, I want to state quite clearly that I've never seen a crafting system that was anything but a pointless grind.

You do this: You base it on random drops - so you have to repeat boring stuff over and over again until you get your viridium ore, or flawless soul gem, or pristine beast hide.

And basically, if you don't make it a pointless grind, it's not a crafting system. Then it's a quest reward instead. So ... I say again: All crafting systems are bad.

Have you tried Eve Online's crafting?

Items are built via blueprints, which you can buy basic ones of from any NPC.

Each blueprint has a list of materials you need and basic ones only need minerals. Minerals can be obtained by mining (gathering equivalent), as loot drops (NPC or players), buying off other players on the market or by reprocessing items (turn equipment and ships into minerals).

After that, you put it into cook in a manufacturing slot and X time later, your manufactured item pops out.

Advanced blueprints require some special items which have their own blueprints. All blueprints can be researched (upgraded) to reduce the number of materials required and time taken per manufacture, and you can make copies of your upgraded blueprints to sell to other players who can't afford the capital/time to buy/research their own blueprints.

If you don't want to do manufacturing, then you don't have to - you can just buy your desired items off players on the market. For those who get into manufacturing and the economy, it can become as cut-throat as the deadliest PVP fight.

There's a story of an tournament where during the preparations, one guild manipulated the market so that the area their opponents operated in were short of a particular weapon system (drones). When the tournament battle came round, their opponents were packing drones which dealt damage for which their own side had their resistances geared towards, thus they trounced their opponents with ease.

Hiro Protagonest

2015-06-18, 12:26 PM

And basically, if you don't make it a pointless grind, it's not a crafting system. Then it's a quest reward instead. So ... I say again: All crafting systems are bad.

So... somehow, crafting is intrinsically tied to random loot drops from bosses? What?

Kaptin Keen

2015-06-18, 01:19 PM

So... somehow, crafting is intrinsically tied to random loot drops from bosses? What?

I can only tell you what I've seen - so ... yea - pretty much. I didn't mention anything about bosses, so that's entirely you ....... not me.

What I mentioned was grind - and quests.

Have you tried Eve Online's crafting?

Items are built via blueprints, which you can buy basic ones of from any NPC.

Each blueprint has a list of materials you need and basic ones only need minerals. Minerals can be obtained by mining (gathering equivalent), as loot drops (NPC or players), buying off other players on the market or by reprocessing items (turn equipment and ships into minerals).

After that, you put it into cook in a manufacturing slot and X time later, your manufactured item pops out.

Advanced blueprints require some special items which have their own blueprints. All blueprints can be researched (upgraded) to reduce the number of materials required and time taken per manufacture, and you can make copies of your upgraded blueprints to sell to other players who can't afford the capital/time to buy/research their own blueprints.

If you don't want to do manufacturing, then you don't have to - you can just buy your desired items off players on the market. For those who get into manufacturing and the economy, it can become as cut-throat as the deadliest PVP fight.

There's a story of an tournament where during the preparations, one guild manipulated the market so that the area their opponents operated in were short of a particular weapon system (drones). When the tournament battle came round, their opponents were packing drones which dealt damage for which their own side had their resistances geared towards, thus they trounced their opponents with ease.

I love EVE. I've played it. I will never play it again. It's a well-made, cool game. It is also a game based on an endless grind - of which the crafting is just a small cog in a machine of grind.

It's not the grind that makes me not play it, however.

It's that ... as a new player, you grind and grind - then you travel to your very first sorta-unsafe-zone ... and find the jump points are camped, you get pod killed, and that's that. You can either stay forever in safe zones, or play something less caustic.

Brother Oni

2015-06-18, 02:56 PM

I love EVE. I've played it. I will never play it again. It's a well-made, cool game. It is also a game based on an endless grind - of which the crafting is just a small cog in a machine of grind.

It's not the grind that makes me not play it, however.

It's that ... as a new player, you grind and grind - then you travel to your very first sorta-unsafe-zone ... and find the jump points are camped, you get pod killed, and that's that. You can either stay forever in safe zones, or play something less caustic.

You seem to have a fairly wide definition of the word 'grind'. If it's anything that you have to do repeatedly over to progress, then pretty much any game is grind.

Take chess for example - you have to repeatedly move your pieces forward to advance your board position until you can get the more interesting parts of the game. :smalltongue:

Closet_Skeleton

2015-06-18, 03:19 PM

Take chess for example - you have to repeatedly move your pieces forward to advance your board position until you can get the more interesting parts of the game. :smalltongue:

You aren't very good at chess are you?

MCerberus

2015-06-18, 03:52 PM

I'd like a system where you're following recipes in the way you do while cooking: a generally accepted baseline you're expected to deviate from if you want different results.

Say you want to make a sword. This particular shape of sword needs X steel for the blade, and different amounts for other parts of it. Then, say, you have access to Damascus steel, Mythral, or whatever. What you use and what recipe you make it into makes your sword something you have control about.

Then you get to firearms, where you can use lighter metals for benefits, but it doesn't help recoil control. Ooh, counteract that by putting a grip on. Don't cheap out on the receiver, the game makes you jam at the worst times. Maybe the barrel is made out of carbon nanotube embedded steel while the frame is a lightweight composite durable alloy. Then you make the tweeks and you have your gun.

Or for laser weapons, you can overload the power systems, reinforce the focusing lenses, leading to a gun you can't fire too often or it'll overheat, and it sure does suck up the power. It's also pretty heavy but you made yourself a silly laser sniper rifle because it's what you wanted to make. Out of Adamantite so you can use it as a flaming club if it gets too hot.

edit- imagine the force of ultimate evil going "aha, so you have found the celestial stone and forged a weapon from it! draw your blade and we shall end it"
"actually I made like, a ton of bullets from it. For the entire party"
"I see."*gets turned into swiss cheese*

Brother Oni

2015-06-18, 06:05 PM

You aren't very good at chess are you?

Just trying to find a ridiculous example of what Kaptin Keen apparently believes is grind. If you have a better example, I'm all ears.

I would have perhaps used a go metaphor, but that's less well known in the West, not to mention the scoring is more convoluted than chess.

Kaptin Keen

2015-06-19, 06:33 AM

Just trying to find a ridiculous example of what Kaptin Keen apparently believes is grind. If you have a better example, I'm all ears.

I would have perhaps used a go metaphor, but that's less well known in the West, not to mention the scoring is more convoluted than chess.

We're having a discussion of what a grind is? Ok then.

There are many things to be said about grinding. There are many types of grinding. Getting your character to max level can be a grind - especially if you just decided your warrior main isn't up to snap, and you'd much rather have a hunter.

I'd like to difine it like this: If you're bored ****less doing the same thing over and over - then it is a grind. But I'm not going to.

I'm going to try and build a binary. For instance, killing an enemy is never a grind. Killing the same enemy over and over again is always a grind. Gaining XP is never a grind is never a grind. Killing whatever comes into range over and over for XP because you have no better way to level is always a grind. Killing an enemy to get his weapon is never a grind. Killing a thousand enemies, over and over and over, in the hopes of getting fragments to build shards to build crystals to build flawless orbs of whatever ... is always, always, always a grind.

I really don't feel there is much room for an actual discussion. Unless you can point to some flaw in my reasoning?! A way in which 'repetitive' and 'grind' (and 'boring', incidentally) are synonimous.

Ailurus

2015-06-19, 08:04 AM

In general, I'm a fan of crafting systems. I'll agree with the opinions about grindiness sometimes being an issue (but seriously, everyone stop talking about iron daggers in Skyrim - you do know that was patched within a few months of the game's release, and has been corrected for over 3 years now, yes?), but overall I find crafting systems superior to the traditional RPG systems because if well done they let you make spells/gear/etc. that fit your character which the loot systems don't account for much of the time.

Classic example of this is I tend to prefer defensive characters in RPGs, and most cRPGs are filled with all sorts of fancy loot - if you want to kill stuff in new and flashy ways. There might be like 2-3 unique/epic/whatever shields in the loot tables for the entire game, but you can cover every square inch of your player's house with the fancy swords and hammers and such you find throughout the game. In my experience, archery often falls into the same category, with only a handful of epic bows. And even defensive magic tends towards the same - you'll get a basic Shield/Mage Armor spell, and an elemental variant and then 50 different fireballs/lightning bolts/blizzards/etc. A good crafting system can fix this by letting you make good equipment that fits your desired archetype without having to look up the one boss in the one dungeon in the one remote corner of the world that contains an upgrade to the item you want.

The one general downside to crafting systems is that a lot of people find it less satisfying than loot drops since it seems like less of an achievement. I think the best way to resolve this is by having an upgrade system - not like Skyrim's upgrade system of simply tacking more numbers and a word on the end of it, but more like a reforging system where you collect rare elements (like some people have said, maybe drops from difficult bosses, or something you find in a remote part of the world). So you can make your own basic sword/shield/dagger/whatever to start with, and then (say after beating the act II boss or whatever) you get material that will let you upgrade your favorite item (or maybe 2-3 items), and then after the act III boss you get more drops that let you reforge your stuff in preparation for the final push to the big bad. This allows the devs to control the level of the crafted gear and also lets the player get more invested the character (rather than the usual "Oh, goodbye ancient heirloom sword that's been in my character's family for 10 generations, I'm tossing you aside in exchange for this small upgrade I found on the floor of a dungeon")